doi:10.1093/bjc/azi077 BRIT. J. CRIMINOL. (2006) 46, 470–485 Advance Access publication 15 August 2005 470 © The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies (ISTD). All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oupjournals.org POLICING SPACE Managing New Travellers in England Z OË J AMES * This paper explores the policing of New Travellers: a nomadic community who have existed since the 1970s. They have been presented by the British mass media as ‘folk devils’ and they are treated by the police as a public order problem. The paper will discuss the methods used by the police to manage New Travellers, applying a spatial analysis to understand police practice. The empirical evidence shows that the ability of policing agencies to manage nomadic people is determined by their notion of space and who can legitimately occupy it. The paper therefore explores the policing of nomadism which incorporates a discussion of the need to develop conceptions of public order polic- ing that recognize the use of ‘guerrilla tactics’. In this paper, I will present an analysis of public order policing by exploring the policing of the New Traveller community (Dearling 2001; James 2004). Spatial analysis has been used by academics to comprehend the societal position of New Travellers as nomads rather than sedentarists. It has been similarly used in criminology, including in police studies, to interpret deviance, criminal behaviour and social control. This paper will focus on the police management of space, but does not mean to imply that spatial analysis wholly explains the way that public order policing functions. Rather, it is pre- sented here as a useful tool for understanding some aspects of policing and is particu- larly relevant to public order policing. My main aim in this paper is to highlight the use of alternative public order policing tactics by the police, namely guerrilla tactics. I will evidence such methods at the end of the paper, having initially outlined the spatial nature of policing New Travellers that has informed my analysis. Method This paper has been developed from my doctoral research which was an empirical study of the policing of New Travellers. It focused particularly on the application of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 (CJPOA), which permits the police to evict any Travellers from land they have settled on that is not an authorized site. The research constituted analysis of 18 police interviews and 14 New Traveller interviews in forces/areas throughout England. The study was wholly qualitative and the samples were collected purposively. The interviews with the police were carried out by myself, as a Research Officer at the Research, Statistics and Development Directorate in the Home Office, alongside my colleague, Tom Bucke, as part of a broader Home Office research study of the public order provisions of the CJPOA (Bucke and James 1998). The interviews with New Travellers were completed two years later by myself, as a * Senior Lecturer in Criminal Justice Studies, School of Sociology, Politics and Law, Faculty of Social Science and Business, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA; zoe.james@plymouth.ac.uk. at University of Plymouth on October 22, 2015 http://bjc.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from