Police Responses to Security, Safety, and Mobility Challenges

This paper is a discussion on mobility, safety and security. The analysis concerns the transport polices which form a sort of dead angle of the analysis of the mobility, with the exception of some practitioners’ works and Anglo-Saxon academics. But, the object of the paper is not simply to make better known these works. With two empirical studies – British Transport Police and California Highway Patrol –, we also try to seize what moves closer to these polices between them, beyond their modal speciality and different contexts of deployment and what distinguishes them from the other organizations and activities of police. Is such a police specialization a product of the particular requirements of the mobility? Can we “démodaliser” institutions and police activities of transport? How are they affected by the transformations of the contemporary police systems?