The summer Olympic Games are renowned for producing the world s biggest single-city cultural event. While the Olympics and other sport mega-events have received growing levels of academic investigation from a variety of disciplinary approaches, relatively little is known about how such occasions are experienced directly by local host communities and publics.

This ethnography examines the everyday policing of the London Borough of Newham in relation to the London 2012 Olympics. It explains how police defined, monitored, prioritized, contained and investigated Olympic-related crime, and...