This special issue, edited by Maya Mynster Christensen and Peter Albrecht, introduces a conceptual framework for ethnographies of urban policing that foregrounds how defining features of the city produce police work, and in turn, how police work produces the city.

With an empirical point of departure in ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Bagong Silang, a poor urban area on the outskirts of Metro Manila, this article by Anna Bræmer Warburg and Steffen Jensen highlights the perspective of the state police in an area that has been heavily exposed to the drug war and can be considered as one of its hot spots.

In this article, Francesco Colona shows how the work of heterogeneous security and policing assemblages in Nairobi hinges upon and reproduces physical urban borders, and consequentially enacts social orders.

Jairo Matallana-Villarreal's paper presents the phenomenon of batidas militares—military raids with the purpose of enforced conscription—carried out by the Colombian army as an informal policing practice.

The article by Mette-Louise Johansen introduces the notion of epidemic policing to show how Danish measures for countering violent extremism are based on an epidemiological approach resembling the World Health Organization public health rationale, and how the field of countering violent extremism policing is itself expanding in epidemic ways.

Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Nairobi between 2017 and 2018, Tessa Diphoorn analyses how police officers differentiate themselves from other police officers along (moral) ideas of reform and how this occurs in two divergent, yet interconnected, directions.

Dennis Pauschinger's article combines spatial thinking about the production of territoriality with an emotional understanding of the police as ‘edgeworkers’ grounded in cultural criminology. Empirically, this piece uses ethnographic material from research with ordinary civil police officers and Special Forces in Rio.

In this article, Helene Maria Kyed explores how the spatial bordering of Maputo city affected the configuration of police authority in an underprioritised inner-city periphery. Based on ethnography, I show how police officers struggle to perform their duty and assert authority through what I refer to as institutional–jurisdictional ‘bordering practices’.

This article by Samuel Merrill, Shanti Sumartojo, Angharad Closs Stephens, and Martin Coward examines the forms and feelings of togetherness evident in both Manchester city centre and on social media during the first anniversary of the 22 May 2017 Manchester Arena bombing.

This paper by Tim Edensor and Thomas SJ Smith draws on a case study of Achill Henge, County Mayo, Ireland, to examine the interplay between economic crisis, rebel creativity and shifting geographies of commemoration.