Abstract
In other chapters, we have examined some of the academic and political issues that impact American tourism policing and professional security agents. This chapter is a bit different. Instead, it examines several tourist cities in the Caribbean, Latin America, and Europe. The locations studied are not always the largest tourism centers, but they represent a variety of tourism locales and as such serve as case studies for similar locations in other parts of the world. Another goal of this chapter is to learn not only how tourism security and tourism policing have impacted these non-American communities, but also some of the problems experienced by their security services.
TopTourism Policing Outside Of The United States
Chapter 9 takes us on a tour of various tourism policing locations outside of the United States. It builds on some of the ideas expressed in chapter three, which touched on some of the tourism security literature from both in and out of the United States. In this chapter we read about tourism locations and their efforts in tourism policing. Some of these locations do an excellent job in developing tourism security and other places struggle with how to train tourism security officers, be they police or private security.
One of the interesting findings in this chapter is that the quality of tourism security often has no relationship with the size of a community or with the strength of its tourism industry, but rather often depends on the commitment of a few individuals in each locale.
A central underlying question that the reader needs to ask is: What is the impact of tourism-oriented police departments and how do they impact the local community? For reasons of space, this chapter, unlike the others, touches only upon public security entities. It examines tourism policing by region and then by nations within that region.