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The article proposes some ideas for a sociological analysis of security policies, with specific regard to urban contexts and focusing especially on the intersection between policy and politics. The main questions concern the way in which security has been studied as a public good construed as a collective problem and an object of political action, as well as how to develop further perspectives and conceptual tools within this approach. Some other questions are also asked and provisionally answered, regarding two aspects of security policies that are suitable for a research agenda: the role of knowledge and the related politics of expertise; the relationships between urban security policies and the processes of neoliberalization.