concentration and uncontrollable residence and movement of an excessive number of aliens, mostly without legal documents, b) their daily gathering in hundreds or thousands on the road, which makes traffic difficult or even impossible, which together with the blossoming of the black-market results in affecting business activities and tourism in the area (The Greek Ombudsman, 2010). As I observed in 2012, while I was travelling through the centre of Athens to reach the Petrou Ralli detention centre, foreigners were not hard to find. All around the city but especially in the centre you can see immigrants pushing trolleys filled with any metal objects they have found in garbage bins. Poverty has visibly increased on the streets of the capital where immigrants can be seen rummaging through garbage cans for food or scraps of metal or glass to sell to garages for some Euros per kilo. The streets there are downhill and due to the weight of the trolleys, they sometimes are drifted along on the road risking being run over by cars and buses. ‘Lucky’ ones have very small cars to transfer everything they find. (Fieldnotes, Athens, 2012). Nevertheless, as the Ombudsman (2010) stresses in his letter, the deplorable living conditions of newly arrived immigrants without papers and asylum seekers without support networks, with high visibility in public space and polluting practices have affected the quality of everyday life for the citizens of Athens, have discouraged tourism and contributed to the degradation of the area. In this very harsh and polemic rhetoric, the independent authority urged the police to assume the role of dealing with the problem of overconcentration. However, mass arrests of ‘illegally resident immigrants’ in the city centre should not be considered a panacea, they warn, but rather have to be combined with policies that manage this population more effectively. Still, ascribing too much power to the police without any oversight would not necessarily guarantee the respect of human rights, as research into Greek police abuses of migrants, highlights (Amnesty International, 2014; Human Rights Watch, 2013). Following revelations that around 5,000 migrants were living in an estimated 500abandoned buildings in the city, and that more than 2,000 other properties occupied by migrants were unfit for human habitation, in May 2011 the Cabinet decided to adopt another action plan for the revitalization of the city centre (European Migration Network, 2012; see also Pangalos, 2011 for the link). Warning of a ‘public health time bomb,’ police officers were indeed asked to control the overconcentration of irregular migrants in the 97