The past decade has seen the consolidation of a substantial sociological literature exploring how practices, institutions and discourses of policing figure in the politics of neoliberalism. In has become common to speak of a distinctive form of “neoliberal penality”, which in its discursive dimensions involves the demonisation of the poor as a source of criminal disorder, an emphasis on the need for the state to secure society from their depredations, and a corresponding glorification of policing and carceral apparatuses as the means by which this is to be achieved. It has been argued that such aggressive discourses on crime control offer new bases of political legitimacy for states which have abdicated functions like economic regulation and social support. However, this existing literature has focused overwhelmingly on Europe and North America. To the extent that it offers tools for thinking about the relationship between neoliberal restructuring and the politics of crime control in other parts of the world, this has too often boiled down to an unsatisfactory hub-and-spokes diffusion model, whereby “neoliberal penality” is depicted as having been forged in the United States and then exported to its peripheries. As a basis for engaging critically with such accounts, this paper considers decades’ worth of writings by senior officers on matters of crime, security and the economy published in an Egyptian police journal which has been in continuous production since 1958, alongside memoirs and PhD theses by Egyptian policemen. This source material suggests that shifts in the politics of policing which occurred as Egypt transitioned from a broadly socialist orientation into an era of economic liberalisation, privatisation and welfare retrenchment have not been reflective of some universal model of “neoliberal penality”, nor can they be reduced to echoes of developments underway in the US. In fact, the ways in which senior Egyptian policemen sought to publicly frame and position themselves within these far-reaching socioeconomic transformations from the infitah-era onwards were strongly informed by Egypt’s own endogenous history, including its particular location in the global economy, the persistence of forms of security discourse carried over from the Nasser era, and pre-existing configurations of political legitimacy and citizenship. In drawing out the significance of local specificities and contingency, the paper argues for the need to bring historicised perspectives to bear in efforts to understand how policing has figured in the politics of neoliberalism in contexts across the Global South.