Change and continuity in the police: Introduction to the Special Issue
| DOI | 10.1177/1461355719889474 |
| Date | 01 December 2019 |
| Published date | 01 December 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Special issue: Change and Continuity in the Police |
Special issue: Change and Continuity in the Police
Change and continuity in the police:
Introduction to the Special Issue
Jan Terpstra
Radboud University, the Netherlands
Renze Salet
Radboud University, the Netherlands
Over the past few decades police organizations in demo-
cratic countries all over the world have been confronted
with a seemingly endless flow of minor and major changes
and developments. These changes differed from the intro-
duction of new technologies, demographic changes in
workforces (more female officers, more diversity in ethni-
city and sexual orientation, increasing numbers of officers
with higher levels of education), to a range of new police
models (such as community policing, problem-oriented
policing, information-led policing or hot-spot policing)
(Weisburd and Braga, 2019). New styles and disc ourses
of leadership and management were introduced. Many
police forces, especially in north western Europe, experi-
enced drastic processes of restructuring and organizational
reform (Fyfe et al., 2013). New forms of policing were
created outside the traditional public police, resulting in all
kinds of cooperation with other public agencies, private
security and groups of citizens. Processes of pluralization,
privatization and trans-nationalization have had a great
impact on the position and image of the public police. Over
the past few decades, police organizations have been strug-
gling with creating new answers to drastic changes in their
social, economic and political environment, such as
increasing mobility, individualization, the erosion of tradi-
tional forms of authority, the rise of political populism,
digitalization of the social world and the increasing impor-
tance of global crime and disorder. It has often been sug-
gested that this complex of changes has had a huge impact
on the police, on policing and on relations between the
police and citizens.
On the other hand, however, it has often been stated that
the core of police, police work and police culture has not
changed so much after all. For instance, more than 15 years
ago, Jones and Newburn (2002) noted that there has often
been a tendency to interpret current developments in the
police and policing as sharp breaks with the past. In their
view, however, significant continuities and consistencies in
police and policing have often been overlooked or insuffi-
ciently recognized. In the same line is Loftus’ (2009) con-
clusion, based on her ethnographic study of the English
police, that notwithstanding many changes in the police,
officers often espouse cultural characteristics that are sim-
ilar to those found in the early police studies of the 1960s
and 1970s. She found ‘remarkable continuities and inertia
within police values and practices’ (Loftus, 2009: 187–
188). Many studies that focused on the impact of new tech-
nologies on the police showed that there is much more
continuity in policing than the high ambitions and expec-
tations underlying these innovations often suggest (Chan,
2001; Chan and Moses, 2017; Manning, 2008; Willis et al.,
2018). One of the factors that contributes to this continuity
is what Orlikowski and Gash (1994) called technological
frames. The assumptions, expectations, interpretations and
knowledge that police officers have of technological inno-
vation may be helpful in understanding why potentially far-
reaching innovations such as big data policing result in not
only many changes, but also many continuities (Brayne,
2017; Ferguson, 2017).
This dual and complex pattern of change and continuity
in the police has been found in many studies dealing with
highly diverse aspects of the police. This complex of
change and continuity, with its related tensions and con-
flicts, can be seen as one of the most profound questions in
the study of the police. As, for instance, Sklansky (2006)
Corresponding author:
Jan Terpstra, Radboud University, Houtlaan 4, 6525 XZ Nijmegen,
the Netherlands.
Email: j.terpstra@jur.ru.nl
International Journalof
Police Science & Management
2019, Vol. 21(4) 193–195
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1461355719889474
journals.sagepub.com/home/psm
To continue reading
Request your trial