Great expectations? Assessing the creation of national police organisations in Scotland and the Netherlands
| Date | 01 June 2019 |
| Author | Nick R. Fyfe,Jan Terpstra |
| DOI | 10.1177/1461355719842310 |
| Published date | 01 June 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Great expectations? Assessing
the creation of national police
organisations in Scotland
and the Netherlands
Jan Terpstra
Radboud University, The Netherlands
Nick R. Fyfe
University of Dundee, UK
Abstract
Against a background of recent structural reforms to police organisations in northern and western Europe, this paper
examines the experiences of Scotland and the Netherlands where national police forces were established in 2013. Taking
a comparative perspective, an analysis of the police reform proposals is followed by a review of the arguments for reform,
the challenges of implementation and the findings emerging from the evaluations of the police reforms in each country.
The paper concludes by drawing out the contrast between the ‘great expectations’ of the two police reforms articulated
by the governments and the realities of bringing about rapid and large-scale organisational change, arguing that
institutionalist perspectives on police reform have much to offer in making sense of the challenges of the police
reform process.
Keywords
Police, police reform, Scotland, Netherlands, evaluation
Submitted 12 Dec 2018, accepted 31 Jan 2019
Introduction
Several countries in northern and western Europe over the
past years have experienced fundamental transformations
to the structure, organisation and governance of their police
systems (Fyfe et al., 2013), among them Scotland and the
Netherlands. In these two countries police refo rms have
many similarities. Both reforms started in 2013 and
involved a highly comparable change from a regionalised
system to a single national police force. In both countries,
the police had had a strong traditional focus on local poli-
cing and local police governance. In the two countries, the
transition to a nationalised police system can be understood
as a radical break with the past that confronted the new
police organisations with highly similar questions and chal-
lenges (Fyfe and Scott, 2013; Terpstra, 2013). Similarities
in the trajectories of reform in Scotland and the Netherlands
therefore offer a good opportunity for a comparative long-
term analysis of police reform. In two earlier studies (Terp-
stra and Fyfe, 2014, 2015), we showed that the plans for
reform, the underlying policy processes and the implemen-
tation of reform over the first year also highlighted inter-
esting differences between the two countries. This paper
can be seen as a next step in our comparative study of these
two police reforms. The analysis that we provide here,
gives us the opportunity to have a look over a longer period,
from which we can draw on a greater body of evidence than
before. Now, more than 5 years after the reforms were
Corresponding author:
Jan Terpstra, Radboud Universiteit Faculteit der Rechtsgeleerdheid,
PO Box 9049, Nijmegen, 6500 KK, Netherlands.
Email: j.terpstra@jur.ru.nl
International Journalof
Police Science & Management
2019, Vol. 21(2) 101–107
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1461355719842310
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