Mind the implementation gap? Police reform and local policing in the Netherlands and Scotland
| Author | Nicholas R Fyfe,Jan Terpstra |
| DOI | 10.1177/1748895815572162 |
| Published date | 01 November 2015 |
| Date | 01 November 2015 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2015
Article
Criminology & Criminal Justice
2015, Vol. 15(5) 527 –544
Mind the implementation
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1748895815572162
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policing in the Netherlands
and Scotland
Jan Terpstra
University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Nicholas R Fyfe
University of Dundee, UK
Abstract
In 2013 the governments of the Netherlands and Scotland established national police forces,
replacing a tradition of largely autonomous regional police organizations. In both jurisdictions,
these radical reforms have raised concerns about the consequences of these national police
structures for local policing and for relationships with local communities and local government.
Drawing on documentary sources and interview material from each jurisdiction and informed by
insights from the policy implementation literature, the key question addressed in this article is
how has the legislation that created the new national police forces been put into effect at a local
level? Focusing on the impact on the governance, organization and delivery of local policing, the
article reveals how the implementation in both jurisdictions involves interpretation and discretion
by multiple actors so that gaps are emerging between the national ‘policy promises’ set out in the
legislation and the ‘policy products’ experienced in local contexts.
Keywords
Governance, implementation, Netherlands, police, reform, Scotland
Introduction
Since the early 2000s, the organizational structures of many police forces in Western and
Northern European countries have been reconfigured, shifting from largely decentralized
and often fragmented systems to become more centralized, national arrangements. In
Corresponding author:
Nicholas R Fyfe, Scottish Institute for Policing Research, University of Dundee, Dundee DD1 4HN, UK.
Email: n.r.fyfe@dundee.ac.uk
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(5)
countries as diverse as Austria, Denmark, Finland, the Netherlands, Scotland and
Sweden, the underlying drivers of these changes have been similar. These include
promoting effectiveness and efficiency, improving the response to transnational crime
and enhancing the power of national governments over the police (Fyfe et al., 2013; Van
Sluis et al., 2013).
One of the most important issues in the public debate about these reforms concerns
the consequences of centralized, national police structures for local policing and for
relationships with local communities and local government. In some countries, such as
Scotland, Denmark and Norway, supporters of reform have claimed that a national
police force can enhance local policing (by, for example, improving local access to
specialist expertise and resources) while critics have highlighted the risk of negative
impacts such as the erosion of local democratic oversight and a loss of local knowledge
among officers (see Holmberg, 2014; Holmberg and Balvig, 2013; Scott, 2013). In this
article we elaborate on the consequences of centralizing police reforms for local polic-
ing and the relations with local authorities by focusing on the implementation of national
police organizations in Scotland and the Netherlands. We concentrate on these two
countries because both have had a long tradition of decentralized policing arrangements
comprising regional police forces and a strong focus on local policing and local police
governance arrangements. In early 2013, however, each country made a radical transi-
tion from a regionalized police system to a single, national force. There were different
drivers of these reforms in each jurisdiction (in Scotland the main focus was on the
financial savings while in the Netherlands concerns centred on improvements in the
control and management (‘beheer’) of the police) but in both jurisdictions the claim was
made by national governments that the new police system would not have negative
consequences for local policing. By adopting a cross-national comparative perspective
we are able to analyse how these seemingly similar structural reforms to police organi-
zations which came into force within three months of each other are being implemented
and experienced in different ways. This comparative approach therefore offers the
opportunity to distil the specificities of particular political and organizational contexts
in shaping the structure, governance and delivery of policing.
Against this background, this article critically examines the local dimensions of the
police reform in the Netherlands and Scotland. Given that the research on which the
article is based was conducted largely during the first year after each of the national
police forces was formally established, the main focus is on implementation rather than
on evaluation. Furthermore, the approach taken in this article is essentially inductive,
providing a ‘thick description’ of the implementation process but using this to exemplify
themes in the wider literature on implementation research (Hill and Hupe, 2009; Hupe,
2014). The key questions we address are how, why and with what consequences has the
legislation that created the new national police forces been put into effect at a local level?
This is important because, as Barrett and Fudge (1981: 9) observe, ‘policy does not
implement itself’ and policy implementation is rarely a rational or linear process. Rather,
there are multiple actors involved, often with different interpretations of central policy
objectives and with varying degrees of discretion (Schofield, 2001) which creates scope
for an implementation ‘gap’ or ‘deficit’ to emerge between policy objectives contained
within legislation and practice at street level (Ham and Hill, 1986; Pressman and
Terpstra and Fyfe
529
Wildavsky, 1973). Implementation may also be a ‘process of strategic interaction among
numerous special interests all pursuing their own goals’ (Bardach, 1978: 9). As a result
the implementation may be confronted with delay, resistance, symbolic implementation,
but also create the room for learning, bargaining and negotiations or the creation of coali-
tions supporting the policy mandate (Hill, 1997; Lane, 1987). This capacity of actors to
modify policy in the process of implementation is what we explore here by focusing on
the impact of the police reform legislation on the local governance of policing and the
organization and delivery of local police services.
The account draws on both documentary sources and interview material from each
jurisdiction. The documentary sources include the plans produced by both government
and police in preparing for reform, the legislation which established the new policing
arrangements, official reports of Parliamentary debates about police reform and initial
assessments of the implementation of reform produced by oversight bodies, such as
police inspectorates and audit organizations. In each country 15 interviews were carried
out with key actors, including local police commanders and representatives of local
authorities (in the Netherlands mayors and municipal officers; in Scotland local council-
lors and officers of the council) in rural and urban areas. This involved a process of
purposive sampling and while no claim can be made for the representativeness of the
overall group interviewed, the range of people who participated does provide insights
from different perspectives and contexts. The interviews were conducted between
October 2013 and June 2014 and so focus on the implementation process during the first
10 to 18 months of the national forces.
To set this documentary and interview material in context, we begin with a short
description of the two police reforms, and the treatment of local policing in the legisla-
tion that introduced the national police organizations into the Netherlands and Scotland.
The second half of the article then focuses on how the process of implementation has
impacted on the governance, organization and delivery of local policing. It reveals how
the implementation in both jurisdictions is far more complex than a linear ‘top–down’
process but involves interpretation and discretion by multiple actors so that gaps are
beginning to merge between the national ‘policy promises’ set out in the legislation and
the ‘policy products’ experienced in local contexts.
The Contexts and Contours of Police Reform Legislation
Contexts of reform
There are some significant similarities between the Netherlands and Scotland in terms of
the background to the 2013 police reforms (see too Terpstra and Fyfe, 2014). In both
countries, policing had previously been delivered by relatively autonomous regional
forces (numbering 25 in the Netherlands and eight in Scotland) and both countries had
well-established traditions of local policing. In the Netherlands this was exemplified by
the way in which before 1993 each municipality with more than 25,000 inhabitants had
its own police force and in the other small and rural municipalities the former Royal
Police Force had a very strong local basis with a network of police stations in the small
villages. After the 1993 police reform the main organizational principle for the Dutch
police became ‘decentralized, unless …’, an indication of the continued stress on the
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Criminology & Criminal Justice 15(5)
importance of local policing. In...
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