seven - The future of policing

Summary

‘Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen.’ (Winston Churchill, speech in 1922)

It is always something of a risk to write about the future, especially when it is as diffuse as the future of policing, which is subject to change, vagary and political initiative to a greater extent than many public service activities, with the exception perhaps of medicine or of politics itself. Nonetheless, we felt that we should give our respondents a chance to comment on the future of policing, both in Europe and further afield, trusting that their experience and wisdom would inform the debate.

That debate has been rumbling quietly for many years, and seems to consist – with Churchillian consistency – of explanations why something did not happen. The hubris of William Bratton's ‘crime in New York is down; blame the police’ is perhaps the nadir of such explanations, especially as it was shown that Bratton's much-vaunted ‘Compstat’ process actually did little to address the underlying causes of crime. Crime analysis has since revealed that crime and criminality were declining anyway across the Western developed nations, and the police were often tangential to this process. But one cannot blame them for trying to take some of the credit, since, when crime goes up, they get the blame, irrespective of other social factors.

At the same time, discussions have been taking place at European police conferences, seminars and on academic courses (including those run by the European Police College), in which topics have been aired such as the future control of civic unrest, the nature and character of policing to come (especially in the opposing ‘civil police versus gendarme’ schools of thought), the positioning of the police with regard to the expansion of cybercrime, and to what degree policing itself needed to change to reflect profound and sometimes seismic shifts in society (Ekblom, 2005), such as in employment, diversity, gender, education, ethnic proportions and the stratification of society.