8 - Conclusions

Summary

Contemporary policing is a reflection of both continuity and change. At the outset of this book, we said that police management at the beginning of the twenty-first century is undergoing a dramatic transformation. This change is a response to the pressure on police to ‘do more with less’ resulting from the revolution in public management that began in the latter half of the last century and ushered in an era of chronic and enduring financial restraint for public institutions. In the chapters that followed, we sought to give flesh to the bones of this transformation, exploring in some detail the techniques police are using today to enhance their resources. These techniques involve police in exchanges with the ‘outside’ world: with other government agencies, with community organisations, with the business community and with individuals in various capacities. Some of these arrangements we have examined have been wholly new and even quite startling; others have proved to be ‘old friends’. Through this examination, the complexity of what Bayley and Shearing (2001) termed the multilateral character of policing, and what Shearing and others have since referred to as the governance of security has revealed itself (Burris, Drahos and Shearing 2005).

In this concluding chapter, we look first at how we have gone about the task of unpacking this transformation in public policing. We then examine some of the implications of our findings.