Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Glossary
- About the authors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one European policing in context
- two Getting to the top: the selection and appointment of strategic police leaders in Europe
- three Accountability
- four Relationships and influences
- five The preference for cooperative bilateralism among European strategic police leaders
- six The challenges facing European policing today
- seven The future of policing
- General conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
six - The challenges facing European policing today
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 March 2022
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures and tables
- Glossary
- About the authors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- one European policing in context
- two Getting to the top: the selection and appointment of strategic police leaders in Europe
- three Accountability
- four Relationships and influences
- five The preference for cooperative bilateralism among European strategic police leaders
- six The challenges facing European policing today
- seven The future of policing
- General conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘The problems here are what they’ve always been: dodgy businesses cutting corners, criminal entrepreneurs making use of our liberal laws on trade, global companies thinking we’ll do anything for a few Euros, and being a transit point for international trafficking of all kinds. That's reflected globally and internationally, which is where I come in because my job is to plan the criminal interdiction upstream of the country and that means thinking ahead and beyond the purely nationalistic. Sometimes it's hard, and people get quite scared at going out on a limb, but policing properly is about assessing risk properly and that's what our work is in the international sphere: it's a form of risk management. I have to say that not many of us are any good at it because we keep thinking too much inside our own narrow national concerns. The time will have to come when we think together rather than just cooperatively.’ (Interviewee BI 69)
Introduction
Understanding the challenges facing policing is usually hedged about with caution, given the potential for unforeseen developments to change the basis of any analysis. This chapter is no exception to this general observation. Some expectations about challenges to policing may not materialise at all (Crawford, 2002), some may mutate into something altogether more sinister (Europol, 2011), and a few may make the impact predicted for them (Edwards and Gill, 2003).
The states that make up the regions of Europe interpret such ‘hard’ policing challenges differently, depending on what social, economic, political, historical or national compound lens they look through: what is a jurisdictional problem in Latvia may not be in Greece. Aspects of illegal trafficking that impact heavily on the Slovenian police (smuggling routes through the high mountain passes) may barely register with Portugal's gendarmerie. Stolen vehicles may be a problem for the Belgians, but the Slovak police are more preoccupied with drug smuggling. To try to bring coherence to this very disparate, and often fragmented, picture of the challenges facing Europe's police forces, sometimes complicated by the remits and approaches of the law enforcement agencies involved, we group the views of strategic police leaders thematically, we analyse their proposed solutions and we identify some of the likely barriers to potential success.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Leading Policing in EuropeAn Empirical Study of Strategic Police Leadership, pp. 165 - 188Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2015