The police change because the societies in which they operate change. The most commonly used framework links changes in policing to changes in societal contexts. Each perspective links diverse forms of policing to specific histories, dynamics, and changes in societies but stresses particular causes and processes of change: political, cultural, and ideological modernization the growth and decline of the nation-state and the rise of a neoliberal domestic and international order exemplified in the emergence of risk-based calculations of security and threats and the multiple policing responses to the changing security conditions of the world that have emerged since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some societies have developed patterns of policing that are extensive in their reach and activities and that reflect the original conception, at least in Western societies, that policing is the government of local communities, while other societies have over time arrived at quite restricted notions of what the police should be doing.Īnswers to the question of why policing varies over time and place fall into three general theoretical perspectives. The social ordering functions of policing are similar in any society, but the manner and ways in which these are carried out will reflect contextual societal changes, including fluctuations of criminal activity, disorder, and political instabilities.

The work of policing is inherently political and conflict generating.ĭevelopments in policing are seen as closely linked to and influenced by the same factors that drive developments in the societies in which they exist. Since all social orders are divided by class, cultures, value systems, and gender and ethnic identities, the impacts of policing are never experienced equally by or imposed equally on all members of society. The police are crucial elements in systems of social control that protect the valued dominant distributions of material and symbolic goods in a society against challenges by crime, subversion, or riotous disorders through the threat or the exercise of coercive force and the collection and analysis of information. Do the police provide a service that seeks to benefit all or are the police a repressive force protecting the interests of the few at the expense of the many? In addition, as an underlying subtext, theories include a normative element by linking the basic purposes and historical developments of policing to hegemonic notions of social control and social order and ideologies of justice in a society. Theories of policing, largely comparative in nature, seek to explain why policing systems differ widely in their organization, the powers and authority granted them, the roles and tasks they are entrusted with, the occupational cultures that characterize their work, their interactions with civic society and the state, the quality and effectiveness of their work, the extent of entanglements in the political life of their societies, and their capacity to shape the dominant ideologies of policing that, in turn, define for themselves and for society what constitutes good policing.

Police omnipresence definition