Policing: High Versus Low

Jean-Paul Brodeur coined the term high policing in 1983 as a way to differentiate between the use of the police to maintain political order in the face of political activities and the use of the police to maintain public order in the face of everyday crime. He originally used the term to illustrate the use of the police as an instrument of political control in the 1960s and 1970s in United States and Canada. In response to the use of the police by the state for political purposes, beginning in the 1970s both the United States and Canada moved to separate those organizations engaging in high policing and those focused on low policing. Since Brodeur's original article, the term high policing has expanded to incorporate ...