Comparative Policing

Comparisons of policing serve four basic purposes. First, most generally, comparisons satisfy curiosity, enlarge the pool of information one can draw on, stimulate insights into the cultures and practices of policing, and depict the variety of ways in which policing can be organized. Second, comparisons point to practical and policy lessons that may help improve policing in one's own country. Third, comparisons help build theory, and that is their most important utility. Fourth, comparisons raise questions that are at the core of political life in any country. Policing provides a window on the quality of state-civil society relations and helps illuminate theories about the nature and maintenance of social order, the dynamics of political power, or the salience and persistence of cultural and ideological hegemony. Policing reflects the practical balance of order versus liberty, of force versus legitimacy, and of autonomy versus accountability experienced by citizens.

Comparative research requires a common set of conceptions and definitions as a starting point. What characteristics define people as police? What jobs are they expected to perform, what standards are used to evaluate how justly and effectively they carry out their work, whom are they accountable to and by what methods? Answers to these questions vary widely from country to country; and even within one country it is not always clearly defined who are police or what activities deserve to be called policing. For example, should corporate security forces, community-based watch and vigilante groups, or specialized state agencies (e.g., customs officers) be called police?

The most widely used conception is that “policing” refers to all the societal institutions and practices that seek to maintain social order through potentially coercive means. Anyone who carries out those functions is doing policing. This is not a precise definition, but neither is policing demarcated clearly from other mechanisms for ensuring social control and order. Bayley (1985: 7) captures the conventional conception well: the police are “people authorized by a group to regulate interpersonal relations within the group through the application of physical force.” The general terms used by Bayley to cover most contingencies—authorized, group, physical force—normally are specified as the legal authority given by the government (representing a group or nation) to a specialized agency to use all legitimate means necessary, including force, to deal with all situations that threaten public order. Policing can be done by many people. Police refers to people working for the state.

By this definition (which is not the definition normally used by the police themselves), policing is more than law enforcement, crime control, or order maintenance. Policing is all those activities, whether done by government or private groups, that protect by law and force the routines of life people depend on. Crime control is one such service, but so are the provision of helping services, the administrative regulation of rights and privileges (e.g., gun registration), the collecting of intelligence, and the use of the police by government to repress and punish people who the government or the powerful feel threaten their values and interests.