This book has tackled highly complex issues and has ranged widely. Given their professional backgrounds and working experiences, the authors are well aware of the difficulties of organisational life in general and institutional change in particular, and that policing is by its nature ‘accident prone’. Indeed, at times, policing is rather like the religious procession of Echternach in Luxembourg: which was characterised by three steps forward and two steps backwards, except that in policing the number of steps backwards can vary. The preceding chapters have elucidated with a broad brush that the two police systems under consideration – along with others – face challenges emanating from socio-political change, institutional reform, organisational restructuring and constant debate about the direction policing should take. Moreover, police leaders are increasingly confronted with politicians and civilians gaining enhanced control over the police organisation and over the decisions of senior officers. There is near-constant change, involving multiple stakeholders, considerable pressure to achieve improved performance and the need to adjust to more intrusive forms of media scrutiny. Furthermore officers have to learn to cope with new structures of governance.

Beyond cutting crime

The current predicament of policing in the mid-2010s is a matter of some urgency as policing is in rough water. Choices are being made that may determine what policing will look like for the next generation of officers and what policing will mean to people in society, and some of these choices go against a considerable body of knowledge that informs the views of acknowledged experts within academia, policing and criminal justice. The authors have no power to make things happen but come down firmly on the side of an integral paradigm of policing. The distinction made between the ‘control’ and ‘consent’ paradigms is simplistic, reductionist and based on a false dichotomy. To argue, for instance, that the only focus for the police is ‘control’, primarily in the sense of cutting crime, is to do a disservice to the reality of policing and to ignore the accumulated evidence from decades of research. Vacillation between the two paradigms is particularly damaging and a retrograde swing back to control may be destructive of institutional investments and engrained competencies. This would be the case in the Netherlands, which has for three decades specialised in a social-consent model and would have to reskill, or deskill, its workforce in this scenario.