What is offered in this book, for the first time we think, is rich detail of the views and attitudes of a representative range of European strategic police leaders. These officers determine the operational effectiveness of police forces across Europe, and it was timely to look at who they are, how they got there, what they do, what they want and what they believe to be the future of policing.

The strategic police leader remains an enigma, even inside policing, and for many reasons, including democratic accountability, we need to understand how this elite works and to ask whether it is properly accountable or merely self-referential. What often seems to concern the elite itself are ways and means to operate effectively across jurisdictional boundaries to interdict cross-border criminality, which is laudable but hardly strategic.

The official and political powers in the European Commission (EC) see police activity at the operational level of bilateral cooperation as an example of narrow nationalism, and would much rather encourage strategic coordination of all members’ agencies on a sufficient scale to combat international criminality across Europe. But there was little in our interviewees’ comments that willingly embraced this political ideal of pan-Continental concerted police action. In turn, this may suggest that there is something of a credibility gap between the kind of supra-national policing vision promulgated by the EC and a doggedly pragmatic determination to get the job done at the cooperative policing level.

There are also internal controversies aired by the strategic police leaders, such as:

• • their scepticism about the role of Europol and Eurojust;

• • their frustration at the lack of objective and systematic development programmes at the strategic level in almost every country;

• • their weary, even jaundiced, view of police accountability in practice, particularly through what many saw as their ‘submission’ to the local mayor and to the media.

They also gave us extended commentaries on:

• • cybercrime

• • public order

• • illegal trafficking

• • transnational organised crime and criminals

• • terrorism

• • operational prioritisation in a time of financial austerity

• • political interference.

These are all urgent topics that have engaged, and continue to preoccupy, strategic police leaders, and we should listen carefully, if dispassionately, to what they have to say.