Abstract
This article charts the career of Robert Reiner, the pioneering British police researcher and prolific writer on mass media, popular culture, political economy, law and order, crime and justice. It surveys his life and work focusing on his contribution to the sociology of policing. The article examines Reiner’s empirical and theoretical studies of policing and the ways in which his work has shaped the discipline. The Politics of the Police, published nearly 30 years ago and now in its fourth edition, is the finest, most authoritative and comprehensive account of British policing in the post-war period and remains the standard work in the field. The article explores the historical, sociological, cultural and social-legal facets of Reiner’s work that have decisively shaped our thinking about policing, how it should be defined, understood and studied. The legacy of Reiner’s work is a tradition of policing scholarship that embraces a fully social and democratic sensibility of what the police are for in order to show how policing can best be performed.
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