Where is Policing Studies?: A Review of Democratic Policing in a Changing World. By Peter K. Manning (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010, xvii + 306pp. $95.00 hb, $28.95 pb) * The Policing Web. By Jean-Paul Brodeur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, xiii + 404pp. $45 hb) * Lengthening the Arms of the Law: Enhancing Police Resources in the Twenty-First Century.

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, there has been a dizzying expansion in the number of institutes, posts, publications, conferences, courses and academic and quasi-academic journals devoted to research and teaching in policing. Against this backdrop, it is clearly preposterous to think that one can fully address the question ‘where is policing studies?’ in a single essay concerned with but three of the field's latest outputs. Indeed, this once small sub-field of sociology and criminology has grown at such a rate that if one set oneself the task of reading only the books and articles published on policing each year, one would struggle to keep up. The publication of these three texts nonetheless provides an opportunity to consider the current condition and prospects of policing research—to examine where it has been, where it currently stands and where it might fruitfully now travel. One reason for thinking this is that their authors include some of the founding—and subsequently most influential—figures in the sociology of policing (e.g. Brodeur 1983; Manning 1977; Shearing and Stenning 1981). Another is that these books are themselves works of synthesis, diagnosis and prognosis, and they each have interesting—and sometimes pointed—things to say about the history and state of policing studies, the challenges that presently lay before it and the agendas its practitioners should now pursue. It is with these matters in mind that I consider, in turn, the contribution of each.