Community-oriented policing (COP) has become, at least in rhetoric, the dominant style of policing among countries systems across the globe. Yet even limited comparative research reveals the vast variations that have occurred among and within nations that nominally seek to implement the basic principles and values underlying COP. One core principle of COP is partnership/co-production. We focus on the question whether a policing system can be said to implement the COP philosophy if effective partnerships are lacking. Partnerships, or working together, can range from merely symbolic interactions to effective and roughly equal cooperation among the police and civic society groups. Based on selected country studies, we argue that the type of partnership adopted depends heavily on societal conditions that enable or constrain implementation, but also who—police or civic society—originates and implements the idea.

Intelligence-led policing’s (ILP) promise to reform policing has attracted many to its cause. Based on empirical research, this paper challenges the validity of some of its claims and explains the ways that ILP may most fruitfully be employed. The research found that the success or failure of ILP depends on people and not on the ILP technologies, organizational structures, or processes that routinely receive attention. ILP may make perfect business sense in principle but human factors will always mitigate its prospects. Justifiably, ILP is the preferred strategy for combating organized crime or ‘professional’ criminals; the cost of investigations and intrusions into privacy can more readily be warranted. In the policing mainstream, an acceptable return on investment in those same methods is unlikely because the professional skills and specialist resources required to service them are in such short supply. Moreover, in liberal democracies their use is much more difficult to justify in social worlds that, properly, lie largely beyond the institutions’ control.

This paper briefly reviews the changing usage of the concept of police culture in studies of policing. It argues that what are regarded as the early classic studies in the field (which hardly used the term culture itself) analyzed the world-views of police officers are primarily shaped in a dialectical interaction with structural factors stemming from the police role. Some of these factors are intrinsic to policing in any circumstances, others vary between political economies, social and organizational forms, and general cultures.