ABSTRACT
Reforming police is one of the key challenges of contemporary policing and governance (Brodeur, 2010; Manning, 2010; Fleming & Wood, 2006). A few years ago, Stenning and Shearing (2005), drawing on work a decade earlier arguing that the 1990s represented a “watershed” period in policing reform (Bayley & Shearing, 1996), outlined what they believed to be the key opportunities, drivers, and challenges to reforming police. In their analysis, they identi‹ed a range of internal and external factors shaping the reform process, more or less “facilitating” or “hastening” reform (2005, p. 168). ey concluded that we can be both optimistic and pessimistic about the potential for police reform. Reform is quite possible even in circumstances of entrenched and seemingly unchangeable bad policing arrangements and practices (our term), while, on the other hand, the same applies to good policing arrangements-they should never be assumed to be so good as to protect against reforms that are less progressive in the sense of undermining democratic, human-rights respecting, and community-based policing. Many of the chapters in Global Environment of Policing o er di erent aspects of good and bad, and di erent internal and external forces shaping policing reform.
