ABSTRACT
The main impact of the policy of internal recruitment was to reconfigure the social structure of police management so that chief constables ceased to be part of the local ruling elite and became a self-contained elite group in their own right with special links to central government. The policy of internal recruitment effectively realigned the mechanisms which effect control both over police management and also over the police in general. By placing control over the police in local hands, the initial police legislation laid the basis for the development of three separate traditions of police in England and Wales, even though the Metropolitan police model influenced the construction of the provincial police. Any discussion over the future recruitment of senior police officers is locked within the current paradigm of police management, of which the ideology of internal recruitment is an integral component.
