ABSTRACT
It is both reassuring and sobering to recall that the history of academic and empirical research on policing activities in democratic countries now extends back some40 years. The pioneering ethnographic work of Michael Banton (1964) and William Westley (1970) in the late1950s and early1960s, which did so much to open up the ‘secret social world’ of policing, was later supplemented by the work of other social scientists using a range of techniques. 1 The importance of research undertaken by independent researchers was recognized early on in the history of academic research on policing because so much of the previous research findings, produced by police departments themselves, were methodologically flawed and subject to data-rigging (Reiner2000:116). Thus, when police patrol experiments and studies of police detectives were undertaken in the USA in the early1970s, it quickly became apparent that traditional police ways of ‘doing business’ (very often backed up and legitimated by ‘research’ undertaken by police departments themselves) were lacking in both efficiency and effectiveness (Clark and Hough1980; Wilson1968, 1983; Sheptycki1993:4–20). While it is probably true to say that most police research carried out ‘in house’ in many police organizations today is more methodologically sound than it has historically been, it remains the case that independent researchers are the best bulwark against research conducted under the auspices of vested institutional interest. It is also sobering to think that this relatively young social-scientific pursuit has yet to make inroads into so many national jurisdictions and, even where it is relatively well established, must still fight to assert even a modest effect on preferred police ways of ‘doing business’.
