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 some 40 years. The pioneering ethnographic work of Michael Banton (1964) and William Westley (1970) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, 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 (Reiner 2000: 116). Thus, when police patrol experiments and studies of police detectives were undertaken in the USA in the early 1970s, 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 Hough 1980; Wilson 1968, 1983; Sheptycki 1993: 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’.
