ABSTRACT
In earlier overviews of the development of policing research author distinguished several different phases, but what is most apparent, looking back over the past fifty years, is a sharp break in the problematics of policing research in the early 1990s. As Newburn's readings show, empirical research on policing emerged in the early 1960s, in both the United States and the United Kingdom. "The police are only one among many agencies of social control". This is the first line of the first book reporting empirical research on policing. Empirical research on calls for police help and on how patrol officers spent their time and reacted to calls showed that most police work did not involve law enforcement or crime control. The implications of the early empirical research on policing were certainly debunking of much popular and police mythology. Crime, law and policing were marginal to each other.
