ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework for examining the development of police research in Britain over the last thirty years, and the prospects for the future. The development of police research will be related to wider political conflicts and controversies surrounding the police. The development of the police in the last thirty years can be divided into four stages, demarcated in terms of the nature of political debate about policing. During the 1970s the elements making for the legitimation of the police in Britain became unravelled and reversed. The series of revelations of police deviance, both in the sense of corruption and other violations of the rule of law, undermined the image of the police as professional symbols of legal authority. Since 1981 there have been two contradictory pressures at work shaping the development of policing. The contradictory pressures, making for continuing delegitimation, stem ultimately from the increasingly acute economic, social and political divisions of Britain.
