ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on grey zone creativity in policing, meaning the process whereby police officials creatively improvise new solutions to handle situations in which they find that official directions and ways of acting are unclear or inadequate. It deals with some interesting organizational and cultural challenges related to introducing innovative strategies, such as predictive and intelligence-led policing, into actual police practice. The chapter is an elaboration of author's previous in-depth work on innovation and the creative grey zones of policing and informal innovation in police, based on a total of 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork, interviews and surveys in the Danish police. The tendency to abstraction in policing concepts and programmes has at least two explanations: the call for innovative government and the desire to integrate academic knowledge into practice. At a societal level, government rhetoric about large-scale innovation and academically validated practice intensify the tension between demand that police should at once conform and be rich in creative initiative.
