ABSTRACT
Conditions in changing societies may provide windows of opportunity to redefine location and control of policing types and forms. In unstable or changing systems, ownership of policing may be movable toward community groups. Every reproduction of policing is an attempt to reconcile inherent contradictions into effective and legitimate forms of order maintenance. Such contradictions will continue even during periods of massive social changes. The current dominance of state policing in practice and in police theory may be, as Samuel Walker and Clifford Shearing argue, a historical phase. Forms of policing are inextricably caught in a tension between stability and breakdown, a dynamic which is normally hidden by the stability of state and society. The state, civil society, and the police each are shaped by complex and shifting constellations of causative forces and are linked to each other in complex and shifting patterns. The police themselves are characterized by the uses made of their coercive capacity, whether for protection or repression.
