Preliminary Programme

When English police forces trained recruits, their goals included reinforcing character traits considered necessary for effective constables while discouraging unsuitable ones. In early decades, forces stressed negative qualities to avoid (recklessness, violence, insubordination, slovenliness) and positive qualities to cultivate (vigilance, intelligence, civility, discretion). The message was to avoid being like corrupt watchmen and thief-takers, an image presented to them in force histories, and instead become a new police constable. As forces became well-established, training shifted away from avoiding violence and drink, and towards the prudent exercise of discretion and a perfect command of temper. Recruits were reassured that submitting to discipline reinforced their manliness and self-respect. Sweeping histories linked policing back to Anglo-Saxon and medieval traditions, inferring that policemen were modern knights. Training stressed honor, courtesy, and restraint. When policing moved from walking beats into automobiles, the focus became building relationships and community relations. Constables were to be tactful, cheerful, and obliging in their dealings with the public, no matter how provoking the public might be. Their good behavior was presented as crucial in gaining public support. Finally, the police were forced to admit, reluctantly, that the police character worked for both genders. At first, women served in social welfare units focusing on women and children, which allowed male constables to avoid service duties that did not seem sufficiently manly. Nevertheless, female officers received the same training as male officers, including education in the proper police character. Eventually, when women served alongside men as constables, the presentation of the police character became gender neutral. Ironically, the positive qualities had always been fairly gender neutral; only the negative qualities tended towards a stereotype of the violent, reckless, and slovenly male. This paper will explore how the police character evolved in police training, with a particular focus on its reflections on gender. (Show less)

Dutch colonialism and police work on the Netherlands Antilles (1954-2010)
Bart Lentfert (Dutch Police Academy)
In addition to the great colonial empire in the East Indies and Surinam, the Netherlands have long been ruling over six islands in the Caribbean: the Netherlands Antilles. From 1954, they gradually gained more independence. They are still part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, although they now have different forms of self-government. My paper is a first report of my PhD research on the impact of colonial relations on daily police work, especially on the way in which Antillean police officers operated in the tension between the native people and the government associated with the Netherlands.

The quality of the police force and the delivered performance often received public and political attention in both the Antilles and the Netherlands. Much has been written about the organizational development and administrative embedding of the police in the Antilles. Crime, especially the role that he islands had in the traffic of narcotics from South America to Western Europe, is also known. This drug trafficking, as well as the high crime rates, including theft and robbery, urged the Netherlands partly through international pressure, to stay intensely involved with the security of the Antilles and the police. The Dutch police became a model for the Antillian police.

The main "player" in the security issue, the police officer in the Antilles, had to fulfill that model. The police officer has to do his job while he often is insufficiently trained, faced with understaffing, not appreciated by the people, plagued by integrity issues, suspected of corruption and therefore considered unreliable. What does it mean for a police corps, the local team, the individual official, to be under the magnifying glass? Not understood by Dutch government and scorned by its own population.

How did he keep up and what mechanisms did he develop to cope with this elementary uncertainty and all sorts of influences. How did he experience decolonization? The insolvency of the Antilles recorded in the 1954 statute, the riots in 1969 in Willemstad, the Status Aparte of Aruba in 1986, culminating in the 2010 separation of the Antilles in independent countries and municipalities within the Kingdom of the Netherlands. What effect did all these experiences and expectations have on his work? (Show less)

Research and popular debate has often viewed the creation of the modern police force as a logical, almost natural, response to the challenges of modernization. Contemporary commentators often characterized the modernization-process – often defined as an increase in industrial activities and urban life – as violent and disorderly. Many of these commentators saw the new factory towns, and their noisy working class, in stark contrast to the tranquility of rural areas. Cities were dangerous places that needed to be controlled, and the new way of urban lifestyles created different social and moral problems, due to changing social conditions and crumbling social control.
The often dramatic changes in urban and industrial settings placed pressure on city officials. Cities had offered the workers a dream of a better life, but they had become a stronghold of poverty and conflict. A fear arose of the unruly and possibly violent and revolutionary poor classes at the bottom of society. New ways to manage the problems were deemed necessary, at least by the ruling bourgeoisie.
This is the context from which the modern police force arose in most Western European and North American countries during the second part of the nineteenth century. From a relatively insignificant place in society’s management of crime, the police rapidly became one of the prime solutions. The modern police force, first developed in London, expanded relatively quickly to other parts of the Industrial West as the need to fight the perceived rising crime levels spread.
The view of the birth of the modern police as society’s rational reply to the crime-ridden industrial towns has been problematized by several scholars, and two conflicting perspectives have been presented. The “Whig-perspective” is an orthodox view based on a consensus model of society, and often it has been characterized as a conservative view. The development of the police force is seen in a straightforward, linear manner, and as the result of the collapse of order in an emerging industrial and urban society. The “Revisionist-perspective” challenges this perspective. The development of the police force is interpreted within the framework of a conflict-based society. The threat of the working class caused the bourgeoisie to create new methods to control society. This paper discusses the birth of the modern police, and the two perspectives above. The discussion is based on empirical findings from local, regional and national levels during the industrialization process in Sweden, and the development is compared to those in other Western countries. (Show less)

Professional journals - not to be mistaken for staff magazines - occupy the middle ground on the continuum between popular magazines and scholarly journals. Which way they lean, depends on aspects such as the level of independence, the editorial team and the target group.

In a narrative approach to the history of criminal justice, professional journals of the police can be a valuable addition to the sources available to researchers and in the Netherlands a treasure trove of professional journals is available for those wishing to study the history of the Dutch police. Since 1947 eight journals have existed; some for a couple of years, others for decades. Two of those journals have been published ever since 1947 and have seen little change in editorial policy, guaranteeing a more or less continuous and similar coverage of the Dutch police.

These eight journals range from free journals (aimed at all police, and subsidized by the so-called police departments) to subscription journals (aimed at a specific niche within the police, and independent of the police organization). Some journals have (had) a(n) explicit external focus; some had a journalist as editor-in-chief while others had a (chief) commissioner of police or a non-sworn member of the police organisation take up this position. Some depended on commercial advertisements, while others put strict limits on the opportunities to advertise.

Together, the eight Dutch police journals offer a unique insight in the narrative of the police and, as such, can be a useful addition to more traditional sources for narrative research like memoires written by former police and interviews with former and current police. Moreover, where memoires can be scarce, former police tend to die of old age, and current police may feel or experience some restrictions, professional journals are always available and offer plenty of articles on a great number of subjects.

Of the roles of police journals that are of interest to the researcher, the following four will be elaborated upon: (1) as a source of renewal in police practices (example: gathering criminal information); (2) as a podium for debate about the future of the police organisation (example: plans for a regionalized police); (3) as a podium for debate about government policy (example: drugs policy); and (4) as a medium to broach sensitive subjects (example: police in the Second World War). (Show less)