This Appendix is divided into two parts. Part One comprises two case studies – one from the UK and one from the US – illustrating how difficult it is to deliver service under the community policing label, hereafter referred to as ‘COP’, and how this reveals deep ambivalences within policing. Part Two contains an outline of ‘agora’, a safe haven for confrontational thinking, in Amsterdam. Police employ concepts that are vague and infinitely elastic but that promise to take the public seriously and to accommodate their needs. As the case study from the UK shows, the structure and functioning of the Met undermines the institution's espoused goals and its implicit contract with the people of London, and, importantly, it demonstrates what Londoners want from their police. In Seattle we can see that the promise to implement COP is highly dependent on what is meant by ‘community’ and the nature of the community being policed. We also learn that while COP is marketed in the US as the defining concept in American policing of recent decades, it is hardly ever wholeheartedly supported throughout the organisation and is rarely adequately evaluated. Manning (2010) portrays this at length. Hence policing runs the danger of constantly promising what it cannot deliver, and if it does make a serious effort – as in Chicago (Skogan, 2004) – a change of wind in the administration can thwart or reverse that effort. To a considerable extent, that reversal is evident in the UK and the Netherlands. The rhetoric remains the same, but the reality is that in several societies less effort than before is being put into COP-related activities.

Agora in the Netherlands moves attention to a different level within the organisation. It was mentioned in Chapter Five that some police leaders feel they were not adequately prepared for senior positions; and that senior officers in England and Wales feel they needed to be better prepared for the chief officer level and chief constable function (Caless, 2011). Taking this into consideration, agora is a means of supporting the chief individually in decision making by offering thinking space and ‘breathing space’.