Crime has gone down, yet the police are in crisis. The police forces of two states studied in this book – the UK and the Netherlands – have been going through their most convulsive changes since the 1960s. The Dutch system, after decades of devolved forces, has been centralised into a single national force. In the UK, Scotland has adopted the Dutch or Nordic model of a single force, and England and Wales has decentralised and imposed a radical change in democratic oversight. All the changes have a common driver in the perception that public policing needs to be reformed to meet future challenges and to respond to past and present problems. The very fact that crime has gone down across the developed world has allowed a political stock take of the investment in policing and a reassessment of its relative contribution against other public services at a time of deep austerity. Cybercrime, people trafficking and organised crime have presented challenges to public policing to which the 20th-century model cannot respond effectively. Bounded by geography, public policing has struggled to find ways to tackle crimes without boundaries. Meanwhile, police legitimacy in their core mission has been under pressure. On the one hand, the very deterrence-based strategies – particularly stop and search – that were deployed to reduce crime in public places have created a gulf between police and young people and minority communities. On the other, there have been failures to tackle domestic violence and the sexual exploitation of children. Hence this study of police leadership is timely and insightful.

The Netherlands and the UK have shared a common approach to many policing issues for several decades. Both have sought to develop a consent-based, community-focused model. Both have wrestled with the need to balance local control of priorities with national strategic requirements within a unitary state. Both have been edging towards a more professional framework for education and ways of enhancing the contribution of research and knowledge into practice. Neither has yet been wholly successful. This book is a product of the type of partnership between academic and practitioner that is critical to that ambition. Professor Punch has long been one of the most articulate and insightful commentators on the interface between police science and police practice.