The ‘local dimension’ that John Casey mentions in the quotation above is still very much a part of modern community and locally delivered policing in districts all over Europe, but increasingly, local crime has an international dimension. Among other things, we are concerned in this book to examine what Casey calls ‘distant jurisdictions’ in European strategic policing, yet even such a ‘continental’ approach might be regarded as parochial, especially by the Americas and the Far East in terms of, say, drugs smuggling or people trafficking. Nonetheless we are aware, as is Casey, that the average senior officer ‘routinely’ works in areas involving terrorism, cybercrime and human trafficking (Casey, 2007). The boundaries have to be drawn somewhere, and, as we explained in the Introduction, our concern is strategic police leadership in the modern European law enforcement context, because while there may be many studies of the police tactical interdiction of crime, and while there may be analyses of how ‘policing’ has reacted to social change, there are no contemporary studies that look in detail at strategic police leadership across Europe.

This chapter is partly a historical overview of the evolution of policing in Europe, partly a literature review of contemporary thinking about European policing and partly, but most importantly, the provision of a context for the views of those who spoke to us about contemporary strategic policing concerns. The most obvious example that encapsulates all three concerns is in rethinking the role of Europe's gendarmeries (Hovens and van Elk, 2011, passim; and Chapter Seven).

How did Europe come to have a sense of its own security? Are its police services evolving into something approximating to a federalised ‘nation state’? What is entailed in terms of prevention and interdiction of crime on a federal scale?