The Social Science Encyclopedia

Authors: Kuper & Kuper
Summary: The entry distinguishes between the term police and the broader concept of policing, and notes recent scholarship on these matters. Police refers to a specific social institution with its own bureaucracy, rules, and norms, while policing refers to a process with particular social functions.
Policing connotes a set of activities directed at preserving the security of a particular social order. It may be defined as surveillance coupled with the threat of sanctions for any discovered deviance. The most familiar system of this kind is indeed the police, a term which implies a formal organization concerned primarily with regular uniform patrol of public space together with post-hoc investigation of reported or discovered crime or disorder. More broadly, policing may be carried out by professional state employees with an omnibus policing mandate, or by professional employees of specialist private police agencies, or by citizens in a voluntary capacity within state organizations.
Specialized policing institutions, together with social inequality and hierarchy, emerge only in relatively complex societies. They are linked to economic specialization and the differential access to resources that occur in the transition from a kinship to a class-dominated society.
Since the mid-1960s a substantial body of research on police organization and practice has developed, primarily in Britain and North America. This research has coincided with a period in which growing concern about rising crime and about police malpractice has kept law and order at the center of political controversy. Police forces have grown in powers and resources while, paradoxically, research has shown little correlation between crime reduction and increased police deployment.