Response to Review Symposium on The Politics of the Police 4th ed.

It is most gratifying to read these reviews of the new edition of my book The Politics of the Police, written by three leading scholars. It is particularly encouraging to someone of my vintage (due to retire this year) that these assessments come from the generation I think of as the young Turks, two of whom I got to know whilst they were still doing their PhDs (though there are now even more youthful researchers snapping at their heels—like police officers of yore, criminologists are always getting younger).

I am particularly gratified that all three have cut right to the heart of what I intended by writing the book. Although I am sure it is mostly used as a teaching text, my main motivation has always been to offer a polemical intervention into the political debates that the book charts. But what has shifted dramatically, in particular between the...