European national police systems and metropolitan realities

Abstract

By including this chapter in the volume we want to avoid that each of the contributors has to explain the broad national policing context and the standing conditions in their chapters, while it is precisely the intention to focus on differences in metropolitan policing. In other words, the ambition of this publication is cross-national, even trans-national, comparison. But the endeavour is also intra-national. It was the merit of Wesley Skogan to suggest to compare in each country two or more major cities in one and the same country, trying to discover to what extent policing in these cities differ from each other. The underlying assumption is that differences in policing in metropolises in the same nation-state reflects the elbowroom of metropolitan areas to develop their own policing policy, in spite of one and the same national context. We assume that the reverse is also probable, more precisely that the absence of prominent metropolitan differences in one and the same country mirrors largely the dominance of a national security policy. Therefore it is necessary to include this chapter in the volume. Politics in European metropolises is largely characterized by the competition of power between the nation-state and metropolitan governance. In the majority of European countries the state police are still considered as the formal guardian (or the relic of a vanished age) of sovereignty on the national territory and the visible expression of state power.

It seems that European nation-states consider police matters still as their property and that national governments conceive their police system as one of the national symbols of their existence. Police is considered as the visible presence of the state in public space.

In this chapter we present a typology of different national police systems, useful for the interpretation of a metropolitan reading of policing realities within different national contexts. Given this general framework, we tried to build this typology on the question of (historical) national dominance or regional autonomy in policing.