This article examines a 1949 police training text written by Glasgow City Police Detective Constable Douglas Hamilton, published in The Police Journal, to analyse one way in which homosexuality was rendered visible and policeable in the immediate post-war period. Through a close textual and discursive analysis, the paper argues that Hamilton's article functioned as an example of a practical technology of police visuality: it instructed officers how to identify and entrap homosexual men in public and semi-public spaces at a time of intensified concern with crime detection, moral order, and internal security. Situating the analysis within literatures on police culture, detection, and discretion, as well as queer and cultural criminology, the article demonstrates how police knowledge about homosexuality was operationalised through narrative description rather than formal law alone. By foregrounding this police training literature as an historically significant site of cultural and institutional power, the paper contributes to policing studies by showing how everyday police practices of looking and detection helped construct sexual deviance as an object of governance. While grounded in historical analysis, the article also highlights the enduring relevance of these visual tropes for understanding the fragility of subsequent sexual liberalisation and the persistence of moral policing through processes other than law.
This study examines how disciplinary decision-making (DDM) operates within the Korean police by focusing on the processes through which disciplinary outcomes are produced. Drawing on in-depth interviews with disciplinary officers, this study employs a grounded theory approach to analyse the dynamics of police discipline. The analysis identifies Situated Inconsistency in DDM as the central phenomenon. This inconsistency is shaped by causal conditions such as excessive discretion in DDM and institutional constraints embedded in disciplinary rules and procedures. Contextual conditions - including individual characteristics of key actors, organisational and external pressures, and the expanded involvement of external members - further influence decision-making. Intervening conditions, such as oversight by higher-level agencies and informal reliance on precedents, influence action-interaction strategies within the DDM process. In response, disciplinary authorities and officers engage in responsibility-avoidance and risk-dispersion strategies. By demonstrating how bureaucratic blame avoidance and the symbolic dimensions of institutional accountability operate within the DDM process of the Korean police, this study highlights the need for police discipline research to shift its attention from disciplinary outcomes to decision-making dynamics and provides useful implications for future research. Lastly, the study discusses some implications for improving consistency and legitimacy in police disciplinary systems.
Police leadership in Canada is in flux. Police leaders appear to be turning over at an alarming rate, potentially jeopardising the stability of police services and raising questions about recruitment and retention by police service boards and commissions. In this study, we examine police chief tenure in 40 jurisdictions across Canada, 2000-2025. We investigate if the rate of police chief turnover is increasing and, if so, which factors contribute to these changes. This research has implications for police leadership in Canada and internationally, by contributing to important conversations about the demographic profile and turnover of police leaders in the twenty-first century.
Public trust in the police is a vital element of law enforcement legitimacy, effective policing, and social stability, particularly in fragile and post-conflict contexts such as Mogadishu, Somalia. In Somalia, despite the police's significant role in maintaining public order, there is low trust in the police. This study examined the joint influence of perceived police professionalism and perceived police accountability on public trust in police services through the underlying mechanism of citizen satisfaction with police services. We collected cross-sectional survey data from 531 participants who were residents of Mogadishu, Somalia. To test the proposed model, we used partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The findings revealed that both perceived police professionalism and accountability exerted significant positive effects on public trust in police services. In addition, the results showed that both perceptions of professionalism and accountability significantly enhanced citizen satisfaction with the police services. Furthermore, the results showed that citizen satisfaction with police services partially mediates the relationship between independent and dependent variables. We integrated perceived police professionalism, accountability, citizen satisfaction with police, and trust in police into a single unified conceptual model. Therefore, this study advances the scholarship on policing and criminology by extending police legitimacy research to fragile post-conflict settings. The findings of this study highlight the importance of strengthening police professional conduct and accountability mechanisms to improve citizen satisfaction and rebuild public trust in policing institutions in Somalia and comparable contexts.
