The Politics of the Police is well-known to readers of this journal, as it is likely one of the handful of texts that could be deemed a ‘classic’ in police studies. Indeed, a quick citation search suggests that since its initial publication in 1985 it is probably the most cited academic book on the police. The 4th edition does not significantly revamp Reiner’s views about the nature of policing presented in the previous editions, but is more of a re-working of several themes and update in light of events that have transpired in the decade since the prior volume was published in 2000. Notwithstanding some qualifications that I set out below, the revised book will be appealing to academics who want a solid undergraduate text that provides a comprehensive overview of the social scientific study of the police. It should be noted, however, that this is a book about the...

Intelligence analysis has emerged as an important component of contemporary policing strategies. Drawing upon qualitative data and a perspective informed by some of the concepts associated with the sociology of scientific knowledge, this paper provides an epistemologically oriented critique of some of the key techniques associated with crime analysis. Data presented suggest that crime analysis: is used in line with traditional modes of policing; is a way of claiming 'scientific objectivity' for police actions; and is largely shaped by police perspectives on data. It is argued that the sense of enhanced objectivity often attributed to the products of 'intelligence work' is frequently overstated. The products of crime analysis are better understood as an artefact of the data and methods used in their construction, rather than providing an accurate representation of any crime problems.

This paper discusses how a fairly standardized sequence of actions performed by police detectives can be understood as a form of social process and seen to be productive of an incident of homicide as a 'meaningful' event. The particular focus is upon how three key factors-the law as a mode of rationality; the organizational properties of the police service; and the circumstances surrounding the incident under investigation-shape the actions performed by individual officers, and in doing so constitute a process structure.

In this paper the concept of ‘signal crimes’ is proposed to capture the social semiotic processes by which particular types of criminal and disorderly conduct have a disproportionate impact upon fear of crime. Drawing upon the wider social scientific literature on risk perception, a sense of how and why different crime types might be possessed of different signal values is provided and some of the implications for current police practice outlined.

This article examines how the police seek to use the media in an instrumental fashion, as an investigative resource in murder enquiries. The majority of murders are comparatively easy for the police to solve. There are however, a small number of particularly serious and difficult to solve murders and it is during investigations into these types of crime that the police may employ a range of tactics to use the media as part of their wider investigative strategy. A discussion of police media strategies is provided and decisions about their strategic deployment are linked to the structural concerns of the police and media organizations.