Recruiting ethnic minority police officers is widely seen as a way to improve police effectiveness and police/public relations, and systematic reviews are often commended as the most robust way to evaluate such policies. We argue that the tenets of classic systematic review are, however, inadequate to that task, and that a more inclusive methodological palette would advance our understanding of this and other important policing policies. Our principal empirical example is a systematic review we conducted that examined whether ethnic minority recruitment has beneficial effects on arrest rates and public satisfaction with police. After evaluating 10,791 studies, eleven satisfied methodological inclusion criteria, but they could not offer conclusive evidence on the effects of minority recruitment on arrest rates or public satisfaction. The example illustrates the obstacles to systematic reviews in contemporary police research. We then profile recent studies that benefit cumulative understanding of the effects of minority recruitment by employing more diverse methodologies, with each study addressing a distinct component that coheres around a logic model.

The central theme of the chapter is the similarities between ethnography and policework. Several similarities are highlighted. The core similarity concerns ethnographic fieldwork and police investigation, casting the latter inclusively so that it includes not only the work of the detective but police practice more generally. Similarities between the two fields emerge along the way, including matters of competence and craft, knowledge, and experience. Acknowledging that policing seems poised on the brink of substantial change in Western societies, not least to meet the changing expectations of the public, the chapter also directs its analysis to where we may find ourselves in a near future where contemporary efforts to bring about 'evidence-based policing' have matured.

In this editorial, we introduce the FQS special issue "Mixed Methods and Multimethod Social Research—Current Applications and Future Directions" by firstly considering changes and continuities in the field since the publication of FQS 2(1) on "Qualitative and Quantitative Research: Conjunctions and Divergences" (SCHREIER & FIELDING, 2001). We then provide a brief overview of the historical development of mixed research approaches over the past 20 years so as to arrive at a concise description of the status quo. We highlight some of the advances made by researchers applying integrative designs in multiple research areas, as well as methodologists analyzing the conceptual groundwork of mixed methods and multimethod research (MMMR). However, we also point out some of the critical issues remaining to be resolved, including the increasing internal fragmentation of the MMMR discourse and a seemingly growing gap between MMMR methodology and empirical research practice. We conclude by introducing the 13 contributions assembled in this volume.

Social science, legal and behavioural science analyses of routine police/public encounters have proposed several broad mechanisms to account for the course of police/public interaction. There is a fruitful analytic distinction to be made between formal and informal aspects of organisation. The fact that formal models do not square with what members actually do has led to descriptions of the informal organisation as a patchwork of unofficial work practices and norms. Van Maanen’s terms for the stages of organisational socialisation are respectively ‘choice’, ‘introduction’, ‘encounter’ and ‘metamorphosis’, and it is important that the last stage is concerned with ‘continuance’ rather than the achievement of some end-state. Constraints on one’s ability to understand police/public encounters either from the perspective of formal organisation, legal reality, police personality or occupational culture have been indicated. Officers also become aware that the cooperation of the public cannot be assumed but depends on the officer’s personal qualities, the character of local law enforcement and so on.

This article considers the affordances of Web 2.0 social media tools for public communications by the police and illustrates their use, presenting data from exploratory fieldwork with officers and staff in five UK police forces. Future lines of development are noted that may merit ongoing research.

This chapter provides an overview of the historical dimensions of ethnographies using mixed-methods approaches, supported by examples from selected landmark works within this tradition. It presents the epistemological assumptions about knowledge production, positionality, and the types of questions typically asked by a criminologist using mixed methods and makes clear how they differ from ethnographies using other approaches and traditions. The chapter considers what ethnographies using a mixed-methods approach can produce that other approaches may not be able to. It then details how ethnographies using mixed methods can contribute to policy development, framing this against the perspectives and needs of policymakers. The chapter concludes by assessing the potential future contribution of ethnographically grounded mixed-methods research to crime and criminal justice issues.

Critical qualitative research is at a troubled juncture. Web 2.0 has stimulated an appetite for Big Data across the policy community that maps to quantitative research, less to qualitative work. Evidence-based policy places qualitative research at the bottom of the scientific credibility scale. A lurch to the hard Right in the political world marginalizes critical research and sets back the indigenous and alienated, with whom many qualitative researchers most naturally ally. Qualitative research has a long tradition of impact in the policy world. Current trends are set against that tradition to take stock of where we are now.

This chapter discusses the evolution of the Evidence-Based Policy and Practice idea as applied to policing and in light of the contributions to this volume. It differentiates the 'First Wave' Evidence-Based Policing professed by Lawrence Sherman, and those sharing his approach, from a putative Second Wave, represented by the contributions to the present book, which pursues a more agile approach to the application of research evidence to practice, one that, it is argued, offers more scope for uptake in everyday police work. Signalling the pursuit of genuine co-production, as opposed to laying down 'evidence' with limited attention to transferability, the chapter endorses the move in the research community towards 'evidence-informed' as opposed to 'evidence-based' practice. The role of a wider palette of research methods and research approaches is explored for its potential to deliver a more inclusive rendering of the application of research to police practice, policing policy and police governance.

The pace of change occasioned by the affordances of new technologies is accelerating. The last 5 years have seen developments following in the train of Web 2.0 applications that are remarkable even set against the pace of change since the advent of the Internet. Yet it is important to be realistic about the depth of change. While there is a widespread view that the prevailing trope of our contemporary times in the Western democracies is that of neoliberalism, that view also testifies to the enduring grip of long-established realities of political economy. This article assesses what has really changed, and what has not, in four domains: Collaborative and Online Working, Citizen Research & Opening Up Research, Analyzing Online Materials, and Merged Methods.

The police have long struggled with the concept of professionalism. The Victorians veered from regarding police as servants to sanctifying policing as a special calling, while the supposed Golden Age of Policing was riven by divisions of class as sharp as those of the social diversity that poses one of contemporary policing’s harshest tests. Police training has reflected these ambiguities and uncertainties. The ground its curriculum covers, pedagogy it employs, and structures through which it operates have been contested, troublesome to manage, and blamed for policing’s failures. Behind these frictions lie large issues of governance, policing’s place in society, and what it means to be professional. Policing’s contemporary rhetoric of managerialism, consumer focus, and technology is an expression of unreconstructed modernism. Late modernity is marked by uncertainty and scepticism. In ‘post-truth’ times, professionalism must accommodate ambiguities of class, ethnicity, and sexuality. The police languish as last believers in a monochrome vision of society while the norms that make for contemporary sociality have moved on to a multiplex of diversities that harbour new extremes both of tolerance and intolerance. True professionalism alerts practitioners to other ways of delivering social control and just societies: empowering citizens and encouraging autonomy; supporting new modes of social relationships and lifestyle; fitting provision to cases; pluralizing services. This yardstick is used to assess and challenge the recruit and in-service curriculum and to tease out the options around which professionalism can be configured and embedded such that it plays its part in a humane, coherent, and accountable framework of police governance.

The chapter positions professionalism in policing and police training in the context of the contemporary police mission. It seeks to define and measure police work and the police mission by examining and assessing current policing strategies, the operation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in relation to suspect populations, and the role that the police play in responding to racism, hate crime, and terrorism. Adopting the idea of ruptured communities marked by division and polarization as a key challenge facing the police, it assesses how police respond to riots, organized crime and gang crime, and evaluates the practice of stop-and-search. It closes with the twin mythologies of new police governance—that new powers gained by the police lead to fewer constraints on their activities.

The chapter uses contemporary policing problems and challenges to evaluate how well training prepares recruits, auxiliaries, detectives, and managers for the police role. It reviews patterns of police corruption, misconduct and complaints against officers and considers whether, and how well, training helps police forces counter such problems. It also notes instances of positive responses to failures of service delivery. The discussion moves on to examine the challenge that diversity poses for the police, both at a cultural level and in respect of the specific experience of female officers, ethnic minority officers, and officers with alternative sexual orientations. The lessons of sickness, stress and injury on duty are considered in relation to how effectively training and supervision helps counter these. A discussion of public confidence and trust is used to address the concept of police legitimacy and to place it in relation to the acquisition of professional competence.

The story of training and early police service is more than a story of police and policing. At their best, studies of these stages of policing careers are stories of identity and how it changes, an...

Through a spatial analogy Chapter 7 examines the ‘topography’ of the contemporary police landscape. It traces the development of the ‘police professional body’ in the UK in the form of the College of Policing, and along the way it considers the effects of policies of austerity imposed on policing as a result of the international crisis in investment and retail banking and consequent recession. It considers the adequacy of training in helping police officers to negotiate the new terrain, and assesses the promise, and drawbacks, of a fuller engagement of police training with higher education, including the aspiration to move to a graduate force. The chapter, and book, closes with a discussion of what constitutes a professional practice of policing in the contemporary context, and how the police organization might proceed in order to achieve such a practice.

Research funders throw down a gauntlet about the grand challenges of our time, like a cure for cancer, or eradicating poverty. But normal science is the practice of the particular. Our knowledge comes in glimpses, not the arc of the floodlight. This article argues that if we want to build a cumulative knowledge of the social, we need to synthesize, not fragment, and to talk across borders, not put up fences. Critical qualitative inquiry can be a vital corrective to the grand challenge mindset, but only if we help the wider research community understand our message.