![Sample our Social Sciences journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110822/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Social-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
There are many new challenges for senior police officers in a globalized world: International management skills, knowing about scientific apporaches, the management of knowledge and information. It seems to be clear, that a police manager's job qualifications fit into the profiles of other academic disciplines. The Bologna process is leading to bachelor and master degrees in the fields of police training and education in the EU member states. Developing Police Science as an integrative discipline within and outside the police seems to be a proper way of solving problems to the benefit of both — the police and the society.
Notes
1. We use the term ‘‘modern police science’’ for the new discipline to distinguish it from the older police science (Polizeiwissenschaft), a discipline firmly established at German universities until the mid-19th century that dealt with topics which would today probably be part of ‘‘public policy and administration studies’’; it is described in detail in Hans Maier's post-doctoral thesis of 1962 (see Maier, Citation1965).
2. See Feltes (Citation2001) for additional information. See also Programm Innere Sicherheit (Internal Security Program), 1994 update, edited by the Permanent Conference of German State Ministers of the Interior.
3. The Higher Education Committee of the Conference of Education Ministers has decided to make recognition of a future police university dependent on its accreditation by the Advisory Council on Academic Affairs four years after the change of status, at the latest.
4. The claim of being an integrative discipline pertains not only to the various (sub)-disciplines and subjects of the field, but also to its theoretical pretensions, its practical relevance, and its impact on academic and police culture.
5. It hardly needs mentioning that an academic education as such is no guarantee of good practical performance.
6. Of course, the politicians (‘‘primacy of political authority’’), the courts, and the professional associations also provide innovative impulses for practical police work. Nevertheless, long-range concepts, such as the introduction of DNA analysis, community crime prevention and community policing, have always been initiated and/or accompanied by innovations in science.
7. For example, the technical means of operational command and control or natural science means of criminal investigation and forensic medicine.
8. This is confirmed by the history of police training and education in Germany, which did not begin before the late 19th century.
9. Hubig (Citation2000: 54 et seq.) distinguishes between multi-disciplinary, trans-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary approaches. While a multi-disciplinary approach implies a merely additive combination of different approaches, the concept of a trans-disciplinary approach calls for an incremental modification and qualification of a single-disciplinary modeling of a problem by adopting the perspectives of other disciplines. The aims of a problem-oriented inter-disciplinary approach are somewhere in between ‘‘It begins with an exact and complete understanding between individual disciplines concerning the failure of solutions to problems’’.
10. Examples: functional communication and co-operation between defense lawyers and administrative lawyers, between secondary school teachers and vocational school teachers, between orthopedists and internists is quite possible, especially because they share the basic principles and questions of the respective integrated disciplines.
11. See, for example, the journal Universitas, which is in its 59th year of publication, and covers virtually all academic fields and integrated disciplines in a comprehensible language.
12. This is symbolically expressed in the annual meetings and congresses held by the various disciplines and scientific associations, which are often conducted on a large scale and attended by many hundreds of people.
13. In an expert report on colleges of public administration issued on 10 May 1995, the German Advisory Council on Academic Affairs (Wissenschaftsrat) reached the disillusioning overall conclusion that these colleges do not meet the academic standards of the general colleges. The Advisory Council, therefore, made the recommendation that the personnel structure must be improved to become more like those of the universities, the course contents must become more academic, and the colleges should be integrated into the general system of higher education. The autonomy of universities and colleges is considered an essential prerequisite. One recommendation reads as follows: ‘‘A further reform of police training and education is desirable, since a possible separation of the police training from external facilities and its continuation in the police administration would lead to an even greater isolation from the public, which is not desirable for social and political reasons, particularly in the police force’’ (Wissenschaftsrat, Citation1995: 64).
14. Medical doctors did not work for years as nurses or as medical assistants; most jurists did not work for years as judicial clerks; most teachers did not work as clerks in the school administration; most Bundeswehr officers did not serve for years as company first sergeants; chief engineers or architects are not required to have worked for years on building sites; good dentists must not have long-time professional experience as dental technicians. No one would come up with the idea of demanding this or consider this to be special proof of job qualifications.
15. These contradictions are particularly evident in the professional self-image of those police officers that have been employed for a long time (sometimes even without a time limit) as teachers, lecturers and instructors at the police training institutions. From an objective point of view, they are teachers, lecturers or instructors at colleges who previously worked in police forces many years ago. In their self-image, however, they have remained police officers, even 20 years after their last police operation. They receive their identity and their sense of community from the police rather than through their college. Many still see themselves as ‘‘practitioners’’, even after many years of full-time teaching, and they are labeled as such: not as college teachers, but as police practitioners. This almost comical phenomenon has so far not been the subject of an empirical study; however, it can most likely be explained by the internalized and long-standing norms of the cop culture (their sense of community), their lack of social recognition and self-acceptance at the college or police academy, and the symbolic or overt rituals of exclusion by the academics who are employed at the police education and training institutions.
16. An example of such a new development is the establishment of the CEPOL Research and Science Committee in 2002. One of the authors of this paper belongs to this committee as a ‘‘national correspondent’’. The committee attempts to concentrate and interlink police science and police research at the EU level, e.g., by holding police science meetings or creating a database for research projects in the European Police Learning Network (EPLN).