From the Editor-in-Chief

A global board of editors

I would like to use this editorial to reflect on a few recent significant developments in Police Practice and Research: An International Journal (PPR) and its affiliating organization, International Police Executive Symposium, IPES,WWW.IPES.INFO.

We have made a departure in our editorial practice we have been following since the millennium when PPR was born. Every Managing Editor, the most important editorial position in this journal, has been from the North American side of the Atlantic. For the first time with this issue, we are starting with a Managing Editor, as it appears to us in the PPR, from as if, a ‘Brave New World’ (Shakespeare, 2001), England, the other side of the Big Pond. PPR’s new Managing Editor is Professor David Walsh; a Professor in Criminal Investigation; and, a Business and Law Faculty Research Ethics Chair in the School of Law at the De Montfort University (Leicester).

It appears that in PPR innovations emerge very naturally, unobtrusively. Before David Walsh, we had for the first time in PPR, a woman researcher, Dr. Carla Lewandowski, as a very successful Managing Editor, and it was she who advocated inviting her successor David, from outside our physical, geographical home base, (not, of course, the spiritual orbit). The PPR’s very natural innovations seem to have an ever expanding horizon. The Associate Managing Editor, Dr. Anna Bussu, who recently joined the Edge hill University in Ormdkirk in England as a faculty member, became known to us when she was teaching at the Sassari University in Italy. We came in touch with Anna while she was there as she became an author of PPR when she was teaching in the above mentioned university in her native land. True, Dave too began his journey to the top editorial job as a PPR author.

Some of our outstanding Reviewers (Our experience is that good reviewers are indeed the most valuable contributors to the quality of a peer-reviewed, truly global journal like PPR). An outstanding Reviewer came to PPR as the European Research Editor from the UK: She is Dr. Winfred Agnew-Pauley of Anglia Ruskin University and we also invited another distinguished Reviewer. Wendell Wallace, Barrister, from The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago as an Editor. Dr. Clare Farmer of Deakin University, Victoria, Australia; Xiaochen Hu of Fayetteville State University, North Carolina, Loene Howes of the University of Tasmania, Australia, Marco Celaresu of the Sassari University, Italy and Sally Ashton from Edgehill University in the UK were recently invited to join the Board of Editors because of their spectacular performance as Reviewers.

One of our recent Editors, the Practice Editor, North America came to us after his impressive performance as a speaker in IPES Meeting hosted last year at the UNODC (United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime) in Vienna. He is Assistant Commissioner, Kevin Hackett of RCMP in British Columbia. We have found a couple of other Editors through this avenue. They are chosen police leaders who are thinkers (Goldstein, 1977). Another thinking police leader who is preparing to come to this year’s IPES Meeting is Assistant Commissioner Mercio Basilio of Rio de Janerio in Brazil.

We have editors who have come to PPR after their brilliant contribution as authors and editors of books in the IPES Series, Advances in Police Theory and Practice as well as IPES/Routledge Co-Publications like Bruce Baker of the Coventry University in the UK. and Clifford Shearing of Australia. They have endeared themselves to us as PPR Editors. In this category we have as Editor Gary Cordner, John Eterno, Diana Peterson, Tim Prenzler, Otwin Marenin, Arvind Verma, and Curt Griffiths. We bask in the bright, warm sunshine they have brought to us.

What I have narrated above is not a Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens, 2000); It is perhaps a rambling fireside chat about how so many scholars and practitioners from all over the world have come to be part IPES and PPR, two worlds of police practice and research.

This issue 4 and Volume 20, is a global product of articles and reviews coming from various parts of the world. We thank the authors and reviewers who have made this possible.

1. Edited at the office of the International Police Executive Symposium, IPES, WWW.IPES.INFO