Short description:

This handbook identifies the key issues facing the police and safety governance across the globe and offers insights into the implications for policing theory and practice, proposing solutions to some of the most intransigent problems facing contemporary societies.

Long description:

Critical analyses of policing have accompanied accounts of the police since the early days of modern police organisations. More so than ever, police and policing are subject to close and critical scrutiny from governments and the public. It is timely, therefore, to consider what is critical about police and policing.

The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Policing Studies brings together scholars and practitioners to critically explore the full continuum of safety governance from police reforms to the redistribution of policing resources to the replacement of state police. In offering the three Rs of policing?reform, redistribute, replace?we provide a conceptualisation of critical policing studies that acknowledges a continuum of policing that mirrors the different trajectories, priorities, and possibilities that exist across different cultural and historical contexts. This collection is composed of 65 scholars and practitioners across 39 chapters, edited by a team of police pracademics and policing scholars, to showcase accounts of policing from outside the Anglo-European metropole, privileging works from First Nations people and from the Global South, and presenting contextualised solutions to the problems facing police and communities.

This Handbook identifies the key issues facing the police and safety governance across the globe and offers insights into the implications for policing theory and practice, proposing solutions to some of the most intransigent problems facing contemporary societies. Individually, and as a collection, this Handbook will be an essential read for scholars, practitioners, and activists alike.

?Confirming and confronting of old truths while simultaneously offering new approaches to the policing praxis, this book is thought provoking, intellectually challenging, and entirely relevant. For origins to future trajectories, each aspect of policing is tackled in a multifaceted and multilayered manner reflecting at its core a careful weighing up and ethical reckoning of the police narrative.?

Professor Rob White, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Criminology, University of Tasmania, Australia

?The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Policing Studies is a well-constructed compilation of global scholarship that challenges traditional beliefs about policing. The book also provides measured critiques of traditional policing, inequality, and injustice in policing, while offering critical reflections and potential new directions in policing.?

Dr Wendell Wallace, Coordinator, Mediation Studies Unit, University of West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago

?Honouring policing's aspirations?and more importantly protecting and elevating a society's most vulnerable members?requires that we question the status quo with a sharp critical lens. That is what this volume does so well: taking a broad, global scope, it provides fresh and rigorous thinking about some of the most vexing challenges of modern policing.?

Dr Brandon del Pozo, Assistant Professor, Medicine and Health Services, Policy, and Practice, Warren Alpert Medical School, Brown University, USA

Table of Contents:

List of Figures and Tables
List of Contributors
Foreword
Acknowledgments

SECTION I. Conceptual Frameworks

1 ?Who ya gonna call?? Peelian ghosts, contemporary contradictions, and conceptualising critical policing studies

2 Origin stories and the possibilities of policing

3 Policing and the myth of public safety

4 Reforming policing

5 Reformism, abolitionism and the structural context of policework

6 Reform and the policing of gender violence: specialist stations in the province of Buenos Aires, Argentina

7 Decoding of restorative justice practices: Evidence from Indian police stations

8 Desistance-led policing in the Maldives: A new way of policing persistent offenders

9 Policing indigenous communities in Canada

10 Rethinking community policing in Fiji

11 ?Light touch? police reform: The Tonga Police Development Program

12 Citizens? trust and legitimacy in the police in Africa

13 Professionalising a profession: The PEQF and policing in England and Wales

14 National levers for reform of decentralised policing systems

15 Redistributing resources, rank, and relationships to reduce harm in public safety responses

16 Propinquity and public safety

17 Crowdsourcing in missing person investigations: Opportunities for police to foster public trust

18 When we need you, we will call you?: Policing through social contract in a localised health setting

19 The policing of dis/ability

20 Arts and policing: imagining new approaches to police-community relationships?

21 Policing African migrants in Australia

22 Lost in translation: Policing and alternatives to mental health crisis

23 Missing communities: A novel approach to police-community partnership

24 Envisaging the future of community safety and wellbeing: Practical examples of policing and public health collaborations

25 Civic heroes or untrained allies? A critical examination of bystander intervention in co-production policing

26 Beyond communities and securitarianism: Plural security in Umbria

27 Building up, not breaking down: Replacing systems of exclusion and harm

28 Police reformism and the challenges of decolonialism and abolitionism

29 The failed Indigenisation experiment: a critical analysis of the state-of-exception policing in Aotearoa New Zealand

30 Policing of urban margins, police accountability and contested Human Rights: An enquiry into a Chilean neighbourhood

31 An Elders-led response to the criminalisation of Aboriginal Young People in a Remote Community

32 The Rojava revolution and alternative models of policing

33 Freedom House: A critical counternarrative

34 Sex workers, work! Anticarceral practices to criminalisation

35 Reclaiming public safety: How lessons from harm reduction can help us realise a police-free future

36 Crowdsourcing as a strategy to monitor police drug dog detection operations in New South Wales: The ?Sniff Off? case study

37 Pain compliance, disability, and state accountability: Lessons from Chile and Colombia on the form and function of less lethal weapons

38 Confronting the unconfronted: Colonial legacies and policing in the Swedish suburb

39 Considerations for Police Abolition in the Global South