Sunday, July 6, 2014

Kratcoski and Das, eds, 2007, Police Education and Training in a Global Society (policing)


Kratcoski and Das are both eminent academics in comparative police scholarship, but the more than 40 contributors from more than 25 countries are predominantly practitioners: police colonels, senior administrators, technical specialists, lawyer-practitioners, and academics with field-time. It’s an impressively global and diverse list. The collection is built around the proceedings of the 9th International Police Executive Symposium held in Turkey in 2002. Given the five year gestation (I can imagine chasing some papers) the content is now dated by more than a decade, but is still the only collection of its kind outside specialized journals.  Footnotes and references point to some useful sources that I suspect have been updated more recently.  The organization is both geographic and functional. Europe (Ukraine, Austria, Serbia, Croatia, Russia, UK, and a four-country comparison of Switzerland, Germany, France, and Japan). North and South America are rather under-represented with a single country-paper from Brazil, and a bunch of specialized papers from the US, mainly by university-based professionals, albeit with field experience.  The section on specialized police education and training includes socially driven change in the NL, ICRC relations with police and security forces, and an interesting chapter from Turkey on management training and the New Public Management.  At the time, NPM was just seeping into the public sector in the West, so Turkey was on the forefront in applying it to police management. The section on Issues in police education and training is dominated by the anglo sphere - US, Canada, and Australia. While each of the papers has potential value, the golden synopsis is the editors’ summary introductory essay, including some great quotes about the merging of police and international security responsibilities, and the importance of education.  
(also on Amazon)
David Last, 17 November 2013

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