Police professionalization: The Norwegian case

• In Event: POLWG Panel 12: Defining the Professional Police: Readiness, Recruitment, and Reform

Abstract

Modern police organizations are facing many challenges and problems: societal, technological, and organizational. When it comes to solutions, few approaches are discussed more often than the need for (further) professionalization. Professionalization is supposed to make the police more effective, efficient, just, motivated, legitimate, and simply better at their jobs.

Professionalization, however, is in the eye of the beholder. It is little surprise that the need for professionalization is so broadly agreed upon, as this one concept in fact covers many fundamentally different underlying images, logics and preferences. A push for professionalization can hence mask large differences between the actors involved. Moreover, discourse and policy surrounding police professionalization are strongly context-dependent, meaning that different countries will have different dominant interpretations of what professional policing means and how to achieve it. This can lead to vastly divergent trajectories of police professionalization.

This presentation focuses on one part of a cross-national comparative study on police professionalization. Norway is a particularly interesting case: police professionalization has long been a policy theme yet it has seen vastly different, even contradictory, interpretations and implications. For instance, the rise of the Norwegian higher police education system in the early 1990’s was closely intertwined with the broader higher education system where professionalization is achieved by acquiring formal competences and academic knowledge (Hove, 2012). On the other hand, more recent advances in digitalization of police work have fostered an organizational interpretation of professionalism that relies on abstraction, standardization and bureaucratic control (Gundhus, Talberg & Wathne, 2022).

Based on findings from interviews with key stakeholders on trends and developments in (the social construction of) police professionalization in Norway, I will attempt to make conceptual, theoretical and empirical sense of this professionalization complex. Finally, I will discuss lessons to be drawn for other countries based on the Norwegian experience.

Author

• Dorian Schaap, Radboud University Nijmegen