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Police for the Future by David H. Bayley. New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
David Bayley's most recent book is a very welcome contribution to the recent myth-busting literature about the public police. While North American readers will most easily recognise the phenomena he discusses in the book, the arguments he makes in it are enriched by the fact that he draws his illustrative examples from many other relatively affluent countries, including Australia, Britain, Canada, Singapore and Japan. Graced by his usual and refreshingly lucid and jargon-free writing style, Bayley's collation and integration of experiences of the public police in such diverse jurisdictions provides an encouraging example of the potential value of comparative policing research, of which Bayley himself is undoubtedly the world's leading practitioner. On the other hand, the selectivity of the jurisdictions to which he refers provides a ready warning against too easily assuming that either the problems he identifies or the solutions he advocates are necessarily universal. One suspects, for instance, that had his research been conducted in Brazil, Haiti, China, Russia, Mexico, Iran, and South Africa instead of in the countries he in fact chose, his diagnosis and prognosis would have looked quite different. With police, it is difficult to underestimate the importance of political, social, cultural, and even religious context.
With great perspicacity - and in refreshing contrast with so many recent books about the police whose authors seem fixated on the childhood development and identity problems of the concept of "community policing" - Bayley identifies the central issue which needs to be discussed as why the police "do not prevent crime" (and why they keep claiming that they can and do), and whether (and if so how) they can be reorganised and redeployed so that they do. That the prevention of crime is the principal justification for the existence of the public police is more or less taken for granted in the book, without any serious consideration of other possible reasons why modern states might find such an institution useful - a reflection, probably, of the fact that all of Bayley's illustrations are drawn from more or less "democratic" states.
The first part of the book (Chapters 1 to 4) provides a very valuable summary of current research and...