Political culture and structures of social control: Police‐related scandal in the low countries in comparative perspective

Comparative studies of police have been a staple of the criminological tradition in Britain at least since Michael Banton's pioneering work on the sociology of the police organisation in the early 1960s. This paper focuses on cases of police‐related scandal in the Low Countries as a way of illustrating the importance of the political‐cultural component in comparative policing. It begins with an historical overview of the polities of the Netherlands and Belgium and examines the structural evolution of the police system in those countries. An account of some police‐related scandals is then given. Such scandals provide particularly good data for understanding the political and cultural embeddedness of policing, since such scandals are reflective not only of police practices, but are also constituted within culturally relevant terms of political discourse which help shape the machinery of governance, including police. The lessons that can be drawn from this case study are twofold. On the one hand, this paper ...