State police in a state of change: remaking the entrepreneurial officer

We are currently at a point in time in Australia where questions concerning how to govern police have never been more pressing or more fluid. Systemic corruption has been identified in several states; a range of new accountability mechanisms have been established internal and external to police and in Victoria police corruption has been linked with a violent \u27gangland war\u27. This thesis locates these contemporary developments within a broader analysis of the historical circumstances shaping the changing techniques for governing state police. More specifically, this thesis engages in a detailed comparative study of the changing techniques of governing police in Queensland and Victoria. The theoretical tools to conduct this analysis are drawn from \u27governmentality studies\u27. This refers to a broad grouping of theoretical scholarship concerned with the changing ideas - or \u27political rationalities\u27 - on how to govern some thing or some activity, and the underlying reasoning, justifications and ambitions contained within the practical tools or \u27techniques\u27 used to govern. Central to the thesis is an argument that a new politics of policing has emerged recently, one that extends the dyad of the old accountability - \u27police powers\u27 and \u27external accountability\u27 - to a pluralisation of accountability processes and structures. The thesis argues that governmentality studies offer new insights into ways of analysing the techniques for governing state police, increasingly shaped by the managerialisation of governing and embodying efforts to make police innovative, risk-taking problems-solvers. This is what I refer to as an open-ended normative project for re-making the entrepreneurial officer. However, a detailed examination of the development of governmental techniques for \u27making up\u27 the entrepreneurial officer indicates that such a governmental project is not implemented unproblematically. Nonetheless, the thesis concludes that the attempts to remake the entrepreneurial officer through the managerialisation of governing presents distinct possibilities for a new \u27politics of policing\u27 that fosters deliberative, reflective police practice within a new framework of police accountabilities