Conceptualizing of Police

International audienceOverview Police as an institution cannot be said to have inspired in-depth conceptualization effortsfrom criminology and criminal justice so far. Scholars in this area show a clear preference for empirically exploring what individual police officers do or think, and the policing concept they most readily converge towards tends to hinge on the use of force, a notion developed by ethnomethodologist, Egon Bittner. This concept holds that what constitutes policing as such is " the distribution of non-negotiably coercive force ". In another tradition, stemming from European political philosophy, police are heir to a dual dimension, i.e. its relationship to both knowledge and dogma. However, numerous affinities between these two schools of thought – the Anglo-American sociological school, withits interactionistinclinations, and the European school of political philosophy – suggest that the concept of police should in fact be understood through a dualist epistemological approach. Both in legal and knowledge terms – two fundamental dimensions of policing –, police as an institution is highly idiosyncratic in that it concomitantly harbors both a) the rule of law and violence, and b) knowledge and ignorance. Main Tex