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

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Abstract
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 will show that comparative criminologists need to be extremely cautious in making general statements based on abstracted models of police systems and organisational frameworks, since such general models are inattentive to the cultural embeddedness of the crime control enterprise. The cultural meaning of police and policing, it is argued, ought to receive more attention in the comparative police literature. On the other hand, those concerned to analyse policy development with regard to the harmonisation of police and criminal justice systems within the European Union need to take account of local political cultures. This case study will illuminate some of the processes that may confound dirigest rationalism in one region.