From Community Policing to Abstract Police:

Twenty Years of the Belgian Policy Reform

Abstract

Although the decision thereon was already made in 1998, the reform of law enforcement in Belgium began twenty years ago, on 1 January 2001. The Police, drifting into a legitimacy crisis over the failure to deal with serious crimes that shook society, have regained the trust of the community in a matter of years. Based on a community oriented policing philosophy, the unified national police force has not only earned the general recognition of international and domestic law enforcement practitioners, but also served as a compass for several police transformations in Europe, including the Dutch, Scottish, Swedish and Northern Irish police reform. In the first part of my study, I analyse in detail the antecedents of the Belgian police reform, the structure and operation of the post-reform Belgian police and the system established for the control of its operation, by processing the Belgian law enforcement law, the evaluations on the subject, the scientific literature and, especially in the current situation, the newspaper articles. In the second part, I describe the implications of the changes for the pluralism of the police and the evaluation of the Belgian police and the Belgian police system after the first ten years of the reform and today. In my analysis, I focus on the reasons for policing reforms, the measures to ensure the democratic functioning of a unified national police force, the enforcement of local and national security interests, and the current state of law enforcement reforms carried out at the turn of the millennium. From all this, I try to draw conclusions about how the police reform of the turn of the millennium works in dealing with today’s security problems.