Attitudes of Police Leaders and Master Students Towards Police Reform

– A Common Intersection of Two (Types of) Empiricisms

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to compare the research findings of the two authors on the reform of the police occupational culture and its organisational restructuring.

The first is a survey commissioned by the then National Police Commissioner in 2009 as part of the Police Strategic Planning process to inform the strategic concept for the transformation of the occupational culture of policing, and the subsequent empirical data collection among Master's students at the Police College. The second study is part of the doctoral research "Prospects of reform and community-based operation in the Hungarian police" and examines the results of 19 interviews with police leaders of a Hungarian county on the interpretation of security, the assessment of cooperativeness and the definition of public security problems.

The two authors' research on different target groups, significantly separated in time, led to different results. The first concludes by proposing a complete reform of the law enforcement system, while the second calls for an evolution of the internal professional processes that affect the functioning of law enforcement. The two different approaches, however, reach a number of similar conclusions regarding the state of the police and the points of intervention.

The comparison of the two studies in one study shows that there is no significant disagreement between experts in the field of police education and practitioners in the field of policing as regards the functioning of the police. The fundamental difference in their positions is in the way and extent of change, which, given the common goal, does not seem to be an irresolvable conflict.