Theorising police professionalisation and academic education

The paper explores the role of academic education in police professionalisation by placing it within a theoretical framework of sociology of professions. Police can be argued to display many of the qualities of professions but has lacked their characteristic level of ‘instructional abstraction’ provided by higher education and leading to externally recognised qualifications. Academic education bestows a rich cultural capital, strengthens and legitimises police expertise, market monopoly, and status. It enables the survival of the profession, giving it the tools to prevail in conflicts over competence and the right to define and interpret policing. The paper argues that that police professionalisation via academic education can be understood in terms of both the agency and structure: as a deliberate occupational upgrading spurred by social and economic aspirations, aimed to reconceptualise and relegitimise policing and as an inevitable development emerging out of the broader social changes.