The abstract police. An exploration of the concept in the Belgian local police

Abstract

In this chapter, we explore the concept of the abstract police (Terpstra et al., The Police Journal: Theory, Practice, and Principles, 92(4), 339–359, 2019) in a Belgian context. We draw upon a project concerning police officers’ ethical decision-making processes, more precisely systematic social observations conducted in three Belgian local police forces, including informal conversations with police officers. The examples show that the contacts among police officers and between the police and the public are mainly personal and direct. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, negatively affects these relations in several ways. We discuss the causes of a more abstract police organisation in other countries and reflect to which extent these evolutions are also taking place in Belgium. We conclude that the decentralisation of the local police may be the main reason for the personal relations and that the ideal type of the abstract police could be seen as a dystopia (i.e. a scenario that the Belgian police may want to avoid).