Decent Policing: Police Professionalism Beyond the Legalism-Autonomy-Axis

The status of the police as a profession in democratic societies is a contested issue. At stake is whether the police have an autonomous field of action related to a set of important values, or whether they are simply upholding and executing a set of given rules. In recent research, this issue has been framed in terms of two opposing sets of attitudes among police officers: legalism and autonomy. Even though their precise definitions vary the terms have recently, perhaps most prominently in Scandinavia, become a standard framework for describing the ends of a continuum. Core elements of legalism is strict adherence to the law and a rejection of discretionary innovation. The autonomous police favor practical police work, focus on efficiency, and honor the internal code of silence. This paper presents an alternative approach, modelled on Aristotle’s conception of the virtue of justice, that questions the usefulness of the legalism-autonomy-axis as a starting point for a normative discussion. Our alternative is a form of police professionalism we call decent policing. Central to our argument, developed with the help of concrete examples, will be the idea that lawfulness, properly understood, does not stand in tension with at least one important sense of autonomy, but in fact requires it. In addition to contributing to the normative discussion of these terms, the paper should thus also be seen as a conceptual intervention, enabling a more precise and nuanced discussion of the ethical and epistemological dimensions of police work.