Policing in a globalized world: Some practical implications for policing and police training

Abstract

This is a conceptual and explorative article that discusses how the police and policing in Sweden and the UK are affected by global and transnational conflicts, politics and events that spill over into local contexts. Our examples are the riots after the burning of the Quran in Sweden during Easter 2022 and the riots that followed the murders in Southport in the UK in summer 2024. To deal with these and similar conflicts, we argue that the police must pay closer attention to global and transnational dimensions and events. Despite that there are empirical reasons for arguing that “the local” is closely entwined with “the global” in areas such as economics, politics and social media, there is very little (if any) research on how police and policing are affected by the complex processes that interlinks local delivery with global events, and how these tensions are experienced by and affecting police officers in their everyday work. This article wants to draw attention to this research lacuna and call for more research on how global and local dimensions are interlinked and have an effect on public discourses, conflicts and tensions in communities, and on policing.

Introduction

It is well established that we now live in a globalized world that has become more and more interconnected and transnational (Steger, 2003). In addition to providing new possibilities for business, communication and travel, the age of globalization has evidently also resulted in unfairness and inequalities both globally and locally. To put it bluntly, there are both winners and losers in the globalized world. While some have had the means to enrich themselves in terms of economic prosperity, education, and material and intellectual growth, others have lost their jobs and seen their hopes for a better future disappear (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). While some individuals embrace this development, others are appalled by it and fear that the old world, with its imagined communities (Anderson, 1983), is about to collapse.

With the social changes following migration, the outsourcing of industrial production to parts of the world that can offer cheaper labor and lower production costs, e-commerce booming on a global scale, and growing cultural, ethnic, linguistic and religious diversity (not the least in the Western world), new lines of conflict have emerged in societies. For example, urban segregation and the growing gap between the well-educated and liberal youth who predominantly live in urban centers and a less well-educated and more often unemployed, elderly and male-dominated population who live in the countryside, seem to be having an impact on open democratic societies in both direct and indirect ways (Goodhart, 2017). Different interests and conflicting political tensions related to globalization occur broadly, but more specifically on issues of migration and multiculturalism. Among other things, these have given rise to political populism and provided a fruitful breeding ground for spreading distrust against the “elite” (whether politicians, academics, journalists or advocates of feminism and LGBT + rights), as well as conspiracy theories that threaten legitimacy and undermine trust in the democratic system and its institutions (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018).

Globalization has also impacted on the police and police work in several important respects (Bowling, 2009). Some of the most politically and publicly acknowledged crime-related issues are different forms of transnational crime, whether in the form of drugs, terrorism, the illegal arms trade, Internet crime, money-laundering or sex-trafficking (Sheptycki, 2000, 2007). These types of crime have resulted in the intensification of international police collaboration and the establishment of new international police organizations (Anderson, 1989, 1995). But perhaps most notably for the ordinary localized police officer, globalization has resulted in the world becoming more interconnected due to digitalization and migration patterns. Violent conflicts and wars in countries such as Bosnia (Müller-Suleymanova, 2021), Somalia (Osman, 2015), Pakistan and India (e.g., issues related to Kashmir; Ellis and Khan, 1998) have had, and will continue to have, significant impacts on countries like Sweden and the UK—the two case studies examined in this article. Such events can generate or intensify new lines of conflict, whether real or perceived (Atran, 2010). As demonstrated by Féron and Baser (2023; see also Féron, 2017), so-called transported diaspora conflicts are shaped not only by conditions in the migrant’s homeland, but also by the realities of life in the new country of residence and the broader “transnational space” that connects the two.

This insight is crucial for policing, as the cultural norms and traditions of migrant and diaspora communities influence the local socio-cultural landscape and, in turn, the conditions under which policing is carried out. Moreover, these dynamics create new contexts in which social challenges, which are often rooted in prior conflicts or globalization-related processes such as job losses, inequality and shifting lifestyles, must be understood and addressed. Importantly, the police must recognize that imported conflicts are rarely replicated exactly as they were in the homeland. Instead, as Féron and Baser (2023: 377) note, “conflicts between and within diaspora groups become enacted anew in a different configuration.” Transported conflicts can therefore be reimagined and expressed in novel ways by subsequent generations. Baser (2014), for instance, illustrates this through differences in political mobilization and expressions of long-distance nationalism between first- and second-generation Turks living in Sweden.

In this article, we discuss the potential implications of the above-named processes on policing, and especially why these topics must be included in the training of future police officers. With the help of two illustrative cases from Sweden and the UK, we argue that police training and the further education of police officers must engage with processes that relate directly or indirectly to globalization, and we show how these forces might impact on local policing. Otherwise, the police may experience difficulties in understanding and taking into consideration how, when, where and why dividing lines that are related to globalization, as well as global wars and transnational conflicts, can impact on the local delivery of policing in the West. The reasons why there is so little research on these topics are unclear, but a possible explanation is that earlier research on policing focused on national contexts, specific crimes or police tactics, therefore downplaying or leaving out entirely the global, cultural, religious and political dimensions of policing. To draw attention to policing in a globalized world, the article argues that there is a lack of research on how global conflicts impact on police work. From this point of view, the article is also a call for more research in the hope of inspiring more culturally competent policing. At the end of the article, we will also address some topics and methodological questions that, we argue, merit further research if we want to understand how global dimensions influence policing.

Globalization: Consequences and responses

Regardless of our attitudes and opinions about globalization, there is convincing support that the world has become like a global village, to paraphrase the Canadian media sociologist Marshall McLuhan (1962). Due to several concurrent political, economic and social processes, as well as technological developments, especially in communication technologies and automatization (and maybe also AI), the world has shrunk, and the boundaries between the local and the global have been rapidly eroded. While news used to travel slowly, current events in a remote and distant place on the globe are today displayed on our screens and mobile phones within a second of their happening (Castells, 2001). For example, an armed conflict between Iran and Kurdish militia groups, a terrorist attack by al-Shabaab in Kenya, a coup in Turkey, or the persecution of someone who has converted from Islam to Christianity in Pakistan will most likely have instant repercussions among Kurds, Christians, Muslims or human-rights advocates living in Sweden or the UK. This interconnectivity is not only related to the last decade of migration to Europe, it is also linked to the concomitant rise of digital and social media.

While the emergence of the Internet and other social media from the 1980s have been applauded as tools supporting democracy and spreading information in a fair and democratic way, the same communication tools have also been used for spreading, for instance, hate, violence, child abuse imagery, surveillance and control, as well as facilitating new types of crime (e.g., “hacking”, “bot attacks”, “ransomware”, “phishing”,) (on “cybercrime” and policing, see, for instance, Curtis and Oxburgh, 2023). Criminologists Powell et al. (2018) use the term “digital society” to illuminate “the fundamental nature of the technological, structural and social changes in the contemporary society in which we live” (p. 4), which impacts on crime and crime-prevention via its relational, cultural, affective, political and socio-structural dimensions. The processes that we tend to associate with globalization have therefore not only produced prosperity, growth and harmony, they have also created a “global criminal opportunity structure” (Szeptycki, 2007: 488). However, before delving into some of these contemporary problems and challenges for the police, it should be emphasized that criminality has often (if not always) had a global dimension. Examples include the transatlantic slave trade (which was not always criminal, e.g., in the UK first after 1807), the smuggling of alcohol during periods of prohibition, the use of violence by politically motivated anarchists in Europe in the late 19th century (Bowling, 2009; Jensen, 2014), or religiously motivated violence in Northern Ireland (Altglas, 2022). However, the widespread availability of internet-enabled devices has democratized the ability to conduct crime internationally. Furthermore, negative or hostile attitudes toward migration and multicultural societies—attitudes that have become increasingly normalized within mainstream political discourse—combined with a heightened sense of relative deprivation, can provoke protests and even violent terrorist attacks. Notable examples include Anders Breivik’s attack in Norway on 22 July 2011 and Brenton Tarrant’s attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, on 15 March 2019. These acts of violence have, in turn, inspired other perpetrators of mass shootings and attacks across the globe. This underscores the need for the police to adopt a global perspective and to closely monitor activity within both local and global contexts, as well as on digital forums (Baele et al., 2023).

Thus, it should come as no surprise that new technologies have and will continue to be used by humans for carrying out crimes. Today we often talk about criminal networks (i.e., organized crime) that operate in several different countries, and even if this is true in the case of, for example, drugs, the smuggling of weapons, or terrorist violence, this development is not new. However, what is new is rather the scale of the problem and how easy it is to exploit human suffering today. As an example, the global policing cooperation that cracked “Encrochat” groups used by organized crime groups globally is reported to have led to over 6000 arrests and the seizure of 900 million euros (Europol, 2023).

Although most of the outcomes of the social, political and economic processes described above are caused by human decisions and actions, and therefore enabled rather than caused by technology, some of the outcomes are also systemic and exist on a much larger scale. Migration and climate change are two relevant examples of this development. According to the United Nations and the IOM World Migration Report for 2024, there are about “281 million international migrants in the world, which equates to 3.6% of the global population” (World Migration Report, 2024: xii). While there are different strands and even disagreements within the research community, it is likely that there are multiple and complex reasons why there are so many migrants in the world today. Many of the major drivers for people leaving their homes seem to interact with one another, like, for example, a lack of general means, poverty, overpopulation, political oppression, war, and climate changes that make it impossible or very difficult to see a possible future in one’s original homeland, or just a desire to improve one’s living conditions (Warner et al., 2010, cf. World Migration Report, 2024: Chapter 7). Questions like migration and climate change also trigger tensions, violent conflicts and even wars between “those who have” and “those who have not,” or between those who perceive that they have the right, e.g., to a land or a resource and those who are forced to leave their home because of scarcity or a lack of means. These processes can lead to xenophobia, anti-immigration attitudes, ethnocentrism and negative attitudes in the West, as well as growing tensions and violent conflicts in the Global South (Sullivan and Townsend, 2022).

As indicated in the introduction to this article, this framework not only constitutes a dividing line between the Global North and the Global South, it is also a source of division within the Global North with its class distinctions, which therefore cause other responses to globalization and its effects, such as migration, guest-workers or multicultural policies in the Global North. While some express solidarity and concern for the poor and downtrodden citizens of the world and express worries about climate change, others are more prone to express anti-migration and isolationist attitudes (Kentmen-Cin and Erisen, 2017; Sullivan and Townsend, 2022), or deny that human actions have an impact on the environment or that climate change is a “fabricated calamity designed to get countries to surrender their sovereignty” (Sullivan and Townsend, 2022: 918).

According to political scientists, these developments have caused a change in the political landscape. Instead of following the traditional line that has mirrored voting patterns and has differentiated between parties that side with blue-collar workers (“the socialists”) or white-collar workers (“capitalists”) (i.e., the political left and right scales), many voters and parties are today more concerned with how they relate to globalization. Issues such as immigration and national identity have therefore seen a significant rise to prominence in political discourse (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018). Consequently, “open borders and an inflow of cheaper immigrants particularly upset those EU citizens who are financially insecure or have a lower occupational status” (Kentmen-Cin and Erisen, 2017: 13). Following this development, political scientists argue that it is possible to distinguish between those who are more positive towards globalization and embrace multiculturalism and liberal values, and those who are more concerned to hold on to what is defined as the tradition and who are more authoritarian and positive towards nationalist sentiments (Hooghe et al., 2002).

The two cases: the Quran riots and the Southport riots

The developments we have addressed in the previous sections are of general relevance for policing in the West, but for the purposes of this article we have chosen the UK and Sweden as our case studies. The reason for this is that we are more familiar with the local setting in these two countries and how they are impacted by global developments.

In line with this approach, our first example will be used to discuss and illustrate how the local and the global are increasingly interconnected, and how this can spill over into local policing delivery. This is the case with the so-called Easter riots following the burning of the Quran that took place in the summer of 2022 in Sweden.

Since 2020 the Swedish-Danish lawyer and provocateur Rasmus Paludan has burnt the Quran during public rallies that have been held in towns and areas in Sweden that are densely populated by immigrants. While some saw his action in terms of a political right to express his criticism of Islam and Muslims (i.e., freedom of expression), others saw his activities as an explicit form of Islamophobia (Larsson and Mattsson, 2024). Consequently, Paludan’s burnings of the Quran infected political discussions about freedom of speech and the right to criticize religions versus the right to be a Muslim in the name of freedom of religion. However, the debate also placed the focus on how the legal term “hate crime” should be understood and applied by Swedish courts and the police (Sandén, 2020). Initially the conflict was primarily political or even philosophical, but during Easter 2022, which coincided with the month of Ramadan, the demonstrations organized by Paludan ignited public rage that led to significant riots and violence against the police in several cities around Sweden. Without giving specific details, the Swedish police union stated that more than 300 police officers had been injured during the Easter riots and Paludan’s activities were estimated to cost Swedish taxpayers approximately 43 million Swedish kronor (around 3.8 million Euros) (Larsson, Frydenlund and Brekke, 2024).

Following this development, the riots became international news, and Swedish interests around the world became targets of criticism and even violence. In a counter-demonstration against the burning of the Quran that was organized in late January 2023, an effigy of the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdoğan, was burnt outside the Turkish embassy in Stockholm. This action upset the Turkish president, and as a response Erdoğan threatened to veto Sweden’s application to become a member of NATO, a process that Sweden had started after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in the spring of 2022. Following this development, international Muslim organizations argued that Sweden should ban the right to burn the Quran, and organizations like al-Qaida threatened to conduct terrorist attacks on Swedish interests (Dahl, 2023). On the night between 19 and 20 July 2023 the Swedish embassy was attacked in Baghdad, Iraq, and on the night between 9 and 10 August 2023 the Swedish consulate was attacked in Beirut, Lebanon (Larsson, Frydenlund and Brekke, 2024). In October 2023 two Swedish football supporters were killed in Brussels, most likely because they were dressed in Swedish football shirts (Säkerhetspolisen, 2023/2024). In the annual report of the Swedish Security Service for 2023/2024, we can read that:

Strong reactions to Koran burnings, combined with disinformation campaigns that Swedish authorities kidnap Muslim children, as well as the image of Sweden as a country hostile to Islam, led to Sweden being seen as a more legitimate target among violent extremists. As a consequence, the terror threat level has been raised and is at high. This became especially clear at the time of the tragic act in Brussels, where Swedes were killed and injured precisely because they were Swedes. Sweden’s image has ultimately become a question about our safety (Säkerhetspolisen, 2023/2024, p. 6, our translation).

These conflicts and dividing lines, which became manifest during the burning of the Quran and the following Easter riots, shows the police caught in a web of judicial discussions, political opinions, tactical discussions (i.e., how to handle large crowds and balance the right to freedom of speech with other rights) and international politics, such as the NATO membership application and responses from the wider Muslim world.

A similar nexus between the global and the local was also displayed in connection with the murders and subsequent rioting in Southport, England during the summer of 2024. On Monday 29^th July 2024 an incident of shocking violence occurred. Just 17 years of age at the time of the incident, Axel Muganwa Rudakubana was found guilty of three counts of murder and ten counts of the attempted murder of children and adults who were attending a Taylor Swift-themed dance class at a local community center during the summer holidays (Downs, 2024). Following his attack, Rudakubana was charged with two offences under the Terrorism Act, found guilty and sentenced to fifty years in prison (Halliday and Siddique, 2024). Shocking enough as an apparently random act of violence, what followed across the UK has had serious political, social and economic ramifications, especially for local policing in a globalized age.

Serious disorder followed the Southport atrocities in 27 towns and cities in England and Northern Ireland from 30^th July to 7^th August, with police attending 29 anti-immigration demonstrations and riots or events of violent disorder (Downs, 2024). The disorder was characterized in police and media reporting as ‘far right’ in nature, with known far-right activists attending and promoting the disorders through social media platforms. Mosques and hotels housing asylum-seekers were the main targets, with extensive damage to property, including acts of arson, and attacks on police officers. Within a month over a thousand people had been arrested, of whom 796 were charged with various public order offences, a number likely to continue increasing as other offenders are identified and processed as part of the post-disorder inquiry (Downs, 2024).

Issues for policing

In seeking to learn lessons from these events in the light of globalization, there are three important aspects in need of further interrogation. First, there is the common issue of the political context to violence, which has two specific stages, identifiable by their timeliness. Initially, as a trigger created in the immediacy of both the Quran burnings in Sweden and the Southport attack and subsequent disorderly reactions in Sweden and the UK, but also in providing a longer term context from shifts in political rhetoric towards populism and the multicultural society that reflects global trends, and therefore the Quran burnings and the Southport attack led to social unrest. For instance, the idea that the outbreak of disorder following the murders in Southport was political in nature gained support from former Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu. As a former Head of the UK’s Counter Terrorism Command, Basu suggested that the police needed to consider bringing charges against the rioters under terrorism legislation (De Simone, 2024). This notion that the violence displayed in these two cases was political requires much deeper analysis from further research. To understand and prevent these and similar future outbursts, the police need a better understanding of both local and global discourses and contexts. This requires a growing sensitivity and awareness from the police of when, where, how and why some questions might erupt and even give rise to clashes and violence between specific groups.

For instance, the disorders following the Southport murders appear to have developed and been influenced as a response to rumors which circulated on the day of the murders that the perpetrator was a recently arrived illegal immigrant to the UK, who had traveled by boat from France. This was not true. The subsequently identified culprit had been born in the UK, is British, and apparently has no particularly devout political or religious views. The motivation behind the murders at this stage remains very unclear. However, elected politicians in the UK added to these rumors via their personal social media accounts in the first 24 hours after the murder, adding fuel to the fire (Dodd et al., 2024). Hence, this is a clear example of how political issues related to globalization (i.e. migration) may become weaponized, with clear consequences for local policing. To recognize and counteract these tendencies, we need more research on both how the police understand, pick up on and counteract local tensions and conflicts, and how they work with these questions (i.e., what tactics and methods are used, and whether some methods are better than others). We also need more research on civil-society organizations, religious communities and minorities on such conflicts and tensions. For example, when are minority communities willing and prepared to work in cooperation with the police, when is there distrust between these communities and the police, and how can the police work to build up the necessary trust? This kind of research can be done with the aid of quantitative methods (e.g., surveys), qualitative interviews, or participant observation, or through a mixture of several methodological approaches.

Second, the disorders reignited a debate about so-called ‘two-tier policing’. This is an accusation leveled at both Swedish and British policing from actors on the political right who suggest that Swedish and British policing are losing, or have lost, their operational independence, and have become ‘soft’ on protestors as a direct result of an infection of ‘woke-ism’ in modern policing (actors frequently cite police responses to Black Lives Matter, anti-fascist and environmental protestors). It is argued that the ‘soft’ policing of politically progressive protests should be contrasted with more proactive policing stances at right-wing protest groups such as the English Defence League or the Nordic Resistance Movement (NMR in Swedish). Leading figures on the right of the British Conservative Party such as the former Home Secretary Suella Braverman MP and the former Minister for Immigration, Housing, Communities and Local Government Robert Jenrick MP, have stoked this idea further following the months of extensive demonstrations seen in central London after the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7th October 2023 (Home Office, 2023; Knowles, 2024). The Swedish police have faced similar criticism. Following the Easter riots in Sweden, the leader of the Christian Democrats, Ebba Busch, rhetorically asked the Swedish public:

Why don’t we have a hundred injured Islamists, a hundred injured criminals, a hundred injured insurgents? (Busch quoted in Killgren and Sjögren 2022, our translation)

Police responses to the post-Southport disorders in the summer of 2024 have faced the same criticism, with policing being suggested as being ‘soft’ on predominantly Muslim groups who came out onto the streets to ‘offer protection’ to their own communities in the face of right-wing disorder (Bland and Dodd, 2024). His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Policing (‘HMICFRS’) statement on the disorders and on accusations of two-tier policing suggests that British policing is being undermined in one of its core principles – the operational independence of police chiefs – and that this needs to be urgently addressed (HMICFRS, 2024). This politicization of policing again requires much deeper investigation, given the implications, especially in the context of globalization, as seen in the examples above. This question can, for example, be investigated by paying attention to political discourses and media debates on the role and function of the police. But it is also a issue that can be related to the study of police tactics, and it is an open empirical question whether the police “handled” different crowds differently, e.g. during demonstrations, and whether this matters.

Third, social and community responses require further investigation of what actually happened during the riots? For example, why disorder occurred in some areas and not in others is a key question for further research, as are the political, social and economic conditions that preceded the disorders, and how issues might be addressed at the strategic, policy and operational levels moving forward. While the socio-economic factors might be important for social unrest, this question is also related to the tactics and strategies used by the police and the wider criminal justice system in both Sweden and the UK. In Sweden, reports indicate that the areas where the police and Muslim organizations had ongoing dialogue and collaboration were less affected by violence relating to the Quran burnings (Sorgenfrei, Larsson, Lindström and Sandberg, 2022). To what extent riots are less common in local settings in which the police are engaged with and cooperate with local communities to prevent social unrest, i.e. so-called community policing (Cordner, 2014), is another key research question. Does the use of community policing to build up long-term trust and support for the police reduce such instances of disorder or not? Can community policing help build resilience in the face of bad actors and ideas?

To gain deeper insights into the three aspects outlined above, both the research community and law-enforcement agencies need more empirical studies that document and critically analyse the circumstances—when, where, how and why—certain incidents or manifestations (e.g., demonstrations, celebrations, commemorations), whether at home or in the host countries (e.g., political decisions related to diaspora groups or issues within multicultural societies) trigger responses and political mobilization that may lead to social unrest or violence. Such studies could explore political mobilization within and between diaspora groups, online mobilization, public discourse, and how the police perceive and respond to potential conflicts. To address these needs, researchers should employ quantitative and longitudinal methods, in-depth qualitative approaches, or mixed-methods research designs to address the complex questions raised from multi- and inter-disciplinary perspectives.

The examples described here also suggest a need for more comparative studies. In other words, we need to know if different types of conflict are manifested differently across local contexts, and understand how they addressed differently by law enforcement and other actors in different countries? Such comparative approaches can be used to gain better knowledge, as well as to build up a preparedness to handle questions and demonstrations that might lead to social unrest or division within increasingly interconnected societies. The police and other local agencies also need to develop methods (tactics, training, etc.) that are based on best practice and that build on the available research on global conflicts and on how they might interact with local communities. Multimodal and reflexive research seems to offer the greatest hope of finding a way through these complexities.

Conclusions, implications and future research

To provide better opportunities for more culturally competent future policing, it is necessary to understand the problems exposed by the examples presented here. We lack research on how policing on a micro-level is affected by globalization processes, politics and global interconnectedness. To put it in Bowling’s words:

There is a clear need for some description of the nature and extent of the transnational activity emerging within local, national, regional, international and global socio-spatial networks. How far and how fast is local policing, in fact, changing in response to increased global interconnectedness? (Bowling, 2009: 157)

As pointed out by Bowling in the quotation above, future research should not only address how global interconnectedness and transnational criminality influence macro- and meso-level analyses, i.e., how police cooperation is organized and how police forces are strategically structured, though these questions are of course of great importance and relevance. It is noteworthy that since Bowling’s research certain points have become more pressing than ever. The interconnected nature of communities has accelerated beyond what was conceivable even in 2009 through technology-enabled communications.

However, there is also a need to understand how, when, where and why individual police officers on the beat experience the effects and appropriately respond to global interconnectivity in their daily duties. To do so, we must study empirically how globalization affects the so-called police gaze (Finstad, 2000) by examining how the individual police officer understands, “reads” and learns about the challenges, problems and possibilities connected to globalization. This is increasingly important as our local police forces begin to mirror the multicultural communities they serve and recruit from them. Global events could well impact more keenly on local police officers in the West drawn from immigrant and diaspora communities than officers from the host nation. Transported conflicts and global developments can therefore be a true test of police officers’ trust and loyalty: whom are they actually serving? But it is also possible that police officers with a so-called immigrant or minority background could serve as cultural brokers and bridges between the police and local communities. Again, this is poorly researched and understood, and there is a need for more qualitative studies on whether police officers with such backgrounds experience their identities as an asset or a problem in their police work.

At a basic level, it seems that police training must at least pay attention to both the local settings (i.e., who is living in the local district, what organizations are active in the area, what questions and concerns unite or divide the local community), as well as keeping a finger on the pulse of global events that are felt keenly but also unevenly in local communities through global interconnectedness. This means that police officers must be trained and learn how to see when, where, how and why international or global questions might impact on their local duties.

One potential and positive outcome from the further research this article calls for, we suggest, is more detailed recommendations for policy and police training. However, solutions to how violence and disorder in the context of multicultural and globally connected communities is avoided, managed or mitigated in the future feels very likely to lie not only with the police and police training. Existing work on community cohesion suggests a vital and ongoing role for other actors, such as NGOs, local municipal government, the education sector and others working alongside the police. Such an approach needs further work, but, in line with ideas emerging within activist communities on policy initiatives such as defunding (Cunneen, 2023), such solutions are beginning to understand ‘policing’ as being beyond just ‘the police’.

To answer how the local context is influenced by and related to global developments and how the police understand and respond to these challenges, we need novel research that employs different methods for understanding both the local context and its link(s) to global developments. This research should focus on the police, public and political discourses, as well as on questions concerning migration and minority communities. To put it bluntly, this is a novel research field that requires researchers from several academic disciplines to become engaged and to conduct their research in cooperation with both the police and local minority communities.