Paper short abstract:

What are the implications and unintended consequences of police reform implementation across strategic and operational levels? Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Denmark, this paper explores how police management and police officers navigate a political agenda and how it informs everyday policing.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, there has been a growing tendency in national politics to address perceptions of unsafety and insecurity as principal driving forces of governance. In Denmark, this has resulted in an increasing number of political initiatives aiming to enhance safety and security for the Danish population. This paper explores the implementation of the latest police reform in Denmark – a so-called proximity reform. It outlines how Danish policing has taken a recent turn toward proximity policing as part of a larger decentralization process that aims to enhance safety, police visibility and bring the police closer to the citizens.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in one Danish police district, this paper unfolds the top-down process of reform implementation across strategic and operational levels. In doing so, it explores negotiations and concerns of reform implementation in police organization and everyday policing, and it unfolds the implications of navigating a political agenda including managerial dilemmas in resource allocation and recruitment as well as disruptions to everyday policing and resistance from local police officers. As a reform that has been advertised as a transformation of the Danish police, this paper further engages with the question of what is perceived as valuable police work across the chain of command and among the public.