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Abstract The history of police reform in England and Wales is one of change and continuity, and despite decades of reform, police occupational culture continues to be characterized by notions of hierarchy and authority. Drawing on a qualitative study of police leadership in the COVID-19 pandemic and Elias’s (1991) drag effect, this article examines what happens to police culture in times of significant change. We present this through the conceptual domains of turbulence, change, resistance and reversal to further understanding of the relationship between context, change and setbacks in police reform and challenge notions of change as linear. Rather than assuming resistance and reversal as failure, therefore, we argue that ‘drag’ is an inevitable and expected feature of police reform.
Davis et al. (Sat,) studied this question.