Experience or Knowledge? Perspectives on New Knowledge Regimes and Control of Police Professionalism

Drawing upon ethnographic research, this article explores how implementation and practice of knowledge-based policing are encouraging specific forms of legitimate knowledge in police practices, and how police occupational culture responds to these new knowledge regimes. As in other studies of changes in the police organization, implementation of knowledge-led policing creates resistance by street-level police occupational subculture and facilitates increased differences between management objectives and practitioners views. It is argued that knowledge-based policing in practice promotes a concept of knowledge that indirectly threatens the police officers’ traditional experience-based knowledge and professional discretion. To become knowledge-based implies a particular view on knowledge. Knowledge-based policing emphasizes a logic based on evaluation of codified, standardized information-systems, rather than an experience-based, action-oriented, and collegial logic.