Towards victim-oriented police? Some reflections on the concept and purpose of policing and their implications for victim-oriented police reform

The global policy drift towards community policing and an enhanced philosophical and practical orientation towards victims of crime has been slow but incrementally successful in some jurisdictions. This paper uses a comparative approach to review the different conceptual and theoretical assumptions that underpin thinking about policing to tentatively identify the factors that support victim-oriented police reform. The paper draws on evidence from India and Argentina plus England and Wales to assess how different policing models have translated victim-oriented language into practice. It is notable that while police forces across the globe often share a common understanding of police functions there is less agreement when referring to how to engage with citizens and balancing the broader panoply of policing priorities. Conceptual understandings of policing often contain unarticulated assumptions about how policing should be done and this partly explains why placing citizenship and victims at the core in rhetorical terms does not always translate into practice. The paper concludes with a call for a concerted effort to articulate a clear philosophical and conceptual understanding of victim-oriented policing as an enabler of police reform.