Samenvatting

The police are without a doubt an important actor in policing. However, there is a strong tendency to go one step further and limit the essence of police work to activities performed in the context of policing. As a result, enforcement and especially crime control are seen as the most important tasks performed by the police. This opinion calls for a renewed focus on the first responder and general assistance task, which brings the police officer into closer contact with the citizen. The essence of police work is to make society safer by tackling social problems, or in other words, providing assistance. However, this requires a number of preconditions. At a micro level, police training must be strengthened so that, in addition to skills, competences such as the ability to have deeper understanding and think in more abstract terms become more central. At the meso level, the connection between the police and other organizations must be improved. Specifically the link between the police and those organizations that play a role in tackling current social issues, and that are located both inside and outside the security field strictu sensu, must be ameliorated. Finally, at the macro level, smart investments must be made in both the security domain and in related policy domains such as health and poverty reduction.
This shift is in line with the shifts proposed away from a New Public Management and even New Public Governance way of thinking, and towards a Neo-Weberian perspective. This means that the police retain legitimacy as a central distributor of tasks, but at the same time orient themselves more externally and focus on the various needs of citizens, even though these needs may differ from each other. In this new paradigm, the government is once again more central to tackling social problems, without returning to a bureaucratic and strictly hierarchical way of thinking.