Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Date: 01 December 2005
• Author: Waddington, P.A.J.
• Published date: 01 December 2005
• Author: Waddington, P.A.J.

Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing J.B.L. Chan, with Chris Devery and Sally Doran (2003) Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press

Janet Chan has deservedly achieved an international reputation for high-quality research on police reform. The laboratory for conducting this research has been the trials and tribulations of the New South Wales (NSW) police, which was racked by a succession of scandals that led to fundamental reform in the early 1980s. Professor Chan's earlier publication, Changing Police Culture (1996), charted the course of the reform agenda implemented by Commissioner Avery. It was a penetrating, if salutary, analysis: Chan convincingly argued that reform could not be introduced in isolation from the social and cultural conditions in which policing occurred. The colonial origins of the NSW police and the society they serve still makes themselves felt, especially in the relationship between police and Aboriginal people. Reform is frustrated by such deeply entrenched structural relationships and cultural understandings.

In this volume Chan gets up close and personal to study the training of new recruits in the reformed NSW police. Using a complementary combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, she and her collaborators followed a cohort of recruits through their training at the academy and through their first year of operational duties as police officers. Again the product is penetrating and salutary.

The reform agenda had a critical impact on the training of recruits. The force was...