Policing across cultures

Police as an institution — a state-sanctioned force with monopoly on legitimate violence tasked with maintaining order — takes radically different forms across cultures, from the community-embedded, largely unarmed policing of some Nordic countries to the militarized, frequently lethal policing of others. The model of policing reflects the society's answers to fundamental questions: who is the public being protected, from what, by whom, and at what cost? Where policing and justice diverge — where the force meant to protect some communities routinely harms others — the divergence is a justice emergency.