Criminologie’s presentation of police and security: beginnings and thematic diversification
The literature on police and security has evolved considerably over the last few decades and articles and special issues of Criminologie provide a useful picture of these developments. Four major areas of study have appeared during the journal’s fifty years of publication, with overlapping studies on the foundations of a critical criminology of the police, its quantitative evaluation, transformations in the security market, and the development of more diversified and international policing. In this article, we analyze the content of published articles both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to highlight their main influences and the spin offs resulting from these four aspects. This review of the literature makes it possible to narrow down these different areas of study and contextualize them in relation to important events that have influenced the evolution of the police as a social control mechanism in our societies.