Interest in the relationship between police and higher education is not a new phenomenon. However, in the UK, co-operation between police and the academy has been slow to develop, particularly when compared to the United States and Europe. Nevertheless, a number of police-university partnerships and a variety of courses from Foundation to Masters level aimed at current and aspiring police officers has mushroomed over the last decade, illustrating a recent formalisation of the police-academia relationship in the UK. Overall, the relationship between police and academia has become more routine, taking place at organisational (as opposed to interpersonal) level. The recent introduction of the Certificate of Knowledge in Policing, overseen by the newly established College of Policing, is likely to further expand and deepen the relationship between police and higher education institutions. The impact of academic police education on the professional identities of the students and the broader organisational culture of the police is a topic that has so far garnered relatively little research (e.g. Punch, 2007, Heslop, 2011). Yet, professional communities, such as higher education and policing, strongly influence identity construction through the process of socialisation. Institutions define and confirm identities via expert knowledge systems that provide ways to interpret the social world and the individual’s place in it. Indeed, an individual’s entrance to the cultural landscapes of higher education or policing can be viewed as a transformational experience, requiring a renegotiation of one’s self-identity. The perceived and actual cultural and paradigmatic differences between the police and academia implies separate social (and mental) spaces which suggest conceptual tension, uneasy compromise, and a certain degree of dissonance are a possibility for the students wishing to occupy both worlds of higher educatio
