'They didn't treat us like professionals': a case study of police recruits trained at a university.

Abstract

This paper challenges widely-held views about university education and it benefits for ‘professionalising’ policing. A collaborative initiative to train police recruits at a local university is shown to be producing ‘unintended consequences’. The social theory of Pierre Bourdieu is employed to examine how the pedagogic practices of the tutors and other aspects of the university programme operated to undermine the development of professional habitus