Affiliations: [b] Free University of Amsterdam, Department of Public
Administration and Organization Sciences, De Boelelaan 1081-c/DBL 859, 1081 HV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 20 4446918; E-mail:
[email protected]. ICT Service Coöperatie Politie, Justitie en
Veiligheid (ISC), Department of Policy and Strategy, The Netherlands | [a] Free University of Amsterdam, Department of Public
Administration and Organization Sciences, De Boelelaan 1081-c/DBL 859, 1081 HV
Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Tel.: +31 20 4446918; E-mail:
[email protected]
Abstract: At the moment the Dutch police is busily integrating its information
domains. What effect will this have on the Dutch police system? Will it cause
the stark centralisation Bellamy and Taylor feared in 1997? Due to the
peculiarities of its institutional arrangements, simply posing the
centralisation/decentralisation question about the Dutch police system leads to
little. As we will show in our article, if we want to assess anything at all
about the direction the system is heading in, we also need to pay attention to
two other oppositions determining its organisation: the administrative versus
the judicial police duty, and administrative police management versus authority
over the police. It is these three oppositions that form the Dutch police
system's 'institutional paradigm': the norms, values, cognitions, rules and
regulations that determine its organisation.
Keywords: Dutch police system, informatisation, information domains, institutions, paradigms
