Over the last 50 years, there have been numerous high-profile judicial inquiries, presidential commissions, royal commissions, and national reports into one policing crisis after another across a spectrum of countries. While these reports have varied in terms of scope and specific content, there are many commonalities in the broad focus of recommendations, particularly in the need to change police through a suite of internal police reform mechanisms and improved measures for accountability. The key police reform priorities which are often identified (and endlessly repeated from one inquiry to the next) include enhancing community policing, introducing diversity quotas and recruitment initiatives, technical solutions such as body cameras, a greater reliance on evidence-based policing (EBP), and various measures to improve citizen complaints systems and accountability mechanisms. Added to this catalogue is recommended investment in an the almost never-ending list of training courses: in de-escalation techniques, in cross-cultural awareness, anti-racism and unconscious bias, in the use of force and physical restraints, to identify signs and symptoms of mental illness, in community policing and community-based crime reduction programmes, in responding to domestic violence and sexual assault, and so on.

This chapter turns to the failure of reform and the problem of police reformism. The discussion focuses on the limitations of programmes of reform in affecting meaningful change. Given the number of inquiries and recommendations and the failure of empirical evidence, research, or practice to show significant improvements, it appears to be a case of not learning from continual failure and instead doing more of the same over again. However, in a deeper sense, and from a perspective of the impact on police as an institution, reformism reinvigorates and reinforces the centrality of the institution of policing rather than challenging it. Indeed, police are able to command even greater resources through reforms, and police power is enhanced rather than contested. What we do not see on the reform lists is a recommendation for the retraction of policing. In contrast, the Defund the Police demand has been for divestment of resources from police and investment in community structures.