In 1968, Lord Denning thought that a chief officer occupied a unique position in relation to both politics and the law. Delivering a weighty judgement in the matter of a dispute of authority between the state and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Denning observed that:

It is unlikely that many would now espouse such purity of purpose and certainly, Ministers of the Crown have long regarded ‘law and order’ as something where politics is embedded. In 50 years, we have come a long way from the notion that chief constables, and by extension all other chief officers, were answerable to the law and to nothing else. A modern observer of the police would probably add that chief officers are answerable to the public, through consultative bodies and as a member of a series of partnerships. It is likely too that a list of ‘accountabilities’ would include being responsive to the media (if not directly answerable to them), to Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC), to the Home Office and the Home Secretary, and latterly to the ‘police crime commissioner’ who replaces Police Authorities in 2012 in providing oversight of a chief officer's function.

What this means essentially is that Denning's view of the role of a chief constable now sounds curiously old-fashioned and incomplete, but actually, it was not wholly accurate even when he wrote it. For all that there is scrutiny, and for all that there is oversight of what he or she does, the chief officer of police remains a quite unknown and elusive factor in criminology and in the analysis of policing.