The college of policing: Police education and research in England and Wales

Abstract

Educating police officers has been a topical subject for many years. Since the days of August Vollmer at the start of the twentieth century, how police officers were educated was open to discussion and sometimes quite emotional debate. Vollmer was the first police chief to require that police officers attain college degrees, and persuaded the University of California to teach criminal justice. In 1916, UC Berkeley established a criminal justice programme, headed by Vollmer. At Berkeley, he taught O. W. Wilson, who went on to become a professor and continued his efforts to professionalise policing, by being the first to establish the first Police science degree at Municipal University of Wichita (now Wichita State University). This is often seen as the start of criminal justice as an academic field.