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This article considers some of the barriers to ethnic minority recruitment into the police, as well as those factors that would encourage interest in a police officer career. In addition to reviewing recent policy, the article incorporates results from research conducted on behalf of one UK police force. The research revealed a considerable degree of hostility towards the police among some ethnic minority respondents, many of whom would never consider pursuing a police officer career. The importance of securing a fully representative police service has been emphasised by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary, and the Macpherson Inquiry (1999) added urgency to this aim. To encourage police recruitment, it is concluded that the quality of service to local ethnic minority communities is probably as important as any special police recruitment campaign.

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This paper seeks to assess the relationship between contemporary policing and postmodernity, and to argue that police leaders and policy makers should develop a postmodern sensibility in relation to social change and policing. Official discourse about police reform and policing developments is overwhelmingly couched in terms of modernization; following Gibbins (1998) it is suggested here that a postmodernization agenda should form part of the discourse surrounding the police service and its ''reform''. The paper identifies how some police leaders and agencies in the UK have considered the challenges and development of policing in an increasingly fragmented, diverse and eclectic society; whilst such consideration has generally not occurred within a framework of postmodern analysis, it is argued that police leaders, and some initiatives, have paved the way to postmodern policing. The extent to which the modernist project still dominates the policing (and wider criminal justice) agenda is also reviewed.