A current discussion about the role of research knowledge, particularly in Nordic police research, is concerned with research-funding collaborations being too entangled with political interests in documenting best-practices ("what works"), to maintain a trustworthy degree of critical and freely reflexive ethos. Whereas previous debaters find the solution to be one of researchers distancing themselves from their embeddedness with the police organisation they study in, we argue on the contrary that embedded, in-depth and close-up approaches are essential in producing rich enough knowledge from within the police to achieve critical and freely reflexive research-knowledge. In nuancing perspectives on the role and potential of embedded police researchers in contributing to knowledgeable policing, we suggest a framework for Embedded Police Research.

The current COVID-19 pandemic brings about dramatic challenges for frontline police officers and their organizations. This will, we argue, likely have two implications for frontline learning and innovation. First, the pandemic will surely occasion a surge of frontline improvisation and innovation in police organizations responding to the crisis as the experienced needs for new solutions dramatically increase. Secondly, but equally importantly, this wave of frontline innovation is likely to be more transparent than is typically the case for innovations developed in frontline police work, because of changes in formal mandates and informal tolerance for procedural deviance. At this moment of unusually widespread and transparent frontline innovation, we propose an approach to capturing and diffusing this frontline innovation. By taking seriously the unique dynamics of frontline innovation, such an approach is likely to capture valuable innovations that might otherwise rapidly dissipate and be lost.

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Emotion regulation is essential to the maintenance of institutions. To date, institutional scholars have focused on how individual actors express or suppress emotions according to internalised institutional ‘feeling rules.’ Drawing on an empirical study of police officers, this article offers emotion absenting as a socially practised, embodied form of emotion regulation. Police officers’ shared emotion absenting enabled them to practise fear in unarticulated yet highly coordinated ways in alignment with their institutional role. The practice of emotion absenting is learned through socialisation into policework and the institution of law enforcement. Because police officers learn to regulate emotions together in subtle ways through the coordination of their bodies, emotion absenting can be functionally invisible in social interactions. This suggests that inappropriate emotions are not necessarily suppressed, i.e. removed from the situation. Rather, our study shows that such emotions may function as a resource among members of a group, especially when these emotions are practised in institutionally competent ways.