Abstract
At the moment the Dutch police is busily integrating its information domains. What effect will this have on the Dutch police system? Will it cause the stark centralisation Bellamy and Taylor feared in 1997? Due to the peculiarities of its institutional arrangements, simply posing the centralisation/decentralisation question about the Dutch police system leads to little. As we will show in our article, if we want to assess anything at all about the direction the system is heading in, we also need to pay attention to two other oppositions determining its organisation: the administrative versus the judicial police duty, and administrative police management versus authority over the police. It is these three oppositions that form the Dutch police system's 'institutional paradigm': the norms, values, cognitions, rules and regulations that determine its organisation.