What characterizes the kind of people recruited to police work? How are they shaped bypolice education and socialisation into the profession? These questions are addressed bythe longitudinal, cross-national comparative project Recruitment, Education and Careers inthe Police (RECPOL). The project made it possible to study and compare police students’and candidates’ values and attitudes, both initially and over time, how they changed and/orsustained during the education and training and after graduation – as police officers.

The first RECPOL-study started in August 2010. Seven European countries collected dataduring four moments in time: at the beginning and at the end of police education, after threeand after six years in the workplace. The findings over the period during police educationwere published in The Making of a Police Officer. Comparative Perspectives on PoliceEducation and Recruitment (Bjørgo & Damen 2020). The overall results showed that policestudents are strikingly similar across different types of police education. The national contextseems to play a more important role than the type of police education system.

There have been significant changes in several police educations in Europe in the lastdecade – since the first data were collected in RECPOL. Therefore, an initiative has beentaken by representatives from Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, Catalonia, and Norway, to startup a new RECPOL study once again. We intend to present an overview and some specificsfrom this project at the conference. We ask the audience to participate in a discussion aboutvaluable topics and research questions for the next round, and we hope to welcomeexpressions of interest from other countries or universities to join the project