From Obligation to Resource

After noting a contradiction between ethnographies and quantitative surveys about police training, this paper examines the different relations to the law in police training at the École Nationale de Police de Paris (National Police Academy of Paris). This paper identifies three different kinds of relations—legalism, competition with principles of justice and submission of the law to situational requirements—and highlights the continuity between the training academy and policing in practice. This observation raises questions about the persistence of discourses proclaiming the existence of a deep fracture between training and street policing.