Abstract

Evidence-Based Policing (EBP) has established itself as a central paradigm in the reform of police decision-making. Framed as a rational alternative to intuition and tradition, it promises to enhance legitimacy, effectiveness, and accountability through the use of scientific evidence. Drawing on social systems theory, we conceptualise EBP as a specific form of structural coupling between the function systems of science and policing, organised through a semantic and organisational programme that links truth-oriented research to control-oriented practice. We show how this evidence-based programme reproduces itself through recursive decision-making, identity-forming self-descriptions, and reflexive mechanisms that often narrow what can count as ‘evidence’ in the first place. Analysing these self-referential dynamics, we identify a paradox: EBP functions as a problem-generating solution. The very mechanisms designed to improve decision-making may suppress uncertainty, marginalise alternative forms of knowledge, and stabilise legitimacy through symbolic coherence rather than epistemic openness. In response, we propose reflexive policing as a reflexive mode of operation of the policing system: a configuration of second-order operations that organises observations of how policing links knowledge and control and feeds their results back into the programmes and structures that guide policing decisions, including those observed as evidence-based.