In this examination of British and Dutch interest in American-style zero tolerance policing, I place this policy transfer in relation to influential developments in policing and criminal justice in the wider, even global, environment. Police forces everywhere are under constant pressure to change and have become increasingly internationally oriented; looking at police appraisal of zero tolerance in two societies can inform us of shifting paradigms in policing, policy formulation and implementation in practice. To a large degree, police in both Britain and the Netherlands had traditionally adopted a ‘service and consent’ model of policing that was particularly strong in the Netherlands. When New York became associated with a new and tougher approach to law enforcement, dubbed ‘zero tolerance’, it attracted a great deal of attention from abroad, particularly as zero tolerance was held to have led to a substantial reduction in crime. The considerable political and media attention fostered by this can be seen as a periodic return to emphasising the ‘crime control’ paradigm.

The policing innovations in the US, especially the New York model, also interested large numbers of visitors from abroad, including senior British and Dutch police officers. In both Britain and the Netherlands, however, there was considerable ambivalence, scepticism and even hostility among practitioners to implementing zero tolerance. To understand what was subsequently implemented in these two countries, I have had to unravel the diffuse label zero tolerance and divide it into several components. Some elements – such as techniques associated with information-led policing (‘Compstat’), the emphasis on ‘fixing broken windows’ (solving community problems to reverse decline) and a more assertive and directed police presence on the streets – were adopted. As in much policy transfer, the practitioners, in a pragmatic and even opportunistic manner, filtered out the innovations that could realistically be implemented while endeavouring to fit them into existing values and practices. But in both societies, there was little enthusiasm for the underlying ‘tough on crime’ mantra. The policing elites in both countries were under pressure to shift to a crime control model, but this no longer fitted with the more balanced, consultative and rights-based approach that had been adopted in recent years.

In retrospect, then, there was no ‘Americanisation’ of British or Dutch policing: zero tolerance was more of a rhetorical device, driven by politics and the media, than a major policy shift.