Policing in Austria: Development over the Past 20 Years – Present State and Future Challenges.

The primary aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the current state of policing and its development over the last twenty years in Austria. For that purpose, it is divided into eight sections. The first brief provides background information on the country; the second describes the function and organization of the police, which has been reformed recently and is still in reform; the third outlines the crime trend showing a peak in the early 2000s; the fourth deals with the police educational system and especially informs about the academization of training of commissioned officers; the fifth shows changes in policing during the last twenty years, namely its “Europeanization”, but also the expansion of enforcement powers and the centralisation, privatization and technization of policing; furthermore some current trends in policing are illustrated such as the focus on combating cybercrime; the sixth deals with the relationship between police and the media and presents some survey results showing that the public opinion on police is rather positive; the seventh analyses trends in research on policing and presents the most important institutions conducting such research; the final section mentions some future challenges of policing.