The three distinguishing characteristics of policing in the United States are its responsiveness to citizen demands, its public accountability, and its openness to evaluation. Among the 7 major changes in police over the last 30 years are the increased intellectual caliber of the police, the greater ambitions of senior police managers for their organizations, the development of an explicit scientific mind-set, and increased standards of police conduct. Further changes include greater diversity in race and gender and acceptance by police of civilian review of police discipline. Nevertheless, despite many policing innovations, strategic changes have not been widespread, and what is commonly accepted as new is not necessarily new. Thus, research may not have made as significant, or at least as coherent, an impression on policing as scholars like to think. The role, function, and strategies of police are more likely to reflect the impact of factors that are unseen by either scholars or police practitioners. Four factors are likely to have the greatest influence on the future of policing. These include privatization; the restructuring of government; group violence stemming from the inequities of race, class, and ethnicity; and growth in the destructiveness of criminal violence, especially with regard to terrorism and organized crime. The impact of scholarship on policing is indirect rather than direct; the development of police research during the last 30 years has institutionalized the practice of critical reflection within policing in the United States. 14 references