Loving the Neighbourhood, Loving Enemies: Towards a Theology for (and from) Policing1

Policing has been curiously absent from direct, sustained and explicit consideration in the long-established and significant theological literature on criminal justice. This chapter begins by interrogating that absence as a first move towards constructing a theology of and for policing that reflects the author’s own experience as a serving British police officer. That is supplemented by the more or less focal engagement with policing in other theological literatures (political theologies, Black Lives Matter movement, international peacebuilding and just war, Christian pacifism and non-violence). Twin nodes of a theology of and for policing are identified: love of neighbourhood and of enemies as vehicles for a social order oriented towards human flourishing. Policing practices are considered as tools that might foster such a social order in a theological engagement with policing that is at once critical and, realist, in which policing has transformative and reparative potential.