The term ‘democratic policing’ has become the catchphrase in recent years. I, however, had not bothered delving into its meaning hitherto. When I sat down to write about it for this volume, I could not keep myself from faltering for a moment, as I came to realize that although all these years I have been attaching unwittingly a cornucopia of taken-for-granted meanings to the term ‘democracy,’ a commonly agreed upon definition of democracy is yet to be made. So, as a police officer, how could I conceptualize ‘democracy’ and put it in context with ‘policing’, in order to have a clear understanding of their juxtaposition, ‘democratic policing?’

Nearly an hour of rumination yielded unconvincing results; ergo, I decided to visit my Simerenya (an imaginary world) with the hope of coming across my hero intellectuals to ask for advice and clarify my mind about the multifarious interpretations of democracy. My visit to Simerenya was a sojourn as usual, ended by the crepuscule, but I was fortunate enough to meet with several of those intellectuals from the epochs of ancient Greece and Rome to those of our present day, who have explicated their own approaches to democracy. Being enchanted by their remarkable views, I had to extricate myself from my Simerenya and return to my desk to carry on with my writing about ‘democratic policing.’

In light of what I heard from my heroes, I became convinced that reducing the definition of democracy to a single form would be selfsame with naming an amorphous diamond ‘a triangular’ or ‘a rectangular’, when the possibility of forms that a diamond could take could, in fact, reach ad infinitum. Notwithstanding the fact that some of the ideas of those thinkers were almost completely contradictory to each other, e.g., Plato’s conception of democracy versus Popper’s or Popper’s conception of civil society versus Gramsci’s…for my purpose here, it will be adequate to say that the common attitude towards the term ‘democracy’ by almost all of them was a positive one. That is, when it was pronounced, most would understand it to mean certain positive values such as the expansion of human rights and freedoms, maintenance of the rule of law, independence of the judiciary, pluralism, protection of minorities, and so on.

In this frame of mind, it may be sensible to posit that just how successfully democratic policing can be implemented is contingent upon the internalization of the aforementioned values in a society. More importantly, internalization must take place on the individual level in a society in the sense that for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost. To be specific, if we think of society organically, the health of the collective will depend on the health of each person; i.e., the individuallevel conviction about the virtue of the abovementioned values that are attached to democracy is a prerequisite for bringing about a healthy, ideal society.

The internalization process, however, does not take the same shape everywhere which, in turn, necessitates one to distinguish ‘democratic policing’ from ‘policing in democracies.’ While the latter may be relatively easier for police because of the institutionalized nature of democratic values, the former depends on the kind of society within which police strive to incorporate democratic values into their policing practices. For instance, although the view that ‘liberal democracy is the best form of government that humanity could achieve’ is for the nonce shared by many states, it will not be perhaps incorrect to say that in fact the number of polities around the globe is almost tantamount to the number of states. Thus, two important points emerge here: First, democracy, as well as democratic policing, cannot be understood and implemented in a ‘one size fits all’ fashion. Second, democracy should not be conceived as an end, but instead a process.

Regarding the case of Turkey, the flaw in the ‘one size fits all’ approach and the importance of the processes of democracy are insinuated in the writings of Cemil Meric, a renowned Turkish philosopher who had criticized the Turkish ruling elite several decades ago for their equation of modernization simply with Westernization by saying that “…we have taken the fruit of the West and hung it on our own tree…[but] we have to know that ‘thought’ cannot be established overnight.” Yet, I am proud to claim that since around the time of Meric’s death in 1987, Turkey has been taking strides in incorporating the aforementioned values, resulting in an incessantly maturating democracy sui generis. This optimistic development indeed merits high commendation; particularly should one consider that it coincides with the era of rapid globalization, an era which not only marks the declining of moral values, but also the emergence of unnamed, or rather incomprehensible, criminal activities. It is even more striking to see that as the country is being plagued by separatist terrorist attacks, the Turkish people’s adherence to democratic values becomes more conspicuous. On my next visit to my Simerenya, I will inform Meric about these positive developments, hoping that this will expedite his convalescence from his despondency.

I shall note, however, that there are still some problems with the foregoing buoyancy about the way democratic values are taking root in Turkey. For example, some people unfortunately, and quite infrequently, articulate that “too much democracy is not good in the context of Turkey.” Instead of welcoming the recent socio-political transformation, i.e., increased incorporation of people who have been subjected to decades- long exclusion from social, cultural, and economic capitals in our society. They would rather prefer arresting social change, à la Plato, in favor of maintaining the status quo, as it has been favoring them for more than half a century in the form of provision of power that they are not willing to relinquish or at least share with larger segments of the population. Nevertheless, exactly at this point we should be more tolerant and understanding. We should remain neutral and view the actions of these disgruntled people simply as ‘protest’, so long as they do not resort to violence. On the contrary, we should be happy that contrasting views exist in our society. Following Ziya Pasha’s famous aphorism that “the spark of truth emanates from the collusion of thoughts,” we should relentlessly work to ascertain that a free, peaceful, and intellectual debate takes place in our society. The precondition for achieving these tasks, in my opinion, is the establishment of an open society. To this end, the change towards the better must start, once again, on the individual level, the natural upshot of which will be the positive change on the aggregate. To clarify, as police officers or ordinary citizens, we each should reorient our understanding of ourselves in today’s rapidly globalizing world which has spawned all varieties of almost insurmountable complexities. Emancipating our conscience by an anthropocentric, emphatic, and openminded approach can perhaps be a panacea to overcoming these complexities. In other words, we should be ideologically blind and free from all prejudices and discriminatory inclinations in our encountering with the other. Moreover, we should equip ourselves with the necessary knowledge by marrying our professional experiences with scientific research, in order to avoid lagging behind the mind-boggling socio-political and technological changes occurring all around the world.

Last but not least, we should dedicate ourselves to extirpating nepotism, corruption, and malfeasance in an effort to establishing an open society, the core values of which would entail representativeness, responsibility, and accountability.

*Kamil Yilmaz, PhD Student, Department of International and Transcultural Studies, Teachers College, Columbia University