This lecture is about politics, policing and the police, and it brings back in the political context of policing – and also how this relates to the craft of policing. I define the craft of policing in terms of the core tasks of the police: maintaining public order, enforcing the law, offering services to the public and securing the underlying quality of (criminal) intelligence - and finally executing these tasks in a timely and professional way. And by ‘professional’ I mean ‘within the boundaries of the law’, and thus proportionate. Still, the term ‘professional’ here is also about setting one’s own moral standards and about being self-critical when it comes to assessing one’s performance.