This chapter investigates how, after the Second World War, the Dutch police sought new forms of legitimacy in the face of recurrent waves of politicisation of their functioning. It scrutinises why the police time and again became subject to political debate, how this related to a more general politicisation of and within electoral-representative democracy, and what depoliticising dynamics ensured the police’s survival. In 1945, in order to depoliticise them in the public eye, Dutch police forces were hastily purged of collaborators, but with limited results. In the 1960s, widespread criticism of both the police and representative democracy caused renewed politicisation. Police resistance to reform hindered efforts at depoliticisation, while street confrontations with social movements reverberated in an increasingly polarised parliamentary system. In the 1980s, following confrontations with the squatter and antinuclear movements, a somewhat more successful attempt at ‘community policing’ aimed to depoliticise policing in the face of public scrutiny. This coincided with the rise of managerial, consensus-based politics in parliament. This chapter shows that depoliticising efforts to make the police more impartial, reflexive, and closer to citizens were often initiated top-down by lawmakers, but civic deference during the 1950s and bottom-up civic attempts to institute police oversight since the 1960s also played their part.