Police departments today are more attractive places than they used to be for experiments in participatory management and other forms of workforce empowerment, but experiments of this kind in law enforcement remain disappointingly rare. The articles in this special issue, drawn from an international, cross-disciplinary conference on 'police reform from the bottom up,' highlight the potential benefits of giving rank-and-file officers a larger collective voice in the shaping of their work, as well as some of the difficulties of doing so, and the conditions under which it is most likely to succeed.