By acting on the process through which policemen and women are selected, public authorities can prioritize the resources, social abilities and dispositions that they consider important, thus selecting the applicants who will best comply with the requirements of the security policies they promote. However, the entrance exam is underused for this purpose, and its handling is not very easy. Often presented as a lever for the professionalisation of the institution, major reforms of the recruitment test have in fact been based on a plurality of logics and its specific impact upon changing the direction of police policy has been limited. Moreover, the entrance fee required of candidates is mostly defined by the members of the jury themselves. Hence, recruitment practices tend strongly to result in the reproduction of the institution, rather than in its transformation.