It has been with the creation of national police forces all around the world that policing has raced into the political realm. At the same time the relationship between politics and the police has become apparent. However, the relationship between politics and the police has rarely been studied by political scientists interested in Turkish police studies. This work aims to fill this theoretical gap by analyzing the principal approaches to the relationship between politics and the police. In this respect, it aims to establish an analytical basis on how the relationship between politics and the police organization should be studied. The differences between these main approaches are due to the different definitions attributed to the concept of "police" by these same approaches. Approaches which define police as an institution mainly focus on the relationship between the police and political authority. According to these approaches, the police appear mainly as an instrument in the hands of political authority and act under the direct control of the government in power. So, the police organization does not achieve autonomy. Approaches which define police over policing and mainly as a function, in their turn, mostly focus on the influences of the activity of policing on political processes. Here policing has the ability to determine political processes. After the evaluation of these main approaches this study, in its turn, aims to integrate the concept of "police autonomy" in the analysis. For sure, police organizations remain related to the political power because they execute their function under the authority of governments. However, they also achieve some degree of institutional and personal autonomy since they construct their own identity and defend their own interests as a centralized and professional organization. However, this autonomy has its own limits. At this point, the concept of "relative autonomy" integrates into police research. The relative character of the police autonomy necessitates that empirical analysis based on socio-political contexts should be established for the observation of the relationship between politics and police.