In May 1998 the Belgian government and Jour opposition parties reached the «Octopus agreement,» deciding on the most comprehensive police reform in Belgian history. However, the problems to which the reform was intended to be a solution were known long before and the basic option of this reform also existed for some time. Hence the research question: why did the reform only take place in May 1998 and not earlier? To answer this question, the paper follows the narrative method: it tells the story that preceded this Octopus agreement from 1980 onwards. That narrative is «codified» in the language of a theoretical framework, a combination of the policy analysis models of Kingdon and Baumgartner and Jones. Together, these models turn out to be very useful to structure the narrative and provide a strong answer to the research question, allowing for analyticgeneralisation andJuture comparison.