Disassembling Police Culture

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Drawing on six years of ethnographic research, this book critically examines police culture, exploring police behaviours, decisionmaking and actions. Police culture is a concept widely used, often critically, to characterise the working attitudes and behaviours of (usually uniformed) police officers. It is shorthand for a workplace imbued with machismo, racism, sexism, a thirst for danger and excitement, cynicism and conservatism. Rather than looking for culture or identifying how culture affects behaviours, this book identifies factors that influence the decisions and actions, including technology, targets, training, timing, intelligence, geography and supervision, thus reassembling police culture much as Bruno Latour sought to reassemble the social.

The analysis develops a clearer and critical understanding of culture by explicitly connecting the debates about police culture to those about organisational culture. Offering a detailed ethnography of two shifts, it grounds the analysis of the idea of police culture in a 'thick description' of the day- to- day activities observed in the police station and the patrol car, rather than using brief illustrative extracts. The book dispenses with any assumption of the utility of the concept of police culture, not least because it is opaque, and reassembles our understanding of policing and, if it retains any relevance, of police culture.

An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of policing, criminology, sociology, law, politics and all those interested in the day- to- day lives of police officers.

Author(s): Mike Rowe
Series: Routledge Frontiers of Criminal Justice
Publisher: Routledge
Year: 2023

Language: English
Pages: 175
City: London

Cover
Endorsement
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Chapter 1 Introducing Police Culture
Culture Explains Everything
Presenting Ethnographic Data
The Data
Summary and Structure
Contribution
Notes
References
Chapter 2 Spencer and Carol: A Shift
Some Cultural Interpretations
Notes
References
Chapter 3 Turning Blue?
The Academy
The Tutor Constable
Probation
In Service Training
Fitting in
Reflections
Notes
References
Chapter 4 On the Record
The Function of Stories
Forms of Stories
Reports as Formalised Stories
Reports as Intelligence
Reflection
Notes
References
Chapter 5 Part of a Whole
Kitted Up
Visibility
Connected
Shaping Discretionary Choices
Direction
Reflections
Notes
References
Chapter 6 Billy and Timothy: A Shift
Some Further Cultural Interpretations
Note
References
Chapter 7 No Cultural Dopes
Bureaucracy
At Street-Level
Understanding Disproportionality
Institutional Explanations
Reflections
Notes
References
Chapter 8 Culture Disassembled
A Place for Culture?
Final Remarks
References
Index