Chapters 1-8

the professional model era (1920-1970)

- "professional police departments" - August Vollmer, "the father of professional policing", also was a strong proponent of police technology - Professional policing "emphasized discipline, equal enforcement of the law, and centralized decision making"

Herman Goldstein (1980)

- "the father of community policing" developed the concept of problem oriented policing - recommended a move away from reactive, incident oriented policing - concept included identifying and addressing crime and disorder problems based upon community perceptions

How do we frame police culture?

- (identify the source of the values, social structures, and other elements that make up some organizational culture such as police culture) - there are three frames commonly used in literature on police culture: interactionist (locates culture and cultural emergence in the face to face interactions of officers in local settings; looks at police organizations in terms of subcultures (whose values and cultural predispositions are imported from outside, and uses an institutional perspective to identify common subcultural elements; 3rd frame draws from a variety of contemporary writings to argue that multiple cultures co exist in police organizations.

Technology and the nationalization of crime CURRENT ERA (since 1970 - present day)

- A result of: - crime rate doubling from 1940 to 1965 - president's commission (1967) made over 200 recommendations, including many dealing directly with police operations - the federal government assumed the responsibility for fostering the development, availability, adoption of new technologies and providing the funding to local law enforcement. - federal programs designed to provide funding to local law enforcement were visualized - the omnibus crime control and safe streets act of 1968 was the first formal federal funding subsidy in law enforcement through the law enforcement assistance administration (LEAA) - LEAA provided over $7.5 billion dollars over a 13 year period (1969-1982)

emergent component of culture

- Four aspects: products of social action, emergence, emergence of new relations, and emergence of cultural elements. - Products of social action: the behavior that flows from the decisions we make about things can give rise to new ideational and physical components of culture. - emergence: recognizes that culture construction is a creative activity. - emergence new relations among social groups - emergence of cultural elements may be a product of conflict with other groups.

Grounded Asethetics

- Grounded: concrete, ordinary life events - aesthetics: creative process of values - culture grounded in everyday experience - influences transmit cultural elements across unconnected groups - individual express by symbols and practices: behavior, language including slang, and dress - provides an image (perception) - transmitted by media influence, "fads", global in scale, provides symbols and practices, modifies behaviors, forum for value identification, and provides modes for adaptation.

conclusion: which notion of culture is best?

- Position inside culture, recognizing that I am making a judgement from a prejudicial standpoint. The position I prefer has two parts: the decision about one or the other strategy of inquiry depends on and flows from the interests, skills, and intent of the researcher or writer & the mode of inquiry. - the researcher can select the method or narrative style that best addresses the problem she is concerned with, or that provides the most elegant method of assessing her notion of culture. - second, the mode of inquiry a researcher selects is not some window on the truth, but simply another interpretation. The cultural interpretation is a sort of textual account of what we have observed, - from this recognition emerges what warnke calls a hermeneutic conversation. Our goal is not to determine which is right, but to see what we can learn from each interpretation. we learn by trying to see the world as it is comprehended by members of the culture of interest. - the obligation of the researcher is to engage the text on its own terms.

O. W. Wilson (1970s)

- The "father of modern police management" - strongly supported police professionalization: de-politicizing policing, focus on crime, use of scientific methods in police management and programs - Wilsons model of effective policing: preventative patrol - random patrol, seeking out crime, and deterring crime through high visibility; Rapid response - faster the response, greater chance of catching offenders, aids victims of crime, and technology used to increase response time; follow up criminal investigation - crimes not solved forwarded to CID, gather evidence and statements, and pursue leads. - beginning in the 1970s, federal money was allocated to conduct research on police practices and strategies. Many of the aspects of professional policing were tested during this period.

cultural observation: a thought experiment

- Three issues central to cultural studies: cultural autonomy, observer objectivity, and the location of culture. - cultural autonomy: the idea that a group is stable and independent social entity, as she learned about them, she noted intervillage behavior. It might have involved trade, religion, warfare, family contacts, or even slavery. - objectivity and observer dependency: describes the villagers, their patterns of interaction, family life, structures, customs, symbols, rituals, and other notions associated with their cultural identity. To explore we need to begin with another idea, institutional facts- are statements about human relationships. - the location of culture: developed an image of the culture she is observing; the culture was in her, in our heads. - culture and police culture. the thought experiment and discussion has several implications for the study of police culture. - culture and observer dependency. there is no such thing as police culture in the objective out there. It does not exist independently of the observer. - language. language is critical to understanding the life of any group. By the study we engage the text. - culture, intergroup interactions, and conflict. To speak of police culture is not to suggest that the police sub populations of interest are somehow autonomous, by which i mean that members identities are determined only by their traditional group affiliation or that they are independent of the influence of other groups. cultural identity is closely tied to conflict. - culture is in our heads. this element reminds us that the study of culture is always the study of people. Understanding the people. The idea that culture is in our heads means that when someone is hired, they bring with them a complete complement of cultural behaviors, values, and predisposition. Culture reproduces itself. Managers in the police organization tend to hire people like themselves, who see the world like they do.

What is culture?

- a confluence of themes of occupational activities - values shared by members of the group - personal sentiments of individuals - acting and reacting to personal interactions and events - finding meaning in ordinary activity - personal experience - shared experience - grounded aesthetics = common culture

Coercive Territorial Control

- a linkage of three themes: Dominion, use of force, and guns - Coercion is seen as the core of police work - Coercive territorial control is a grounded aesthetic

What is community policing?

- a philosophy and attitude - recognition that police cannot solve crime problems alone - knowledge of community resources - sir robert peel: "police are the citizens, citizens are the police" - only difference is some citizens are paid to be police

What is culture??

- a working definition - a working definition adapted by Hall and Neitz, Sackmann; Culture is collective sense making. Sense making has ideational, behavioral, material, social structural, and emergent elements: 1. ideas, knowledge (correct, wrong, or unverifiable belief) and recipes for doing things; 2. behaviors, signs, and rituals; 3. humanly fabricated tools including media; 4. social and organizational structures; 5. the products of social action, including conflicts, that may emerge in concrete interpersonal and inter social encounters and that may be drawn upon in further construction of the first four elements of collective sense making. - Useful definition because it has: ideational component, behavioral component, material component, social structural component, and emergent component.

Waddington

- an umbrella term for a range of negative values and practices among the police. Waddington noted the limitations of this view of culture: "its convenience lies in its condemnatory potential, the police are to blame for the injustices perpetuated in the name of the criminal justice system" - the purpose of this research was not to understand what police do or think but to change them, it was about reform. - The impulse for change "was a civil libertarian concern for the extent and sources of police deviation from due process of law." - the literature on police culture ends up telling us what is wrong with police culture from the perspective of the observer of the culture. it does not tell us anything about culture from the perspective of its participants. We learn a great deal about the perspective of the observer, not the observed. The interaction of the observer and observed is a central and unsolvable dilemma in all research on culture, and particularly haunts narratives on police culture popular in both the popular and academic media.

what is police culture?

- being a police officer is a state of mid - what it feels like to be a cop - police culture is complex, multivocal - a moral grain formed by shared values - attitude under the deterrence philosophy: presence of officers on the street, preventative patrol, and rapid response - E911 - all designed to increase the likelihood of getting caught, in an effort to prevent criminal acts - the work of police officers is not simply a set of rules or organizational bureaucracy - powerful personal sentiments: - feelings for each other - feelings toward work - feelings about the citizens - feelings about criminals - meanings held in officers mind - unpredictable, ironic sense of work - why we do what we do: - grounded in everyday activity - values in preferred ways of responding - accumulation of common sense meaning - doing and thinking are institutionalized perspectives - police cultures are similar across the United States

Limitations on a common distinction between culture and subculture

- culture - can be described as the occupational beliefs and values that are shared by officers across the country. - subculture - the values imported from the broader society in which officers live. - this distinction between culture and subculture above is practical for reform minded professionals, because it permits us to both view how values are adopted from broader society and how police recruits are socialized into a prevailing way of thinking about police work. - the way of distinguishing between of culture and subculture, is limited. First, it does not recognize complexity in the relationship. Second, we examine only ideational components - values, beliefs, and ethics - associated with municipal police organizations, we might observe that some elements seem to be present in all departments, suggesting the presence of general culture of policing. Third, all of this is complicated by the predispositions of the observers. Fourth, to identify a subculture begs the question: what is the larger culture of which the police are a subculture? - the image of culture carried by this author is that culture exists in varying degrees at all levels and flows in all directions from individual to society and back again. We are embedded in culture. - their lives are embedded in each of the cultural frames simultaneously. Yet the frames are not separate from them - culture is carried in people, and their creativity, aesthetic interests, or misunderstandings can create new cultural knowledge. Their participation in the different frames reveals the complexity of cultural life in mass society.

the police as local culture

- culture emerges locally in concrete social interactions and radiates out to other groups in patterns determined by the social interactions of the group members with other groups. we do not simply and blindly take culture as it is handed down to us. Interactionists focus on emergent properties of culture. - humans are constantly engaged in a process of interacting with other people, and the meanings these interactions hold for us emerge in a practical, common sense way from these interactions. - observers of culture have developed a diverse and colorful terminology to describe the interactive process: a shared typifications, as common sense knowledge, as figurative action, as documentary interpretation, as a tool kit, and as a humanistic coefficient. Culture is a body of knowledge that emerges through the shared application of practical skills to concrete problems encountered in daily routines and the normal course of activities. this body of knowledge contains both information, values, and behaviors that tend to interact in ways that are self confirming, reproducing culture through confirmation. - knowledge about how to act and how to think about work derives directly from real world experiences shared by its members. - problem solving is not a solitary exercise, but occurs in the sharing of problems concretely experienced. - skolnick discusses the symbolic assailant, a person whose clothes are mannerisms suggest that the person will cause trouble and is a likely candidate for a stop and frisk. Typifications indicating the potential for trouble (type of tattoo, clothing marked by gang member) and danger arise from the concrete doing of police work, are shared by cops and become a part of the lore of a local police culture. - in time such typifications are regarded as common knowledge that carries common sense values. - there are many cultural interpretations of the same incident - with changing times, the police began to adopt elements of community policing. - an element of the incident was that it was somewhat unpredictable. the circumstances and outcome of the incident in turn become added to local cultural lore. Unpredictability, in its many forms, are a central ingredient in police culture. - because a particular culture is always undergoing change, any study of it will of necessity be incomplete. it can never be wholly understood, because there is not this finished or complete entity to understand. cultural understanding for both its participants and observers is a continual process of interpretation, never complete, always changing and adapting to new historical circumstances. - the incident reaffirms and reproduces culture. Drugs are still bad, bad guys deal with drugs and police justifiably treat them roughly. all this must be done to protect the community. - the aesthetics of local culture. Ground aesthetics resemble typifications in that they both describe how meaning and common sense arises from everyday experiences. It shows how culture is grounded in everyday activity, yet also how powerful media and commercial influences transmit cultural elements across otherwise unconnected groups. - common culture could be seen in the way young people copied popular modes of dress, ways of speaking, and other forms of concrete behavior. the attire, behavior, vocabulary, and goods an individual used to express him or herself, and the meanings that those elements held for young people, became that persons grounded aesthetic. - willis described what was meaningful to british youth, and the imaged he captured was the excitement and the enjoyment of shared elements of popular culture. - youth culture emerged from the way in which individuals shared their aesthetics, made available through media transmission of common cultural goods. - the idea of grounded aesthetics has much to offer to our understanding of the culture of policing. by thinking of the police in terms of grounded aesthetics, we can focus on concrete events, style of dress, forms of patrol, ways of talking, styles of weaponry, and rituals of celebration and of grieving. - we can also think about police discretion as an artful response to practical exigencies of police work, in which officers select among different cultural competencies when deciding how and when to act. - the artistry inherent in the idea of a grounded aesthetic suggest that members of the police culture are not simple dopes mindlessly responding to powerful environmental forces. - the transmission of local culture. police departments have elements that are similar to one another because of: multiple group membership, weak ties, structural roles, and media diffusion. - the more groups share common cultural features, the great is their overlap. - processes of media transmission also provide for a common core of cultural symbols across organizations. training films that discuss danger and show cops killed in action contribute to a shared and particularly intense way of thinking about danger among the police.

Culture and the nature of knowledge

- culture is an idea of extraordinary breadth; in its origins, culture was conceived broadly, that there are bounded, isolated, and stable social entities called cultures, and these cultures provide the measure of a whole way of life of a people. - red field described culture as people who shared common understandings and who produce and consume their own goods. - kluckhohn provided 11 definitions for culture, including the total way of life of a people, a way of thinking feeling and believing, and a set of techniques for adjusting such a large intellectual space in the early days of anthropology that it has been described as the root metaphor of the field. - the study of culture emerged in ethnographies of primitive or non western societies. - early conceptions of culture, carried out by ethnographic observers of indigenous peoples in far away places such as Africa, developed a conception of culture as a bounded way of ethnic or tribal life. Cultural theory in turn contrasted such folk or traditional cultures with modern or western societies. - many of the founding ideas of culture have been reconsidered; the notion that human cultures should be thought of as an isolated and autonomous social entities has been largely abandoned in the current age. - Wolfe noted that many non European cultures studied by anthropologists were not isolated, but were involved in complex interrelations with other (non European) groups. - early observers of culture were concerned with going native becoming so involved in local cultures that the observer or ethnographer began to take on the trappings of local identity and lost their independent viewpoint. - the independence of the western viewpoint has itself been sharply challenged in recent years. These challenges have two elements. 1. many observers content that there are particular aspects of the western worldview that carry predisposing biases, 2. the notion that somehow we can stand outside culture and study it form a non cultural standpoint is today considered by many to be particular kind of viewpoint associated with enlightenment ideas of objective social science.

Police and Danger

- danger to police is poorly understood - public run from danger - police run towards danger - danger is a central theme of police work - brief periods of terror in the midst of long periods of routine activity - How dangerous is police work? - Statistics: most police are killed and injured in traffic accidents and many fatalities are caused by suicide - difference: officers know the potential for danger that exists in the job - job function is highly unpredictable - training reinforces danger - job requires intervention with people - many responses unpredictable - job requires response to violence - job requires use of violence - officers defense is humor

police infrequently fire guns on the job

- despite their high profile in the psyche of individual officers, guns are used infrequently in real work situations. - the infrequency of gun use belies the emotional intensity of encounters where guns do come into play. guns encounters are scary, and few cops looking forward to them.

reuss-ianni territory and cops rules

- elizabeth reuss-ianni in her research on police in new york city, has provided an illuminating case study of the dimensions of police culture. she described the linkage of territory to responsibility as a process, defined as the formal and informal relationships between environment and behavior within the precinct and between the precinct and other environments. - management cop culture, has sought to provide universal principles of administrative governance and accountability to a police tradition of local autonomy and decentralized decision making. this means that administrators have applied a wide body of rules and procedures to the traditional domain of local territorial responsibility, seeking to regulate and standardize what officers do in their territories. - reuss-ianni identified several fundamental elements of street cop culture. several responsibilities having to do with territory: dont get involved in another officers sector, dont leave work for the next tour, and hold up your end of the work. - territory seamlessly fuses with line responsibility, and shared ideas of beat responsibilty are a powerful cultural theme that seeks to limit the intrusiveness of management brass. 1. keep out of the way of any boss from outside your precinct. 2. know your bosses. 3. dont do the bosses work for them. 4. dont make waves. 5. dont give them too much activity. - these maxims place responsibility at the lowest organizational levels and bring peer pressure on cops to avoid management oversight. - the fusion of responsibility and territory has implications for media relations as well. - challenges to officers abilities to control their territories are a fundamental threat to their sense of self worth.

Culture

- enables a great many of those things that mark us as quintessentially human. - our capacity for moral and ethical development, the way we describe and act out fundamental institutions of marriage, church, government, and economy, the labeling of others as friend or foe, our ability to act in ways that display justice and fair play, our identity as citizens, all of these are expressions of culture. - is an umbrella term for a range of negative values and practices among the police. Waddington noted the limitations of this view of culture: "its convenience lies in its condemnatory potential, the police are to blame for the injustices perpetuated in the name of the criminal justice system" - the purpose of this research was not to understand what police do or think but to change them, it was about reform. - central to ideas of this is the recognition that its neither bad nor good, but rather is a central feature of our humanity - our capacity to find meaning in our lives. So it is for the police as well, it is what makes police like the rest of us, not different from us.

perspectives on excessive violence

- excessive force is a topic of extensive discussion in the criminal justice literature. manning suggests that the use of excessive violence is one of the fundamental characteristics of American policing. the excessive use of force symbolically communicates the unquestionable authority of the state in the affairs of the citizenry. - the moral authority of the state is a theme evoked by van maanen in his description of street justice. he contends that cops mete out immediate punishments in the face of what they perceive to be behavior that denies the authority of the state. - police violence is sometimes explained as an overreaction in the face of potential or real danger. in these instances, it is suggested that the scruffle was started by the felon, and police only reacted in like measure to control the situation. - suspects are particularly vulnerable to rough justice when they try to hide from or avoid the police after being approached. - street violence is sometimes associated with more traditional policing styles. - wilson contended that coercion was mechanism for the distribution of justice to those who have earned it. police violence was not gratuitously, in the sense that it is randomly distributed by so called out of control cops. - because police violence is associated with old fashioned police practices, professionalizing reforms, particularly those favorable to education, seem to be a way to control it. there is little evidence though that this is the case.

introduction 6

- few issues are so emotionally charged as the police use of force. in the US, democratic principles properly our belief in law over order, and the police are expected to behave objectively and fairly as instruments of the law. - we then ask cops to deal with our most profound social problems and to use whatever force is necessary to shelter us from the criminal and the uncivilized. We complain bitterly when police do not quickly resolve problems we ourselves cannot handle. - media portrayals of the police frequently focus on their capacity for force. Tv shows and movies make police a powerful source of media inspiration. - what does not sell, and what we do not see, are the police living ordinary lives, facing the same daily myriad of petty problems confronted by the rest of us.

introduction 7

- few notions seized the american psyche in the latter half of the twentieth century with as much vigor as did the idea of as war on crime. the introduction of a war on crime into federalist politics can be traced to 1966, when president lyndon johnson presented it as a political call to arms. - the notion of a war on crime is an example of a metaphor that, in many ways, fits police work pretty well. Criminals become an enemy combatant and crime control becomes military battle. in this case, the notion of war is a metaphor with dramatic organizing potential. - the war metaphor is warmly received by many police officers for several reasons. Many police are recruited from the military, and bring with them a military bearing and perception of the appropriateness of military discipline. the police and military often overlap, with family histories often blending police and military careers. - the problem is that it is not common sense for everyone. To some, it is strikingly unamerican. the war metaphor plays havoc with posse comitatus separatist traditions of the police and the military in the US. - yet that the war metaphor has taken hold is increasingly apparent. one of the many dramatic political developments in the post 9/11 era - the period after the terrorist destruction of the world trade center towers in new york on september 11, 2001 - has been the reassessment of the relationship between internal security - local and national police- and the military. - militarism can be defined as the adoption of military procedures, attitudes, structures, and practices by the police. Post 9/11 militaristic tendencies among the police occur within a history and milieu of police/military interaction.

Guns

- firearms are central to police officer authority - guns represent the final reality check for officers - guns symbolize the power of police officers - guns symbolize the dangers of police work - most police believe in guns - guns illustrate issues of personal responsibility - police firearms use is a position of public trust - guns are an integral part of police identity - firearms training: starts with recruit training, firearms evaluated for stopping power, training in double tap kill zone, officers are not trained to wound or graze, mandates for qualifications, usually a primary factor in officer failing to meet performance standards - part of the officers identity kit - popular myths about police and guns: - few officers ever discharge their weapons in the line of duty - officers are trained to shoot to kill - officers shoot to survive - deadly force use is limited by law - about 10% of police shootings are the result of police shooting each other

kraska: the iron fist of militarism

- in a series of articles, peter kraska has described how the ideology of the new warrior is gaining a powerful foothold in american municipal police agencies. this phenomenon, metaphorically described as the iron fist inside the velvet glove represents a poorly recognized but sweeping change in american police departments today. - in spite of a great deal of police managerial rhetoric about the velvet glove of community policing, an influential militaristic way of thinking is securing its place in american police organizations. - PPUs are changing the character of urban policing tactics as well. modeling themselves as elite paramilitary troops, they adopt the training, the language, the planning, and the weaponry of warriors. - this is a military vision of police work. it looks at america and sees the enemy within. its mission is tactical: search and destroy. - kraska and paulsen provided a case study of the way in which the use of a paramilitary teams has become a normal part of police work. - from 1986-89, the PPU was used for 43 drug raids, six arrest warrants, two civil disturbances, and one security detail. - PPUs are proliferating across the urban landscape, and increasingly they are spreading to the rural american environments: kraska estimates that one of five of all departments has one such unit. - that perceptions of hyper danger are culturally based is revealed by the history of the PPU - max weber is reputed to have commented on the remarkable ability of ideas to reverse their meaning during their intellectual careers. - in the mid 1990s the velvet glove is giving ground to a new image, one that has a powerful paramilitary component, and where community policing is measured in a departments deployment capability for drug raids and its capacity to shut down crack houses.

how officers use patrol time

- in practice, RPP means that officers have a great deal of police discretion to determine, if, how, and when to intervene in the affairs of the citizenry. - greene and klockstars findings are important for two reasons. first their findings that police spend a greater proportion of the time on law enforcement than has been generally thought. Their workload represented value choices by police on patrol. - unstructured time fuses in a practical way the use of automobile patrol to the demands of territorial control, and provides police with the opportunity to exercise value choices. - territory is practical knowledge. Police proactivity in patrol activity is also revealed in Rubinstein's enlightening discussion of territory. He observed that the organization of a police officers cognition - the way they viewed their working space - occurred in terms of immediate and practical considerations of territorality. - officers learned that they could create private space for themselves at prominent public places. fire stations and hospitals provided places where an officer could make a phone call, wash up, or simply relax for a few moments. - officers eventually memorized their sector assignments. - knowledge of particular buildings was determined by the officers obligations. those visited regularly were those that were friendly, or that had required log sheets for the officer to sign. - geographical knowledge was also private knowledge. officers knowledge of their area was for their use only; they did not discuss it with other cops, and they did not inquire too keenly about things having to do with outer cops territory. - officers learned what rubinstein called "a highly particularized" knowledge of the people and activities in their sectors. this knowledge was normative, which meant that officers developed a sense of what was normal and acceptable, and what hinted at being out of kilter. - territory is people. territory has a distinguishing geography, and the geography provides the cognitive structure of an officers knowledge. Territory is occupied by people, and the people define the way in which an officer acts out his or her sense of responsibility. - the physical geography of an officers territory is overlaid by a human geography, and normative standards regarding the human use of the sector or beat geography guide police behavior. - officers view their right to intervene as an absolute authority in all circumstances. - during a three year period, fletcher interviewed 125 Chicago police officers. the product of her interviews are police stories about police crime activity. - intervention is also acceptable for service related phenomena as well. a police officer will stop to inquire about the plight of a motorist with a flat tire in a bad neighborhood. - importantly, many cops do not believe that they need a reason to intervene. Distinctions of service, order maintenance, and law enforcement, are useful for administrative pigeonholing their work, and useful to the unremitting and insufferable flow of social scientists. - the geography of a territory is given meaning by the flow of people through it, and problems are associated with the people that inhabit particular locations. Intersections become important because gangs may use them as boundaries or because the pattern of the lights seems to invite an unusually high number of traffic violations or accidents. - herman goldstein observed that small number of locations accounted for most recurring crime. he argued that the police should shift out of traditional, reactive modes and focus on these hot spot areas. today his approach is called problem oriented policing.

the future of dominion: morality and community policing

- in recent years a new image of police territorial responsibility has emerged- a community based notion of police, sensitive to and responsible for the preservation of local communities and neighborhoods. - we are in what has been called a sea change in policing. this generic term for this change is community based policing a term that covers a lot of strategic and tactical ground, but seeks in the most general sense to expand the scope of legitimate police interventions and to build bridges between police and the public that will enhance police intelligence. - the expansion of the scope of legitimate police interventions was central to wilson and kellings broken windows essay, in which the authors argued that police needed to refocus their efforts away from an abstract and individualist notion of law enforcement and adders the needs of specific communities. - neighborhoods, they proposed, are the same way: once a few human broken windows - prostitutes, derelicts, drunks, and their like- appear the neighborhood will rapidly deteriorate unless the police intervene. - the authors advocated for an expansion of the authority of the police to intervene in the affairs of the citizenry when the police order was threatened. - community policing also appears to hold promise as a way to soften management line hostilities, a widely cited condition of police organizations in the US. - the end of police culture? such an outcome is neither likely nor reasonable. it is more likely that enhanced police discretion under a community policing mandate will lead to sharply different outcomes. - to the contrary, both are likely to expand as the work of the police expands. yet it is precisely these accountability mechanisms that alienate street officers from managers, that spur the growth of police culture. - community based policing is not a solution for the blue curtain secrecies associated with the police culture.

introduction 5

- in the heart of every cop is a senses of morality, strong in some and weak in others, but always present. morality is bottom line - if they lack it they will not be hired, they will resign, or they will be weeded out. - bestowed with a specific beat assignment, working alone, and provided a portion of automobile-enhanced discretion, they act out their subjective, shared sense of morality every time they decide whether, and when to intervene in the affairs of the citizenry. - territory is for cops more than a geographical assignment. It is their prize for being morally righteous, a divine gift, placed in their care so that they can deal with the a$$holes and bad guys of the world. A cops territory is theirs, not managements, not another cops, certainly not the medias, those sovereigns of a darker order. And cops take it very seriously. - I use the term dominion rather than the more traditional term territory to capture the spirit of responsibility that is associated with a geographical assignment. - territories are spaces frightened with meaning. were one to view territory from a operational or management culture perspective, one might use descriptors such as deployment effectiveness, neighborhood coverage, response time, span of control, emergency responsiveness, and the like. - police reformers and executives have been doing this or related sorts of scientific management since the turn of the century, believing that such efforts will instill greater efficiency in police work. Territory is about dominion over people, those that live there, work there, recreate there, or commit crime there. - territory carries a great deal of meaning for the police. Police territories are infused with important values - commitment and responsibility - that surpass simple conceptions of spatial arrangement and population flows. - territories are normally organized as beats. a beat is an assigned geography, whose particular dimensions are historically based on common sense divisions of community boundaries, the road and train system, the distribution of precinct stations, and geographic features of the jurisdiction. - random preventive patrol enhances territorial control. The contemporary practice of police patrol, called random preventive patrol, is based on a philosophy of geographical crime deterrence. Officers are supposed to drive around unpredictably and randomly in their assigned areas, so that criminals will not know where they are. - random preventive patrol was founded in the early part of the twentieth century. August vollmer implemented automobile patrol in Berkeley, California in 1914, and added radios in 1921. He believed that automobile patrol would lead to an end of crime in the united states; that criminals would be preoccupied with the threat of potential police encounter, that they would not know where the police were and would face an increased likelihood of capture. today it is highly institutionalized form of police patrol whose effectiveness is unquestioned in most police organizations, and is widely practiced in police departments in the US today. - random preventive patrol is proactive police work. what some police managers and most academic researchers fail to understand is that random preventive patrol is a myth of operational effectiveness nowhere seriously practiced: cops simply do not drive around randomly. Officers certainly spend a large part of their days driving around in cars, but their driving patterns are intentional, not random. - random preventive patrol has gotten a bad reputation in recent years, largely because it is said to force police into an ineffective, reactive or post crime mode. by random i mean that a police dispatched receives a call from a citizen to deal with some problem, the dispatched calls a patrol car, and the patrol car responds to the call. - what is often not realized is that so called random preventive patrol permits many opportunities for proactive activity on the part of individual officers. officers drive around purposefully, not randomly. - officers on random preventive patrol are engaged in a great deal of proactive activity. they drive around in areas where there are problems that they want to monitor, and where there are people whom they want to track. - thus, in the strategic guise of randomness and deterrence, police are highly proactive. RPP provides officers with a great deal of discretion, and that discretion is used to seek out and identify problems in their territory.

the new warrior

- in warrior dreams, james gibson discussed a profound frustration, engendered by the vietnam experience, that continues to haunt the memories of american veterans of the war. in vietnams aftermath emerged a myth of spiritual malaise: the US lost and did so because it did not try hard enough - it lacked the political will to fight. the troops were not supported at home. we lost not from the absence of manpower, not because our troops did not give their all, but from moral weakness on the home front. - a new warrior emerged from the war experience. celebrated in the media, the warrior fought the righteous fight, but always carried the battle on two fronts. On one front, a firefight involved a small group or a lone operative in a jungle setting, seeking to right some wrong incurred by the Vietnam experience. - the new warrior refought the battle for vietnam a thousand times, each time winning it decisively. - rambo was not an isolated disturbed malcontent. to the contrary, he represented a core set of american values. - the ideological shift from vietnam to the streets of america was easy. - the new warrior was wholly committed to the war. the warrior culture passed the banner to american paramilitary police, dedicated to stopping the asian and south american influence from destroying our country through drugs.

Cultural themes

- is broad areas of shared activity or shared in common, and sentiment associated with activity. - dynamic affirmation = linkage of activity and sentiment: not random responses, not particularly rule bound, bound in tradition, and customs and assumptions. - boundaries - geographical remoteness does not apply to police (surrounded by other groups) - Rank - most police organizations have multiple cultures, often segmented by rank: line officers, supervisors in the field, middle managers, and the brass (command staff)

material component of culture

- is expressed as tool making, and information processing structures. - sense making emerges in response to brute facts about the world. In turn, the tools may take on a social vitality of their own, independent of their practical tool making properties. - Guns have a brute fact, they may enable a person to protect themselves against another dangerous human or to put food on the table. - print media also has this quality, the print media and machinery that enables It are the daily fare for many people for gaining information about the world around them.

behavioral component of culture

- is recognized in Mannings definition of culture as "accepted practices, rules, and principles of conduct that are situationally applied" - behaviors are not casual or consequential to ideas, but exists in a reciprocal and occasionally independent relationship to them. A person acts in a certain way because it is culturally appropriate way to act, and a person thinks about that action in particular ways because that way of thinking is also appropriate.

social structural component of culture

- it is expressed in physical and organizational things. - it encompasses the physical structures of a police department, the physical geography of beat boundaries, and organizational features of the police such as operational strategies and goals, training practices, and patterns of occupational differentiation.

distinguishing legal and illegal coercion: a line in the sand

- legal and illegal coercion do not separate cleanly in practice. - police officers inhabit a world of unfolding contingencies. it is not easily amendable to control.

militarism and the metaphors of war

- metaphors are powerful linguistic tools that at once organize thoughts and focus our attention on some aspect of the criminal justice system. metaphors provide a way of thinking about something by likening it to something else that can highlight an important or distinguishing point. - militarism is such a metaphor for the police. the police are not a military unit fighting a war - their principle clients are citizens and their work is dominated by petty peacekeeping problems involving rowdy teenagers, angry spouses, and neighbors, and other persistent social problems. - the metaphor war has had explosive mobilizing potential. it provided a way to view the police as protectors of society and to view criminals as amoral enemies - less than human. - the language of war provides a vocabulary that unites officers in militaristic identity, and provides individual officers with a warrior persona. - betz further observed that the military model becomes embodied in cop identity and encourages violence. - militarism, a model that has been celebrated for the discipline and accountability it provides for officers has resulted in a paradoxical conclusion: today it provides a basis for many of the enduring features of the police culture. - kraska identifies several dimensions of police militarism and militarization in policing today: 1. blurring external and internal security issues. 2. emphasis on information gathering and processing and surveillance work. 3. ideology of militarism that emphasizes problem solving with state force, technology, armament, intelligence gathering, aggressive suppression efforts. 4. special operations paramilitary teams and policing using military tactics. 5. purchasing, loaning, donating, and using actual militaristic products. 6. collaboration between the defense industry and crime control industry. 7. the use of military language within political and popular culture to characterize the social problems of drugs, crime, and social disorder. - in each of these items, we can see the interpenetration, in material and ideational culture, of the military and the police. - in 2002, a new word with powerful metaphorical organizing power emerged: terrorist. terrorist is a word difficult to pin down, and easily accumulates meaning for that reason. a terrorist is a status, a person who commits crime. any kind of crime can constitute terrorism, depending on how terrorism is defined. - after the attack on the world trade center towers in NYC, the word terrorism accreted a great deal of meaning. it conjures images of people in far way places plotting the destruction of the US. - the logic embedded in this article is clear. we are engaged in a domestic war with terrorism. by labeling law breaking as terrorism we implicitly justify the wholesale abandonment of civil liberties as we have already done for Americans accused by the executive branch of the federal government of aiding the taliban or al qaeda. - the police, warriors for the forces of good, have become what reformers sought, through perhaps not what reformers wanted.

the police and multiple subcultures within an organizational setting

- much of the proceeding discussion has viewed police culture or subculture as synonymous with the membership of a police organization. Such a notion of culture does not fully recognize the implications of occupational and role differentiation - subcultures proliferate according to the degree that their representative subgroups develop their own language, norms, time horizons, and perspectives on the organizations mission. culture emergence is indicated by a consciousness of difference in which subcultural units believe they are best positioned to control the work they do. - the presence of subcultures within police organizations has been noted by several authors. - manning in a wide literature has also explored cultural differentiation or segmentation within police departments. in his work on British policing he noted a two tiered pattern of segmentation similar to that described by reuss-ianni. senior officers ranks above sergeant identified with rational bureaucracy, while constables were socially organized around principles of individualism and traditional notions of police work. - the accounts of segmented police culture presented by both reuss and van maanen above are images of occupational segmentation of police culture. They represent an image of police culture that is segmented within individual organizations. - sackmann: emergent patterns of cognition: a different notion of cultural differentiation is put forward by sackmann. He does not describe differentiation in terms of subpopulation identity, but in terms of the organization of cultural knowledge. Cognitions are structured through four Cognitive devices: dictionary knowledge, directory knowledge, recipe knowledge, and axiomatic knowledge. - he used a thematic content analysis to identify cultural themes, which she defines as equivalent meanings, attributed to different situations or events. Interviews were conducted to acquire respondents perceptions of commonly held themes. - patterns of cultural participation were uneven across the different kinds of cultural knowledge. Meant that different subcultures emerged depending on which kind of cultural knowledge was assessed. - chan: culture and reform in Australian police: she extended sackmanns work to police organizations. lamenting the failure of existing definitions of police culture to account for internal differention and jurisdictional differences. Chan used sackmanns typology to conceptualize the police response to reform. Her conceptualization is: police axiomatic knowledge, police dictionary knowledge, police directory knowledge, and police recipe knowledge. - she described the community policing interventions as generally ineffective. Substantive change was noted only with regard to axiomatic knowledge. - the field is defined as social space of conflict and competition, where participants struggle to establish control over specific power and authority. - the importance of this field was that it provided the social structure in which police culture operated. The failure of reforms led chan to conclude reforms must be aimed at the broader social structural environment in which police work occurs, not only at the police. - the changes adopted by the new york wales police department were intended to improve relations with minority groups, particularly aborigines. The position of the aborigines in Australia society - the field- was generally unaffected by the reforms. - in a paper published in 2001, she extended her perspective on police culture to agency socialization processes. she argued that a theory of police culture should account for variations in socialization processes, recognize the active part played by recruits in socialization, locate socialization within the sociopolitical conditions of policing, and take into account broad social change in the field. - with regard to variations in the socialization process, she noted that the process was heterogeneous. - recruits took an active part in the process - they reflected on who they talked to and assessed the relative merits of information received from superiors. When asked about participation in police culture, recruits provided diverse answers, suggesting different models of adaptation to local cultural dynamics. - paoline: culture and police types: he took a sharply different approach to the study of police culture; he used an empirical methodology, and allowed the definition of cultural differences to be determined by the results of statistical procedures. - he used a technique called cluster analysis, which is a data reduction technique to identify group formations within the particular attitudes studied. Clusters produced by the analysis were the empirical basis for the identification of subcultures, or differentiating patterns of attitudes. - analysis revealed the presence of seven clusters, suggesting subcultural differentiation. an interpretive review of the clusters suggested the following labels: lay lows, old pros, traditionalists, anti organization street cops, dirty harry enforcers, peace keepers, and law enforcers. - one of the interesting aspects of the analysis was the analytic separation of subpopulations from subcultures. An officer could be a member of several different groups, depending on the clustering pattern she or he matched. This allows researchers to consider than an officers identify is not subcultural per se, but is a composite social entity formed from subcultural elements selectively obtained from participation in a variety of subgroups. - controversial in the mode of cultural analysis was the way empirical measures are used to generate cultural identity. all interpretation of cultural or subcultural identity were based on assessments of statistical differences, an analytic strategy at stark variance with ethnographic traditions in culture analysis.

the political era (1840-1920)

- mutually beneficial ties between politicians and police in most areas of the country - two available forms of technology: the gun and nightstick - force was the primary tool of choice

Police - Suspicion Stops

- police cannot detain without reason - consensual: free to leave - non consensual: not free to leave - traffic related and pedestrian stops all require reasonable suspicion or cause - Hunches - not sufficient - experience, training can be used - detention must be reasonable and for a reasonable period of time - terry vs california - miranda vs arizona - use of suspicion as a display of power - drive or approach with display of interest - stare and/or wait for a response - initiate contact to force a potential criminal response - developing suspicion - use of cues: verbal, physical (kinesics); experience; training - ultimately, the officers behavior is subject to judicial review

police culture environments

- police culture is embedded and bounded by organizational structure - similar in all organizations - organized by the police "squad": squads by shifts, platoons by geography, geographically assigned (zones, districts, beats), and chronically assigned (shifts) - shift and squad deployment isolates officers from public, and other officers in the department - leisure time restricted; social circle restricted - police cultural themes stem from everyday interactions of police with the various environments - governed by particular rules and procedures - environments replicated - no single environment, but a series - similar across jurisdictions - expectations vary with environment - response is appropriate to the particular audience - street environment is the first and most salient - powerful themes of territory - officers assigned and responsible to a particular areas - police behavior: reflects the interaction of personal temperament, circumstances of the encounter, attitudes of the individuals involved, and resolved through "officers playing roles" - citizens invoked interactions: - calls for service - dispatched - bulk of police citizen contacts - reactive style of policing - police are a target for community frustrations - police are frustrated with reactive role - repetitive, destructive side of human relations - unsatisfied, police become cynical and disillusioned - traffic stops: integral to patrol task, semi articulated from department expectations, usually discretionary - officer initiated, public response is less than friendly sometimes openly hostile to officer, observers have traditionally paid little attention, and now a focus "professional police stops", "racial profiling" - articulated through the organization - roll call (briefing): may contain mild rebukes, guidance, offical policy - shift end: may continue to local pub or other location - sergeant supervision: first link, most influential person in the day to day operations - Internal review: formal procedure most feared by officers - standard operating procedures: formal rules intended to guide officers, perceived as punitive tool - the courts: warrant process, hearings, depositions, and trials - officers arrest = probable cause - court conviction = beyond a reasonable doubt - police: personal authority vs quality of evidence - the media: social control agents and reporters influence can impact positively or negatively. - the inner circle: - media friendly to police, identify with police values - managed release of friendly information - secrecy and silence allows for control of information - inner circle will censor themselves - scandal ruptures the inner circle dissemination; results in uncontrolled articulation, veil of secrecy widely breached.

introduction

- police culture is embedded in and bounded by organizational structure. - all departments, given sufficient organizational size, are organized at the line level into squads. Rubinstein's analysis of the organization of squads in Philadelphia could apply to any city in the US. Squads worked a six day week, and were assigned to work shifts at one of three times. - this working schedule, especially in departments where officers rotate across shifts, tends to isolate members of the squad from the public. - squads are divided into platoons of around 25 officers, each of these directed by a sergeant. the sergeants are answerable to lieutenants, the highest ranking officer with whom line officers are likely to make contact. Platoons differentiate by geography. Each platoon has its own roll call, but members of the two platoons knew each other and were in frequent interaction during shifts and at the end of shifts. - the period at the end of the shift is a particularly fertile period in which to rehash the activities of the day, to pass on new information about problems, and to tell stories and exploits of particular officers. - end of shift thus provided a fertile period for interactions that provided a basis for the emergence of police culture from the shared experiences that officers has encountered during their shifts. - department wide common culture emerges because officers are occasionally reassigned to new squads across the organization. - the fundamental unit of local cop culture is the squad. Because of transfers over time, and stemming from the inevitable gossip that characterizes the police locker room, squad information is transmitted across the organization and provides a common basis for culture across the organization. - cultural themes stem from the everyday interactions of the police with their various environments. The members of a squad are in contact on a regular basis with people in their working environments in ways that are governed by particular rules and procedures. - line officers are not presented with a single monolithic environment in which they conduct their work, but instead confront a series of environments, each with their work, but instead confront a series of environments, each with its own particular expectations of the police. it is the context of these environments, and the particular patterns by which the culture is articulated with the environments, that cultural themes become meaningful, and that we begin to gain an understanding of the powerful currents of solidarity that bind officers.

militarism, professionalism, and reform

- police paramilitarism as we know it today emerged after the civil war. Lane attributes the emergence of paramilitarism to the prestige associated with the military after the civil war. - efforts to reform the police at the end of the nineteenth century led to the unlikely marriage of professionalism and militarism. - in 1893, the international association of chiefs of police (IACP) was formed by a group of police chiefs whose allegiance was reformist. dedicated to removing the influence of political machines; - central to the agenda of the IACP was the separation of urban politics from the affairs of the police. They sought to make police departments autonomous from city politics and instituted a wide ranging agenda in pursuit of that goal. - over the following 40 years the professional model gradually displaced the machine model of policing. But the professional model was a model of quasi military discipline and rank structure - in the current era, police organizations are distinguished by their military's bearing. police wear uniforms, have adopted military sigils and rank insignia, and dress for combat. - command officers today consistently agree with the notion that police organizations should be organized along paramilitary lines.

Use of force

- problems with an emotionally charged issue - police deal with profound social problems - distrust of force so great, police are encircled with due process, review, education, training standards - misapplication no matter how trivial, results in litigation, public rebuke, suspension, and termination - use of force is often contradictory responsibility - public see the police in the venue of force: sensationalized reporting, media portrayals, and central to literature on police. - Public fails to see police as: ordinary people, dealing with their own problems, and subject to the same humanity - wesley (1970) - american democratic society embodies peace - we limit use of force to solve problems - police are created as "a core institution whose special competence and defining characteristics is its monopoly on a general right to use coercive force" - police occupation is inherently offensive to the democratic process - police conceal what they do to coexist - Bittner (1970) and Klockars (1991) - police common thread is use of coercive force - police alone have the legitimate use of force - public use the police for one reason: "they deal with situations that require immediate resolution" - Why do we have the police? "to deal with those problems in which coercive force may have to be used" - Use of force Continuum: - presence - voice command - pain compliance - chemical agents - impact weapons - deadly force - Wilson (1968) - police work is carried out in a context of emotions - police must get personally involved - dynamics are sensible in immediacy of interactions - police deal primarily with order maintenance situations; unpredictable - police regularly use "personal authority" to resolve conflicts - handling the situation rather than enforcing the law. - Militarism - police are a paramilitary organization - political machines replaced by the quasi-military model - IACP (1893) organized to promote professionalization, widely regarded as the foundation in movement - professional model widely accepted in reform from political pressures - professional model - quasi military discipline and rank structure - supports the war on crime mentality - successful model for funding and support - uniforms, insignia, ranks, formations, military courtesy, all part of police organizations - military structure not a professional status but method of administrative control - officers with the most discretion and power in life and death matters, and the highest visibility, are the lowest in the hierarchy and have the least status, least pay, and lowest rank - officers have not missed this fact - the metaphors of war - language includes militaristic symbols, that has strong mobilizing potential - a war on crime, fighting crime, crime fighters - police are outgunned and outnumbered - police gather intelligence - the thin blue line separate order from anarchy - public enemy (vs the state, or society) - most police departments organized in this manner - command officers agree the model provides the most effective policing structure

Summary of Chapters 1, 2, and 3 Powerpoint

- relationships between officers and groups gives meaning to culture - police culture receives its identity from these relationships - police culture has an immediacy and practicality often overlooked in other culture studies - police culture is how police deal with these groups and pass on that knowledge to recruit officers.

History of Policing in America

- roots from the London Metropolitan Police - Role of police defined by Sir Robert Peel "the father of policing stated principles of police, "police are the citizens, citizens are the police" - only difference is some citizens are paid to be police. - scholars divide the history of US policing into three eras: - The political era - the professional model era - technology and the nationalization of crime era

guns and occupational identity

- rubinstein is among the few scholars to recognize the importance of guns for the occupational identity of police officers. guns occupy a central position in the arsenal of weaponry. they become second nature, a part of the psychology of survival. - in rubensteins research - a scant 30 years ago - the principal weapon was a service revolver. In the current era, service revolvers have been replaced by 9mm semi automatic hand guns. - rubenstein recognized that guns were qualitatively different from other weapons. guns have as their principal intention the killing of the felon. - scharf and binder described the contribution of guns to cops occupational identity in terms of goffmans identity kit. - the identity kit for the police is their uniform and its compliment of weaponry, cuffs, and other related hardware. the thick police belt with field weapon and holster is a prominent feature, capable of creating fear in outsiders and engendering respect among peers. - advertising aimed at police audiences reinforces the importance of guns. - guns fuse with police mythology. righteous images of police stomping bad guys are carried in stories of marshals dealing with gunfighters in the old west, or g men in the prohibition era. - the image of cops carried by contemporary media sustain the hero mythology. Television frequently portrays lone officers fighting a soft or corrupt criminal justice system in order to get rid of an unquestionably evil bad guy. - police officers are presented daily with media images of their profession. these images have an impact. it is quite common to see police officers between arrests in the station glued to the latest account of cops. mass media feed the occupational preoccupation with weapons and violence.

the police as subculture in an institutionalized environment

- some elements of police culture - ideational, behavioral, material, and social structural - exist at a level that transcends individual police departments. - these characteristics have an interorganizational reach. - elements of cultural similarity. The police display similarities in some cultural elements - certain features of police social structure are also widely present. police have characteristic organizational features and careers - broad recruitment, a pyramid shaped organization, a flat hierarchy, little interorganizational mobility, limited vertical and extensive horizontal mobility, characteristics formal and informal specialization, and bases of job attachment/commitment. - the presence of some elements of police culture across national and international settings suggests that they have become institutionalized: they are elements of culture that have a broad acceptance, and we do them because we share a belief that they are the right things to do. - EX: institution of marriage; children out of wedlock are b@stards, unmarried couples are living in sin, homosexual couples are qu33r. - social control is also an institution. - it is acted out informally through everyday routines that discourage particular kinds of behaviors. Acted out formally through the enactment of legal sanctions that punish particular behaviors and sometime require others. they act informally using the law as a threat to gain proper behavior rather than automatically invoking formal sanctions of the law. - an example of how police organizations act out widely held values can be seen with regard to the value called personal responsibility. - our society carries a deep seated belief in free will of individuals, and it is widely thought that people will use a pleasure pain calculus before they do something - they will do things that bring them pleasure, and avoid things that bring them pain. - the CJS in the US embodies this powerful belief in the form of what is called deterrence, a way of thinking about people that includes policies and punitive strategies that seek to increase some sort of pain associated with wrong doing. - random preventive patrol and 911 rapid response to citizen calls are highly institutionalized forms of crime control practice. - the founder of contemporary police control, august vollmer, believed that random preventive patrol would end crime in the US. He formed the dominant form of random preventive patrol used in police organizations across the US today. - both 911 systems and random preventive patrol also reflect beliefs about how our society views human nature, rather than rational ideas about effective police work. Both are based on the notion of deterrence. Organizations, particularly police organizations, are powerful carriers of cultural elements, including behaviors, ways of thinking, and other predispositive strategies for organizing the work environment. - the new institutional research has tended to focus on the relationship between institutional environments and organizations. - imposition of organizational structure and behavior: some environments are so powerful that they can impose their notion of appropriate ways of doing things. Imposition carries the idea of force - cultural elements can be forced on particular organizations, even in the face of organizational resistance. in justice systems we see the imposition of structure through court order. - the authorization of organizational structure and behavior: this is the process by which broader social or sector wide norms are defined and enforced. The development and formalization of ethics statements by police organizations represents such recognition of such norms. - the inducement of organizational structure and behavior: inducement occurs when the broader environmental sector cannot force change, but carries sufficient resources to induce structure. - the acquisition of organizational structure, behavior, and knowledge: this refers to the deliberate choosing of organizational elements by particular organizations. The rapid gains in the contemporary popularity of COMSTAT (an acronym for compare statistics programs are an example of acquisition) - the imprinting of organizational structure, behavior, and knowledge: this is the process by which new organizational forms acquire characteristics at the time of their founding which tend to remain into the future. - the incorporation of environmental structure, behavior, and knowledge: This means that organizations will tend to internally map the complexity of structure that exists in their environments. This is not a coercive process, but reflects a broad array of adaptive processes ranging from cooptation to the evolution of specialized boundary roles to deal with strategic contingencies. - the bypassing of organizational structure: much of the orderliness and coherence in American schools emerged from institutionally shared beliefs. Shared conceptions, have a direct influence on the beliefs and behaviors of individual participants. -crank and calderos perspective on police ethics represents this kind of institutional to local view of culture transmission. They suggested that police officers are frequently hired who are fully committed to crime control goals such as do something about bad guys and make a world a safer place to live. They called this ends orientation the noble cause. - institutionalization in action: the community policing movement: an institutional perspective to explain the way in which community policing has been adopted by US police agencies. The term community policing first emerged in the mid 1970s. It was adopted by a few agencies in response to a growing dissatisfaction with the reform or professional model of policing. - Identified two eras on the community policing movement: the ideology and justification of community policing was explicit & 1989 - present day. The authors offered a theory of transmission of elements of community policing across the US: growing dissatisfaction with some problem, growing consensus about what to do about the problem, early adoption by organizations whose characteristics best match the problem as earlier codified, and later adoption as the ideology becomes taken for granted and the structural solutions become ceremonially recognized as characteristics of proper organization. - swidler provided a perspective called culture in action that provides insight into the process of community policing adoption. In periods of social transformation, ideologies - explicit, articulated, highly organized meaning systems... establish new styles and strategies for action. - ideological models emerge in some contested arena. Increasing frictions between reform or professional policing and broad trends in municipal life in the US. - during settled times traditions emerge and the rational for behavior becomes taken for granted. An explicit ideology is no longer necessary to justify behavior.

Dominion

- territory is more than a geographical assignment - territories are spaces with meaning - random preventative patrol enhances territorial control - random preventative patrol is proactive police work - territory is practical knowledge - territory is people - territory is about dominion over people - how officers use their time: - Greene and Klockars - 1991 study in Wilmington, DE police department - Largest block of open time was in unassigned patrol activity (29.3%); this time use is discretionary - study results: - police spend a greater proportion on LE - workload represents value choices by officers - Rubinstein's Discussion of Territory (1973) - territory is knowledge; immediate and practical considerations; a working environment; officers knowledge is normative - sense of what is normal and acceptable; officers create - private spaces or safe locations AND private knowledge that's not shared. - Officers knowledge is determined by: obligations, prior experience, the way the officer views the working space, local behavior, and familiarity with people and places. - Territory is people - defines response to people in the territory - physical geography overlaid by human geography - officers view their right of absolute authority: laws violated police intervene, offenders are the bad guys; public order violated, police intervention is as rapid and righteous, @ssholes addressed without due process associated with legal system. - Herbert's Normative Ordering of Space (1997) - cultural dimensions of territory - Law focuses on legal regulations - bureaucratic control - maintenance of order - adventure a celebration of courage and strength - safety is a value of life - competence a demonstration of respect - morality - good over evil - recognize culture and values deeply intertwined - Elizabeth Reuss-Ianni's "cops rules" (1983) - don't get involved in another cops territory - don't leave work for the next tour - hold your end of the work - derived maxims - keep away from outside bosses; know your own bosses; don't do the boss work for them; don't make waves; don't give them too much activity

herberts normative ordering of space

- the cultural dimensions of territory have often been overlooked. an ethnography of los angeles patrol by steve herbert begins to fill in this important theme of police culture. Social action always occurs in space, and social, cultural, and spatial elements of police activity are deeply intertwined. - herbert extended his analysis to a consideration of the values that characterize police use of territory. Use of territory, was socially constructed in terms of a series of normative orders, and linked the spatial nature of police work to social and cultural factors. - police work was characterized by several normative orders. these normative orders were each centered on a celebrated value and structured the use of police space. normative orders and their celebrate value are as follows: the law focuses on preserving a legal regulations.

overview of police use of force

- the first national survey of the police use of force was carried out by the bureau of justice statistics in 1996. - the use of force appears to be relatively infrequent. Of those with a face to fact contact, less than one percent encountered police use of force. - however, force may be defined in much broader terms. force involves something more than violent behavior. Force can be defined as anything the police do to have citizens act in a particular way. - that force occurs at the moist casual interactions is recognized by trainers, who introduce trainees to use of force standards. Following levels: mere presence, verbalization, command voice, firm grips, pain compliance, impact techniques, and deadly force. - police training provides exercises in the use of appropriate force. by the time officers have completed POST training, they have some skills in the use of force, a preliminary sense of appropriate levels of force, and have practiced some situations requiring the use of force. - the formal training of use of force is always in terms of resistance- forces increase as resistance to the requests of an officer increases. - the capacity to conceive of such treatment during a routine stop of a carful of rich white men is simply absent. on the other hand, it is commonplace if they are black teenagers. Use of force occurs within a cultural environment in which rich whites and poor blacks are viewed differently. - one might counter that force is appropriately different in the two encounters, because the potential threat from the two groups are different. - their findings showed that the decision to use force involved both what the citizen did and who the citizen was. the force used by an officer was often triggered by the resistance displayed by citizens.

coercive territorial control

- the first topical area is coercive territorial control. Links three themes; dominion, use of force, and guns. It is a grounded aesthetic- grounded, because its meaning derives directly from normal daily routines of police officer activity, and aesthetic, because the use of coercion and control of territory are done in particular ways, reflecting officers styles or behavioral preferences. - many observers of police view coercion in its various forms as the core of police work. They are of wide interest and are widely recognized as important, provide a basis for launching the general discussion of police cultural themes. - the term means that the police seek to gain control through practical applications of compliance when faced with someone who does not want to give compliance. This very general notion of coercion encompasses such diverse aspects of force as the use of lethal force, the use of pain compliance to control the behavior of suspects, lying to gain information when a suspect does not wish to provide that information, or thumping someone who refuses to accept the police definition of a situation. the legality or illegality of compliance is secondarily relevant to the imperative that is obtained. Cops may strategically use symbolic elements of their authority as coercive devices as well - displaying their weaponry in an intimidating way for example. - when i use the term territorial control I am referring to the physical geography of police work- the beat, or the jurisdiction in calls for assistance or other emergencies, that pragmatically bounds the daily routines of officers. The term dominion to territory to better capture the relationship between police and their geographical assignments. - guns emerge as an important theme in this section because they are regarded by cops as the core element of an officers capacity to protect himself or herself from the criminals. - coercive territorial control provides a historical basis for understanding the contemporary importance of law enforcement in police work. By carefully considering the three elements - force, dominion, and guns- we can see how the contempory emphasis on law enforcement has shaped police culture and we can gain some insight into one of the most profound through unrecognized changes in contemporary policing - the militarization of cop identity. - training provides officers with techniques and skills at different levels of force and provides knowledge in the use of pain compliance, both of which are techniques that weigh a police response against an offenders behavior and perceived danger. - a common thread in all the themes is that they have concrete meaning, situationally applied, regarding the use of coercion in the control of particular territories.

media

- the fourth area of articulation is with the media, members of which are in frequent interaction with the police. newspaper reporters are social control agents whose influence can both negatively and positively affect the police. the police know this and seek their sanction through co-optive strategies. - news reporters, particularly the inner circle frequently carry scanners so that they can arrive at the scene of breaking crime events. police try to steer the flow of information to friendly reporters and to avoid the release to others who might also look at the conduct of the police. - police manage the release of friendly information through the inner circle when possible. They seek to otherwise tightly control the release of information that might ideologically disparage the organization. - scandal ruptures the inner circle. Sometimes stories are too hot to be controlled by the inner circle, and public relations units cannot contain the sudden, massive investigation of the outer circle. - in summary, the relationship between line officers and these groups gives meaning to culture. The values, stories, metaphors, and meanings that give each police culture its uniquely identity stems from its relations wit these groups. Because culture is grounded in the relations of line officers with these groups, culture had an immediacy and practicality often overlooked by students of culture. How police make sense out of, deal with, and pass on knowledge about these groups to recruits is what police culture is about.

guns and authority

- the gun is a powerful totem of the police officers authority to use force. it is not simply the extension of a cops physical prowess, but takes on a symbolic life of its own in the officers cultural cosmology. - guns are at the most defining moments of the police role: confrontation with a dangerous and armed offender. Deadly encounters are etched in the personality of the police officers forever. - this is followed with a story of a detective who kills a suspect during a botched robbery. - why have guns been overlooked by researchers? for some, they may be too gritty, dealing with a hard and uncompromising edge of reality. the consequences of using guns are serious, intense, and final. they lack the sentimental flexibility that typifies the assessments of the police by social scientists. - guns embody the most thrilling aspects of police work, the reason police do what they do carried out at its highest, most intense moment. guns deter. - the controlling power of guns has not been lost on female officers, who quickly learn the equalizing power of weapons when dealing with potentially dangerous felons.

introduction 8

- the harsh sentiment contained in the quote above is ubiquitous to cop culture. it is replayed in an astonishing variety of situations, a word of support to a husband or wife who unexpectedly finds their spouse with a lover, small talk to cool off a pal whose encounter with a felon brinked on the use of a deadly force. - " why didnt you shoot them, i would have" - surprisingly, that the police are participants in a culture in which guns are key elements, though common sensically recognized by observers of the police as well as by the police themselves, has been virtually ignored by police researchers. - in the culture of policing, guns transform police work into a heroic occupation, providing both a bottom line and an unquestionable righteousness that pervades all police citizen encounters.

force is central to the literature on police

- the idea that force is central to the work of police is common among academic studies of the police. writers seeking to understand the unique characteristics of police work and culture, almost always focus on some aspect of the use of force. - Wesley and force. Wesley was among the first of the police scholars to recognize the importance of force to the police and the paradox that implied in a democratic society. he argued that as a nation, the US was committed to the virtues of peace. - in order to eliminate violence as an acceptable way to conduct our affairs, society creates a core institution whose special competence and defining characteristics is its monopoly on a general right to use coercive force. the police stand apart, yet they are alone can act as protectors of society. - how are we then to reconcile the offensive nature of routine violence in a democracy committed to peace? bittner argued that we must conceal what the police do. the history of police was marked by a tradition of themes that served to hide the raw use of police force and surround the police with powerful themes more acceptable to a peaceful people. - bittner, klockars, and the mystification of force. bittner contended that police work became comprehensible in specific situations, when it was used to resolve particular problems. He called this situationally justified force. - klockstars extended bittners ideas to the contemporary community policing movement. He argued that the community policing movement was imply another of the history of circumlocutions used by the police to obscure what they did. - community policing gave police a new legitimacy when the police professionalism movement lost its credibility as a justification for police behavior. - in the end, the public uses the police for one reason: so they can deal with situations in which something ought not to be happening about which something should be done NOW. - wilson and the emotion content of force. The idea that police use of force is mystified behind ideas of peace is also embedded in the notion that police can act emotionlessly to enforce the law in an evenhanded way. the notion is nonsense. - police, wilson observed, were far more likely to deal with order maintenance situations - a family dispute, a loud stereo, a rowdy teenager - than with an actual violation of the criminal law. - the lack of clear legal guides in order maintenance situations meant that officers had to use personal authority. they had to get involved to become emotionally engaged. - wilson recognized that emotions were an inevitable part of police citizen encounters. many police situation encounters took on the character of contests, in which each tested the other to see who would control the situation. - wilsons way of looking at personal authority is sensible for understanding police citizen interactions when citizens refuse to do what a police officer tells them to do. - street citizen encounters are marked by powerful and sometimes destructive emotional energies. to understand them we must look at how force links with other themes of police work. - emotion involvement is not simply a by product of the failure of formal authority to resolve unsatisfactory police citizen encounters. it is sometimes a desired way of dealing with particular types of troublesome individuals. - wilson recognized that the emotional nature of police citizen interactions limited the extent to which officer behavior could be brought under administrative control. - police coercion contributes to solidarity. police use of force is a powerful stimulus for cultural solidarity. - a policeman understands the meaning of fear, the loosening of muscles in the midriff and the vision of terrible things happening to your body, and he does not condemn men for being afraid, but he does not what them around him while hes working. - police officers must be prepared to use force, and those who are unable to put themselves in harms way without giving way to fear are shunned. - the linkage between force and culture is often viewed negatively, as a collusion among officers to keep quiet about abuses of force. - the idea that force is a negative impulse for solidarity overlooks important aspects of force. - officers are not equivocal in the use of force. Ambivalence is dangerous, weakness where force is needed invites disrespect and encourages counterforce. - as a cultural element, use of force is not about the secret bonding of men from dark deeds they have committed and of fear that they will come back to haunt them.

ideational component of culture

- the part of culture related to thinking about problems and organizing information to create coherence in occupational life. - includes the ethical prescriptions. - recognizes the ways of thinking about issues are an element of police cultural study.

police culture

- the perception that its a source of hidden, unpleasant police characteristics is not only a media construction - it is also widely present in academic literature. - it has been described in terms such as "culture of violence", "suspicion", "machismo", "racial prejudice", "distrust", and "siege mentality" - literature on this is rarely embedded in any sort of definition or notion of culture. It emerges uniquely from the organizational setting, yet the broader notion of culture is unaddressed or taken for granted. Wha

militarism and the organizational status of cops

- the professional paramilitary model has never been well suited for street cops, nor was it intended to be. the model has served the purposes of reformers throughout the century, whose goals were largely to bring the behavior of street cops under administrative control. - that the professional/military model was about the control rather than in the granting of professional status to police officers has not been lost on street officers. in a twist of fate, the professional police officer, the street officers who make everyday decisions on life and death matters, have the least status, lowest rank and pay. - line officers have adopted elements of the military mindset, what we call today the war on crime mentality. but as anyone who has been a grunt in the military service knows, a part of the mindset is a gut level dissatisfaction with the authority of superior officers. - the military model, while serving important symbolic purposes, limits reform. - the public, sykes notes, expects the police to do more than solve crime, a task they do probably as well as can be done given the crime opportunities in mass modern society. the public wants the police to solve problems, a task considerably larger than law enforcement activity.

administrative environment

- the second environment is the organization administration. line officers are physically present at the police station during two periods each day, prior to and at the end of their shift. - roll call. Prior to the beginning of the shift, officers arrive at the station house and go to their locker room to change into their uniforms. They go to a briefing room for assignments and for roll call. the briefing session lasts for 15 to 20 minutes, during which time officers receive information on the activities of the previous shift, on the focus of the current shift, and on any new policy. Shift sergeants may caution officers on particular dangers, praise them for particular accomplishments, or call attention to particular problems. - may contain mild rebukes of officers. During roll call, particular officers may be singled out for unpleasant duty, may begiven disagreeable temporary partners, or otherwise be the recipient of administrative bull$hit. jocular humor provides a way in which officers maintain face when subjected to rebuke during roll call. The most important information of the day is sometimes shared among officers on their way to their cars, out of the hearing range of superior officers but not yet in their cars where their conversation can be monitored by radio dispatch. - shift end. at the end of the shift, officers return to the briefing room to complete their paperwork. Their reports are reviewed by their sergeants, and time is spent debriefing. officers spend more time than necessary here, relaxing and exchanging stories about their shift activities. consequently an environment for the types of interaction and story telling that contribute to the generation of local cultural knowledge. officers may extend the end of the shift to the local pub or to an officers house, to further story tell, some observers call bull$hit sessions. - sergeant supervision. during this shift, sergeant supervision is somewhat informal, occurring prior to and during patrol activity. Sergeants are the first link in the chain of command above line officers, and are responsible for the supervision of line officers during patrol. - internal review. officers are articulated to the organization through internal review procedures. Review may be mandatory. It has been hoped that internal review would penetrate police culture and curb its excesses. Unfortunately, internal review is often perceived by line officers as an arbitrary tactic used by management to hang officers out to dry rater than as a tool for the uncovering of wrong doing. police reformers have failed to recognize that internal review is the source of loose coupling and a powerful stimulus for the development of police culture. - standard operating procedure. the rules binding line officers with the organizational administration are called standard operating procedure (SOP), intended to guide police encounters in specific circumstances. SOP is a typically thick manual that defines the vast array of rules telling officers what they should not do in various circumstances, representing, quipped one officer, 100 years of f+uckups. representing the rules by which the organization seeks to coordinate its functions, the SOP provides little insight into the creative process officers use to deal with their most intransigent concerns - unpredictable police citizen interactions. SOP is a tool used punitively, always in retrospect, and by managers who seek to protect themselves from line level mistakes. SOP represents the systematic formalization of department bull$hit.

the street environment

- the street environment is the first and most salient environment. this is the officers patrol beat where the powerful themes of territoriality, force, and uncertainty are played out. officers are assigned to a particular area, and become responsible for the production of police activity in that area. - citizen invoked interactions. occur when a citizen telephones a department or when an alarm is sounded, and a patrol car is dispatched to the source of the call. This type of interaction accounts for the bulk of police citizen contacts. for property crimes, police can do little more than take a report. the likelihood of solving the crime is remote, and citizens know this. - violent crimes tend to be similarly frustrating. These are typically felonies, and about 50 percent of these are solved, depending on the specific offense category. the higher the clearance rate associated with these crimes stems from the presence of a witness (the victim) and surprisingly, the frequent presence of the suspect, who as often as not is a friend or member of the victims family. - for both felony and misdemeanor encounters, the decision to intervene is discretionary and affected by factors other than the presence of an apparent violation of the law. police interactions in this context are sometimes contaminated by the toxicity of power for both the police and citizens. the first layer of cultural meaning, coercive territorial control, emerges in this context, and is immediately shrouded in task ambiguity. - traffic stops. line officers routinely come into contact with the citizenry through traffic stops. Perhaps because stops are so mundane in the sweep of police activity, observers of the police have paid them to scant attention. - police citizen interactions are articulated by the organization. contact with the public is articulated through the organization. the decision to intervene is at the discretion of the officer, but problems associated with intervention are enveloped in department policy. - in spite of the seeming autonomy and low visibility of police attributed by many authors to contemporary patrol practices, police citizen interactions are increasingly modulated through the organization.

Introduction

- the term cultural theme represents the joining of cultural elements in ways that manning observed highlight areas of shared occupational activity. They represent activities that tend to be widely distributed, common to many police departments. - themes tend to mix together many cultural elements. - First they are behavioral - they occur the ordinary doing of police work, and derive their meaning from routine, ordinary policy activity. - Second, themes are a way of thinking about that activity, the sentiment that is associated with the activity. - Third, the themes imply social and organizational structure. This can be seen in patrol strategies, which associate a commitment to territorial control with geographical assignment. - many observers noted that the police share a culture united by common themes. - shared cultural themes - of unpredictability, @ssholes, management brass, and the liberal court system have been cited so frequently as to seem ubiquitous in literature on police culture. - some of the general considerations of culture and its themes pertinent to police culture specifically. These considerations have to do with cultural boundaries, and how I developed the boundaries of police culture: - boundaries. a boundary central to police is rank. That a police organization may contain multiple cultures has been suggested by various scholars. Manning describes a three tier image of police culture segmented by rank. - the selection of cultural themes. this method suffers from problems of validity. Themes are describing using writings both from quasi-scientific models of inquiry and from the anecdotal perceptions of police researchers or writings of former cops. - theme inclusiveness. when a cultural theme is identified, can it be known if the theme represents only one particular culture in some particular organization, or if it is more inclusive, characterizing beat officers in municipal departments generally? Culture is thematic topography. - thematic dominance. it is my belief that far too much emphasis has been put on such heavyweight themes of police work as the use of force, coercion, danger, and corruption.. These themes are weighty ideological hammers and clumsy for the weight, too unwieldy to mete out the diversity and subtlety of police culture. - the way in which culture uniquely characterizes the police does not reside primarily in these most publicly visible attributes of police work, but in the myriad details of occupational activity. culture is a diffusion of the work a day world in which ways of doing work become habitual and habits become meaningful. culture is like heaven and hell, its sustained, celebrated, and fears - in short, lived in the concrete minutiae of everyday work. - culture can be thought of as a confluence of themes of occupational activity. The word confluence is a metaphor suggesting the emptying of streams and rivers into a common body of water. - thematic overlap. cultural logic is an astonishing process of circular reasoning encompassing fluid situations: police citizen interactions that progress unpredictably and rapidly, danger anticipated and resolved in a context of hurried decisions, reactions to potential threats, use of force and applications of street justice, and how to act, to avoid action and corresponding responsibility, or to simply lie in the face of sharply incomplete and inconsistent information from the public, courts, and from their own superiors. - there is substantial thematic overlap in the book, This means that many themes tend to be similar to other themes, or that an example may get used again. This teleological phenomenon is unavoidable - aspects of culture tend to a sharing artistic form, or a sort of emotional and logical consistency. - emotions and themes. culture study is not simply a dry analytical exercise. at its core it is about how police express emotions. - the role of emotions are not somehow unimportant to the study of culture: they are part and parcel of the way in which we think about the good life. emotions are part of our eudaimonia, our sense of flourishing, they embody the persons own commitment to the object as a part of her scheme or ends. - grief for the police, the death of a fellow officer is deeply personally felt, a hole in the fabric of personal identity. In the grieving process we witness the reconstruction of the social self, absent the person lost. In police culture, with its clannish relations and close ties, loss is strongly felt and acted out through elaborate rituals. - if police work is meaningful, then this study of police culture must tape some of the feelings that constitute the social and narrative self. - themes and the observer. to a large context, the image of culture herein is a distillation of the views of the many writers about culture included here. There is no such thing as an unbiased or independent view of police culture. - the onioness of culture. think of police culture as an onion, it has a heart and many layers. - the heart or officers values, particularly their commitment to the noble cause and the belief that they can make a contribution to society, are important from broader society. They heart is not an emergent property of police culture. - the layers over the the heart of the onion are emergent properties of local culture, which means that they come about from the daily experiences of police work and the ways the experiences are shared by officers. - layers of onioness suggest an insulation or a crescive embeddedness of the heart inside its protective shield. The first layer, the layer that encloses the heart and animates its pulse, is their assigned beat, romantically called the street environment. This is where patrol officers and detectives carry out their daily work and refers to the various kinds of people line officers come into contact with. Their reputation and self esteem rise and fall on how well they control their territories. Their territories include suspects, bad guys, trouble makers. They do not see a lot of difference between criminal suspects and trouble makers. The second layer around the heart of the onion is uncertainty, a psychological sense of uncertainty was intimately tied to the external world of disorder and risk. the capacity to recognize the danger in the unknown is called suspicion. officers not only deal with legal suspicion, but develop the special skill of sixth sense suspicion. Police officers confront not only real dangers, but operate in a working environment where danger can occur unpredictably. The third layer around the onions heart is the strong sense of solidarity that police officers feel. their sense of solidarity, what we call the mask of a thousand faces is often attributed to camaraderie, the sense of coming together in the face of danger. Solidarity is a product of conflict with outside groups. - some of the conflict is physical and involves the use of brute and state force, as when the police deal with criminals. This layer is described by themes used by line officers to protect themselves from external oversight. These are loosely coupling themes - they allow line personnel to carry out what they see to be the organizations principal business - taking care of crime - while administrators deal with the placation of various groups in the institutional environment. The most important group that line officers protect themselves from are their own administrators and commanders, sometimes imply called brass. Officers tend to have a powerful distrust of their departmental managers. In the heart of the onion we can see the way in which broad cultural elements are introduced to policing, indeed make it possible.

illicit coercion

- the use of coercion under legally questionable circumstances is often darkly described as the abuse of force. it is too often made simple.

guns and the culture of policing

- to understand the relationship between cops and guns, one has to consider their background. rarely are officers first exposed to guns during pre service POST training. - for many, the use of guns and the desire to be a cop have been shared notions since they were children. - guns are central to a vision of american indepdence, summarized in the saw "god made men but sam colt made them equal". guns are neither socially irresponsible or the cause of crime;

guns are central to police training

- training in POST carries large blocks of time devoted to weapons use and care. officers learn about types of service weapons, how to clean them, to fire them, to wear them, and to care for them. - rubinstein is one of the few researchers that has written about police firearms training. the importance of the revolver, was emphasized at the outset of training. though revolvers are badly outdated in the current era. - weapons training is used to demonstrate the sheer unpredictability of the working environment. officers learn that they can trust no one, and the failure to anticipate all circumstances may result in their death. - ragonese trained in the early 1970s, more than 30 years ago. since then, the sophistication of training technology has increased dramatically. yet guns continue to be at the core of a police officers carefully trained skills in uncertainty and danger recognition. - consider the following training exercise. an interactive video called FATS (for firearm training instruction), popular among recruits and staff alike, provides a series of interactive videos that train recruits in the use of deadly force. - trainees will face a series of gambits in which they try to take control of the situation. sometimes they should not fire, and sometimes they must to survive. - recruits also learn that they should take nothing for granted, that no one is to be trusted. interactive training is a more sophisticated version of the training described by ragonese. - gun training has changed over the years. officers have traditionally taught to aim for the largest mass - center of the trunk. today officers are increasingly taught to aim for the head as well. - gun training thus brings concerns of officer safety and survival to their highest pitch. IT is no wonder that, by the time officers have graduated from POST academy, they think similarly about danger and survival.

Understanding: engaging the text on its own terms

- understanding emerges from the ability to understand the culture in its own terms. the ability of our ethnographer to engage and learn from the villagers to share a conversation with them as it is sometimes put, is tied to her experience and knowledge. - in our thought experiment, as our ethnographer spent more time in the village, she learned more about the people, she expanded her sense of cultural understanding, that is, her knowledge of the human stock of institutional facts. - this suggests that researchers interested in the culture of the police should engage the police on their own terms. This is accomplished through participation and the study of elements of their written, spoken, symbolic, social, and physical culture. - the capacity to learn from studies of police culture are tied to our ability to engage them on their own terms.

the courts

- when line officers make an arrest, they have linked the police with another component of the criminal justice system. The third environment to which the police are articulated is the courts. this articulation is of several types. The first type, police are articulated through the warrant process. - a variety of additional circumstances articulate police with the courts. If an officer has made a felony arrest, he or she will have to appear at a preliminary hearing. Both work and time off may be disrupted at the whim of the court. - during the pretrial phase, the defense has the right of discovery to find out about all evidence that may be used against the defendant at the trial. - police legitimacy in the courtroom, based on the legality of their behavior, may be at odds with their street behavior. while on patrol, officers may rely on the presence of a wide variety of subtle cues in deciding where and how to intervene in the affairs' of a citizen. in the courtroom, legitimacy is an issue of the quality of the evidence and demeanor in front of the judge, and officers have to express obeisance to the judge. - in spite of high minded rhetoric claiming that bad guys regularly beat the law because of liberal due process protections, courts operate pretty much like most people would like them to operate. - of those cases that are carried forward by a prosecutor, about 95% of those result in conviction and some type of penalty. When prosecutors do not carry cases forward, it is for obvious reasons of evidence and witness. due process issues are simply irrelevant to the day to day activity of the court.

Sir Robert Peel's Principles of Law Enforcement 1829

1. The basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to the repression of crime and disorder by military force and severity of legal punishment. 2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect. 3. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain public respect. 4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives. 5. The police seek and preserve public favor, not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to the law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of society without regard to their race or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life. 6. The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to achieve police objectives; and police should use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective. 7. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police are the only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the intent of the community welfare. 8. The police should always direct their actions toward their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary by avenging individuals or the state, or authoritatively judging guilt or punishing the guilty. 9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.

Political Era

1840's to 1920's: the period when police agencies were first established to provide a unified law enforcement force in the major American cities

Professional Era

1920's to 1970's: the period when there was a call for the establishment of measures to assist law enforcement agencies to improve their effectiveness and become more professional

Community Model Era

1970's to the present: the period when it was advocated for law enforcement to move away from the crime-fighting focus of law enforcement towards a greater emphasis on maintaining order and providing service to the community

Henry Fielding

A London magistrate who, in 1748, formed a group of law enforcement agents to apprehend criminals and recover stolen property from the entertainment district. They were called the "Bow Street Runners."

Frankpledge System

A form of community policing instituted by King William in 1066.

Sir Robert Peel

A member of the English Parliament in 1829, who led the mandating of a publicly funded police force throughout England via the London Metropolitan Police Act. He advocated the 12 principles of policing.

O.W. Wilson

A student of Vollmer's who advocated for law enforcement agencies to employ technological advances, such as motorized patrols, effective radio communications, and rapid response to aid effective crime fighting

Spoils

A system that used political power to hire supporters and fire those considered disloyal. This led to a period of incompetent, corrupt, and disliked police force

Peelers

Another name for the "bobbies" because of Sir Robert Peel's influence in creating the force

Chapters 4-6 Powerpoint

Chapters 4, 5, and 6

Chapters 7-8 Powerpoint

Chapters 7 and 8

Police

Entrusted to serve and protect the public, and to control and prevent crime

Pharaoh Hur Moheb

Established the first recorded police organization in Egypt around 1340 B.C

Justice of the Peace

In 1326, the shire reeve was replaced with the office of the justice of the peace

Bobbies

In 1829, English Parliament mandated a publicly funded police force throughout England. They became known as the "bobbies."

Night Watch System

In England, the night watch system provided citizens with protection from crime. During times of duress, the men on watch would raise the hue and cry to summon assistance from the citizens of the community or, in the case of a larger community, from others already on watch. The watch standers were equipped with various signaling devices, including bells, ratchets, and rattles

Tithing

In the Frankpledge System, every male over twelve years of age was required to form a group of ten families called a "tithing."

Constables

Local level individuals who assisted the shire reeve and organized posses to chase and apprehend criminals

Chapters 1-3 Powerpoint

POWERPOINT 123

Shires

Ten "tithings" were grouped together to form a hundred, and these consolidated groups were called shires

Politeria

The Greek word that "police" is derived from

Law Enforcement

The most visible representatives of the criminal justice system; typically citizens' most common and direct contact with law enforcement

Shire Reeves

The top law enforcement official, who was the forerunner of the American sheriff

Chapter 1 Textbook

Understanding Police Culture

Reform Era

Wanted to take law enforcement out of politics, introduce modern technology to make law enforcement more efficient, and establish police administrative boards that were responsible for appointing police administrators and controlling police affairs

August Vollmer

Was known as the most famous police reformer in the early part of the twentieth century. He believed the police should be a professional force.

Chapter 4 textbook

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Chapter 5

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chapter 6

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chapter 7

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chapter 8

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Chapter 2: issues in the study of police culture

chapter 2

Chapter 3 Textbook

culture and cultural themes

Coercion

gaining control through practical applications of compliance

Community policing

is a philosophy that governs how police and citizens work together to identify and address crime and disorder problems in the community.

reasonable suspicion

the perception an ordinary person would have, that indicates either a crime has been or is about to be committed, with the ability to articulate the basis for the stop

study of culture

the study of what it means to be human

police shootings of police

when people think of police shootings, they typically imagine police shooting suspects, or felons shooting police. people infrequently think of police shooting police. yet police deaths at the hands of other police, whether accidental or suicidal, are as common as police suspect shootings. - accidental police shootings and killings are among the most emotionally disturbing events that can happen to a police department. - suicides are also prevalent among the police, through their relative frequency tends to be overstated. - recent research has found high levels of police suicide. - the tendency of police to commit suicide by gun is usually explained by the proximity of weapons and the effectiveness of the police in using them - the gun is described as if it were a potent self, experienced as an aspect of the officer turned inward, against him, in an orgasm of hate and destruction. guns are the most potentially violent element of the police culture, the ultimate expression of its authority.