The Charleston, South Carolina, Police Department

Abstract

One morning about midway during our fieldwork in Charleston, a police car arrived at my motel to drive me about a mile to the police headquarters. A fifteen-year veteran police sergeant whom I had never met was driving the patrol vehicle. He moved a number of papers and other pieces of police equipment to permit me to sit next to him in the front passenger seat rather than in the caged seat in the back. I suspect that the passenger seat had rarely if ever been occupied, a suspicion supported both by the sergeant’s having to move his equipment and that the clasp for the passenger side seat belt had been pushed to the floor and stuffed under some additional equipment that was lodged between the seats. Unable to locate the clasp as I pulled the seat belt across my body, I offered to hold it there so no one would see that my seat belt wasn’t actually fastened during our short trip.