Policing is one of those defining concepts of modernity about which much has written—to the point where it is difficult to imagine that there is much left to be said—that is, at the same time, decisively modern. The modern conceptualization of police referring to a fixed and commonly identifiable role, occupation and organization, rather than simply a practice performed by the state through its various arms and agents, is not yet 200 years old. Egon Bittner wrote that, “the most remarkable fact about the timing of the foundation of the modern police is that it is sequentially the last of the basic building blocks in the structure of modern executive government.” (1970: 15) The taken-for-granted structures of modern society and democratic governments not only count among them the various structures and practices of policing but to a large degree are held together and reinforced through them. Far from the simple practice of formal social control of public security, the police have become engraved as a symbol of society—for better or worse.

The police today, and in most places, are just as much a “Rorschach in uniform” (Niederhoffer 1967: 1) as they were in the US in the 1960 s. Public attitudes and opinions often seem to be divided between hostility to the continued existence of police and universal support for every action of every officer. The growing field of police studies often seems to be similarly divided into positivistic and technocratic attempts to improve the efficiency of the “war on crime” and those who look at the past seventy years of police reforms, theoretical and technological developments, failures, and varying relationship to their communities and the very concept of ‘democratic government’ and seem ready to throw their hands up and declare the entire project a failure. Part of the reason for this is that the taken-for-granted nature of the concept of policing is rarely challenged: even to criticize the police in a specific case or mediatized scandal could interpreted as a call for improving training, hiring practices, internal disciplinary practices, or supervision, as a direct and personal criticism of police administration or political leadership, as a critique of specific practices or the use of specialized units which display less concern for civil or human rights or the concerns of the citizenry, as an attack on the very nature and structure of the police as a state institution, or as a more symbolic, expressive, exasperated rhetorical utterance. Despite myriad conflicts and disparities between them, the various dimensions of the policing concept are often treated singularly: the individual uniformed officer, often even out of uniform, is treated as a part of the whole organization, indistinguishable from that organization, and at the same time as a representative of the entire broader cultural idea and institution of policing. The work done by police is likewise considered ‘police work’ whether discussing the work they are theoretically considered to be doing within the strict confines of the bureaucracy (in this case, the production of measurable outcomes primarily in terms of crime and arrests), the practicalities of encounters and actions taken in pursuit of institutional demands (patrolling the streets, responding to calls, talking to individuals and declaring them suspects, making arrests), the work they inevitably find themselves doing that doesn’t easily lend itself to bureaucratic measurement (advising residents, giving warnings, solving minor disputes, ‘checking up’ on people and places) and the entire realm of action that takes place from the moment a shift begins until it ends. If policing refers to an institutional organization—in which the actions taken by the agents of that organization only roughly correspond to the bureaucratic guidelines, hierarchies, mission statements, and statistics presented to the public and outside agencies—and police work refers to the actions taken by an member of that organization, then how should we view police work situated within a social space, municipality, community, or society?

This work is an ethnographic analysis of a police organization presumed to challenge many of the orthodoxies of police behavior, identity, and relationship to the local community. The Revierpolizei is a community-oriented policing unit which—in the most generous reading of history—predate the contemporary fixation with the rhetoric (if not practice) of community-oriented policing. Though similar units (with different nomenclature) exist throughout Germany, the Revierpolizei within the state of Brandenburg are particularly relevant for working in regions highly defined by low population densities and a rapidly decreasing population (due in part to poor economic opportunities locally.) The Revierpolizei are in a region—and in a country—where crime has not effectively become a “moral panic” or a bellwether issue in politics, at least not to the extent it has in most English-speaking countries. The problems facing the region—the pseudonymous country of “Falkenmark”—are not the sort that could easily be claimed to be ‘police-able,’ but rather tend to contribute to a generally bleak view of the future and in many cases a growing tribalism and us vs. them mentality, not unlike that which is currently upending local and national politics in much of North America and Europe. Yet the lack of explicit police problem presents the challenge of how police can even frame their work and present themselves when appeals to “crime fighting” or public security are lacking in rhetorical power or cannot be shorn of more complex political implications. Based on observations of the officers of the Revierpolizei, the following work examines not just their works but also their words, determining how it is that the varying individual and communal understandings of “police” and “community” are reflected in decision-making, police-citizen encounters, rhetorical practices, storytelling, and police culture generally. The work of the police was found to a great extent to simply be maintaining a social space in which the police could work, rather than to fulfill specifically identified bureaucratic goals: the police did not simply communicate with community members, but they did so in ways (spaces, times, manners) that, ideally, created and maintained the idea of a shared community.