Our Town: The Sociology of Policing Communities

Abstract

Marshal Will Kane of Hadleyville, in the New Mexico Territory, has recently married and is looking forward to retirement and leaving his frontier town behind to open a store and raise a family. When word comes that the outlaw Frank Miller is returning to town and seeking vengeance against Kane, the marshal decides to remain on duty for one more day to prevent Miller and his gang from overrunning the town before the replacement marshal can arrive. Even as the judge who sentenced Miller to prison, the bitter deputy who was passed over for the job as marshal, and Will’s predecessor either refuse to help or prepare to flee the town, the marshal remains adamant.

2.1 The Village Sheriff

Marshal Will Kane of Hadleyville, in the New Mexico Territory, has recently married and is looking forward to retirement and leaving his frontier town behind to open a store and raise a family. When word comes that the outlaw Frank Miller is returning to town and seeking vengeance against Kane, the marshal decides to remain on duty for one more day to prevent Miller and his gang from overrunning the town before the replacement marshal can arrive. Even as the judge who sentenced Miller to prison, the bitter deputy who was passed over for the job as marshal, and Will’s predecessor either refuse to help or prepare to flee the town, the marshal remains adamant. Abandoned by the majority of the townspeople, Marshal Kane writes out his last will and testament, puts his wife on a stagecoach set to leave town, and waits for the arrival of Miller’s train at high noon. The townspeople lock themselves inside their houses, essentially transforming the town into an arena for the expected showdown. Standing alone in a broad dusty street in a seemingly abandoned frontier town, the marshal confronts the outlaw and the two members of his gang. Even outnumbered—but with the help of his wife, who turned back at the last second—the marshal prevails, killing the three. The ghost town reverts to a visible community as the townspeople leave their shelters and cluster gratefully around the marshal and his wife. Marshal Kane removes his badge of office and throws it to the dusty ground. He and his wife board a wagon leaving the town for good, leaving behind the confused townsfolk and ending the film on a somber note.

The 1952 film High Noon (directed by Fred Zinnemann) has been considered among the pinnacle of the Western genre, which in turn has been considered one of the most iconic—and is one of the most critically discussed and analyzed—genres of American media. The threadbare narrative of a lawman risking his own life to defend an often unappreciative society from the proverbial men in black hats has become so common that after the 1960 s its use was primarily relegated to parody or reference. (Cawelti 1975) The image of the ‘Wild West sheriff’ has become a cultural icon rivalling other dominant tropes such as hard-boiled detectives and underdog athletes (even though a majority of films relying on this narrative feature protagonists who are not specifically lawmen.) (Budd 1976)

A German police officer in Falkenmark, in the state of Brandenburg, Polizeihauptmeister Thorsten Meyer, describes himself as the “Sheriff im Dorf”; literally, the “sheriff in the village.” As a member of the Revierpolizei his primarily responsibility is to maintain contact with his local community within his ‘beat,’ implied here with the use of “Revier,” which in a policing context generally refers to the jurisdiction assigned to an officer on patrol. Although patrol officers from the Schutzpolizei, based out of the headquarters in the county seat, occasionally pass through his territory and will respond to calls for service there, in most cases Officer Meyer is the only on-duty officer within his district, consisting of a central small town and the surrounding thirty-odd villages—many with under 50 residents—with a total population of around 4,000 residents. Officer Meyer, unlike Marshal Kane, has never drawn his gun on duty, but he does mention that there are always a few people in his district who he might need to “keep an eye on,” those who are polizeibekannt, literally “known to the police.” But apart from this Officer Meyer discusses his role as a police officer as being someone who everyone can come to when there is a problem, maintaining open hours in his office within the township and, more importantly, being available at all hours via his cell phone number—available online but also prominently posted in municipal offices. As Officer Meyer describes his job and his experiences to me, it seems to be the polar opposite of the scenario presented in High Noon: Officer Meyer not only needs to but claims to be able to rely on the help of the public in determining where assistance and support might be needed, in making determinations about how to resolve problems, and apart from the mention of a few ‘problem-individuals,’ (most of whom he seems to have known for decades and he emphasizes his hope that they have effectively ‘turned their lives around,’) his narrative is one of little conflict.

At the same time, Officer Meyer’s account hits many of the same beats. He discusses police work using the same metaphors popularized by Hollywood (or in the classic Westerns written by German author Karl May), and apart from the different anecdotes available to him, the way he talks about his work would make sense in and could just as easily apply to police departments around the world. Westerns “affirm the view that true justice depends on the individual rather than the law by showing the helplessness of the machinery of the law when confronted with evil and lawless men.” (Cawelti 1976: 35) Rather than emphasizing evil or lawlessness, Officer Meyer talks about how the community—his community—is made up of individuals who might need reminding or encouragement to stay out of trouble from time to time; his job is to be part of that community, not disrupt it, and his goal is to keep the peace rather than to punish people “where it might just make things worse.” In setting apart his work and emphasizing how he works within and alongside the community, he presents a clichéd and typical image of traditional policing, where officers show up at the scene of an incident, only aware of the few sentences and codes they have been sent over the radio, and attempt to resolve it as quickly and efficiently as possible before getting back in their car to resume their patrol. Officer Meyer presents himself as the sheriff, evoking the solitary and somewhat independent figure of the Wild West narrative, who, if he can’t rely on his community for support, can only rely on himself, but the real focus of this self-labeling is the emphasis on the sheriff in the village. Officer Meyer considers himself part of the community, not an outsider who can be summoned in an emergency, and his goal is not to resolve situations and move on to the next location but rather to maintain a long-term positive relation with the residents he is responsible for. In a sense, for Officer Meyer, the community is the sense of order and the stable relationships that he hopes to be able to maintain, and a great deal of his work is consciously intended to not look like typical police work; stereotypical images of police and their work imply conflict, risk and harm, (Crank 1994, Ericson and Haggerty 1997, cf. Doyle 2006) and Officer Meyer sees his work as maintaining consensus rather than managing conflict. This might be a necessary identity for someone in Officer Meyer’s position—there is comparatively little crime and rarely any kind of serious violence within his community. Police officers often identify their work, their territories, and themselves with the potential for risk and violence, hostile ‘outsider’ attitudes towards the police, and metaphors of crime as a disease that, if left unchecked, will spread. (Sacks 1972, Van Maanen 1973) However, it has often been concluded that officers overemphasize these problems, that talking about risk and danger is a more fundamental, functional, element of policing, necessary to maintaining a position for policing in society that avoids both the extremes of faceless institutional bureaucracy and embeddedness within a local community which itself defines policing. (Cullen et al. 1985, Waddington 1999, Campbell 2004, Demaree 2017, cf. Meyer and Rowan 1977) Officer Meyer suggests that a significant portion of conflicts, issues, or problems do not really need a solution, but that someone simply needs a channel to “express their frustration” or “some sympathy;” key to this was often talking about problems not specifically in policing or legal terms, but rather at a more everyday or personal level.

Policing as a profession—especially in the US and UK—has become so associated in the public consciousness and within the narrative culture of policing with violence, confrontation, and crime-fighting that finding a counterexample seemed to challenge many basic assumptions of the role of police within society. (Bittner 1990, Behr 2000) The question remained of whether Officer Meyer was the exception or the rule—if the identity and role of police officers is framed in contexts outside of, or that downplay, crime and conflict, how exactly are they framed? If the connections between police work and crime-fighting are less related to the actual experiences of individual officers and more to the establishment of an interstitial cultural identity that can more effectively manage the various and conflicting institutional pressures, what does it mean to find a police organization—or even a valued sub-unit- where crime cannot effectively be the focus?

The term ‘village sheriff’ is not an uncommon term in German for referring to rural police officers, and the associations with the Wild West are almost certainly superficial and tertiary. Officer Meyer is not unique in using this term to describe his role, a role which can be found in rural and less-than-urban areas around the world where police deal with a different range of issues, situations, and encounters than those typically presented in popular culture, the media, or by scholars. (Weisheit et al. 1994, Young 1993) Yet his use of this term, and his pride in its use, corresponds to the way he views himself as being both responsible for and dependent on his community. The connection to the village is the most relevant here, as the elements and themes that define popular stories of the Wild West share a similar basis with ideas of community, Gemeinschaft, in rural villages and small towns. Cawelti (1976) describes the literary West as “an open society where the intricacies of complex social institutions are unknown, where people are surrounded by loyal friends, where hearty individualists can give vent to their spontaneous urges, and where justice is done directly and without ambiguous.” (214) The West (as the village) is not the absence of broader society, Gesellschaft, but it is one in which community members essentially are their social roles, where stand-ins for the sociological concepts of structure and social change are less important than personal knowledge of and experience with the people who act out that structure and change in everyday life, where common sense is put forward as the explanation for understanding social action because experiences are presumed to be shared and shareable. (cf. Geertz 1975) To be a part of the village, one must share in the same experiences and understandings of those experiences. This means that even cases of deviant behavior, whether technically criminal or not, must also be viewed within this communal tradition: while the ‘rule of law’ philosophy of the social institutions governing crime and punishment emphasizes individual acts primarily only in their immediate occurrence and outcome, the localized perspective of the community views social actors, individuals with stories that must be understood for those actions to make sense—some crimes may be seen as evidence that the offender is truly the victim, “it’s really the family’s fault,” while crimes that may be conventionally less serious could be portrayed as a major violation, as confirming a developing portrait of someone as an outcast, a black sheep, as troublesome rather than troubled, as no longer worth being excused or helped. (cf. Christie 2004) How can a police officer enforce morality given the potential for such discrepancies and even drastic differences between the values of a community and the dry ink of the criminal law?

What makes Officer Meyer unique is that his role is specifically that of a community-oriented officer as well as being the most immediate and local representative of law enforcement in his local community, as well as his emphasis on the more ‘social’ aspects of policing. Community-oriented policing, primarily through the invocation of the “Broken Windows” model (Wilson and Kelling 1982) in the US and as an extension of earlier approaches in Germany, has, in most Western police institutions, been formally adopted as the guiding philosophy of police work, but the results to-date are inconsistent and inconclusive (with significant caveats.) A glaringly open question remains how and to what extent it has or was even intended to be implemented: through the use of specialized units or projects or as a transformation of the core ideas of police work? (Kelling and Coles 1996, Harcourt 2001, Waldeck 1999, Lindenberger 2003, Sparrow 2016) The case of the Revierpolizei in the German State of Brandenburg provides an interesting hybrid example—officers who work in a special unit but essentially perform core police duties and with primary responsibility for their jurisdiction. While the Revierpolizei model has its origins in the pre-unification German Democratic Republic, the stated values, aims and working styles of the unit closely mirror those claimed by the advocates of the community policing approaches developed in the US and the UK.

Notable here is that the Revierpolizei is, within the local communities, not generally seen as anything potentially controversial, at least not more so than policing in general—officers are quick to latch on to any visible symbols of public recognition or acceptance: Officer Meyer’s office, with just a few newspaper clippings on the wall, is spartan in this sense when compared to the workspaces of many of his colleagues, with walls covered with pictures drawn by schoolchildren, sports jerseys from local teams, or posters advertising past local events. Many officers were quick to tell me that the earlier conceptions of the Revierpolizei from before the fall of the Berlin Wall—local officers known as Abschnittsbevollmächtiger (ABV)—were abolished soon after German unification, but due to public pressure were soon re-implemented—officially, newly implemented—in the ‘new German states,’ only with different names: Bürgerpolizisten (lit. citizen police) in Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Regionalbereichsbeamte in Saxony-Anhalt, and Revierpolizei or Revierpolizisten in Brandenburg, winning a popular referendum over the runner-ups of Revierwachtsmeister and Bürgerkontaktbeamten.¹ (Ohder & Schöne 2018, Info110 2011) The use of mythology and tradition within the Revierpolizei was apparent to me, and very often, as was the case with Officer Meyer, clear lines were drawn between normal police work and the community based work performed by the Revierpolizisten. (cf. Crank 1994)

The point here is not, however, to evaluate the Revierpolizei in Brandenburg, nor to present them as a successful model to be copied or adapted. This presentation of one specific and local incarnation of policing is intended to highlight the universalities and peculiarities of policing, the similarities and contrasts inherent to the very term police. Policing can in turn be interpreted as an almost global institution with common symbols and legitimacy, as formal local organizations with defined jurisdictions and (generally) defined powers and goals, and as the individuals who work within that organization and perform policing—as well as the organization culture they are assumed to share, and how that culture is depicted in media, popular culture, and scholarship to define how they perform their work and how they relate to society as a whole as well as to specific groups, and so on. Manning (2012) writes that “In many ways, the symbolization of governmental power is more important than the actual behavior of government agencies or their agents.” (180) The specific case at hand is intended to examine the practices police—as organizations but particularly as individuals—use to manage, manipulate, alter, and weaken the symbolization of policing power.

2.2 Policing Worlds: The Sociology of Police and Policing

Policing is, like the world of medicine explored by Becker, Geer, Hughes and Strauss (1961), “at once a very old and very new profession.” (8) The birth of modern police in the early 19^th century roughly correlates with the birth of modern bureaucracy, industrialization, and social divisions, but the concept of formal social control centered around detection and punishment is likely older than recorded history. The Metropolitan Police of Robert Peel are considered the first modern police department due to their bureaucratic focus on establishing a predictable domain, that of public crime and disorder, as well as for their emphasis on consensus building: Peel intended his officers to work both as members of the community and as a visible remind of ‘order,’ a virtual necessity as the officers lacked most of the resources, notably firearms, which would come to identify policing. (Lyman 1964) Liang (1992) describes how police in Continental Europe, especially Prussia and later Germany, would adapt and develop:

various basic rules of modern police: the exploitation of existing rivalries and animosities within the population; the careful calibration of punitive sanctions to the gravity of each situation; the attribution of acts of resistance to individuals rather than to collective groups whenever possible; and the inducement of collaboration by means of reward of various kinds, not the least of which was the granting of forgiveness to repentant inhabitants who were merely slow in redirecting their obedience to the new masters. (72)

Various strands of policing slowly merged in the second half of the 20^th century, with contemporary German police demonstrating characteristics (and iconography) of British, American, and Continental conceptions of policing. Modern policing has become increasingly “scientific,” with an emphasis on the best ways to accomplish the stated institutional goals of the profession (Sparrow 2016); sociological approaches to policing have conversely often explored what these goals are, how they are derived, and how this knowledge of both what police work is and what police work should be is created within the institution and implemented in various settings. (Manning 2005, 2013) Basic theoretical concepts within sociology such as the enforcement of social norms, deviance, and structure vs. agency can be identified within the life-worlds of policing, sometimes as something of great interest to be explored and resolved, and sometimes as something taken for granted and assumed to be settled. Exploring how these concepts are used within the setting of policing—a case of an identifiable institutional setting, with its own perspective on human behavior, set of values, and forms of practices establishing itself with the broadest concept of ‘mainstream society’—can reveal a great deal about how society, at various levels, is structured, managed, and changing.

The police have long been recognized as an ideal ‘living laboratory’ for the type of reflexive, interactive and critical research pioneered by the Chicago Schools and associated, among others, with Robert Park, William Thomas, and Everett Hughes. The latter in particular is (in)famous for commanding his students to go out an explore their own society as outsiders; to examine in-depth and on-site the parts of society which until then even most sociologists had assumed to be logical, rational, and completely understood. This would lead to a generation of fieldworkers examining professions of all sorts, as well as subcultures and communities, the most prominent example being William F. Whyte and Street Corner Society. (Whyte 1943, Andersson 2014)

Chapoulie (1987) describes how Hughes challenged existing assumptions of professional and menial work by emphasizing first-hand observation in the study of various types of jobs with varying levels of social status:

From the first studies of marginal professions and lower-status occupations, Hughes concluded that these constitute a privileged field of observation, because their members are less capable than high-status professions of maintaining a facade and opposing their own value symbols (‘professional ethics’ or ‘scientific knowledge’) to those that researchers by virtue of their own social position, are inclined to adhere. Therefore, Hughes and his associates sought, through research that was the inverse of that done by students of [Talcott] Parsons and [Robert] Merton, to study professions of high standing with reference to conclusions they unearthed in studying occupations of lower standing. Then; by enlarging the range of professions and work situations they compared, they progressively elaborated a framework of questions that proved fruitful for studying the processes by which the division of labor is established and transformed, the way groups of workers try to exercise control over their own activities, and the unfolding of professional careers. (277–278)

The influence of Herbert Blumer, Anselm Strauss and later Erving Goffman—among others including Howard Becker, Jack Douglas, and Joseph Gusfield—shifted the focus away from social structure as a factor in itself to examining the nature of social interactions and how the use of categorizations and understandings of social structure both impacted and were impacted by interpersonal relations, drawing heavily on the earlier ‘pragmatic’ work of George Herbert Mead, Charles Cooley and John Dewey. Social structure and structural relations are of primary relevance in how they are interpreted, given meaning, acted out, overlooked, represented through symbols and rhetoric, reinforced, challenged, and replaced or modified: how the self is related to others and to society. (Mead 1934) Symbolic interactionism emphasizes how, despite the normal or even ritual appearances of most social encounters, subtle negotiations are often taking place over how things are and should be treated; for example, whether someone caught red-handed by a police officer is ‘more properly’ viewed (as the officer might prefer) as a criminal suspect who should be sanctioned and viewed with suspicion and distrust or (as the individual certainly prefers) as a victim of circumstance who made a small mistake but should be forgiven, let go with a warning, or simply unconditionally let go. Interactionism, and relatedly dramaturgy as developed by Goffman in particular, emphasizes the demands and expectations, but also potentially fluid or porous nature, of social roles and how individuals become more deeply involved within interactions:

Rather than being fitted by socialization for all occasions, interactionists argue that people often experience situations as problematic. Faced with ambiguity or with obstacles to their developing lines of conduct, people are forced to play a major part in defining situations and making sense of them. (Stokes and Hewitt 1976: 840, see also Smith 2016)

Policing—as an institutional field of social control and as a profession—was found to be theoretical conducive to a dramaturgical approach—that is, the explanation of human interactions and behavior using the metaphor of the theater and audience-oriented ‘artificial’ presentations. Police officers, like actors on a stage, perform a role and, unlike Weber’s bureaucrats—tend to involve themselves in a range of interpersonal situations and relationships that essentially spans all of modern social life. (Manning 2003) The police, with simple words and gestures, can convey meaning that cuts through to core understandings of how society functions. Within dramaturgy, collective behavior represents social change (Gusfield 1966, Turner 1974) and the police represent both an institutionally-defined but practically complex and situational collective method for establishing (a desired form of) order and also social roles which are engaged in reacting to or attempting to guide changes within society (i.e. in terms of public behavior relating to deviance and crime and the definition and societal views of social problems.) (Manning 1996) The actions taken by police officers—both as ritualized and predictable behavior as well as more ad hoc adaptations to developing situations—bear social meaning in the relationship of those actions to various audiences, those who are the target of action, those who witness it, and the broader backdrops of the community or society: while a great deal of policing and criminological literature views cooperation with the police as the ‘standard’ and desired reaction, and any other outcome or break from the implied normal trajectory as an aberration, how individuals react to the commands and demands of police officers reflects individual understandings—mediated through shared symbols and narratives and the communicative efforts of the police—of what the police are, can be, and should be.

Policing at its highest level has long recognized the necessity and critical nature of image work—the managing of symbolism and juxtapositioning of symbols to affect how meaning is communicated and interpreted—to both maintain the organization of policing itself—public support, access to resources, etc.—but also as a practice for maintaining legitimacy and authority as practical tools to conduct ‘police work’ and encourage cooperation or discourage resistance both individually and at the levels of community and society. This is especially true for individual officers patrolling the street with a mandate both to ‘maintain order’ and to ‘fight crime’; it doesn’t take long before “the officer recognizes a simple fact of life: there are more members of the public than there are police officers; an officer’s control over the public depends upon the public’s willingness to be controlled.” (Meehan 1992: 41)

2.3 The Images of Policing

Peter Manning (2012) writes that:

The police display themselves visibly, routinely and predictably while acting out their roles. The most visible of all police functions, their mundane core tasks, are realized through and by their strategies of random patrol, answering calls for service and investigating crime. These are ways of penetrating everyday life, even private spaces, and entail traffic coordination stops, tickets, fines, searches, roadblocks, moving presence and stopping and detaining people, keeping them in jail, escorting them to court, serving warrants and producing crime in the form of proactive investigations… The idea of a very visible presence arose from the concern of [Robert] Peel and the English people with secret policing, and the dramatizing of accessible visible officers was reinforced by the use of uniforms, large and elongated helmets, and by hiring large men. (181)

The image of the police has not only been consistently important to the function of the police, but, as Manning notes, has often been synonymous with it. Policing, as an institution, has seemingly managed to envelop multiple contradictions into an internally coherent vision, to a policing social world that is both internally and externally recognizable. Policing seeks to ensure social stability and enforce order, but almost the entire history of policing is one of reform and (often reactionary) response to perceived social change; it often seems as if policing, rhetorically at least, thrives on crisis, and that if a crisis cannot be found, policing will gladly create one. (cf. Hall et al. 1978, Clarke 2008) Innovations in policing have been framed as either reactions to specific problems (ranging from ‘the War on Drugs’ to ‘Satanic Panic’ to ‘the War on Terror’) or more generally as a transformation of the basic police role in response to a ‘crisis of legitimacy.’ (Weisburd and Eck 2004, Willis and Mastrofski 2011) Among the various innovations that have been broadly incorporated into the institution of policing are preventive patrol with the use of patrol cruisers, quick response through 911 or 110 dispatch, SWAT or other tactical response units, specialized gang or narcotics units which are generally given freer rein in targeting specific individuals or demographics², hot-spot targeting and statistical data-based policing (i.e. COMPSTAT), community relations departments and image-management campaigns (including the increasing use of social media), civilian review boards, the use of body-worn cameras, and community-oriented policing initiatives.

These innovations, and countless others implemented by individual organizations, include those that supplement ‘normal’ police work—defined by at-the-time policing institutional goals, policing cultural values, and everyday routines as perceived by officers, their supervisors, and the public—as well as those that transform, challenge, or supplant traditional understandings of the role of police in society. (cf. Rumbaut and Bittner 1979) The innovations described above have all in some way left their mark on policing—or promise to do so, for example, in the case of body-worn cameras and social media, both relatively young concepts within policing (cf. Goldsmith 2015, Schneider 2018.) At the same time, many of these innovations have pushed policing in what seem to be conflicting directions—police appear to be simultaneously moving in the direction of tolerance and zero-tolerance, conciliation and aggression, prevention and reaction. This may reflect a difference between specific agencies and their choice of strategies (cf. Wilson 1968), but it may also speak to yet another coming crisis of legitimacy and a disconnect between the formal institution of policing and the cultural perceptions that impact how not only citizens, but police officers themselves, approach the work of the police and craft images of what policing is and should be. The fact that policing has always been built on the basis of crime as a social problem coupled with the relatively rarity of experiences of serious crime for most individuals within daily routines reaffirms the importance of media outlets in producing, adapting, modifying, and conveying images and symbols that define the role of police within society.

Key events in policing have always been crucial in cementing public understandings and cultural narratives of the police: in the US such events have included the 1968 Democratic National Convention, where live broadcasts of police aggressively beating protestors without visible provocation were viewed nationwide; the 1991 Rodney King beating, which started a new round of public discussions of police brutality, racism, and oversight and shattered common arguments that excessive police violence was a thing of the past; the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, where within a week a news media skeptical of protestors and taking police perceptions of risk at face value turned against the police as even journalists on the street became victims of a police force who saw everyone not in uniform as an acceptable target; and the 2014 “Ferguson Unrest” and the beginning of the Black Lives Matter movement, which to many Americans was the first public display of the militarization of the police that has drastically accelerated since 2001, as officers in full body armor or tactical camouflage backed by armored personnel carriers and snipers introduced a new image of policing into the public consciousness. In Germany, key events include the 1986 “Hamburger Kessel,” in which anti-nuclear protestors were forcibly confined in a small space for up to 13 hours, New Year’s Eve 2015/16 in Cologne (Behrendes 2016), and more recently the police handling of anti-immigrant protests and the 2018 riots in Chemnitz, for which police have been accused of reacting too slowly, selectively overlooking or targeting certain sides, and mishandling the media response.

These key events are important for how they can offer common images of policing, pivotal pictures and narratives that are repeated or used as benchmarks in making comparisons. (Manning 1996, 2003; Manning prefers the term “axial events”) Notably, most of these events are—at least in retrospect—seen as presenting a more negative than positive image of the police, hence their value as milestones as well as their use as catalyzers for reform in some cases. (Earl et al. 2003, Sparrow 2016) Negative images of policing events are often depicted culturally as representative of ‘the police’ as a general category, and not just specific agencies or policies. (cf. Manning 2003) In contrast, more ‘positive’—here synonymous with ‘functional’—images of the police can be found in presentations of crime, of risk, of victimization or moral outrage, in the media, where the link between crime as a socially harmful action (or ‘criminal’ as a socially harmful existence) on one end of the spectrum and law enforcement or order-maintenance exemplified by the police as experts is taken for granted. Despite criticism of the police, particularly through the increased visibility of police work through social media and the pervasiveness of cell phone cameras, the broader cultural association between police work as ‘making society safer’ and crime as the phenomenon which police both identify and combat has not effectively been challenged. The specific forms that police work can take may cause friction, but the nature of policing remains untarnished. To the extent that policing, as an institution, has been forced to respond to possible changes in public perceptions, these responses have primarily been conceived and directed from the organizational level—through public relationships department, image campaigns, and social media—rather than significantly impacting the practice of policing on the street. (Manning 2003, Chermak and Weiss 2005, cf. Kreissl 2008)

Police work is most often performed on a different stage, that of individual encounters occurring every day, with the primary audience simply being those involved. Individual expectations of police work are framed by cultural narratives, by media presentations and second-hand stories, but they are lived through actual encounters with the social world; not just through encounters with crime or of being a victim, suspect or witness, but in every case where an individual must interpret what the police mean: in how they react to the mere presence of police officers driving or walking by, how they respond to them if spoken to, when they choose to approach them or request help, what they view as routine, normal or uninteresting, and what they view as unique, noteworthy, or strange and how they recount their experiences. Robert Prus (1996) describes how experience is intersubjectively constructed through the use of mediated images:

People may sometimes retain particularly vivid images of events even when they are unable to define and classify these within their current linguistic terms, but it is only when people are to find ways of sharing their experiences with others that they achieve the potential of turning these experiences into more enduring (i.e., community objectified or signified) features of reality. Thus, the processes of “indicating” (pointing to, drawing attention to, or signifying [things]) and “representing” (illustrating, imitating, describing in words or gestures, writing about, photographing, or recording) become exceedingly consequential in the matter of sharing experiences with others. (12)

Social worlds of policing are maintained through everyday interactions which are mostly mundane, framed against a backdrop of cultural understandings which emphasize action and risk, which view policing as a form of sacrifice or as the ‘thin blue line’ protecting society from chaos and disorder, but predicated more upon local understandings of immediate social relations and common understandings of problem-solving and compromise. Police work at its most visible—that is, in popular culture, in media, in shared narratives and anecdotes—is big, dramatic, and visible in stark contrast to everyday life: the lived experience of police work not only is most often the opposite, but needs to reconcile these views in order to establish and maintain a relationship with the local community and with those individuals encountered by the police, situation to situation, day in and day out.

2.4 Cultural Narratives and Police Interaction

Soapy felt a hand laid on his arm. He looked quickly around into the broad face of a policeman.

“What are you doin’ here?” asked the officer.

“Nothin’,” said Soapy.

“Then come along,” said the policeman.

“Three months on the Island,” said the Magistrate in the Police Court the next morning.

• O. Henry, The Cop and the Anthem (1904)

The present study is an exploration of how police, individually and organizationally, maintain long-term relationships through the management of specific, individualized encounters. Police legitimacy, that is, the “judgements that ordinary citizens make about the rightfulness of police conduct,” (Skogan and Frydl 2004: 291) is based primarily in how members of society view police in relation to society, conceptually, and their understanding of how well police are fitting to that conception, as well as the various events, trends, and crises that are altering that conception at any point: police legitimacy is a concept which often is expressed through and altered by media presentations and perceptions of police work. (Chernak and Weiss 2004) Ericson (1982) argues that police legitimacy is primarily supported by the concept of crime, in spite of the fact that much police work is unrelated to crime or only includes it as a tertiary variable. Despite decades of academic work arguing that police are primarily engaged in ‘order-maintenance’ or ‘peacekeeping,’ (Niederhoffer 1969, Bittner 1970, Black 1980, Ericson 1982, Moskos 2008b) as well as significant efforts by the police to frame themselves this way³, police are effectively still one half of “cops and robbers,” with everyday depictions of police work, particularly in television, movies and social media, emphasizing the law enforcement role and associated powers, including the use of potentially deadly force. (cf. Bielejewski 2016)

Expectations of what police will do (not necessarily what they should do) are framed by cultural narratives: ‘big’ stories based on ideal type actors and actions—in fictional presentations often represented as ‘stock characters’—which most members of society would be expected to understand or extrapolate from even a barebones narrative, even if they are not necessarily considered to be common, plausible, realistic, or even possible. Cultural narratives are often synonymous with stereotypes, tropes, or clichés; in the present conception they simply refer to any story or connection within a story that is assumed by both presenter and audience to be already existing; at their most effective they establish “the mythology of modern life.” (Gusfield 1989: 434) Van Maanen (1974) writes that:

To some, a policeman is a “fucking pig”, a mindless brute working for a morally bankrupt institution. To others, a policeman is a courageous public servant, a defender of life and property, regulating city life along democratic lines. To most, a policeman is merely an everyday cultural stimulus, tolerated, avoided and ignored unless non-routine situational circumstances deem otherwise. Yet, virtually all persons in this society can recognize a policeman, have some conception of what it is he does, and, if asked, can share a few “cop stories” with an interested listener. (53)

Contemporary cultural narratives about police range from relatively benign jokes about police officers and donuts (reinforced through caricaturization in, among other outlets, The Simpsons and Brooklyn 99, as well as police self-parody) to narratives about police violence which are used to link shootings of unarmed black men to institutional racism. Cultural narratives are relevant particularly through their use as interactional shorthand; personal narratives, whether storytelling as a social act or used as justifications to make actions and decisions socially acceptable, do not need to be explicit or delve deeply into concepts of motivation or agency when understandable cultural narratives can be referred to: for example, one could refer to “losing track of time” as an excuse for being late, a phenomenon that might not personally be experienced or understood in the same way but that is well documented in its usage specifically as an excuse as well as in its experience, or one could refer to “traffic” or “problems with the train,” without expecting to be challenged on the specifics that led to the person being late. Cultural narratives are often identified through their subversion, with the assumption being that the standard narrative would be so routine as to not be worth telling, but that this case is noteworthy: examples of this range from the biblical “Good Samaritan” to the movie and television trope of large, rough-looking individuals suddenly turning into overly friendly ‘softies.’⁴ This is often reflected in police storytelling and war stories, where greater emphasis is put on stories that communicate not just risk and danger but specifically the unexpected. (Chan 1997, Ford 2003, van Hulst 2013, cf. Ewick and Silbey 1995)

Cultural narratives are significant to police work in ways that have been suggested in the literature but have rarely been made explicit. Specifically, this relevance lies in connecting the macro-level conceptual institution of policing with locally determined organizations and situational encounters between individual officers and residents, as expressed in the following two propositions:

• 1. Individuals in society share a general concept of what policing means, who police officers are, and what is expected of them in encounters with police primarily derived from cultural narratives and knowledge produced outside of immediate interaction with police officers; and

• 2. Police encounters with members of society are primarily guided by or around the assumptions brought to the encounters, and processes of meaning-making which occur within encounters necessarily take this into consideration.

This is not to say that all individuals share the same understanding of police work; rather, the point is that all individuals have some understanding of police work, and that police work is structured (organizationally through structure, policy and planning and practically by individual officers) around the fact that individuals will be able to interpret policing symbolism, commands, and definitions with some degree of effectiveness. Police officers, though their understanding of policing likely varies and is certainly more contextual than that which they expect to encounter, need to create intersubjective meaning in communication with others, not ‘compromising’ their understanding of normative systems but rather implementing practices to manage the situation based on their interpretation of the other participant’s interpretation; the interactionist perspective in practice. (cf. Manning 1977)

Gusfield (2000) writes that:

Sociologists have used the concept of “role” as a way of designating the expectations, duties, and priorities that accrue to the holder of a position in the social organization. To be a mother or father or a child is to assume a set of opportunities connected with those statuses. The concept is, however, at best an abstract version of situated events. As many have pointed out, human action is not so fixed and constrained. The metaphor of the stage is limited. The role that governs an event is often chosen from among diverse possibilities in defining the situation. The situation experience must be provided with a meaning. Human beings transform roles, adapt them to specific persons, to specific situations. In many ways, they play with roles and with rules; they obey them, ignore them, avoid and transform them. (106)

As understandings of the police within society are certainly outside of the control of individual officers, and in most cases outside of the control of even specific departments or organizations, the ascribed social role of the police may not always be the most ‘effective’ role in handling situations. Police engage in impression management to switch between available roles, but at the same time are constrained by outside as well as interactional factors and the general difficulties inherent in establishing shared meaning. (cf. Cicourel 1980, Strauss 1982a) Scholarly work on policing has often identified conflicts between differing expectations of police—i.e. from the community, from other officers, from bureaucracy, from local government—and these differing expectations have often been managed by the use of differing styles of policing (Wilson 1968) at both the departmental level as well as by individual officers. Ethnographic research on policing has found that ‘discrepancies’ in police practices which are often viewed institutionally as failures or compromises—such as the giving of a warning where a fine or even arrest would be legally justified—are not reflective of ‘bad policing’ so much as the application of differing systems of norms in cases where the legal or law enforcement norms, previously assumed to govern all aspects of policing, have little to offer in terms of guidance or ‘valued’ outcomes. (Bittner 1970, Reuss-Ianni 1983, see also Waddington 1993, Manning 1988 for examinations of how semi-formal police ‘coding’ to pre-categorize and prioritize situations differs from formal [legal] definitions) Behaviors deviating from the assumed legal-rational, that is, the normative view that police work is simply the detection of crime and the assignment of legally mandated punishments, can be effective in handling situations both because they allow for some form of negotiation—relevant if we consider that police work is more focused on preventing future problems than on punishing those have already occurred with the theoretical assumption that it might have a future preventive effect (cf. Bittner 1974)—as well as because it occurs against the backdrop of the ideal type police action strongly based on shared cultural narratives. Police are able to effectively give warnings because the recipient is aware that the next encounter may go much worse.

While the presumption here is that standard and shared cultural understandings of the police exist—that is, stereotypes and tropes that can be, but may not always be, applied to the police generally and define expectations of what they will do in a given situation—it is also assumed that these will vary significantly in salience and applicability from individual to individual. The purpose here is not to examine how individuals in a given community view or act towards the police, but rather to examine how the police act towards their community based on their expectations of how that community (in its multitude of individuals) views, acts and reacts towards the police.

2.5 Negotiated Authority

Dobbs: If you’re the police, where are your badges?

Gold Hat: Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ badges!

• The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948, dir: John Huston)

In contrast to legitimacy, here defined as the broader understanding of how police fit into society, as well as the recognition that a specific individual is, in fact, a police official, authority is seen as the ascribed meaning of a variety of potential social roles which govern how police, unlike other social roles, are able to handle the type of situations they are expected to handle. Police work consists of a number of norm-violating practices, actions which non-police individuals could only undertake in very specific situations or at the risk of expecting some form of social sanction (even if it may be limited to strange looks, whispers, etc.) The authority of the police could be understood as the way in which these practices, even the mere presence of the police, are interpreted as constituting an enforcement of certain types of social norms, or legal norms.

Egon Bittner (1974) examined how the development of a police mandate was embedded in historical exigencies, primarily the rise of urbanism and the perception of crime as a problem primarily resulting from unstructured, disordered interactions between strangers. This meant that policing was intended to have a specific focus on formal regulation not only as the method for enforcing order or maintaining the policing, but that the creation and establishing of regulation in social life, replacing more flexible informal systems of regulation or forcing them to conform, was both a means and an end. Bittner writes that:

Two conditions must be met to satisfy the need for formal governmental control that would bind effectively the behavior of individuals to rules of propriety. The first… is that all controls rest on specific authorization set forth in highly specific legal norms. The second… is that the implementation of the authorizing norm must be entrusted to impersonal enforcement bureaucracies. In sum, “the due regulation and domestic order” in our times is the task of a host of law enforcement bureaucracies, each using procedures legitimized by, and incidental to, the attainment of explicitly formulated legal objectives. (122)

This impersonal enforcement, as conceived within the police mandate, takes on the form of specific types of practices and behaviors which necessarily fit the criteria of being legitimate (i.e. based on the law and government sanctioning) and fulfilling the ends of the legal norms intended to be injected into societal relations. This is the basis of the institutional role of police, intended to fulfill the bureaucratic objectives of the organization while comporting to a fitting social role, in this case distancing the police and officers from the type of informal relations that were increasingly seen as problematic, mirroring the “shift from reliance on informal mechanisms of traditional authority to reliance on legal rational means.” (Bittner 1974: 122, cf. Weber 1958) The police act as a model—instructive, demonstrative, and remonstrative—to alter the behavior of society at large. Bittner remained deeply skeptical that this model could work in practice: it has proven to be both impractical to centrally exercise control over police behavior in the way that bureaucratic institutions claim to do, and unrealistic to expect police to behave as disinterested automatons with no stake in what their work or actions represent beyond the specific concerns of the organization. Though the mandate of the police is based on legal norms and law enforcement, the police have never been subservient to the courts: “Thus, the institutional independence of the police from the judiciary is ultimately based on the realization that the police are inevitably involved in activities that cannot be fully brought under the rule of law.” (Bittner 1970: 34) This is particularly relevant when considering that the norms and routines of police work—the life world of policing—remains centered on the idea of establishing and maintain order and selectively invoke legal norms, crime fighting, or institutional constraints in establishing a public police role, but the role acted out by police is not one defined or geared towards a larger or parallel institution, but rather one centered on the institution of policing itself. Yet the institutional role of the police has persevered—though arguably in a way that eschews an appeal to legal rational authority in favor of attempting to establish a newer form of traditional authority (cf. Crank 1994)—according to Bittner because of 1) the establishment of an image of the police as crime-fighters engaged in a war against an encroaching evil, 2) the emphasis in public presentations, training, and career advancement on the use of statistics, crime data, and technical methods which serve to maintain an image of the police as specialists in the field of crime, 3) the existing and publicly visible cooperation between police and prosecutors in the most high profile cases and the necessary function of police in investigation beyond the boundaries of what prosecutors are generally capable of, and 4) the use of specialized units, most obviously detectives but also including crime-focused patrol units (or in Germany the use of specialized units for making arrests in ‘higher risk areas.’) (1974: 123–124) The police have managed to consistently maintain some form of institutional image (though not the same image) and this image itself becomes part of their work—this image is (ideally) able to affect behaviors in public in the way police work was originally intended (cf. Lyman 1964) without necessarily even needing to resort to the type of legal based enforcement on which that institutional image is based.

Austin Turk (1966) makes a distinction between social norms, which are followed effectively because they are internalized, and cultural norms, which form a realm of contest in enforcing and constraining the behavior of other, stating that:

Once persons in a collectivity are convinced that some subset of individuals within the collectivity have sufficient power to force others to pay attention to their normative announcements, they may accept announced norms not so much because they understand or “internalize” the norms as because they have learned to defer to the decisions of the powerful subset, i.e., to view that subset as “authorities.” The social norm of deference, learned either by direct and unsuccessful conflicts with authorities or through gradual socialization into the authority structure…, may then serve to support a wide variety of cultural norms just because they are “authoritative,” i.e., “legal.” (345-346)

Considering the norms enforced by authorities, specifically the police, as ‘legal norms’ suggests a stronger conflict orientation in which police enforce rules and desired changes in behavior that the individual has no desire to follow but does so simply because of deference to authority and/or fear of punishment. While not every case of police intervention reflects this, this understanding does fit to the basic institutional model of policing, in which the capacity to enforce the outcome and official definition of the situation preferred by the police defines both what types of situations police are involved in and how they manage those situations. (Bittner 1970) Also relevant here is Turk’s use of cultural norms as essentially a form of attempting hegemonic control, in that an understanding of the power—either learned through direct experience with police or ‘socialized’ through various institutions and cultural depictions, realistically likely a combination of these sources—is necessary in institutionalizing the power of the police and making it into a form of authority that will not need to be overtly expressed or explained. The institutional role of the police constitutes this conflict-oriented image of the police⁵, in which citizens are expected to show deference with the realization that cooperation can always be secured, and when cooperation is forthcoming conflict can be averted. Stuart Hall and colleagues in Policing the Crisis (1978) refer to the “exhaustion of consent” as (in this case, British) policing domains expanded through the use of criminalization and the politicization of crime and deviance: the proper realm of negotiations over acceptable behavior were firmly declared to be the ballot box, but the police were not to be challenged or questioned. (Loader 1997) Similar processes took place among police in the US and Germany (Garland 2001, Weinhauer 2003, Manning 2012, see also Walker 1992, 1993, Wrocklage 2008, Heinz 2017) as well, with a combination of ‘rationalization’ or professionalism alongside law-and-order politics cementing a model of modern police as technical experts fulfilling a defined role with, from the perspective of the institution and its allies in the spheres of politics and law, clearly defined goals and broad powers to achieve them. This institutional role is recognizable in many typical practices and mannerisms of the police centered around formal definitions of situations (i.e. the use of quasi-legal terminology and an emphasis on formal bureaucratic categories and outcomes) and maintaining ‘professional’ or ‘distancing’ relations between police and non-police. (cf. Van Maanen 1974, Manning 1995)

The authority of the police—essentially the source of their definitional and effective power—has generally been presented in Weberian terms, with only occasional advances or lasting contributions in conceptualizing the organization of policing. (Manning 2012) Weber described three categories of authority and related them to governing norms:

Charismatic authority sweeps aside old norms and generates charismatically-certified new norms… Traditional authority is legitimated by traditional norms and is additionally circumscribed by them. Legal rational authority rests upon legal norms and is also contained by them. (Spencer 1970: 125-126)

From a bureaucratic or organizational perspective, the authority of the police is considered legal-rational, vaguely suggesting that individuals who have internalized respect for the law will respect the police as legitimate enforcers of such. (Loader 1997, De Lint 1999) Yet views ‘from the street,’ particularly ethnographic work on patrol and beat policing, have tended to present a view of police authority that combines or selects from the different forms in different contexts. (Banton 1964, Bittner 1967/b, Muir 1979, Peterson 2008, cf. Rumbaut and Bittner 1979) Police do not simply ensure (or fail to ensure) compliance and cooperation by invoking the law, legal norms, or even general social norms, but rather negotiate through sometimes ritualized sometimes improvised actions ranging from the use of specific rhetoric to coercive force. The legal-rational is one basis for police authority, and its mere invocation can certainly elicit compliance in the vast majority of observable cases, though the specific mechanism and internal reasoning is both varied and theoretically relevant: do the police, following Robert Peel’s model of public policing, remind citizens of their civic duty or shared values within society, or are they simply aware of the consequences of ignoring or resisting the police: monetary penalties, physical violence, and imprisonment? There is no singular answer to this question, the relevance for the current analysis lies in how police present their authority, and how they take on and create unique or fixed roles: how the part of ‘police officer’ is played.

Social roles are made, not taken. (Shearing and Ericson 1991) While the use of justifications and accounts to align actions taken to the presumed rules—formal or informal—governing a social situation and setting has been well established in interactionism and ethnomethodology, the existence of relatively stable social roles is often taken for granted. The negotiation of order implies a negotiation over what roles mean while action is still taking place. Even established conceptions of social roles may only be clear or obvious in very specific and clearly defined settings: a physician in a hospital may not be able to avoid the assumptions that patients have of what it means to be a ‘doctor,’ but being a medical professional may be more or less relevant when that individual is simply with friends in a café. (cf. Becker et al. 1961) The availability of ‘stock roles’ in some cases can ease or unbalance the negotiation in favor of one side: it is for this reason that Bittner (1970) notes that police rarely, if ever, lose in conflicts over defining situations (see also Van Maanen 1974, Manning 1977); the ability to use force belongs to most possible understandings of what it means to be a police officer in dealing with conflicts.

De Lint (1999) describes how changes in presentations and the strategic use of images maintains the authority of the police even as “traditional institutional bases of police authority” (128) are weakened, emphasizing that “from the ground level of police culture there is already a long tradition of realism and pragmatism in the forging of presentations.” (129) The institutional role of the police has both a political dimension, i.e. the mandate of the police and its role in terms of maintaining a more-or-less defined political order (Turk 1977), and also a pragmatic one, which must link the political function to social worlds, everyday life, the community, and society. Police have legitimacy in terms of law enforcement, but the law is rarely enforced simply for the purpose of being enforced, and is often consciously not enforced where it could be. (Girtler 1980, Ohlin 1993) The common police functions described as peacekeeping or order maintenance are unable to function as such without at least a plausible appearance of shared values between the institution of policing and the context (i.e. society) in which that policing is taking place, commonly described as ‘the rule of law.’ (cf. De Lint 1999) Policing—as a bureaucratic social institution—has since its inception experienced pressures toward intervening into social relations and systems which might otherwise be governed by more informal, local, or community norms and values, adapting “disembedding mechanisms” (Giddens 1991: 17–20) to establish a new and uniform order, whether referred to as safety, security, or public order. (cf. Ericson and Haggerty 1997, Harcourt 2001) At the same time, the pragmatics of policing—particularly at the street level but also in terms of public relations and image work (Manning 1982)—can lay bare the discord between institutional ideals of order and the chaos of everyday life. Image work encompasses “all activities which police forces engage [to] project meanings of policing” (Mawby 2002: 1) ranging from institutional and organizational orientations (Wilson 1968, Chernak and Weiss 2005) to the use of public-relations (Strecher 1971), policing control over media and pop-cultural depictions (Manning 1996, Bielejewski 2016, Schneider 2018), more recently social media (Schneider 2016) and, of particular interest to the case at hand, the situational, dramaturgical and symbolic use of police imagery, tropes, and cultural narratives in various forms of interactions between police officers and the public. (Meehan 1992, Walker 1996, Manning 2003, Peterson 2008)

Overlooking the fact that officers themselves are individuals and just as likely to be making token gestures toward institutional ideals while decisively acting towards the fulfillment of personal, community, ideological, spiritual etc. ideals, it is a reality of police work that is must be conducted within a social space, and the most effective way to avoid making every invocation of state authority into a potential conflict between ‘high’ and ‘low’ systems of order is simply to address the issues in terms that will be acceptable in the relevant social space. Police officers can, essentially, tell a story that will be believable to the audience in front of them—more believable than a story that tells the audience “you don’t need to understand,” or “this is our business, not yours.”⁶ Community-oriented policing has emphasized the (arguably overstated) commonality between basic norms of order among police officers (if not at the level of the institution itself, cf. Reuss-Ianni 1983) and local communities but in practice underemphasized the need for multidirectional communication to not only establish a shared understanding of norms but also to establish that this understanding is shared. More recent scholarship has at times emphasized the drifting apart of formal state authority and that of the police (Loader and Walker 2001, Sklansky 2011, cf. Manning 2003, 2012) based to some extent on the significant—and theoretically challenging—expansion of forms of private security and challenges to the core police role (Spitzer and Scull 1977): this represents the renewed salience of the observations of Bittner (1965, 1970) and others (cf. Wilson and Kelling 1982, Goldstein 1990, Kelling and Coles 1996) that what police do is so dissociated from the formal rationalizations that the institutional ideals are practically unattainable, that the legal-rational authority attributed to the police is little more than an appearance and a rhetorical toolkit. Efforts to alter the practices or ideological basis of the police aside, the interactionist methodological approach advocated by Egon Bittner, Peter Manning, and others would not discount the legal-rational authority simply because it is posited as an ‘illusion’ but rather would question exactly how this illusion has been maintained and implemented to allow it to remain so strongly identified with policing.

2.5.1 The Institutional Authority of the Police

The police demonstrate a form of institutional authority that has long been the subject of sociological inquiry, most often associated with Weber’s work on bureaucracy. (Spencer 1970) Kenneth Burke’s (1989) approach to authority, with an emphasis on conflict being resolved through the establishment and presentation of hierarchies, could also be applied to the police, which would emphasize the establishment of a situational order which mirrors a desired moral order: this can be seen in the common association of crime or perceived criminogenic areas or even social groups as ‘dirty,’ ‘filthy’ or ‘scum,’ and as police work as ‘cleaning up the streets.’ (cf. Gusfield 1963) The hierarchy of police over citizens is not universal or applicable to every situation, and various rhetorical strategies and practices could be observed in which citizens attempt to subvert or escape their ascribed hierarchical position. At the same time, some police practices would defend against this: while the rhetoric used by policing has been included in ethnographic research on policing (as well as many critical approaches) for decades, specific interest in the use of language by police as a practice for defining situations, maintaining power dynamics, establishing a hierarchy, and implementing an interaction order has been limited to a relatively small number of authors and largely ignored in more ‘mainstream’ policy-oriented research. (cf. Manning 1982, 1989, 1995, Ericson 1982, Meehan 1992, Campbell 2004, Huey 2007, Mensching 2007, Hunold 2011, 2018, see also Bourdieu 1991, Chan 1997)

A slightly more recent incarnation can be found in Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to situational social relations. Goffman, though more often associated with enclosed ‘total institutions’ and psychiatric control, often considered the police as an example in discussing everyday social practices, and was among the first to hint at the ‘ritual’ qualities of many interactions involving the police. (Goffman 1967, 1971 cf. Behr 2006) Goffman (1983) emphasized the need to study situated practices, to examine:

the social arrangements enjoyed by those with institutional authority – priests, psychiatrists, school teachers, police, generals, government leaders, parents, males, whites, nationals, media operators, and all other well-placed persons who are in a position to give official imprint to versions of reality. (17)

It is intentional that Goffman’s list of the bearers of institutional authority includes alongside ascribed, even uniformed, institutional roles, generic indicators of societal power dynamics (i.e. race and gender), as well as more obviously socially flexible roles such as parents and citizens. Goffman’s implication is not that institutional realities are constructed and enforced in one general and identifiable manner, but rather that different forms of action are used in negotiations based on the statuses and roles which participants can claim: a police officer bears a generalized form of institutional authority which means that, for example, the filing of an official report creates a bureaucratic reality which would afterwards be difficult to challenge, but that same police officer might have no immediate advantage when attempting to convince his son’s math teacher that his son deserves a better grade. The institutional context is key here; but the police, unlike many of the other typical examples of structure-based authority (i.e. those roles which derive their authority from a formal organization with claims to represent a larger institution and its goals) do not have an easy to identify scope or arena of authority. While the institutional relations between prisoners and guards are (at least theoretically) relatively straightforward within the confines of a prison, these relations are supported by the fact that everyone in the prison is easily and consistently identifiable as either someone who enforces rules or someone against whom rules are enforced. (Sykes 2007) At which point the institutional authority of the police comes into play remains a question embedded not just in interactional or dramaturgical understandings of social action but also one of politics, ideology, and concepts of democracy, fairness, and social progress. (Remington 1965, Manning 2005)

The police differ also from a more stereotypical bureaucratic model, in that their institutional power is not solely in post hoc definition of situations: the police define scenes while they are still ongoing. (Bittner 1970, Feest and Blankenburg 1972) This means that the institutional authority of the police must be found both within their structures, forms, and organizational networks (i.e. the bureaucracy and the official working relationship between police agencies and courts, civic administrations, media, and various other bureaucratic agencies) as well as in the power of the police role to affect ongoing situations by altering the understanding of power dynamics (in favor of the police) in enough situations to normalize a police role. Egon Bittner (1970) identified this form of authority as stemming from the capacity of the police to use coercive force and the resulting situation in which police (individually and organizationally) develop practices to avoid having to demonstrate that force in most situations, while still being reliant on the broader understanding by citizens that the capacity to use force remains in play.

The authority of the police has been typically conceived of within the frameworks maintained by the institution of policing itself: incidents and case-work. That is, policing interactions are viewed within the boundaries of temporal and geographic relevance established by the officers involved (or their superiors.) Yet the authority of the police is not only invoked or interpreted within society in cases in which police signal that the immediate situation is a ‘police encounter.’ (cf. Van Maanen 1978) Police officers simply walking or driving down the street may not need to even notice a passerby for that passerby to notice the officers and possibly even modify their behavior, such as by avoiding jaywalking even in a place and time where it normally wouldn’t be given a second thought. Police officers in restaurants or cafes will expect to be treated differently without even demanding or desiring special treatment, and often their continuing presence is desired by owners as a way to maintain the image of safety. (cf. Kelling and Coles 1996) The institutional image of the police is in a way a fallback—it is the image of the police that is assumed until it is challenged, primarily because so much of the organization of the police is centered around promoting and maintaining this image. (cf. Bittner 1965, Manning 2012) While its basis is the legal-rational authority of the bureaucratic organization, it shares traditional elements to the extent that the police represent a normative order, and can communicate to society with the language of symbolic values rather than only through punitive enforcement. At the same time, the institutional role is strongest in its use of rituals and common symbols—communication and negotiation over values, norms, desirable outcomes etc. can take the police officer out of this role and recast him or her as something beyond the institution, as someone in a permanent liminal state (Turner 1967, 1969, see also Drummond 2016) who is not quite one thing or another, as both a part of the community, sharing broad notions of ‘community values’ and context but also as heir to the hegemonic institutionalized perspective of the state and its skepticism towards compromise or haggling.

2.5.2 Situational and Personal Sources of Authority

“…all policemen will agree on this point, methods that simply follow universalistic rules are also ordinarily ill considered. Thus, very often one hears officers explaining that while some procedure is normally indicated, in ‘this particular situation’ the norm must be suspended in favor of certain particular considerations.” (Bittner 1970: 89–90)

Institutional authority is considered here both based on the expectations citizens have of the police and the presentation of a specific, related, image by the police themselves. Dramaturgically, not every presentation of institutional authority can be effective, and not every situation is seen by police as suitable for such a presentation. Goldsmith (2010) notes that:

Appearing ‘normal’ is becoming more challenging for police. Police performances today are more ‘subject to disruption’ than previously. Impression management is less within the control of the police or indeed government authorities than before… The police are no longer the only actors, nor do they control all elements of stage production. (917)

While this is primarily intended to refer to the availability of cell phones and social networking to share images of police misconduct, these forms already imply the availability of critical understandings of resistance to the ‘normal’ police authority. The argument that impression management is often out of the hands of the police reaffirms the importance of how police present themselves within interactions. Further, it suggests the important point that the institutional role of the police is an ideal type bureaucratic / interactive fiction: applying fixed institutional roles to differing circumstances, individuals, and settings will lead to a variety of outcomes, some of which may simply look bad for the police (regardless of to what extent the decisions made were justified or in line with proper procedure.) (cf. Linneman 2017) A pure institutional role cannot actively be taken, (Blumer 1966, cf. Goffman 1981) just as “formal structures represent an ideally possible, but practically unattainable state of affairs.” (Bittner 1965: 242) The institution role is based on—and attempts to reinforce—the appearance of the formal structures of policing, but is also limited by the intangibility of those structures. (cf. Bernard et al. 2005) The more entangled a police officer becomes in a situation, the more the abstract and fixed categories that conform to that role will weaken and become ‘unrealistic’ to those involved in the interaction; the officer will become more visible as a person within a role. The institutional role functions based on its association with authority; in line with Weber’s observations on authority (1958, cf. Spencer 1970), its ‘polar opposite’ is a social norms approach, which in this case would fit more strongly to the personal role. An individual who is fully recognized based on individual characteristics and personal relationships and also happens to be a police officer might still be able to perform policing tasks which involve friends or family, but would not be able to maintain the ‘bureaucratic fiction’ of the institutional role (at least not without risking role strain and the violation of some general social norms about how one is expected to act towards friends and family.) A personal role in the context of policing is, of course, equally an ideal type construction, in the sense that not only every relationship, but every imaginable situation, would involve a different understanding of the specific role of the individual.

Institutional roles erode through interaction and exposure to various types of interactions—individuals are forced to accept ‘social realities’ or risk awkward, absurd, and possibly conflict-prone situations, e.g. when a police officer is unwilling to ‘break character’ when greeted by someone who knew them prior to the encounter, or is unwilling to admit that a mistake was made even when it is obvious to all present. (cf. Van Maanen 1973, Skolnick 1985) Personal roles became confused or strained when they are involved in situations which involve the police and some level of formal structure. Institutional roles, specifically as an ideal type construction, are anticipated and acted towards by citizens, specifically in brief, distant, or non-engaged encounters (i.e. when citizens, merely seeing a police officer or the suggestion of police presence, modify their behavior) and common police practices seem geared towards maintaining this role and avoiding challenging this institutional assumption.⁷

At a theoretical level, this involves a pull towards institutional roles, as citizens will essentially have no alternative but to view the police within this generalized frame, and even as it erodes as a communicative frame, it still accurately represents the hierarchy and power-dynamics of the situation; even cases where personal relationships are involved will involve a tendency to make overtures towards institutional roles, both to satisfy defined institutional demands and goals (i.e. a reported crime must still be handled and reported as a crime, regardless of who the victim is) and to consciously avoid the appearance of selective treatment of a conflict of interest. (Macintyre and Prenzler 1998) At the same time, this institutional role will erode and be contextualized resulting in a new situational role, lying on a generalized spectrum between the poles of institutional and personal roles. Situational roles, and the forms of authority they convey, are highly individualized and need to be constantly negotiated: they represent an injection of ‘personal’ characteristics into situations which could otherwise be institutionally defined using formal categories, representing both ‘concessions’ by officers to the fact that the purely institutional role is not tenable as well as conscious choices in tactics and style to allow for a more realistic, overt, and personal form of negotiation: of course, both parties are likely aware that a police officer can unilaterally claim an institutional role at any point, meaning that the overt negotiations, friendly requests, and small talk by police is often more dramatized than authentic: the use of situational roles allows more flexibility in police interactions, resisting (or rejecting) the use of strict formal categories of actors, incidents, and outcomes (without rejecting the ability to later re-implement them.) Of interest are the practices used by police to establish different forms of situational authority as well as practices to assert or maintain their institutional authority.

2.6 Community Policing and Policing a Community

The dominant ideology of policing in the US, UK and (with some caveats) Germany today is community-oriented policing. Declaring this an official ideology should not, of course, be conflated with a change in the actual practice of police work; the NYPD and other major US police departments have become infamous for touting community-oriented policing while relying on strategies of zero-tolerance, stop and frisk, and aggressive intervention which undermine the emphasis on community cooperation suggested by proponents of community policing. (Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001, Manning 2003) Community-policing as an ideology is best considered as a form of image work, as communications policing (Ericson et al. 1993) which attempts to alter the image of the police organizationally and as social actors in the perceptions of some residents in a way that better allows the police to perform the work which is valued within the policing organization and/or institution. Additionally, a great deal of the focus within the broader realm of community policing has been on strategies and tactics such as crime mapping, ‘hot spot’ policing and other (ideally) more effective versions of traditional proactive forms of policing with new terms such as “intelligence-led policing” or “smart policing.” (Manning 2012, Feltes 2014, Trujillo and Vitale 2019) This is not to suggest that community values, input or partnerships play no role in contemporary policing: in fact, they have often been shown to do so (Jenkins and DeCarlo 2015) including in the present case. The major discrepancy is whether this is a practical and applicable theory of policing or simply an attempt to turn the spotlight onto a different part of the stage.

Kelling and Coles (1996), though ultimately advocating for community-oriented policing, pose questions of how this paradigm can be identified or implemented which raise further questions about how it differs from ‘traditional’ policing:

’What constitutes community policing?’ When departments tack overtime foot or bicycle patrol onto an otherwise unchanged 911 strategy – even with a specific mandate to restore order in certain neighborhoods – does this constitute community policing? Does having eight or so community officers out of a total of 400 police officers mean that a department has implemented community policing? Is aggressive order maintenance coupled with a strong anticrime orientation, as undertaken by the NYPD, antithetical to community policing? (157-158) In reality, community policing is nothing less than a completely new paradigm, in which a focus on crime prevention replaces the old reactive policing model. (158)

Community policing in Germany is primarily relevant for three reasons:

• 1) A significant deal of the (international) policing literature either accepts community-policing assumptions, challenges those assumptions, or examines modern policing against this backdrop of organizational reform and image work;

• 2) Community policing has been either officially or tacitly accepted within German policing (Feltes 2014) paralleling (with a delay) the transition away from policing as the protection of state interests to a generalized service-provider orientation (Frevel 2003, Kreissl 2008, Behrendes 2013, Dübbers 2015, Ohder and Schöne 2018, see also Behr 2000b);

• 3) The most (organizationally, if not locally) visible element of German community-oriented policing is the use of special units or assigned officer roles as community-contact officers, including the Brandenburger Revierpolizei; the earliest versions or precursors of these units could be found in West Berlin after 1974, but the Eastern precursor was the Abschnittsbevollmächtiger⁸ or ABV, established in 1952 based on the Soviet model. In the police organization studied well over half of working Revierpolizei officers had begun as ABVs and generally described their work simply as a continuation with new symbols.

The first part speaks to the triadic nature of the term police: it can refer to the institution in a systemic or cultural sense (i.e. American or German police, or even police as a general concept), to a specific organization at a defined jurisdictional level (such as the Newark Police Department, Rutgers University Police Department, Polizei Hessen [the State Police of Hessen], or Polizeipräsideum Nordhessen [one of six jurisdictional divisions in the state of Hessen]), and to individual officers, whether considered in the abstract or as roles, as working individuals performing different forms of police work, or as fully-fledged individuals with lives, interests, and opinions that extend beyond (but may also be reflected in) their work. These distinctions are important in how they present differing concepts of image work—the image of which ‘police’ is being managed?—as well as how they speak to the different conceptions of relations between police and community (at the same time, community can similarly be constructed at varying levels.)

The second point is relevant only to the extent that community policing has tended to guide police image campaigns within Germany in the context of a transition to a ‘service model,’ but little—though still very significant—empirical research has examined changes in terms of policing practices and everyday interactions. (cf. Behr 2000, 2006) Though this might not be attributable to the implementation of community-policing (or its rhetoric), a general consensus seems to exist that German police are overall ‘friendlier’ and less aggressive than their American, British, or European counterparts (Endruweit 1979, Hunold 2011, Lukas and Gauthier 2011, Hunold et al. 2016, cf. Klukkert et al. 2009); this point should not be overstated, however, and is only made here to suggest that the differences between policing in Germany (and more particularly within specific organizations, states, regions, and cities within Germany) may not be linearly related to the adoption of a US model of community policing but rather that deeper cultural and structural factors may just as easily play a role, and that the relatively successful adoption of this philosophy or ideology may be more due to its ease of fit to the existing realities and extant common images of policing than any changes resulting from its implementation. To this point it should be noted that, unlike the comparatively younger police in Hessen with whom I’ve had contact, police officers in Brandenburg in non-administrative positions encountered through the study were rarely if ever familiar with the formalized concepts of community-policing, “Broken Windows” theory, etc., and did not generally describe their work as based on a specific theory beyond a ‘common sense’ view of how to maintain order while avoiding conflict. (cf. Crank 1994)

Community policing emerged as a cultural reaction to the increasing problematization and politicization of crime in the US and UK throughout the 1970 s and 1980 s. (cf. Hall et al. 1978) Though reform has essentially been a constant within Anglo-American policing, community policing was firmly within a trend of attempting to distance the image of policing away from one of an impersonal bureaucracy lacking in concern for residents, alongside similar but less influential ‘movements’ such as team policing and problem-oriented policing. (1990) Chiefly associated with the “Broken Windows” theory put forth by James Q. Wilson and George Kelling in 1982, community policing came to dominate the rhetoric and public relations strategies of first the NYPD and soon almost all major US departments. Critics including Peter Manning emphasize that community policing is more rhetoric than reality, as the tactics that have come to define it, particularly stop and frisk and zero-tolerance, bear little resemblance to the ideological tenets of the approach beyond an emphasis on ‘taking minor crimes seriously.’ While the tactical or mechanistic basis of Broken Windows cited a great deal of interactionist and ethnographic field work (Kelling 1999) and attempted to reconcile the image of the police with the realities of street-level policing, the image of policing that was offered as a replacement was hardly ‘softer.’ (cf. Harcourt 2001) Broken Windows emphasized the idea that police needed local knowledge to know which problems were ‘serious’ and by showing concern could effectively involve the community, rather than following the stricter institutional model of only involving the community within the victim-offender-witness triad. It also emphasized the role of the ‘beat cop’ and foot patrol—the mainstay elements of East German ABVs and community-oriented officers in Germany today. Kelling and Coles (1996) discuss Kelling’s observations of the realities of city policing:

Relatively little training or guidance was given to foot patrol officers, who were pretty much left to their own devices on beats. Yet in the myriad variety of neighborhoods officers patrolled, Kelling found that they acted in a surprisingly uniform fashion. Immersing themselves in the lives of their neighborhoods, officers were well-known, often by name, to area regulars – residents, merchants, and street people alike – and knew many of these individuals by name as well. Foot patrol officers kept abreast of local problems, assumed special responsibility for particular locations or persons, developed regular sources of information (apartment managers, merchants, street persons), became regulars at local restaurants, checked “hazards” such as bars… and in other ways came to know and be known on their beats. Finally, in collaboration with and on behalf of citizens, officers established “rules of the street” that were commonly known and widely accepted by “respectable people” as well as “street people.” (17)

This establishing of these ‘rules of the street,’ not only fixed rules but also defining when, where, and, presumably, by whom, certain actions could be taken has elsewhere been defined as a core policing activity within the context of order maintenance. (Bittner 1967, Meehan 1992, Behr 2000) The paradox here is that Wilson, Kelling, and Coles argue for a new model of policing based on the argument that it is already being done. The appeal to traditional authority is clear in much of the pleas for a broader implementation of community policing with the implication that prior to the 1960 s policing was comparatively conflict free and police officers enjoyed significantly more respect within their communities. (Harcourt 2001, cf. Crank 1994, Belina 2016) The goal seems to be to apply this mythologized view of the past to the present. In terms of practical work, it is worth asking to what extent the lack of resources or departmental attention served as the impetus for officers to look for help and seek a secondary mandate among the residents they were assigned to police.

Manning (2003) writes that:

Any control strategy is profoundly moral because its operation reflects social resources, the norms and values available applicable to a situation, as well as the intention of the participants to maintain the appearance of moral conformity. (19–20)

The key to the Broken Windows model in particular is the assumption that disorder and feelings of risk or fear are more relevant to stakeholders (i.e. the local community) than the institutionally-defined goals of criminal and ordinance enforcement. This perspective is not new to studies of the police, but the question remains of how disorder is defined—the crucial but suspect assumption here is that most communities will share similar expectations and perspectives and that these will in turn be recognized and internalized by local police. This is moral work of the highest degree, and a significant amount of criticism has addressed how emphasizing disorder leads to police targeting the socially marginal, though this is no means unique to Broken Windows-inspired policing. (Quinton 2011, Marat 2019, cf. de Maillard et al. 2016)

German police, regardless of whether the rhetoric of community policing is invoked as such, were found by de Maillard et al. (2016)—in comparison to French police—to be more motivated to engage in order maintenance tasks, and more likely to see peacekeeping and order-maintenance as ‘real’ police work. (see also Hunold et al. 2010 for an evolving picture of policing within German communities) At the same time it must be noted that, unlike the French (or US or UK) situation, the policing of ‘minor disorder’ is relegated to a separate office, the Ordnungsamt, meaning that German police officers arguably have much more leeway in choosing when to involve themselves in ‘low’ tasks and when to overlook or delegate the situation to another agency. The Revierpolizei in Brandenburg, in particular, have a broad mandate but few specified expectations, and the type of tasks performed often overlapped with the work of the Ordnungsamt.⁹ As has been found elsewhere in Germany, the community officers of the Revierpolizei tend to emphasize maintaining good relations with community members over crime-fighting, but in the same way ‘minor disorder’ problems are sometimes turned over or left to the Ordnungsamt who are more effectively able to present their work as institutionally and bureaucratically necessary. (cf. Hunold 2015) While Kelling and Coles discourage focusing specially on using special units (1996: 160) the Revierpolizei and similar community-contact officers in Germany constitute a more hybrid form in that, even as a ‘special unit,’ they perform essentially regular policing duties, with full police (and investigative) authority.

The central but easily overlooked question of community policing is then by which standards police develop ‘rules of the street’ or understandings of community values. The ontology of police expectations of normality is beyond the scope of an ethnographic study, but expressions and rhetorical invocations of normalcy and deviance were key to the present analysis. Additionally, the involvement or exclusion of community members and groups, particularly in the use of formal, semi-formal, or informal partnerships (cf. Ohder and Schöne 2018) was explored both as a practical matter and in how the police (symbolically) legitimate communal and community action.

2.7 Violence and the Police

Violence, alongside crime, is one of the strongest associated symbols of policing, and even in its absence—in this case, its relative rarity in terms of actual occurrences among the Revierpolizei in Brandenburg—it plays a significant role in how stories are told and how many encounters are structured. This concerns not just the use of violence—sanctioned or not—by police, a primary fixation of predictive quantitative analyses of policing, but to a greater degree the relationship of violence to the concept of a police self-image. One of the most-cited ‘findings’ of the ethnographic literature is Egon Bittner’s description of the core powers of the police stemming from their ability to use force, but as Bittner made no claims applying this to police in general outside of the inner city area he observed, it is worth exploring how useful this assumption is in exploring policing in a relatively low-crime, low-violence rural area. (cf. Manning 2003) The idea that symbolic violence, that a form of “bureaucratically symbolized communication” (Bittner 1970: 39), underpins every interaction between police and community, between police officers and residents, remains present, and is worth exploring particularly in how violence is dramatized and symbolically indicated without the use of physical force. While one stated goal at the outset of this research was to avoid a fixation on violence, the concept proved relevant enough even in cases where its absence seemed telling, for example in police officers actively downplaying the relevance of violence to their job and specifically contrasting themselves with their understanding of police in the US.

Violence plays essentially a two-sided role with regards to policing within a community, depending on who ‘owns’ the violence. Violence as a problem is, as suggested, easily definable by the police and easily used to justify the role and actions of the police; this becomes problematic when violence occurs from within a community that the police (as an organization or as individuals) does not want to problematize. While many minor offenses can often by rhetorically ‘written off’ by police officers with simple narratives such as ‘boys will be boys’ violence is often more problematic to narratively frame, particularly when the victim comes from the same community or background. Violence employed by the police is equally problematic when the target of that violence cannot effectively be disregarded or framed as an outsider—culturally police officers are often visible at either the extremes of openly celebrating their use of violence, particularly in the US, or attempting to minimize it or treat it ‘clinically,’ as an emotionally neutral experience reserved for the proper situation. (Goldsmith 2010, 2015, cf. Rumbaut and Bittner 1979) The fact that violence is typically rare for the more generalist officers representative of small town policing—including the Brandenburger Revierpolizei—means that incidents of violence became harder to put into a narrative frame or to incorporate into a policing self-identity without reverting to the traditional, stereotypical ‘us vs. them’ mentality considered characteristic of many urban departments or special units. (cf. Skolnick 1971, Van Maanen 1974, Behr 2000, Marks 2004) The potential for violence, regardless of its actual use, retains its salient symbolism for policing, and it is up to individual officers and agencies to manage this symbolism in ways that communicate with the public at various levels without coming across as threatening, reckless, or even sadistic: this is one of the key challenges facing modern policing in an era of social media and community policing.

One of the few consistent beliefs in Anglo-American criminology is the idea that the police, are, despite popular images of the police firmly establishing them as, for example, the cops perpetually opposed to the robbers, not truly a law enforcement institution, but rather an institution oriented towards the maintenance of order which includes among its toolkit and occasional area of responsibility the enforcement of the criminal law. To sociologists, who were crucial in establishing this understanding of the police role in society (cf. Banton 1964, Bittner 1963, Westley 1970, Manning and Van Maanen 1978) the reason that the police have, essentially, let themselves be defined primarily based on this one aspect of their work, is obvious. Laws are easily defensible, and once invoked are not easily dispelled outside of a courtroom or in communications between attorneys and prosecutors. Order, on the other hand, raises the specter of control: whose order?

2.8 Whose Order? Police Culture and Policing Norms

“To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.”

• Albert Camus, The Rebel (1950)

Police officers use a variety of coercive, persuasive and negotiation-based practices to both define and, based on that definition of the situation, resolve the conflict or elements of the situation considered problematic. Official narratives are created to reconcile the problematic behavior which the police attempted to hinder, sanction, or alter with formal policy, the law, and community standards. (Meehan 1986, Crank 1994, Manning 1995, 2012) Yet these narratives—by design—do not necessarily accurately reflect the reasoning behind the choice to intervene or use different tactics or approaches, and the creation of official reports is better seen as an institution practice intended to fit actual practices to the pre-existing frames required at an institutional level. (cf. Johnson 1970, Loftus 2009b, see also Fish 1989) The implications of the literature on police discretion are that police do not simply enforce the law as it is written, for a variety of reasons, because the law itself is an abstract that needs to be actively applied to a situation. (Turk 1966, Bittner 1970, McGowan 1972) The modern approach to professional police work—community-policing initiatives notwithstanding—emphasizes preventive patrol mixed with calls for service, and the gap between citizen demands for action and clearly demarcated lawbreaking can be significant; more relevant, as suggested by the use of discretion as a core policing tactic, is the use of selective enforcement or under-enforcement, potentially (though not necessarily) in response to community norms. (Bittner 1967, 1974, Schubert 1979, Kelling 1999, Manning 1988) Reiss (1971) notes that “many citizens have only a vague understanding of the difference between civil, private, and criminal matters.” (77) The question here, then, is how police respond to situations where citizen or community demands are a mismatch with legal categories defining which tasks or concerns are within the purview of policing. A broader typology would encompass situations in which police are required to intervene, situations in which police are able but not required to do something, and cases in which the police have no authority or ability to do much at all. Cases of the second type would best display to what extent community values, situational factors, and local connections (such as personal relationships or unofficial ‘understandings’ between agencies) impact what issues and situations become ‘normal’ police work. (cf. Ohder and Schöne 2018)

If policing decisions about how to handle any particular encounter—or even whether to get involved at all—cannot be claimed to be based specifically and solely on the criminal law as written or public ordinances, what norms, values, pressures, or sources of knowledge guide these decisions? Skolnick (1971) has described the police “working personality” as an outcome of police occupational culture and the unique societal positioning of police, in which officers:

tend to develop ways of looking at the world distinctive to themselves, cognitive lenses through which to see situations and events. The strength of these lenses may be weaker or stronger depending on certain conditions, but they are grounded upon the same axis. (42)

The significant literature on police culture—primarily based on the US, UK and other English-speaking countries—has presented a generally conservative, tradition-oriented policing culture, though consistent findings have been a tendency for officers to become more tolerant and empathetic as they become older or more experienced. (Chan 1997, Paoline 2001, 2003, Loftus 2009b) The original presentation of policing culture as both monolithic and homogeneous has also increasingly been challenged. (Reussi-Ianni 1983, Fielding 1988, Manning 2005, Behr 2006, Mensching 2007, Champeau 2015) The strongest impact of policing cultures seems to be in establishing practices for maintaining the outward appearance of unity, even when individual members of policing organizations may share few or none of the dominant perspectives of the respective subculture or when the relevant cultural networks are better defined by their conflict and disorganization than by unity. (Reuss-Ianni 1983, Cancino and Enriquez 2004, Behr 2006, 2018, Conti 2009)

2.8.1 Culture and Institution

Organizational factors have also consistently been cited as determinants of police decision-making, especially in relation to community values or concerns and the nature of police culture. (Wilson 1968) Significant differences in arrest rates and how officers treat certain types of encounters have been found between policing organizations, particularly when comparing urban to rural districts. (Crank 1990) The distinction between institution and organization is particularly relevant here, with institution referring to a broader conceptualization of what policing is that is then enforced through the structure of the specific relevant organization, which is interprets and applies an institutional framework but is also more directly responsible to more concrete structural agents, i.e. political agencies and (if indirectly) community. (cf. Crank 1990, see also Meyer and Rowan 1977) Essentially this means that police organizations will face constraints on their actions and pressures to act both from local sociopolitical factors and actors, e.g. a mayor or city council who view car accidents as a serious problem which the police need to deal with, but that the settings, issues, and concepts involved, as well as the range of actions and solutions which would even be considered possible, will be set by the institutional background of policing. Crime, certain types of dangers and risks (car accidents, drug use) and certain types of ‘deviant’ public behaviors will be considered legitimate issues for the police to deal with, while others (e.g. pollution as a health risk, plagiarism by university students, cutting in line in the supermarket) are likely to either not even come into consideration as a case for the police or to have their assignment as a task resisted by the police (by the overall organization or by individual figures, be it the chief of police or a patrol officer asked to perform a “waste of time” task.) The organization here interprets and reconciles its own view of the idealized institution—for example, it would be rare to find a police department which didn’t consider crime a major focus of police work both in official statements and in officers’ private statements, even in areas utterly lacking in recorded crime—with the specific local concerns, with significant variance in how responsive departments might be to outside actors. (cf. Wilson 1968, Crank and Langworthy 1996) In doing so departments establish standards and policies which mirror broader institutional concerns, but in practice function more as statements of values and evidence of professionalism: it remains generally agreed upon that the bureaucratic products of the organizational interpretation of institutional concerns are not the major driver of practical on-the-street police work. (Van Maanen 1974, Manning 1977, Meyer and Rowan 1977, Waddington 1993, De Lint 1999, Willis and Mastrofski 2011)

If the police do not make their decisions based solely on rules, regulations, and the criminal law, then upon what basis do they decide what actions to take and when? Avoiding overly deterministic answers that ignore human agency or the fact that police encounters function as processes, the most relevant sources of police norms are still often considered to be institutional: the habitus of policing establishes a basis of knowledge that guide not just in decision-making but in establishing general goals. (Chan 2004) This refers both to the more formal bureaucratic and political structures that can directly apply pressure or impart rewards, but also to the more informal cultural understanding of police and the police identity or self-image shared by officers and celebrated, challenged, poked fun at, and imitated in various ways in a variety of contexts. Police culture is one of the most significant topics within studies of policing as it has often been cited as a hindrance to reform (Niederhoffer 1967, Westley 1970, Skolnick 1971, Crank 1998, Cancino and Enriquez 2004, Loftus 2009a, Reiner 2010), yet it is also increasingly recognized as reflexive, flexible, and more varied internally than it is presented externally or seen in mass media. (Waddington 1999, Paoline 2003, Manning 2012, Marks et al. 2016, see also Goldsmith 1990) Fielding (1994), while critical of the more ‘hegemonic’ masculine culture most commonly associated with policing (in this case in the UK but not entirely dissimilar from that identified in the US, Germany, or many other jurisdictions) emphasizes that this culture is not universal, maintains many inherent contradictions that only come into conflict in circumstances in which parts of that culture are challenged or relied upon, and that a great deal of police culture is relegated to symbolism and performances in break rooms and canteens; hence, “canteen culture.” What police culture primarily seems to offer is a set of narratives, symbols, and perspectives—and more recently sociological efforts have gone toward interpreting these in order to better understand the police culture not just as a problem to be overcome but as a culture which relates to, explains, and aligns (but does not immediately determine) what police do in society. (cf. Shearing and Ericson 1991, Fletcher 1996, Ford 2003, Cockcroft 2005, Campeau 2015, Kurtz and Upton 2017, 2019, see also Fine 1984a, Burke 1989)

2.8.2 Two Perspectives on Police Culture

Two contrasting perspectives on the occupational culture of policing both reiterate a similar idea: that how police talk about their work and express their self-image of policing is generally inconsistent with the formalized, bureaucratic idea of policing maintained at the institutional level (and which serves as the basis for legitimizing what police do.) The first perspective has viewed policing culture as monolithic, as masculine and conflict-oriented, and as expressing a series of values which effectively undermine the concept of the criminal justice ‘system,’ in which ‘real police work’ is rare and the best adaption is for officers to adapt a ‘cover your ass’ approach to avoid the hostile gaze of supervisors and outsiders. (Skolnick 1971, 1985, Niederhoffer 1969, Westley 1970, Rubinstein 1973, Van Maanen 1974, Behr 2000, 2017, Cancino and Enriquez 2004, Reiner 2010, Cockcroft 2013) This view could be described as emphasizing the structure of policing culture, from which norms and values are expressed and models for policing behavior are provided. This perspective has tended to present the (typically singular) police culture as a hindrance to reform, and as this disparity between how police view (and do) their work and how it is expected to be done (as well as presented) as the central problem of policing requiring both conceptual change as well as structural change to reconcile these differences. (Sparrow 2016, cf. Kreissl 2008) This view of policing culture has been mirrored to a great extent in popular culture, particularly since the 1960 s and 1970 s, in which increasing political and cultural differences within the US and Western Europe and the injection of crime into the realm of politics primarily through the Nixon and Reagan administrations was reflected by an increasingly ‘modern conservative’ policing culture. (Reiner and O’Connor 2015, Bielejewski 2016, cf. Manning 2012)

The second perspective emphasizes the variety of policing cultures, and their dependency on local and organizational factors in determining how culture is acted out. While both perspectives have been at least to some degree inspired by interactionist approaches, this perspective has focused on the process of doing culture rather than on viewing culture as a fixed structure. The variety of policing cultures has been identified both through the variety of policing practices, dependent on locality, context, and broader cultural background (Bittner 1967, Wilson 1968, Reiss 1971, Muir 1979, Punch 1979, Cockcroft 2005, Loftus 2009a/b, Campeau 2015) Without necessarily challenging the idea of a ‘dominant’ policing culture, some have instead identified a variety of sub-cultures which co-exist or even overlap, suggesting that the dominant and most visible culture may be specifically related to routine patrol work and the lower levels of the police hierarchy. (Reuss-Ianni 1983, Fielding 1994, Behr 2000, Mensching 2007, van Hulst 2013, Hendriks and van Hulst 2015) Both perspectives, however, still suggest that policing cultures are both slow and resistant to change, arguably as a result of the type of work (Loftus 2009a/b) as well as to the existence of strong traditions of continuity and stable images and vocabularies, making it essentially easier for police to tell the same stories. (cf. Crank 1998, see also Burke 1989)

2.8.3 Narratives in Police Culture

Stories are central to understanding police culture, though what they mean for police culture—apart from the question of what police culture actually is—is a question with many conflicting answers. A significant amount of otherwise excellent research into the cultural background and institutional setting of policing was challenged by Waddington’s (1999) argument that, essentially, what police say is not the same as what they do, and that the connection between the two is likely more complex than most of the deterministic views of policing culture which continue to guide policy. Shearing and Ericson (1991) have suggested viewing police culture as “a story book,” which “would mean examining police stories as stories, police myths as myths and police anecdote as anecdotes, that is, as figurative forms with their own logic.” (489) Though rarely considered on its own, there is a significant literature on the forms, varieties, and functions of policing narrative, ranging from the use of justifications and providing accounts in cases of violence or misconduct (Van Maanen 1980, Hunt 1985, Hunter 1999) to the use of ‘war stories’ to enlighten or entertain other officers (Van Maanen 1974, Reuss-Ianni 1984, Fletcher 1996, Ford 2003, Kurtz and Upton 2017) to the use of narrative practices and rhetoric to define situations and establish authority. (Muir 1980, Meehan 1992, Kidwell 2006, Peterson 2008, Mangold 2011)

Police narratives can be analyzed from at least four analytically useful perspectives: dramaturgically, that is, as a performance intended to maintain common ground or group cohesion or to increase the status of the performer; functionally, as a coping mechanism or form of boundary maintenance; culturally, that is, expressing and exploring values and establishing an identity, whether shared or individually, and instructively or practically, that is, as a method of transmitting knowledge and experience that can directly applied as a detached system of knowledge by the audience or recipient. These first three forms overlap significantly when the focus remains on the interaction and the background of the storytelling—whether or not the teller truly believes the story is of at most secondary-relevance, though the practical use of stories for sharing knowledge suggests that the usefulness of the story can often play a role that rivals the performative nature. Functional narratives are essentially reducible to specific dramaturgic forms and forums: where can police talk ‘as police’ and express concerns and frustrations that would be differently (and most likely negatively) interpreted by a ‘mainstream’ audience? To the extent that functional stories have been continuously attributed to dominant or even ideal typical policing cultures (Chan 1997, 2004), as well as to the ‘default’ war stories of the canteen culture (Waddington 1999, van Hulst 2014) they are hermeneutically difficult to separate into form or function, but rather—for the purposes of this study—of relevance for the dramaturgical aspects: how do police talk about stress, violence, failure, success, the community, and citizens, embedded within which types of stories?

The dramaturgical and cultural perspectives as defined here differ primarily in their disciplinary backgrounds—the dramaturgical emphasizes the use of rhetoric and the forms of expression, while the cultural puts more stock in the use of moral statements and the establishment of ‘normal’ behaviors through speech acts and the use of ‘common sense’ as an underpinning of truth. (Geertz 1975) Both perspectives speak—though in different ways—to the establishment of an identity, as well as to the ascription of identity and motives to others. Kenneth Burke (1969) describes the creation, through rhetoric, of “consubstantialities” (21) between elements—the establishment of common ground by linking concepts, ideas, symbols, and identities together. Rhetoric has the strategic and political ability “to bestow or to deny value, to create allegiances, to promise, to form alliances to exclude and to include” (Glaeser 2000: 48) which is primarily indicated, according to Burke, by the establishing of sameness or differentness, by creating or severing connections between things, people, places, and events. As policing—as a Weberian institution—works through classification and the application of pre-defined types, police officers bear a great deal of power simply through their ability to define things as of a type, whether ‘criminals,’ ‘good citizens,’ ‘suspicious activity’ or ‘unacceptable risk.’ (cf. Feest and Blankenburg 1972) Police have a symbolic power, “a power of constituting the given through utterances, of making people see and believe, of confirming or transforming the vision of the world and, thereby, action on the world and thus the world itself, an almost magical power which enables on to obtain the equivalent of what is obtained through force (whether physical or economic), by virtue of the specific effort of mobilization.” (Bourdieu 1991: 170, also cited in Loader 1997, see also Austin 1965, Walker 1996)

Defining at the abstract is easy, but the potential for narrative (as well as role) conflict emerges when police come close to the subjects of definition; ‘symbolic assailants’ (Skolnick 1971) or a hostile community are easy to slip into narratives as background or explanations for the irrational acts of undefined quality-less characters, but become may not always work as well when applied to a more defined personality, to an individual known to the police to even be minimally capable of change or as someone who can be reasoned with. If police define themselves as part of a working community actively engaged in modeling everyday social norms (as community police generally and Broken Windows specifically suggest), then officers may need to either develop more complex narrative explanations of why some individuals became the target of police intervention or else set strict boundaries for how a ‘mainstream’ member of a community can become an outsider. (cf. Becker 1963) Of course, at the institutional level police hold no responsibility to provide accounts, and from an institutional perspective there are no ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ apart from those authorized to enforce laws and regulations and those who are solely on the receiving end, but the concept of policing culture is at its core centered on the idea that police require some sort of identity to give meaning to the work they do, giving shareable (if not necessarily shared) meaning to ideas ranging from the community, problems—including individuals and types of individuals considered to be problematic—and the institution and organization of the police itself.

One of the most ubiquitous examples is the basic commonality of policing, in which police officers across districts, states, and even national borders tend to, at least at a symbolic level, identity and empathize with one another. At the same time, opponents of the police in particular frame the police this way (witnessed by the common and transnational use of the graffitied slogan “ACAB”—“all cops are bastards.”) Somewhat surprisingly, the consubstantiality of policing was downplayed in the observation of and discussions with community-oriented policing officers, with a great deal of narratives separating individual or organizational experiences and ideals from the ideal typical images of US policing as well as from ‘big city’ policing in general. While it is less surprising that officers portray themselves as decision-making individuals who learn from their experience rather than bureaucratic automatons who make decisions by rote, the variety of individualized narratives and contextualization of the police, individually and as an agency, within a community both challenged dominant constructions of a policing culture and worldview but also supported some theorized prerequisites for fulfilling social control roles, such as the need to be able to (narratively) differentiate between predictable and unpredictable behaviors and risks, and the reconciliation of situational decision-making and personal knowledge with institutional demands and regulations.

For the most part, the dramaturgical and cultural perspectives will be considered together, with attention paid to the risk of conflating the way in stories are told with what those stories mean. A necessary—though not always as obvious as would be suggested—distinction is between instrumental narratives, i.e. those used within police work in front of an audience of non-police to ascribe roles or establish a form of control, and demonstrative narratives, which are superficially told ‘for the sake of being told,’ encompassing a great deal of ‘canteen talk’ (allowing for the presumed functional role of that talk in establishing group solidarity, common images, etc.) but especially narratives that were presented to me as a field researcher either unprovoked or in response to questioning. (Overt) dramaturgical narratives often took place in common settings, with mixed audiences or within larger interactions, and their role as action was plausibly interpretable—for example, the contrast between police speaking of facts of an ongoing case abstractly (“the victim,” “the offender”) or including personal details and thereby creating a less two-dimensional image of the person as social actor often indicated a shift in the authoritative presentation of the officer, a way of speaking as a person moderately constrained by a role and its demand and expectations, rather than speaking directly from that role.

These demonstrative narratives are not simply face-value statements of beliefs or values but are rather being communicated (at best) between varying institutional frames with corresponding expectations (and at worst simply reflect a ritual recitation of ‘high level’ policing institutional values.) Of course police officers speaking to a field researcher have an interest in presenting themselves in their best light—although a great deal of recounted stories were also of failures, of mistakes, of learning, and sometimes of regrets—but even allowing for the same rhetorical wiggle room that the dramaturgical approach allows for most personal interactions, the examination of how police present themselves as ‘good’ is enlightening as a demonstration of differing interpretable sets of values: how could police officers best present themselves and their work as effective in front of different audiences ranging from fellow officers, administration and supervisors, local government officials, private citizens with varying formal and informal organizational affiliations such as hunters, volunteer firefighters, community festival organizers and volunteers, and bar regulars, as well as private citizens in random encounters, possibly even involving criminal complaints, and finally a field researcher from the US with significantly more experience with and knowledge of American police than their (East) German counterparts?

A common misstep in research into policing—particularly under the guise of criminology or criminal justice studies—has been to search for universals and regard the culture and worldview of policing as monolithic and unchanging. (Ford 2003) The examples cited and countless others are evidence of the diversity of policing practices and of a diversity of policing cultures, particularly when comparing police work, agencies, and officers across cultural or national borders. This is especially true when culture is considered not to be simply the stories told in certain cultural forums, but also the range of factors that aid police in making sense of their social environment and which practices should be implemented when and where. Policing takes places within spaces and communities, and even policing myths, classics, and legends need to be believably connected in some rhetorical way to the ‘true’ experiences of the audience. The question remains of what to do with this evidence of diverse practices: what can the stories that police tell tell us outside of the context in which they are told?

2.8.4 Stories and Local Knowledge

Practical narratives of policing transmit knowledge and experience but even these basic concepts can take very different forms: which elements are unique and which can be generalized or presumed? Which forms of knowledge provide a step-by-step guide for action or a checklist for idealized procedure, and which constitute a toolkit or tactical advice that can be selectively interpreted and applied by an officer who has the skills and experience to use it effectively? The divide between ‘craft’ and ‘profession,’ (however framed) essentially focuses on the differences in sources of knowledge for both conducting effective police work and how (i.e. on what basis) police work should be conducted. (Bayley and Bittner 1984) Using police culture as a source of police knowledge often overlooks the ‘mechanisms of action’ for how social problems, root causes, or local factors translate into specific incidents: stated policing values might be influential in defining certain generalized outcomes for certain generalized encounters as desirable, but it is important to identify in which ways policing (or other) cultural frameworks provide narratives for identifying ideal type actors linked to actions and contexts. Understandings—stories—of issues or problems, without changing the facts of the case, portray a “troublesome person” or a “troubled person” evoking different connections and solutions. (Gusfield 1989: 434) The basis for police interventions might be based primarily on legal considerations and crime as a social context, but if police officers identify the situation they are responding to, a ‘disorderly person’ in public harassing passersby, as one immediately linked to a ‘deeper’ social narrative, i.e. identifying the individual as someone with a known history of alcohol and/or mental problems, they might alter their interpretation of what an ‘ideal’ outcome is and not be content to simply resolve the incident by removing the irritation, i.e. forcibly removing the individual. In the same way, a great deal of public behavior which becomes the target of police intervention can be viewed as problematic because of the behavior—drug use is often framed this way with explanations ranging from addiction and the need for better treatment to individual or cultural moral failings—or as problematic primarily because it is public, in which case simply displacing that behavior to a less visible solution is not only institutionally acceptable due to the reduction in future complaints and public perceptions of ‘disorder’ (cf. Meehan 1992) but may also be personally, morally, considered a better alternative to the individual officer than a more punitive, even self-defeating, option such as arrest or a fine. ‘Exculpatory’ narratives were common in the case at hand, and the thinner wall between police—at least in terms of individual officers—and the community in which they serve could be considered as a significant factor here, though this is not necessarily always the case in small town or rural areas. (cf. Girtler 1980, Regoli and Poole 1980, Behr 1993, Weisheit et al. 1994, Young 1993, Pelfrey 2007) Falcone et al. (2002) describe ‘small-town’ police philosophy as following the idea that “deviance of any sort is seen first as a community problem to be addressed in the least invasive way, thus avoiding collateral damage the community.” (381) This raises the questions of how certain issues and actions are defined as community problems, which interventions are seen as less intrusive, and how the community itself is constructed and involved. (cf. Wooff 2015)

More general institutional frameworks outside of policing have laid claim to a great realm of social problems which often overlap with policing, meaning that a plethora of referral agencies can be involved in situations which the police interpret—or are forced to interpret—as falling within a more specialized realm. (Gusfield 1989, see also Sennett 1977) This ‘civilizing’ process of attributing responsibility to more and more identifiable problems (cf. Elias 1988) has been discussed with regard to policing, especially in terms of mental health and drug use (Bittner 1967b, Green 1997, Cooper et al. 2005, Sellers et al. 2005), but this formal distinction between police responsibility and the responsibility of other social agencies problematizes personal control or agency. Without viewing this as necessary a more desirable or more effective outcome, a third possibility—more common in a small town or rural setting—would be to handle the problem, or transfer responsibility for handling the problem, to networks of personal relationships, i.e. family or close friends. (Christie 1977, 2004) Other cases might simply involve police avoiding getting involved in problems which they don’t see as related to ‘real police work;’ Bittner (1967b: 279) refers, for example, to the avoidance of the emergency apprehension of individuals with reported mental illness as “doctrinal,” in that it was normal and expected but lacked explicit formulation and was simply seen as something outside the confines of policing. These variations in policing practices might be related to factors including (sub)cultural values, the self-image of the police and police officer, or everyday concerns or routines (e.g. responding to ‘mentally disturbed individual’ cases often require additional steps and paperwork that might result in unwanted overtime.) In some cases, though, they might also fall in line with local values or community expectations as well: the reticence of police to formally involve themselves into situations may also reflect an attempt to allow some problems to remain undiagnosed private issues. (cf. Sennett 1977) On the ownership of problems Gusfield (1989) writes that:

To “own” a problem is to be obligated to claim recognition of a problem and to have information and ideas about it given a high degree of attention and credibility, to the exclusion of others. To “own” a social problem is to possess the authority to name that condition a “problem” and to suggest what might be done about it. It is the power to influence the marshalling of public facilities – laws, enforcement abilities, opinion, goods and service – to help resolve the problem. To disown a problem is to claim that one has no such responsibility. (433)

Owning or disowning problems does not simply affect whether police need to deal with a specific issue or incident, but can also refer to whether they approach that problem from an institutional perspective—as something beyond a doubt of police concern, such as a serious assault—or as a community concern that could be dealt with by the police but alternatively by a variety of agencies, groups, or individuals.

Local knowledge is often stressed as a necessary element in both effectively policing neighborhoods or regions as well as in being aware of community concerns, tolerances, and prevailing norms. This is especially true within more recent community policing programs and the “Broken Windows” model. (Kelling and Coles 1996, Kelling 1999) Yet the concept of having ‘local knowledge’ is more often treated in a ‘common sense’ manner, in academic theory as well as in practical police work. (cf. McNulty 1994, see also Geertz 1975) From an interactionist perspective, it is insufficient to simply say that police have better knowledge of a place, its inhabitants, and local customs, mores, expectations, and values simply by virtue of spending time there on the job. (cf. Mawby 1991) Too much has already been explored in terms of the institutional backgrounds and competing sources of legitimacy and knowledge of the police to simply assume that knowledge can objectively be constructed and then linearly implemented into processes of police work: a better sociological understanding is necessary of how this knowledge is constructed, communicated, and implicated, and a great deal of these efforts seem to take place in the broad arena of police culture, through shared stories, ‘backstage presentations,’ parables, myths, anecdotes, and jokes, as well as official accounts, records and (more recently) social media. (Reuss-Ianni 1984, Crank 1994, 1998, Ford 2003, Chan 2004, Conti 2009, Goldsmith 2015)

Narratives used by police—whether more formally as part of ‘official knowledge,’ e.g. through training, or informally and privately—can be used to provide specific knowledge in the form of connections, associations, or expectations that may be useful in various ways to police officers on the job; this can include information about specific individuals and past criminal histories, relations between individuals and groups, attributions of individuals or groups (e.g. describing someone, or a specific identified group, as “violence-prone,”) expectations of what types of behaviors will or won’t be generally considered deviant in certain areas (and at which times and by which individuals, etc.) and how the intervention or presence of the police will be viewed and reacted to in certain neighborhoods and contexts. Alternatively, policing narratives can establish general rules for how things work or should work, making this type of knowledge universally implementable rather than only relevant to specific cases and contexts: this type of knowledge can often be found in practices such as attempting to determine when someone is lying or ‘acting suspicious,’ or in blanket statements such as, “shoplifters never carry weapons.” The overlap between these two types of lessons is not always clear, as a story of one specific incident can easily be generalized to refer to common patterns, but is relevant in that each appeals more to a different idea of how policing works: do police apply universal ideals, rules, and standards to a chaotic and fragmented cluster of societal and cultural realms, or do they adapt their understandings of what is normal and acceptable to the local community which they serve?¹⁰

Criticisms of the police often stem from the fact that the ‘universal knowledge’ generated and disseminated from police occupational cultures has often been found to have a strong middle-class bias. (cf. Wilson 1968) Complaints by ‘upstanding’ citizens are often taken more seriously—at least in terms of rhetoric and appearances—which easily lends itself to the appearance of bias (Marat 2019): the defense of this promoted by Wilson and Kelling (1982), and generally within many community policing initiatives, has been that actual community values tend to favor public order and the enforcement of the types of social norms that would often be described as “middle-class.” (see also Vollmer 1971, cf. Harcourt 2001)

2.9 Showing up and Saying the Lines: Dramaturgy and Liminality

The present study is an exploration of both the general concept of policing—as a practice of social control and as a socially embedded institution—as well as a situated instance of the performance of associated roles. The primary question raised both in regards to the question of negotiating authority as well as to the connection between community or society as a form of (structural) identity and the legitimization of (the process of) policing is essentially: who are the police? This question, though the answer will vary depending where one looks, cannot be answered purely based on rational theory or teleological conceptions of what the police should be, but instead requires an active participation in the meaning making that itself constitutes police work: the researcher must engage in participant-observation. (Herbert 1996, cf. Marks 2004, Wooff 2015) The roles that police officers take on are, regardless of theorizing or institutional demands and regulations, never fixed, if only for the fact that those who encounter police will have different, and conflicting, understandings and expectations of those roles. Secondly, those roles are not the entirety of what a ‘police officer’ is, as it must be considered that a role is purely a construct, essentially a metaphor. (cf. Burke 1989) Real people take on those roles and mold their actions and understands in consideration of the same, but do not shed the remainder of their identity. Policing reforms have tended to downplay this and separate the individual from the role, often by attempting to separate the individual outside the job from the officer on the job by repeatedly (and inconsistently) alternating the centralization and decentralization of police organization (Crank and Langworthy 1996, Smith and Somerville 2013), discouraging officers from living in the communities they police, exploiting cultural pressures for police officers to limit their social circles to other officers or ‘pro-police’ groups, and rarely taking strong institutional positions with regard to the established fact that officers wield a great deal of discretionary or decision-making power in their everyday work. (cf. Sparrow 2016)

While research on policing has tended to overrepresent metropolitan and inner-city police work (Klofas 2000), the extant literature on rural and small-town policing has painted a distinct enough picture that some authors have considered it essentially an entirely different beast, both in the nature of the work but especially in how that work is expressed through a defining occupational culture. (Young 1993, Falcone et al. 2002, Wooff 2015, Yarwood 2016) The interactional processes—the appeals to authority, the demands for acceptable narrative accounting and the performance of aligning actions, etc.—that characterize policing may be fundamentally the same, but rural policing substantially alters the situated background and context of those interactions to both allow different forms of interactions and restrict conventional forms of police action by imparting them with new layers of meaning, e.g. forcibly removing or even arresting someone from a public setting may more effectively label that person as undesirable or deviant, particularly if that person is already personally known to the intervening officer. Urban police, in contrast, can more often rely on bureaucratic anonymity and institutional blindness in only carrying out their job and avoiding questions of effective longer-term outcomes. This is relevant as contemporary frameworks of policing, specifically community-oriented policing, have tended to either emphasize or simply take for granted the connections between ‘community values’ and what police do without adequately explaining how these connections are established or maintained. (Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001, Wooden and Rogers 2014) The theories of community-policing have tried to make police officers more responsive to the local community but without sacrificing or loosening the institutional pressures which have historically been considered to be the major driver of police activity. (Reiss 1971, Van Maanen 1974, cf. Moskos 2008a, Parnaby and Leyden 2011) At the same time, the ideals of community policing are not dissimilar to the noted realities of rural policing in many ways: exploring the dynamics of policing encounters in rural areas and small towns can demonstrate alternative plausibilities for policing, though not necessary indicate these as possible, effective, or desirable when shorn of their context.

Examining community police officers in Brandenburg reiterated the dramaturgical nature of police—the extent to which policing is not only symbolic but image-based, performative, and centered around the taking on (and subversion) of a variety of roles, masks and costumes, and constitutes routine, ritual, and spontaneous interactions which are interpretable at superficial as well as deeper levels, reflecting the tensions between or synthesis of institutional bureaucratic demands and the consubstantiality of social space, social life, and social norms. The institutional model of policing is only effectively capable of recognizing formal documented acts—actions such as giving a warning, going to a friend or family member rather than confronting someone directly, conveniently looking away so as not to see possibly illegal behavior, or attempting to talk someone out of filing a formal complaint clearly serve a social function and have meaning for the involved individuals which cannot be effectively conveyed with “no action taken,” (cf. Manning 2003) and yet these type of situational interventions require some form of already-existing commonality between police and community in terms of values, norms, relationships and resources including social capital.

Police were observed to take on a liminal meta-role. Liminality refers to a state of transition, traditionally in the context of rites of passage (Turner 1967) but also in the sense of identity which is permanently between states, in which different ‘polar roles’ may be called into existent but may just as easily be pushed aside. The Revierpolizei in Falkenmark were found to exemplify this. Community officers were viewed as liminal because 1) officers lived where they worked and worked where they lived, 2) officers regularly had encounters with individuals who they knew in the context of a non-police role (friends, family, neighbors), 3) these relationships often served to strip the meaning from a formal institutional police role and require adaptions and alter the dramaturgical performance (such as by demanding a more overt transparency and different assumptions of what being ‘neutral’ means within a dispute), and 4) the perception of many police-issues from the broader perspective of the community which lead to many obvious efforts by police to avoid dealing with situations purely in police terms. Essentially this means that police officers were (almost) always responsive to other social roles in their performative actions, ranging from simple everyday gestures such as waving to passing motorists to the issuing of criminal sanctions or making arrests. There was an awareness among officers that maintaining a good relationship with the community requires being part of that community, which in turn requires actively playing the part of a community member, even in uniform. This also affected the apparent self-identity of officers, reflected in how they discussed problems in their community and their expectations of what is good (or bad) police work: while the police played a significant role in identifying and preventing risk, they were not the sole owners of the problems they identified.

This dissertation will explore the nature of police work within this context, emphasizing both universal or general aspects of policing as well as contextual or factors. The way that police officers construct their community is a function of what role police can play within it—the ideals of community policing have emphasized the positives of community embeddedness but downplayed the constraining nature this might have. This work is in no way an evaluation and is not intended to highlight flaws or successes of the specific organization but rather to understand the way police work is performed there. The parallels drawn between this case and others are, however, intended to show the relative fit between the observed realities and the ideals of theoretical community policing. The issues explored will highlight how policing a community from within, as it were, requires more than superficial changes, and arguably is not possible in most communities or jurisdictions barring substantial changes in realms ranging from the legal to the cultural. This work, while searching for universal rules and theoretical insight about policing, is a critique of the application of universal rules to the everyday practices of policing which attempt to separate the most human elements out of practices which affect the lives of communities.

The following chapter will present the participant-observation methodology used, as well as further describing the key elements of the setting, geographically and socially, and explore how the use of ethnographic methods has been crucial in developing a sociological approach to, and understanding of, police work. The use of ethnographic methods in police work in particular has almost always emphasized unique and local factors within interactions and broader settings as meaningful, but the more positivistic nature of ‘applied research’ within criminology and police science has arguably led to a situation where key findings have been cherry-picked and shorn of their context. (Manning 2001, 2012, 2013, Marks 2004) This risk is compounded in the various calls for the use of comparative research, and the fewer actual examples of comparative international policing research, which tends to treat policing within nation-states as homogenous, slow to experience change, and inevitable products of historical conditions. (Das 1994, cf. Reiner and Newburn 2000) The emphasis in this work remains on the sociology of policing in context, rather than an attempt to establish best practices or a systematic database of knowledge intended for police administrators. (cf. Jenkins and DeCarlo 2015)

Chapter Three examines police-citizen encounters and presents a theoretical framework based on the dramaturgic presentation of different sources of authority. This framework is intended to be universally applicable to police encounters but primarily relevant for the types of small town and rural settings where liminality characterizes the police role—those places where police officers cannot be anonymous or interchangeable but must instead manage their own personal identity. In such settings police learn that they cannot simply move from incident to incident but must instead consider the future of encounters and, in essence, question the entire purpose of police intervention—what is being enforced and what purpose is being served? The institutional role brings with it assumptions in the minds of individuals (including officers) which can often—purely by the visible presence of an officer—serve the purposes of order-maintenance or peacekeeping without the need for a deeper understanding of the causes of the disturbance or behavior. At the same time, this assumes a mutual intelligible understanding of what type of behavior is being enforced which requires no additional communication. Officers strategically rely on the appearance of institutional authority—most obviously in situations where they feel they have no local support, such as in an ‘outsider’ neighborhood and generally in situations where they find it preferable to not get more intimately involved. In other situations, officers negotiate not only about the guiding definition of the situation but about the officer’s role itself, and at the same time reflect their understanding of the role of police in the community and the relevance of the community to policing.

Chapter Four explores the issue of violence, particularly its use as a symbol—of policing itself, of danger, and of authority. Violence is central to understandings of its police; it is exceedingly rare in the study area and yet still significant to police culture and identity. The weapons which officers carry serve as symbols which represent violence as they indicate their own potential use, and managing the presentation of these symbols allows police to indicate or downplay their own capacity to use force as a control strategy. How police discussed violence was a significant avenue for exploring how the police viewed their community and the nature of their work as (among other roles) problem-solvers. Violence was also symbolic in its use in instrumental narratives, to teach lessons or define situations in a way which would frame the outcome. Personal experiences of violence among officers were also rare but significant in how they were given meaning and valued as ‘experience,’ particularly in how they forced officers to reconcile generally positive images of their community with more typical police assumptions of a dangerous and unpredictable public.

Chapter Five follows up by exploring the use of narratives within policing in various aspects. While narrative criminology is a rapidly expanding field, in terms of police work only a handful of explorations have critically approached the use of rhetoric, metaphor, and language in general in terms of everyday police work. Narrative, as well as cultural image, frames expectations of what police can and will do from various perspectives (including the police themselves,) and conforming to or subverting these expectations is a significant component of interactional police image work. Storytelling has long been considered important in terms of occupational cultures (Hughes 1958) and the police are no exception; at the same time, it is important to not conflate what police say backstage with what they do on-stage. With this consideration, the narratives of policing are explored in terms of their performative nature—as reflections of cultural values—as well as their use as sources of knowledge and education intended to be practical: the latter is particularly relevant if police are intended to understand their community and interpret and internalize its values in a way that can justify the use of the term “community policing.”

The final chapter attempts to synthesize these elements of policing, following the arc from individual officers and interactions in Chapter Three to the relevance of shared symbolism and cultural framing in Chapters Four and Five to then explore how the community itself is constructed, maintained, and given legitimacy through various forms of police work. Re-incorporating the idea of liminality, this chapter will analyze the use of community partnerships and symbolic practices of policing which allow the organization to uphold institutional realities while officers remain significant dependent on their ability to subvert those realities and make the police identity their own.

The present study examines the contradictions of policing in a setting that itself could be considered full of contradictions: many of the police officers began their careers in socialist East Germany, with a police force bearing an almost antithetical mandate to that of today, and yet themselves do not see their work, goals, or strategies as fundamentally different. The fact that they appear to be correct does not speak so much to the universal nature of policing a populace as it does to the nature of how policing can, in the right setting, with the right people, at the right time, be integrated into a local community; there is no technocratic magic to this, but simply the continuing, knowing, and often unremarked upon managing of who the police are, and who those police officers are, in a way that lets the community say “they are ours” and the police say “we are them.”