Setting the Stage: Setting, Method, and Perspective

Abstract

The present study is based on fieldwork accompanying on-duty (and occasionally off-duty) police officers in the pseudonymous county of Falkenmark in the German state of Brandenburg in 2014 and 2015. The primary focus was on the officers of the Revierpolizei, but observations were also made with additional units and unstructured interviews were conducted with a variety of officers and administrators.

3.1 Ride-Alongs: Accompanying People and Accompanying Roles

The present study is based on fieldwork accompanying on-duty (and occasionally off-duty) police officers in the pseudonymous county of Falkenmark in the German state of Brandenburg in 2014 and 2015. The primary focus was on the officers of the Revierpolizei, but observations were also made with additional units and unstructured interviews were conducted with a variety of officers and administrators.

As a planned ethnographic study, the purpose of the research was not to solve a specific identified problem, but rather more generally to answer the question “what do police do?” in this specific context and explore the function and role of the police within the context of community and society. This serves the broader purpose of better understanding “the police” as an element of social structure, as a cultural factor, and in term of practical everyday behavior and interaction: understanding what is broadly common to policing and what is unique to specific organizations, contexts, and circumstances. The original assumptions of the research as proposed emphasized both the characteristics of the broader region—a rural area generally considered ‘less developed’ than many parts of Germany—as well as the relevant history—Brandenburg is a ‘new German state’¹ which was only (re)united with the Federal Republican of Germany in 1991, involving a transition into new governmental systems, including the police. While both of these are important considerations, what became clear is that understanding policing within society involves a deeper, more critical analysis than simply linking historical or geographical variables to styles of policing. (cf. Wilson 1968, Bittner 1970)

One thing that became clear early in the field research is that what police do is not limited to observable actions or decision-making but also incorporates a much broader range of symbolic actions: at the highest level this means what police represent in society even apart from any action being taken, and at the interactional level this means how even minor actions taken by police can reflect not only social structures but how those structure are being negotiated, challenged, and maintained. What police do is certainly not simply law enforcement, and not even just problem solving, as police involve themselves in all manners of conflicts, disputes, routines, and private behavior, and simply by doing so they transform these behaviors, juxtaposing them with an institutional framework that emphasizes order-maintenance and often uses vocabularies of consensus without needing to rely on actual consensus. The institutional role of the police within society and public life is a still-relevant, though often examined, sociological relationship.

Accompanying officers from the Revierpolizei added a crucial additional level to this examination of the role of the police. While the institution of the police has been found to operate bureaucratically and emphasize ideal type models and measurable outcomes, the Revierpolizei has a general mandate more in line with a community policing orientation. Though considered a specific unit within the broader policing organization, they play a dominant role in the region and are often the primary point of contact for a variety of situations and cases, including both criminal and non-criminal matters, meaning that this community-orientation can (in theory) play a more significant role in police-community relations and interactions than the formal structure, messaging or image work of the bureaucratic organization might indicate. The primary relevance lies here in how community-oriented policing—itself owing a great deal towards ethnographic field and the observation of police officers in situ—emphasizes both individual interactions and dealing with individualized situations as well as maintaining a more abstract ‘good relationship’ with the community both through the aggregation of individual encounters handled using this perspective and framework as well as through image work and establishing specific formal as well as ad hoc partnerships with community organizations. (Wilson and Kelling 1982, Pate and Skogan 1985, Ericson et al. 1993, Kelling and Coles 1996, Kelling 1999 Feltes 2014, cf. Manning 2001, Sampson and Raudenbush 2004, Mastrofski 2019) This means that (at least at a theoretical level) police officers in the Revierpolizei or other community-oriented units are intended to adapt a framework for evaluating ‘good work’ as well as knowledge or skills for accomplishing that work which stands in contrast to the standard institutional life-world of policing. At the same time, that standard institutional life-world has long been recognized as a useful bureaucratic fiction (cf. Bittner 1974, Manning 1977, Kelling and Coles 1996) which can help police in accomplishing their specific organizational, situational and individual goals but which alone does not set out the only objectives of the organization or individual officers and offers little in terms of guidance or resources for practically dealing with most of the issues police are expected to deal with, i.e. situations only tangentially related to, or completely unrelated to, law enforcement.

The police have a comparatively long history in interpretive sociology—particularly within symbolic interactionism and ethnography—beginning in earnest in the Anglo-American context with the Second Chicago School (Fine 1995) and continuing until recent decades where the topic has been subsumed under the field of ‘criminal justice’ and predominantly emphasized policy and measurement. (Manning 2005, 2014, Sparrow 2016) This interest in the processes of policing—seen also in the frequency with which Erving Goffman uses the police as an example for various types of interactions and face-to-face encounters—reflects the complicated position of the police between an enclosed inward-focused bureaucracy and an active component of a living community. (cf. Wilz 2012) Taking the institutional measures of policing—the data produced though organizational work and the formal measures of activity—at face-value is doubly counterproductive, not only because it risks overlooking the importance of additional factors, elements, structures, and outcomes to which the institutional perspective is blind (Sparrow 2016), but also because the evidence already available makes it clear that police themselves—as an organization and as individual employees—rarely treat the ideals and formal truths of policing as actual everyday truth. (Bittner 1970, 1974, Van Maanen 1974, Behr 2000, Mensching 2007) The creation of bureaucratic reality is a process to be explored and analyzed rather than a starting point for theory-building.

The current study involved the use of participant observation of on-duty police officers throughout their shifts. The goal was to develop an understanding of the police role within the community, both in terms of unique individual encounters and in terms of reinforcing or maintaining an image of the community. The role of the police is symbolic in nature—not just in terms of functionality, though the symbolic powers of the police are a critical dimension, but in the sense that all social roles are symbolically constituted. Police work is performed by people who take on that role, tailor it to their own expectations, beliefs, and abilities, act it out in different ways, and distance themselves from it in different ways. The goal of the study was therefore not just to examine the roles themselves, but to get to understand the people who performed them and to understand their own relationship to the role, to not just understand a job or action within a context and setting but to understand how interaction creates and gives meaning and importance to the context. Entering the field as an outsider—not just by virtue of not being a police officer, but also by being a foreigner and new to the region—is both a challenge for determining what can be learned and how, but also reveals many new interesting elements of everyday normality that go unremarked or are taken-for-granted by ‘locals.’ The police were examined from the perspective of symbolic interactionism, which emphasizes the establishment of shared meaning within interactions, and dramaturgy, which presumes some (conscious or unconscious) effort by actors to frame their actions in the best light or in ways that manage their (and others’) power, ability, and responsibility within situations. A method and methodology are required to make the backstage visible, or at least acknowledged, in the way it is for the actors themselves, but also to appreciate the numerous background factors that are easily overlooked but are necessary for any roles to be performed. It is not enough to report what the actor did and said on stage if our goal is to understand the person who plays that role.

3.2 Symbolic Action, Narrative and Cultural Understanding

Symbolic interactionism, particularly as formulated and conceived by Herbert Blumer, is more an approach to social research based on theoretical assumptions rather than a theory in its own right. The emphasis is put on communication, the use of symbols, and negotiated meanings rather than inherent or immutable characteristics of individuals or objects. The three basic premises of symbolic interactionism, as laid out by Blumer (1969), are that (1) people act on things—objects or people—based on the meaning they, the actor, ascribe to that thing, (2) that these meanings are not inherent or even necessarily based on any essential qualities of that thing but rather derived externally from others—whether specific individuals or society in general, and (3) that this generation of meaning takes places through a process of interaction and interpretation. These assumptions mean that some questions asked by researchers in other disciplines with regards to individual’s mental state, motives or true beliefs are seen as not only essentially unknowable for symbolic interactionists, but also irrelevant inasmuch as ‘internal factors’ that are never played out in social action are unobservable and cannot be said to definitively have an impact. As meanings are seen as being constantly under negotiation, the specific meaning of an object or concept held by an individual is only relevant in its ability to explain the actions taken at the point when they are taken. Interest is instead on the use of meaning in establishing ‘social worlds’, with the recognition that some definitions may become standardized, routinized, or ritualized while others will remain unique, ad hoc, or only tangentially and temporarily shared by parties:

Usually, most of the situations encountered by people in a given society are defined or “structured” by them [according to the interpretation of the situation.] Through previous interaction they develop and acquire common understandings or definitions of how to act in this or that situation. These common definitions enable people to act alike. The common repetitive behavior of people in such situations should not mislead the student into believing that no process of interpretation is in play; on the contrary, even though fixed, the actions of the participating people are constructed by them through a process of interpretation. Since ready-made and commonly accepted definitions are at hand, little strain is placed on people in guiding and organizing their acts. However, many other situations may not be defined in a single way be the participating people… Interpretations have to be developed and effective accommodation of the participants has to be worked out. (Blumer 1969: 86)

Situations are created as forms of mutual understanding through processes of role-taking and role-offering. Individuals must understand through common, often subtle, processes that they all, in some way, based on the roles they take on themselves and expect others to take, belong to the situation and that any actions they take will be interpreted by the others within the context of that situation. Blumer, following Mead (1934), emphasizes that role-taking, in order to establish an effective shared meaning, must be mutual, that “one can do this only by placing himself in the position of others and viewing himself or acting toward himself from that position.” (Blumer 1969: 13) A key focus of symbolic interactionist inquiry is exploring the norms and rules which govern individuals’ various understandings of what type of situation they are in, what their role is, what they can and cannot (or should and should not) do, as well as the processes of how these norms are generated, conveyed, interpreted and challenged. Interactionists emphasize the complexity of social interactions—that the meanings of even generic social roles can vary from individual to individual or even from moment to moment, that the same action can be perceived and interpreted differently, that dynamic processes can lead to drastically different outcomes in how actions and reactions are interpreted, and how attempts to clarify or secure meaning may still lead to conflict or uncertainty—even as they try to understand the processes as flowing from common, understandable attributions of meaning. Chang (2004) states that Blumer “correctly argued that we should not adopt a ritualistic approach to explain interaction, treating it as a mere forum through which the supposed determining effects of preexisting structural and cultural conditions are played out. Rather, we must recognize the formative effect of interaction in its own right.” (415) As Blumer states:

Human group life on the level of symbolic interaction is a vast process in which people are forming, sustaining, and transforming the objects of their world as they come to give meaning to objects. Objects have no fixed status except as their meaning is sustained through indications and definitions that people make of the objects. Nothing is more apparent than that objects in all categories can undergo change in their meaning… The life and action of people necessarily change in line with the changes taking place in their world of objects. (1969: 12)

Communication is interpreted broadly in symbolic interactionism, with early analysis from Mead frequently focusing on the use of non-verbal gestures. Mead (1934) described a triadic nature of meaning in which a gesture—a form of communication viewed by a recipient as intending meaning, regardless of whether or not it is ‘correctly’ interpreted (cf. Barthes 2004)—can signify what the person to whom the gesture is directed is intended or expected to do, what the person making the gesture plans or is likely to do, and the joint action that has become a possibility through the use of a gesture. (see also Peirce 1991; a significant influence of Peirce’s semiotics on Mead has been often proposed, cf. Bakker 2011) Blumer provides the example of a robber commanding a victim (who only takes on the role of a victim over the course of this process) to put up his hands, which is at the same time “(a) an indication of what the victim is to do; (b) an indication of what the robber is to do, that is, relieve the victim of his money; and (c) an indication of the join act being formed, in this case a holdup.” (1969: 9) This triadic structure requires a generalized mutual understanding of the purposes of the gestures and the type of joint action or situation being constructed: mutual role-taking.

The use of social roles, following on the work of George Herbert Mead, is seen as essentially offering ways to better categorize and fluidly act within social worlds that would otherwise be complex, chaotic and possibly devoid of any interpretable meaning. Roles themselves vary in complexity, but in a basic sense all roles govern at a minimum whether any expectations are placed upon an individual in a certain context: e.g. a local standing at a bus stop may overhear a conversation and realize that two tourists are about to get on the wrong bus; while he may interrupt to inform the tourists, he likely won’t feel any obligation to do so unless the tourists specifically ask him for help or information first, transforming his role from a simple bystander to a more active participant. Intervening will still mostly likely be seen as helpful and morally correct, but at the same time the local will be going ‘out of his way’ to help, rather than simply doing what he is required to do. At the same time, roles experience pressures, strains, and expectations from different directions and sources: police officers on the street are performing a role that others may not be able to ‘take on’ in the same way the officer experiences that role simply because they are unaware of what factors drives the officer’s decision making—the officer might not personally care much about minor offenses but feel pressure from his supervisors, the department generally, or due to the presence of onlookers, to ‘do something’—in this case the meaning of behavior and outcome are still being negotiated, but the terms and deeper meanings may not be as obvious to all participants. Of course, the individual does not need to fully understand the motives, drives, or obligations of a social role in order to interpret that: it may be enough for the individual to understand that it is normal for a police officer to sometimes issue a ticket and sometimes a warning, just as some interactions are overt and clear negotiations with various plausible outcomes and other are ritualized and formulaic where the outcome is essentially a given. The function of social roles as frames for attributing expectations for ‘normal behavior’ in contexts is one aspect of symbolic interactionist analysis, but this view of roles and particularly their fluidity, negotiations, and management has been central to the development of ethnographic, participant-observation based research. (Agar 1986, Adler and Adler 1987, Fine 2003) If presumed meanings are only fully expressed through social interaction (rather than through detailed analysis of the object itself, or by “isolating the particular psychological elements that produce the meaning” [Blumer 1969: 4]) then a researcher must be able to witness these actions taking place, or even take on the role themselves, to maintain a ‘naturalistic’ setting. Katz (2002) states that “the actor’s ‘definition of a situation’ is not, as the phrase misleadingly suggests, an instant cognitive decision; it is an objectively constrained process.” (260) The expectations and structures that constrain processes of meaning-making are themselves being altered or negotiated, but the adaptation of more ‘visible’ roles can aid in these communicative processes: while a significant literature exists simply debating what the concept of “police” means to society, an individual encountering a uniformed police officer will generally be able to interpret the most relevant social meaning of “police officer” immediately, and the officer, in turn, can react and choose to present him- or herself in a specific way. Managing roles as an insider or outsider is a significant task both in normative processes of socialization (such as starting a new job, or entering the police academy) as well as in ethnographic field research in how it can affect the type of situations the researcher is allowed into and to what extent participants modify or adapt their behavior to the presence of ‘outsiders.’ (Peshkin 1984)

Interactionism as a perspective focuses primarily on individuals or small groups where individual actions can be observed. Interactionist studies within the field of policing have been highly influential, particularly the work of Egon Bittner (1967, 1970) and of Peter Manning (1977, 1988, 2003) which emphasize how police can give meaning to situations which can itself be translated into further meaningful action. Manning’s later research has emphasized symbolic action and meaning making at the organizational level through the production of official report and communication at various levels (see also Meehan 1986). An interactionist approach is particularly fitting to the case at hand, as community-oriented officers in Brandenburg work alone and spend more time among the public than in clearly defined institutional settings such as the police station, and involve themselves in situations ranging from the clearly, even ritually, defined to overt negotiations where shared definitions palpably change based on the evolving dynamics of the situation. The interactionist approach is often (though not always) additionally characterized by the use of participant observation as a way to not just observe behavior but also to better ‘take on’ the relevant roles which guide the creation of intersubjective meaning. (cf. Agar 1986, Dellwing and Prus 2012)

3.3 Participant Observation, Naturalistic Inquiry, and Intersubjective Meaning

Participant observation is a methodological approach which attempts to bridge the gap (in terms of perspective, meaning making or culture) between the researcher and the subject(s) of interest. As the term implies, it is based on a combination of systematic / long-term observation of research subjects engaging in ‘naturalistic practices,’ that is, what they would plausibly be doing regardless of the presence of an observer, as opposed to engaging in a more ‘artificial’ behaviors, such as completing tasks assigned by the researcher or responding to planned experimental conditions, and participation in situations with a distinct role-orientation connecting the researcher with the field setting. Observation can be done in many ways and cover various settings and practices, but its most traditional or conventional sense it refers to the open and acknowledged accompaniment of members of a ‘life world’ (e.g. a culturally defined or defining group, such as motorcycle enthusiasts, or a profession, such as doctors) as they engage in behaviors which are in some way guided or (even tangentially) framed or impacted by their membership in that community. The use of video or second-hand data is possible, but this is generally no replacement for ‘being there’ in terms of generating an interpretable and communicable understanding of the setting. (cf. Dellwing 2016) The elements of police work that are sociologically interesting do not stop when the officer’s shift ends, but for practical purposes the benefits of participant observation are assumed to be greatest when the setting matches the broader socio-cultural orientation, i.e. police are most visible and definable as police while engaging in formal (or semi-formal) police work, on the clock: many officers were met with outside of working hours or spoken to informally, and much of the information from these meetings was useful, but these types of situations often stretch the limits of ‘observation’ and became something closer to open ended interviews or even focus groups, with officers providing a great deal of information and sharing anecdotes, stories, jokes, and experiences; ideally, these situations could be considered participatory in terms of shared participation in the broader culture of policing—in the cases where various officer and their friends, acquaintances, partners, etc. shared stories of policing and their community in a way that was not overtly done for my own benefit.

Participation refers not only to engagement in the broader community of the setting, but at times to engaging in the same tasks. The researcher, through participation, ideally learns to see the world in a similar way to those being observed, rather than simply bringing in and verifying or ‘falsifying’ outside assumptions: discovering what is ‘significant’ or ‘important,’ what is taken-for-granted or ignored, and how everyday events, images, narratives, and stimuli and interpreted and made sense of. Field roles in terms of participation include complete participant, complete observer, participant-as-observer, and observer-as-participant. (Adler and Adler 1987) The choice of field is often guided by the experience(s) of the researcher as well as where access is even possible, and though many, such as Jo Reichertz (Reichertz and Schröer 2003) generally advocate a ‘naïve’ approach, it is not uncommon for researchers to enter and explore fields with which they already have some familiarity. Policing research, in particular, has been heavily influenced by the ethnographic work of police officers-turned-scholars, including Arthur Niederhoffer, Malcolm Young, Peter Moskos, and, in the German context, Rafael Behr. In many of the ‘classical’ works through the 1970 s it was normal for researchers to go through at least some level of police training, be armed, and be expected to intervene in at least some emergency situations. (Van Maanen 1988) Monique Marks (2004) encountered a similar social division in her participant observation in Durban, South Africa, where, as a field researcher, she was presented with essentially an ‘us or them’ ultimatum, offered a weapon, and instructed to perform policing tasks such as searching suspects. Today these types of situations are the exception rather than the rule, particularly in Germany and other western European countries where police training takes years rather than months or weeks and the exercise of police authority by field researchers is likely to be seen as problematic and risky. The current study involved more observer-oriented roles, with attempts made to avoid disturbing the ‘natural’ interaction between police and citizens, though in many other cases my role as a researcher was primary and itself triggered new discussions and rounds of storytelling.² It should be noted that in the course of fieldwork I was only specifically asked on two occasions to outright assist in ‘police matters’: both situations involved direct or stopping traffic and are not considered to have unduly blurred the boundary between researcher role and police role. On several minor occasions I translated for the police or others between German and English, but these cases never involved ‘formal’ police encounters and were generally individuals simply asking for directions: in the few cases where officers needed to communicate in English with individuals specifically for police business I was not asked to translate or intervene and did not offer to. Participation in this case primarily meant accompanying the officer (typically only one officer) and observing encounters but attempting to minimize my presence, typically by explaining it as simply as possible—the accompanied officers tended to prefer to say that I was “being trained” because they found this was less threatening or distracting for the others, rather than claiming I was “observing” the police, which despite not being completely truthful I considered to be acceptable and not overly disruptive or unnecessarily covert. (cf. Peshkin 1984) Managing my own role in various situations was crucial as many encounters were found to be less a bureaucratic transaction and more dynamic, intimate, and ad hoc, structured around existing or situational interpersonal relations, connections which could plausibly be threatened by the presence of an outside observer. For this reason it was important both to guarantee anonymity as well as to establish myself within interactions as both an ‘insider,’ that is, someone who is not there to challenge the conduct being observed, as a ‘harmless,’ as someone who would be unable to effectively act against that conduct; this was the best way to maintain both a connection to ongoing and developing interactions—rather than as a detached outsider with no recourse to follow-up questions—while still generally maintaining their ‘natural state,’ that is, the types of behaviors that are routine and normal and, as ‘artificial’ as they might be in the dramatization, are not purely being enacted because of the presence of an outside observer.

3.3.1 Naturalistic Inquiry

Katz (2002) describes the creation of “naturalistic theory” as a way of explaining social conduct, stating that researchers should seek evidence about:

• 1) how it is constituted through interaction, in one or another collaboratively and in anticipation of its meaning from the standpoint of others;

• 2) how everything, even the most seemingly idle comment or glance, is part of a practical course of action, a project, the innovative execution of a recipe, an effort to do a certain kind of social thing;

• 3) how all awareness and action is created by corporeal processes that are themselves beyond the actor’s direct awareness, but that are visible to the researcher. (259)

While displaying the inherent difficulties in establishing a ‘faithful’ ethnographic account, and the risk of simply swapping one (outsider) perspective for another, this suggests three elements of analysis within a participant observation methodology. The first is on the interactive component, particularly interactions with individuals both inside and (especially for the present study) outside the group to be studied. Egon Bittner (1965) presents a suitable description of exploring how meaning is created within situations:

The investigator can… decide that the meaning of the concept, and all of the terms and determinations that are subsumed under it, must be discovered by studying their use in real scenes of action by persons whose competence to use them is socially sanctioned… in order to understand the meaning of the actor’s thought and action, which Weber sought, one must study how the terms of his discourse are assigned to real objects and events by normally competent persons in ordinary situations. (247)

In the same way that the field researcher is essentially an outsider to the life world of policing and must develop a new or analytically grounded understanding of the immediate situation, so too must individuals who come into contact with police—though for very different reasons. Choosing to observe the police in particular means that citizens within police encounters are (almost always) only observed within that encounter. While police officers typically had the opportunity to follow up, contextualize, rationalize, or further discuss events with me (in some way mirroring their ability to craft, within legitimate constraints, factual versions of events) the focus remained as much as possible on interpreting and attempting to recreate the processes of meaning-making strictly within the encounter—it was this approach in particular that lead to the realization that not only a great deal of police work is unspoken or mutually presumed, but that particularly in the specific context of the study (community-oriented policing within a predominantly rural region) even police encounters with a short duration often included a significant portion of references to personal histories and past events which implied much more than they stated: understanding these references was not essential, however, to understanding how they were presented, shared, rejected, modified and generally used as a practice by both police and others. Police contacts with citizens represent a crossing of observable negotiated process with social structural factors, and in this case personal knowledge, relationships, and conceptualizations of community were powerful symbols for social structure.

“Idle comments or glances,” as Katz writes, were also key to providing plausible meaning to social encounters. The rhetoric used by police within encounters was highly relevant in terms of social practices and how it framed the need for others to accept, even tacitly, the definition of the situation provided by the police. (cf. Feest and Blankenburg 1972) As mentioned above, police often took the opportunity to further explain or explore prior events, and the specific wording and recounting of these events—even if they couldn’t always be taken at face value—showed different strategies for legitimizing and synchronizing accounts (cf. Clarke 2006): even the most extreme case where a police officer legitimizes behavior that to outsiders appears to be an abuse of authority demonstrate what type of institutional understandings of normality, acceptability, and desirability are framing the crafting of that narrative. No events these overt were observed, however, and if anything the tendency was in the other direction with semi-formal encounters having no (easily) formally definable outcome, e.g. a series of minor incidents being discussed but not considered in terms of what should be done, but sometimes requiring the use of institutional shorthand to clarify that the encounter was effectively concluded, such as describing the conversation as “giving a warning” or stating that information was collected, even if no new useful or actionable information was collected by the officer. Simple utterances or routine statements also form to anchor the relationship being constructed or imagined between individuals: “Even to answer a routine question presumes a relationship between a questioner and a respondent— if only an imagined one.” (Gusfield 2003: 121) Idle comments often suggest basic assumptions that might not necessarily be shared by others—for example, a Revierpolizei officer pointed out a ‘home for at-risk or endangered children’ as we drove by it, following up, “but they aren’t really a problem, they’re younger, up to the 6^th grade.” This suggested that the connection between these children and ‘being a problem,’ though here being denied, was considered plausible and possibly even expected, as well as making a connection between (or exception for) problem-ness and age. Another officer described an annual music festival within his beat with two sentences, the second of which was simply, “the people take drugs there.” At their most ‘functional,’ idle comments served to separate insiders, ‘our’ community, ideas of normality or normal behavior, etc. from outsiders, risks, and undesired behavior.

Exploring the attribution of motives (cf. Mills 1940, Burke 1966) even as idle comments, outside of face-to-face interactions between attributer and attributee, often reveals an interesting contradiction or contrast in how deviant or outsider behavior is presented as ‘irrational,’ incomprehensible, and thereby unpredictable but also presented as fitting within a pre-categorized type of causal identities which explain and make that behavior expectable. Blum and McHugh (1971) describe how “motive is a procedure” (103) and involves deeper questions of power and status rather than being ‘just words’:

The paradigmatic procedure here is to ask the actor, ‘Why…?’ and expect him to cite a reason, goal, or intention, e.g., ‘Why did you leave the party?’; ‘Because I was bored’; ‘In order to make my appointment’, etc. In some cases we take these reasons and call them symbols and meanings, but that sort of substitution does not really tell us much about the methodical ways in which such statements are generated to begin with—how, for example, the actor is constrained to cite a reason at all; how it takes the form it does (giving a reason instead of, say, telling a joke); how it comes to be acceptable to the hearer that it is an answer. In other words, its status as a common sense practical device, as opposed to mere idiosyncratic noise or gesture or cue, remains unstated. The methodic social and hence sociological feature of motive lies not in the concrete, substantive reason an actor would give for his behavior, but in the organized and sanctionable conditions that would regularly produce the giving of a reason by a competent member in the first place. The reason given is no more than the surface expression of some underlying rule(s) that the former requires in order to be understood. (101–102)

Revierpolizei officers often contrasted their behavior with that of US police officers, presenting examples from current events portrayed in news media as well as broader stereotypes and cultural images: in doing so they presented the behavior of US police as aggressive, violent and, most importantly, irrational, with phrases such as “I don’t understand why they act like that.” At the same time, they viewed these presumed behaviors as normal within the context and their reflections of American policing culture, and culture in the US in general, were certainly anchored to a large extent on their perceptions of these “axial events” (Manning 2003) and the offered stereotypes. At a micro-interactional level, similar patterns could be found even in how some officers discussed the strategies or approaches of their colleagues, with statements along lines of, “I don’t understand why he does that, I would do this, but he must think that…” These rhetorical practices relate not only to the use of ascribing motives and (ir)rationality but also to the basic minimum infusion of intersubjectivity into speech and narratives of others (cf. Ezzy 1998): the meaning being presented lies, at a conceptual level, between the individuals, even if the framing is subjective and the attribution of rationality, normality, and in the end the overall definition on offer comes from the perspective of the speaker.

Katz’s third point connects structure, society, institutional forces and the like to direct observable action. While it would be presumptuous to grant the scholar a monopoly on truth or the deeper vison to be the sole observer of hidden realities, the practical point here is simply to emphasize the intersubjectivity which (potentially, perhaps ideally) guides both participant observation and ‘natural’ encounters being observed. Katz (2002) notes that “intersubjectivity does not simply happen; it is a contingent and defeasible presumption that is constantly negotiated in a troublesome world.” (261, cf. Schutz 1953) It is therefore important to identify these negotiations and the contingencies and exigencies which structure, constrain, or channel them. Bittner (1965) states that in searching for ‘deeper meaning’ within institutions and organizations:

the author of the rational scheme, typically the managerial technician who deals with organization in the ‘technical sense,’ will not be treated as having some sort of privileged position for understanding its meaning. By denying him the status of the authoritative interpreter we do not propose to tamper with the results of his work in the least. From our point of view he is merely the toolsmith. It seems reasonable that if one were to investigate the meaning and typical use of some tool, one would not want to be confined to what the toolmaker has in mind. (249)

This is based on a phenomenological assumption—that meaning is not naturally given but must be interpreted and acted out, and that ideas and concepts must be given form—linguistic, symbolic—in order to create meaning that can be shared and therefore establish (concepts of) structure. (Gadamer 1976) What a person says might not be what they mean, once taken within a different context, but the words they use might reflect the deeper meanings which can be construed and reconstructed in different ways. A person pointing out teenagers or young men ‘loitering’ on a street corner commenting “they’re all just criminals” likely is neither intending to claim that all teenagers or young men are criminals nor specifically only the ones being indicated, but rather is making a broader ascription and claiming an identity for others, positing or establishing the identified individuals as part of a broader (here vaguely defined) classification of individuals for whom the statement is plausibly true in the view of the speaker—of course, the use of the term ‘criminal’ is also likely to be cultural shorthand rather than a legal determination, and the utterance overall tells us more about the speaker’s framing of society or social factors / distinctions than it does about the group being discussed. Similarly, an officer stating that music festival attendees “take drugs” may not be indicating that all participants do so, but he is indicating a general class (which at some level, even if tautologically, implies motive—drug-takers take drugs) which would narratively provide a better justification for certain forms of action, i.e. supporting the increased use of strict enforcement rather than ‘discretion,’ whereas cases of ‘local’ youth using drugs could more easily be written off as simply “due to boredom” and not indicative of their inherent qualities. This takes on an additional and more prescient structural dimension when the person making such identifications has an accepted power and authority to make labels stick—such a police officer who has the ability to transform someone (officially) into a gang member. (Trujillo and Vitale 2019, cf. Becker 1963)

Structure exists in micro-level interactions most visibly in how it is played out through words and actions, regardless of their ‘positivistic’ connections: for example, the fact that police officers in the US—in various forums including field research, interviews, as well as social media and self-depictions—complain about being ‘handcuffed’ by the courts or regulations is less useful as a statement to be fact checked but rather is indicative of a variety of structural elements, such as the establishment of an ‘us vs. them’ mentality, the crime-fighter image and the organizational emphasis on ‘catching bad guys’ as the chief measure of success, and the stability of police cultural forms and ways of speaking over time even as situations and organizations change. (cf. Skolnick 1985, Crank 1994, Waddington 1999, Sparrow 2016) Additionally, police in Germany are fully authorized to more-or-less unconditionally ask individuals in public for ID, without needing a specified basis or reason, yet still tend to structure their uses of this power to fulfill separate goals or functions which they themselves identify. (Behr 2000, Hunold 2011, Hunold et al. 2016) Police in the US, by contrast, can only ask for ID or conduct searches in legally defined situations—the tactic of ‘stop and frisk’ essentially exploits a loophole by establishing an artificial justification of risk, claiming that the mere presence of a police officer establishes a risk requiring an individual to be searched and present ID: the legal standard is a “reasonable suspicion” by the officer that the individual might be armed, but these suspicion does not need to be further defined or grounded. (Harcourt 2001, Trujillo and Vitale 2019, cf. Quinton 2011 for an exploration of the British context) Stop-and-frisk is also a widely discussed, controversial policy (which has become deeply associated with “Broken Windows”) meaning that individuals stopped by the police on a pretense, asked to present ID, and searched, have a different meaning in terms of power-dynamics, discrimination, and the image of the police that, to generalize, would likely be ‘read’ entirely different by a German tourist in New York being put in the same position.³

The fact that the researcher generally enters the field, or at least the specific local setting, as a stranger⁴ can allow for the combining, comparison, integration or fusion of various perspectives (theoretical and reflecting various cultural frameworks including those ‘unique’ to the field setting) which Katz and Hallett (2014) refer to as “ethnographic authority.” The goal of the researcher is to understand the actions of others as they are taken—in terms of how meaning situationally created and negotiated—but also to maintain the ability to imagine and represent the larger concepts behind those actions that often go unremarked on or unseen. (cf. Bude 2007) Clifford Geertz (1973) introduced the concept of “deep play” in which understandings of relatively fixed structures are reflected and represented in other forms of (semi-) ritualized action—in Geertz’s example of illegal Balinese cockfights which, in their performance and standards of ‘decorum’ or emotionality, mirrored social hierarchies and political power. Deep play suggests that actions which might be viewed as outwardly ‘irrational’ (e.g. from a utilitarian or rational choice perspective), such as high stakes betting or making threats that can’t be backed up, are given significant meaning in the immediate performing of those actions through the interpretation within a less visible rendering of ‘rules’ at varying levels, in the way that even showing a willingness to take a risk might be a demonstration of values or integrity, or winning over a competitor brings more to the victor than monetary reward, and the status he gains likely extends to his compatriots or community members when that victory is over a perennial and feared competitor from a rival community. In a similar way, the deference expected by the police from some and the deference shown by others could be posited to reflect societal hierarchies and relative status.⁵ Resistance to the police and non-cooperation in various forms could be similarly constructed as symbolic and requiring a reading of society and images of inequality or repression that extends beyond the exigencies of the situation. (cf. Shon 2000) A “thick description” should be provided which emphasizes the symbolic nature of even practical, physical actions, objects, and roles. (Geertz 1973) The connection of process to structure is what turns the method of participant-observation into the creation of an ethnographic account.

3.4 Ethnography and Meaning

“In a single phrase, the world is ceaselessly becoming what it means.”

– George Herbert Mead (1938: 515)

Ethnography is often used synonymously with participant observation (and the remainder of this work will be no exception.) In a more technical sense, participant observation is the method of data collection, and ethnography could be considered a broader methodology of how participant observation is conducted (e.g. is the setting considered to be a specific city, working-class neighborhoods, police encounters, the intersection of all three, etc.?) as well as the production of an account and analysis of the research setting which can be interpretable and plausible in an outside contexts (typically of other researchers in the same or similar fields.) The two are in most cases intertwined, as the manner in which data is collected speaks to the ethnographic aims of the research and ethnographic data cannot always simply be filled in or expanded in the event that new questions or interests are raised or a ‘gap’ is found in the data; the fact that even systematic data collection will show evolution or changes in how situations are viewed and captured (in notes or memory) speaks both to the ethnographic spirit (see also Feyerabend 2010), that the researcher is able to ‘learn’ in the field and not only upon concluding the collection of data, and also to the difficulties in systematically analyzing data that might constrained or tinted by a recognizable chronological or situational development, such as an improved rapport in the field leading observed actors to ‘let down their guard’ over time rather than play to the fieldworkers expectations (or vice-versa.) (Lüders 2007) Ethnography and ethnographic methods (which are not strictly limited to participant observation and often include unstructured interviews and media analysis) were adapted (or adopted) from anthropological work, with significant overlap not just in methods but in concepts, topics, and fields of study, but also influenced by journalism—Robert Park, for example, was originally a journalist and emphasized to his students the search for a binding narrative. (cf. Park 1952) Ethnography is an attempt to reconstruct a culture not by the use of objective measurements but rather by collecting instructive observations of acts against a meaningful backdrop which can be effectively interpreted by nature of the ethnographer having been there physically, socially, and culturally.

Ethnography therefore requires access both practically and socially or organizationally: one cannot simply view something from a new perspective by standing in a different spot, but must also observe, gauge, consider, and (finally) preempt the responses of others who are to share that perspective. While participant observation is typically used, as here, to refer to somewhat standardized method for collecting data which can be categorized, combined, correlated, patterned, and otherwise played with, ethnographic fieldwork is rarely assumed to be standard or routine, as potentially conflicting goals of maintaining access, developing relationships and rapport, maintaining objectivity and an image of the same, the inability to see everything, pressures to observe ‘new’ or ‘unique’ actions and events over the routine, and distrust at individual and organizational levels all can shape the process of research. Peter and Patricia Adler (1987) describe the ethnographic process in terms of role management and trust, writing:

Field researchers, then, should enter their settings, announce their intentions, and begin to interact with the people they encounter. Traditionally, their initial activities are unfocused and merely involve “hanging out.” Eventually, they build up to asking, “What is going on?” Researchers should let members of the setting gradually get to know them as they hang around in this manner, so that people realize the nonthreatening nature of their research intentions and their overall interest and sincerity. (12)

Questions of access usually involve gatekeepers and key informants. Gatekeepers allow access to both sites and social groups, which may have implications because they serve as legitimizers of the researcher’s presence, but their approval may suggest ulterior or conflicting motives. Some settings—such as inside a police station or the passenger seat of a patrol car—are simply inaccessible without official permission, requiring a complicated process of formally legitimizing the research project allowing for access. Other settings may be public in nature, but the individuals who make up key social groups—for example, drug dealers in a park—may not be very forthcoming unless someone they already know and trust is prepared to vouch for the researcher and essentially open the doors, or least the windows, to a new social realm. In the present case access was negotiated through several individuals but essentially from the top of the hierarchy down (through the Ministry of the Interior for Brandenburg and then at the level of Polizeiinspektion, essentially policing at the county level.) This meant that access was negotiated not so much based on personal relationships as on organizational hierarchies: in this case it was specifically necessary to reassure those involved in the study that I was in no way a ‘spy’ for administrators or interested in solving research questions posited by political leadership, i.e. I was not engaging in an evaluation or a study of efficiency—key informants, those who provide not only ‘raw data’ but also explanations and frameworks for ‘translating’ that data, could be maintained by giving them an outlet to ‘tell their story’ and express frustrations in an outside context, but at the same time, this ran the risk of the research appearing less practical to those who were facilitating it. While some minor conflicts were involved—particularly in the sense that some officers felt that the new political leadership wanted to present them as ‘doing nothing’ so that they could be given additional workloads (outside of community-oriented work,) and there was some initial concern that my report might be used to confirm that—the focus of the fieldwork was on citizen encounters rather than the micropolitics of the organization with the station, and officers seemed to be persuaded that I was interested in the variety of complexity of the ‘non-criminal’ work they did. It was important that the police officers knew I did not expect to see ‘action’ or violence but rather their jobs as they normally perform them so that they did not feel obligated to show me something in particular or think that most of the time spent together was wasted. There did seem to be some effort by the Revierpolizei officer, however, to provide a tour or to show things: the nature of the work meant that appointments were often fluid and unscheduled meetings or drop-ins were common, and often the fact that I was accompanying was reason enough to make a stop to visit, for example, a local community group that might have been put off until later or not made at all. In other cases, officers attempted to show me every street and corner of their beat, at some point commenting that they themselves had not seen specific areas or even villages in almost a year. This did not substantially conflict with the ‘normal’ work of the Revierpolizei, and the variety of locations visited provided a broad enough span to suggest that nothing was being hidden or avoided, and it was clear both from observations and the diversity of narratives that this ‘randomness’ and lack of a completely fixed day-to-day schedule, though at times altered by my presence, was central to how the job was seen and valued by officers. Officers often ‘narrated’ their geographic and social space, providing a great deal of background on the people and places we visited or passed by and on events that had happened in the distant or immediate past: this information was useful both in contextualizing other observations as well as in seeing the role of local knowledge in police work. At one point (further discussed in Chapter Five) I accompanied an officer who was being groomed to replace a retiring Revierpolizei officer on several shifts as he was given a similar treatment—shown various parts of the jurisdictions and provided with general and specific statements about which people and groups are connected, where problems might come from, where it is quiet, where a patrol car make residents nervous and where it makes them feel secure, and so on. This also provided a chance to, at a basic level, ‘triangulate’ the data in terms of how officers spoke about people, places, communities, etc. to me and to each other. Similar experiences occurred in other cases where officers traveled together either for specific tasks, for public events, in city districts where cooperation was more common, or in the cases of another officer who, at the beginning of fieldwork, had only been working for several weeks and so was often assisted by the officer from the neighboring district.

The participation element of participant observation is not effective simply as a method for data collection, but also ethnographically for allowing the researcher into a community and to establish a role from which interpretation can be done (reflexively.) In terms of police work, for example, it has been suggested that participant observation is sometimes the only effective method because data will rarely be shared with researchers who are not in some way known and trusted by the police, and gaining access and establishing rapport for the purposes of observation can also lead to additional materials and data sources ranging from the possibility of conducting interviews or focus groups, unpublished statistics or raw data, information and data from calls for service, and even the opportunity to conduct experimental research. (Marks 2004, cf. Manning 1988) While the focus remained on observation and unstructured interviews, a great deal of information about police operations, structure, changes and ongoing reform, and planned community partnerships was available only after I entered the field and got to know individuals at various levels of the organization: in many cases this is less about the information being secret or hidden and more about understanding what type of information is available at all.⁶

Being a stranger or insider is not simply a binary factor: strangers can be constructed and identified in various ways and approached, treated, and trusted in ways suitable to their perceived role in situ. Similarly, insiders are not necessarily equals or teammates, but may consider others rivals, incompetent, naïve, etc. while still considering them a legitimate part of a social circle, and may trust or confide in others while still considering them outsiders—perhaps even because of this. Trust is a major factor in how these types of access-seeking roles are perceived, and should not be simply considering a function of ‘getting to know’ individuals. Trust—in ethnographic fieldwork as in policing (cf. Manning 2003)—involves the fit or incongruity or expectations and actions and one’s own certainty that expectations will be a reliable predictor of the future. Informants and actors in the field will develop varying views of the researcher based on actions, statements, appearances, etc., and decide not simply how ‘honest’ they should be, but essentially what type—including format—of information to present and what it means overall to provide information—statements and access for observations—to the researcher. A significant aspect of ethnographic access is establishing views of the researcher as ‘harmless,’ ideally as someone with ‘no horse in this race,’ outside of the micropolitics of the field setting, or at least (likely more realistically) as either someone inconsequential enough to not be threatening to station or self-image or else useful enough in providing an outlet for communicated expression.

In terms of the current study, I have elsewhere described my field role as “double outsider” (Bielejewski 2014), in that—in a policing social-world in which actors are typically either police officers or have a role defined through their immediate relationship and interaction with an officer—I was not a police officer or the subject of police work, but I was also new to the region more generally and, decisively, not from Germany. With only a handful of exceptions, all interactions between myself and officers or others occurred in German, but my accent labeled me as a foreigner, and the recognition of this often lead to a serious of follow-up questions the response to which often seemed to spell the difference between receiving a nuanced and complex explanation of a topic or the “light” version. Although I mentioned that I had already been living in Germany for several years, I was often met with responses suggesting that my ‘master status’ in the field was “American researcher⁷,” and I was often given basic explanations of elements of German society, government, history, etc. with which I was somewhat or very familiar—but these recountings were analytically and dramaturgically significant, in that they provided a better understanding of how larger social structures—society, community, the role of government—were being constructed and with which vocabularies. Though this was not the primary focus of this work, much of this was presented in East-West terms, suggesting that the ‘simplified narratives’ of unification are best considered as convenient fictions but also better left unchallenged in many public forums. (cf. Glaeser 2000) It would be a stretch to refer to the accompanied officer as ‘defensive,’ but similar narratives were frequent and I did not appear to be treated as someone who shouldn’t hear such talk, despite its potential conflict with ‘official views.’ Most of this talk was limited to jokes about “the good old days,” observations about how ‘despite what they say in the West’ not much has actually changed in daily life (or police work), and affirmations that the Revierpolizei is just an extension of its earlier East German incarnation (Abschnittsbevollmächtiger) with a new color scheme (an idea that no longer appears to be controversial among leadership and was even expressed in police newsletters.) Other comments that—as framed—may not have been as directly expressed to ‘single outsiders’ (i.e. German researchers not from the local region) criticized how ‘national media’ or ‘Wessis’ (West Germans) often portrayed the East in general and the broader region as home to neo-Nazi activity—the specific activities, including nationalist and anti-immigrant marches, were described by several officers and local officials as primarily representing ‘outsiders,’ mostly from the West, who simply found the area to be a convenient meeting place for various groups. Further evidence was presented in the knowledge of specific involved individuals in the local region and arguments that their activities had little or no local support, but (in the words of officers) it was a “simpler story” if media, possessing pictures of banned symbols and hateful messages, could portray the scene as characteristic of a specific region rather than endemic of a deeper, not always visible, but nation-wide subculture.⁸ The ostensible form of trust to be established here is one in which an interested, minimally biased, considers the ‘informant’ or narrator to be an expert, giving them a reason and security to talk openly—mimicking if not approaching a ‘backstage’ situation (Goffman 1959) and aiding in establishing a rapport. My outsider status as an American additionally provided reference symbols and common vocabularies which were often used as a way to refer to the work and ideals of the officers: in a basic ethnographic sense, that which is sought is that which is so routine, obvious, and taken-for-granted by locals that it cannot or would not be easily explained—providing a ‘straw man,’ as it were, allows for a dichotomy of values which can aid in contextualizing actions and statements, e.g. police in the US were often criticized or made the butt of jokes for their perceived enjoyment and dependence on violence, suggesting that ‘peacefulness’ or some counterpoint to violence is valued—at least rhetorically—by Revierpolizei officers in Brandenburg; the actual situation was more complex, with violence playing various often conflicting roles in narratives and within encounters, but the framing used by officers in presenting narrative accounts made it clear that they at least considered violence—in word and deed—something to be used carefully and with consideration. As it was quickly demonstrated that police could criticize policing in the US without offending me or starting an argument, this often proved to be a useful topic for describing and exploring aspects of police work and values. In the same way, East-West constructions (though less commonly used in a serious way) were sometimes used as I was generally seen to be a complete outsider and thereby ‘open’ to the officers’ depictions in a way in which insiders might not be. It was critical to establish and maintain a researcher identity which established legitimacy and essentially that it was ‘worth the trouble’ to explain things to me, but also that was not seen as outright hostile or in (definition-related) conflict with the identities with which I came in contact. It was important to maintain relationships in which we could become involved in sharing experiences and narratives alternating (and simultaneously) as situational insiders and, in terms of background and assumptions, as outsiders.

3.4.1 One of Us: Involvement, Marginality, and Access

Involvement is a critical issue that affects the collection of data as well as the role of the researcher, rapport, and trust in ways that may impact access and objectivity. To what extent the researcher is participating is not simply a question of gaining access to the field site or of perspective and membership, but also directly impacts what scenes may be viewed or overlooked, often meaning the difference between ‘unfiltered’ first-hand accounts of an event and relying on second-hand descriptions. (Duneier 2011) Two generalized forms of researcher access run the risk of at times missing a ‘bigger picture’ or at least limiting the researcher in terms of which levels, (local) groups and individuals can be effectively incorporated into descriptions of the world. Researchers sometimes gain access to a setting at the ground level in the way that nearly anyone, or at least most suitable candidates, could: by simply showing up and expressing interest. An explanation of the research might serve as armor against suspicion or distrust, e.g. as a way to explain both the ethnographer’s naïveté (expressed in the use of questions and lack of ‘usefulness’) and curiosity and desire to see everything. A researcher might begin effectively working a job, or at least accompanying those who do the most visible version of that job: a researcher may be asked to help put up posters, work a bar, or clean hotel rooms, for example, but this kind of work rarely overlaps with the settings where political operatives, owners, or managers discuss and make key decisions. (Adler and Adler 1987) Alternatively—as in this study—the researcher could gain formal legitimate access from the top-down, with access to varying levels provided by administrators and bosses, but without necessarily giving the researcher ‘free reign’ to come and go: even doing so raises potential questions of what should be viewed, or how much of a particular activity, group, or setting should be observed before moving on. Continuously accompanying the same individuals or groups and observing similar actions enough that they can be understood in terms of both routine and variation may suggest to higher-ups that the researcher is ‘looking for dirt,’ is hoping to find something more interesting, or is simply aimless. Gatekeepers often grant condition access, or may be helpful in facilitating transport and scheduling (which was my experience in Brandenburg) which can be invaluable but at the same time make it difficult to observe things, people, work shifts, etc. which are not on the planned schedule.

This became relevant in the present study in terms of defining the ‘setting’ conceptually—at its broadest level the research setting was the Brandenburger Polizei in Landkreis Falkenmark (which is a pseudonym, though this was not a precondition of access or demanded by any participants.) In a few cases even participant observation was conducted outside of the study area—in two cases leaving the state entirely, and in one involving police from a different Landkreis, though these were all still cases representative of the situation for police officers and administrators locally. Though my major interest was in the Reveripolizei, I was originally assigned day-to-day schedules to accompany various officers primarily in the Revierpolizei but including other units at well. The original administrative intent seemed to be to have me accompany each officer in the Revierpolizei once and have some experience with other units to show the range of tasks.⁹ This plan was later altered or expanded to incorporate multiple shifts with the same officers, but in practice a great deal of improvisation occurred: fixed schedules were usually made at least a week in advance, but the actual work schedules and specially the planned tasks of Revierpolizei officers were less fixed. On some occasions I would be assigned to accompany an officer only to be told that that officer had taken the day off in order to work on the weekend, or that the officer would either be in the office completing paperwork and making phone calls all day or else would be transporting prisoners or making arrests (the latter two being activities I was not permitted to go along on) and so I would instead accompany another officer from the same station. In other cases, despite the schedule, I would be told that another officer would be doing some ‘more relevant’ to my specific research interests and given the choice of accompanying them instead: this was the case with several public events where an officer needed to make a preliminary ‘scouting’ check to determine what type of police presence would be needed, and it wasn’t clear in advance if no, one, some, or all officers from the municipality would be attending. Sometimes these were simple questions of whether my focus was observing the officer or the event, such as in cases where I attended an event with many officers present and was not required to stay with the same officer, but in other cases it was necessary to clarify the situation with the involved officers and administration. The risk of being given ‘tourist treatment’ can be significant in cases where administrators, owners, or other powerful stakeholders can exert control over the ability of the research to observe different types, and particularly potentially problematic, controversial, or hidden types, or behavior. Overall, however, access was rarely restricted—the cases where it was based on safety concerns or regulations, i.e. serving arrest warrants, was not considered a significant hindrance in light of the fact that access was negotiated based at least partially on the (truthful) admission that my research interests were much less on violence or serious crime and more on everyday community interactions, and so the dearth (but not complete lack) of observations of overt conflict and violence was not so much an attempt to shield me from the knowledge of these events as a willful attempt to focus on ‘routine’ work and a conscious attempt to realize that even the events that were observed were not the entirety of police work.

Marginality arguably played a role. Though less often discussed today, earlier ethnographic accounts stemming from anthropology tended to emphasize a strong core culture, and viewed deviance or outsider status as the exception but with marginal individuals playing an effective role in transitioning the field research into the community. (Adler and Adler 1987, cf. Vidich 1955) This mirrors the (sometimes presented as ideal) marginal role of the researcher, who must be both within the field but still maintain perspectives and ‘independence’ from outside. It would be misleading to refer to Revierpolizei officers as ‘marginal,’ but the transition between the ‘institutional’ environment of police administration as indicated within the police station and its bureaucratic geographies (cf. Millie 2012) and the streets as viewed from inside and outside a police car is, even among ‘standard’ patrol policing, often immense. (cf. Van Maanen 1974) Revierpolizei officers travel one to a car and set their schedules independently, in contrast to the standard two-per-car fixed scheduled nature of policing in Germany, and often maintain offices or meeting rooms outside of the police station where they have significantly more contact with local residents, community groups, local government officials, and outside agencies such as the Ordnungsamt than with police officers. This relative freedom was often cited as a reason for choosing the work, and could easily explain the lack of reticence by many officers in speaking plainly and emphasizing the discretionary, communicative and symbolic aspects of their job over institutional concerns.¹⁰

3.5 Background: The Revierpolizei and the Community

3.5.1 Structure and Agency

The German state of Brandenburg has existed in its current form since (re)unification in 1990, though it has a much older history both within the different incarnations of Germany and as an independent state. It is Germany’s fifth-largest state by area but tenth-most populous, with approximately 2.5 million residents. Brandenburg completely encompasses the city-state of Berlin, itself with approximately 3.5 million residents and 25,000 police officers. In contrast, Brandenburg employees approximately 8,000 police officers, and over a much larger, largely rural, area.

Administratively Brandenburg is divided into 14 counties¹¹ (Landkreise) as well as four independent cities. Policing is organized through four Polizeidirektionen, jurisdictional authority which in this case correspond to North, South, East, and West. The Direktion is responsible for logistics and planning as well as media relations and the Kriminalpolizei, detective units, and Verkehrspolizei, traffic and highway enforcement. Under each Direktion are several county-based Polizeiinspektion, 15 in total (including Potsdam)—it should be noted that this terminology is not standard throughout Germany, and that in most states this would instead refer to a local precinct or post. The Inspektion, typically referred to by the name of the county, is primarily responsible for day-to-day patrol and response policing, through the Schutzpolizei, patrol officers, specifically those in the Wach- und Wechsel-Dienst, essentially watch and emergency response, as well as for general crime prevention strategizing and local community policing through the Revierpolizei.¹² Polizeiinspektion Falkenmark employs approximately 150—200 officers in total, making it one of the smaller county-level units. The local community officers of the Revierpolizei operate out of both the Inspektion as well as out of the Polizeirevier, smaller district officers with several functions, and community offices (officially referred to as ‘Sprechzimmer’, i.e. meeting room[s], but colloquially simply called, for example, ‘my office.’) Typical for Brandenburg appears to be about 10 to 20 Revierpolizei offices per county (including the Inspektion itself, Polizeireviers, and community offices), with the 14 counties (as well as the 4 independent cities) ranging in population from around 80,000 to around 200,000. Approximately 550 officers work in the Revierpolizei throughout Brandenburg. While there is some variation—especially between urban and rural areas—a Revierpolizei officer will often be responsible for around 4,500 residents, generally covering a larger area including many villages or small towns: the rural officers who were accompanied tended to be responsible for much larger than average areas with populations close to 6,000.¹³ The largest jurisdiction covered by a single officer had a population just slightly over 6,000, and had reportedly earlier been home to two Revierpolizei officers. Even during fieldwork, this was one of the areas where officers were most likely to ask for support or assistance from ‘neighboring’ officers.

Revierpolizei officers had ranks and status that put them within the middle of three civil service levels (gehobener Dienst, in between mittlerer Dienst and höherer Dienst¹⁴) The form of training and how it corresponds to modern ranks, however, was less important as the majority of officers had begun their career in the East German Volkspolizei—to the extent that training was brought up at all in these cases, officers tended to emphasize the military aspects.¹⁵ Several officers had begun with the police post-unification, typically in 1993 or 1994, some of whom had already been comparatively old (over 30 or 35) and stated that the police had been “desperate” for new recruits at the time. The general older age of most Revierpolizei officers was reflective of the overall organization, with a reported average age of officers over 45: some patrol officers were essentially ‘fresh from the academy,’ but Revierpolizei officers, as with detectives and administrators, were typically drawn from the ranks of already working officers, and some had prior experience in various other units or duties. Even in cases where new officers were taking over for retiring officers, the new officer tended to be an experienced veteran: while no set rules for applicability were ever expressed, the ideal of work seemed to suggest that officers needed to gain a significant familiarity both with police work and with the local region before even being considered for the Revierpolizei, and, conversely, younger officers—most likely working in patrol or crowd-control units—who lacked existing knowledge of the region were not expected to be interested in comparatively “boring” Revierpolizei work.

The ranks held by Revierpolizei officers spanned the entire range of the gehobener Dienst, from Polizeikommisar (PK) to Erste Polizeihauptkommisar, (EPHK) more likely indicating a station leader; there did not appear to be a certain and indivisible connection between rank and function in all cases, with rank appearing to serve more as a sign of seniority and ‘cooperation with the bureaucracy’¹⁶ more than being associated with a specific function in the way that is typically seen in the US. (King 2003) The position of rank among the Revierpolizei was likely different than might otherwise be the case, as officers tended to value the independent and self-determinative aspects of their work over the institutional trappings, and rarely worked within organized squads, whereas patrol units were led by a Dienstgruppenleiter (DGL) and individual officers might see themselves more in competition for promotion or desired assignments. German police officers, unlike their English-speaking counterparts, are generally addressed with Herr or Frau (i.e. Mr. or Mrs. / Ms.) rather than “Officer,” “Sergeant”, “Constable,” etc., this is the case even with higher-level administrators; for example, the chief, with the rank of Polizeioberrat, was never referred to by rank, and at most was described informally or in the local media as “der Polizeichef” (lit: the police boss.) In terms of participant-observation, rank played almost no role, and was mostly practical as a way to quickly identify new individuals based only on prior knowledge or stores—but far less useful or practical than printed names.¹⁷

The Revierpolizei was essentially a continuation (or modernization) of the earlier Abschnittsbevollmächtiger (ABV), though that title and function was abolished after reunification and the Revierpolizei was only established in 1993. The mandate and tasks of the Revierpolizei are relatively broad, essentially invoking competing senses of the term community policing: policing in a way that engages, involves, and responds to the community, and simply routine performing work in a jurisdiction that corresponds to a local community. The tasks enumerated during the establishment of the role include:

• 1. Close contact with the public, including through public relations police work (e.g. in pre-schools, schools, and retirement homes)

• 2. Safety assurance for children on the way to / from school

• 3. Monitoring of traffic / transportation

• 4. Cooperation in providing statements on questions of administrative law / ordinances and matters of traffic / transportation

• 5. Review and reports of complaints from the populace

• 6. Writing up official complaints

• 7. Becoming informed on the phenomena of: politically motivated crime, narcotics-related crime, police-relevant youth gangs / groups

• 8. Conducting consultation hours for citizens

  (“Vorschrift für den Wachdienst des Landes Brandenburg [PDV 350 BB]” cited in Info110 [2010], own translation)

This list of tasks essentially makes Revierpolizei officers into something like a classic image of a beat cop or small town office in the UK or US, with functions ranging from community engagement to pure traffic enforcement: it should be noted, that traffic enforcement was rarely observed, which was attributed to the fact that traffic enforcement is typically handled by a separately administered unit, though in a few cases the accompanied officer coordinated with the officers from the Verkehrspolizei (traffic police) or else just stopped to discuss something in particular or make small talk. Officers otherwise engage in patrol work (though it was less often discussed using the same term for ‘normal’ policing, Streifen fahren), investigate violations and crimes, and engage in public relations work and maintaining contact with community organizations.

Revierpolizei officer are divided into Stadt-RePos and Land-RePos, that is, city officers and country (in the sense of ‘countryside’) officers. City officers are responsible for specific districts within a city, though in practice they often partner up to work events or for certain incidents or issues, and have an easier time taking over or sharing responsibilities. City officers also spend more time on foot patrol, since they generally have beats where it is possible to cover most of the area in a reasonable amount of time. Country officers in contrast have sole jurisdiction over a larger administrative area and so more often (though not necessarily always) work alone. Their specific beat may take a variety of administrative forms¹⁸ but will usually include over a dozen municipalities, often including a large number of villages with very low populations—in some cases officers were responsible for villages they referred to as ‘ghost towns,’ where only three or four houses were still standing and which were only used as summer homes or vacation rentals.

Contact information for officers was available online through the Polizei Brandenburg, including the full name and a picture of the officer(s), telephone and email, address of the office, and the dates and times for open consultation hours.¹⁹ Officers considered it more useful, however, to have their information publicly and physically posted within their respective communities—apparently on their own initiative. Municipalities themselves often included specific contact information about their respective Revierpolizei officer directly on their websites—though about 1/3 of municipalities did not, and several others essentially required a dedicated search for the term “Revierpolizei” to locate the site, rather than providing a direct link from the front page. Some of these sites included the officer’s mobile phone number along their office number, and some additionally provided contextualization essentially making the point that it is acceptable to contact the officer directly, describing them, for example, as “your contact partner for any disturbances of the peace, property crime, questions of safety, and many more things.” The physical postings—put up in various locations determined by the officer, at a minimum in local government offices but often including schools as well—similarly varied in detail and style, with some essentially a print-out of the police webpage and others more ‘personalized.’

Officers themselves estimate that they spend about 70 to 80% of their time in “Außendienst,” that is, outside of the office. Time in the office is divided between completing standard paperwork—reports of various types related to ongoing or resolved incident and ‘activity reports’ created as official proof of police work having been performed—meeting with residents or ‘concerned citizens’ and various internal meetings and obligatory activities—during fieldwork these included sessions such as firearms qualification (an all-day event taking place in another jurisdiction) and firearms checks (in which a team from outside the jurisdiction was sent and officers could only begin ‘real work’ once their service weapon was either certified or replaced.) Outside of the office, officers visited a wide range of locations and settings—essentially every category of ‘social space’ imaginable for the community was represented in some way, though not all were represented in the same way.

The offices of the local Ordnungsamt were a key location for the city officers in particular as a place to catch up on local happenings, exchange information, drink coffee, gossip, coordinate schedules, and make decisions into official reality. Country officers often found a similar form of ‘allied territory’ in more informal locations, such as cafes and restaurants where they could come into contact with both ‘regulars’ (who were considered alternatingly and sometimes simultaneously “good sources of information” and “talkers who can be safely ignored,”) as well as local officials and mavens with access to key social networks, such as through volunteer fire departments or local sports teams. Other commonly visited sites included courts, the professional fire department, important cultural locations or areas that might draw in tourists (these included several renovated castles or mansions operating as hotels, museums, or restaurants as well as a marina, campgrounds, and a larger culture center with various offerings and a large stage for outdoor concerts), and the offices of local government (whether mayor, director, or another office entirely.) These sites were generally ‘managed’ in the sense that on-site personnel were responsible and could generally be found there, and it was with these key personnel that police officers generally remained in contact, though these visits—to the courts in particular—were often opportunities to randomly or semi-randomly run into other acquaintances and known individuals. Schools were visited often, though generally in the form of conducting specific programs, workshops, or presentations rather than in the more spontaneous manner of most other locations; some officers were more likely than others to visit the school offices simply to ask if anything is going on or to follow up on minor issues. Private companies and work locations—often including construction sites—were also often included in ‘rounds,’ many seemed to be longer-term follow-ups to previous, possibly recurring, incidents, but others seemed to be more along the lines of a check-in—in this capacity it is worth considering that officers are expected to make themselves publicly visible and present, but (with many exceptions) worked day-time shifts at a time when a significant portion of the local populace would be at work, and so efforts were made to visit residents at work, particularly when the location might be considered a potential site for minor crime or mischief such as vandalism.

Other commonly visited locations were more public in nature, lacking in other obvious forms of management or ‘guardianship.’ These included infrastructural points such as train stations, public parks or similar areas including riverside paths, soccer fields, shopping centers or shopping streets, the areas around schools, abandoned or condemned buildings where teenagers might be known to hang out, and, depending on the time of year, entrances to trails through the woods where hunters park and congregate. In these locations the police tended to patrol on foot or simply observe the location in passing, occasionally greeting or talking with others present but, unlike in more managed locations, rarely seeking out specific individuals.

3.5.2 Town and Country: Rural Regions of Brandenburg

The study site of Falkenmark is simultaneously an administrative county (Landkreis) as well as a corresponding police jurisdiction (Polizeiinspektion.) At about 2000 square kilometers, the county is approximately ¾ the size of Rhode Island (the smallest US state by area), three times the area of New York City, and one-and-a-half times the size of London. With a population around 100,000, however, and a resulting population density between 35 and 40 individuals per square kilometer, the county demonstrates significant variation from the nationwide average of 240 individuals per square kilometer, closer to the US state of Missouri and well below the density of any county in England and most of non-Highland Scotland. In contemporary Germany, this distinction is highly significant, though it should be noted that Brandenburg overall is sparsely populated (85 inhabitants / km²) suggesting that the state-wide organization of police is likely to take this population distribution into consideration, rather than see it as an outlier. The distribution of the population is seen as a particular challenge for policing generally and for community-oriented initiatives in particular, as police need to potentially travel long distances, quickly for emergency response, but the infrastructure and population density is not conducive to a high level of decentralization, and local communities are often small enough that organization is primarily informal with little significant opportunity for effect formal partnerships with police organizations. (cf. Feltes 2014)

Crime was certainly not non-existent, though serious violent crime in particular was rare. In 2013 and 2014 less than ten “crimes against life,” which include murder but also various crimes of recklessness or negligence, were reported, with a clearance rate of 100%. Reported crimes in Falkenmark were relatively average for Brandenburg overall considering the smaller population. Direct comparisons of crime rates are, however, not useful, as much of the recorded crimes were minor incidents which, in the US, would be considered misdemeanors.²⁰ Recorded crimes were predominantly minor theft, with categories that could include shoplifting or minor theft: officers often presented a ‘typical theft’ as ‘gasoline theft’ or taking something from a yard, shed, garage, etc. The most typical types of thefts reported to officers and investigated during fieldwork were predominantly from businesses or construction sites, but the types of crimes reported to Revierpolizei officers are not necessarily representative of crime or conflict overall. A wide swath of crime types were either recorded or investigated by officers during fieldwork, with a much smaller number occurring during observations, with situations ranging from minor thefts, vandalism and destruction of property, assault or attempts at bodily harm (including against police officers), death threats, internet or electronic crime, and (attempted) suicide—while not technically a crime in Germany, the latter is usually treated as a police matter and one incident in which an individual was simply believed to have indicated suicidal intent resulted in essentially an entire shift dedicated to talking with acquaintances and searching along rivers and through woods. Consistent with media portrayals, crime was popularly (specifically outside of the police) attributed to be primarily related to foreigners—typically from Poland—but officers more often suggested it was typically local in nature, with foreigners responsible for less than 10% of total crime. Crime statistics for Brandenburg overall suggest that over half of reported offenders live in the same municipality as their reported crime, though some officers suggested that some offenders do specifically travel to different jurisdictions—a different county or state—assuming the police won’t bother to follow up, but it was usually followed up with an explanation that this was less common than assumed, and that the generally effective cooperation between agencies made this “not worth the effort.”

Falkenmark contains only three municipalities designated as cities, one slightly larger than the other two though all still relatively small by city standards: all three have experienced significant decline in population, trends which have only slightly reversed in recent years. These cities also serve as the physical site of the Polizeiinspektion and the two Polizeireviere, the ‘base of operations’ for police in generally and for the local Revierpolizei officers respectively. The remainder of the country was divided into approximately ten other municipalities (several of which were Ämter or townships which could be further subdivided into a few dozen small towns.) Municipalities often had one ‘population center’ (usually with a population under 3,000) and several others included places with populations in the hundreds: however, these municipalities were all geographically large and even these subdivisions masked the presence of dozens of separate villages typically with populations ranging from 50 to 300. Some villages reportedly had ‘year-round’ populations of less than 10. Of the approximately 100,000 inhabitants, slightly over half live in the three cities. The area is a mixture of farmland and wooded areas, with both agriculture, as an economic factor, and hunting often cited by police and government officials as playing a major role within Falkenmark: this fact, and the general distance between ‘population centers,’ primarily gave the country its image and rural despite the majority of inhabitants living and possibly working in more urban areas. Tourism, though not seen as a major factor, was occasionally suggested as a topic that might become increasingly relevant, specifically in the context of vacation homes to rent and generally lower costs for both construction and property ownership compared to much of Germany. There was some anecdotal evidence pointed out by officers that some residents, particularly in smaller villages, were simply ‘summering’ or staying a shorter time; this was often attributed to the inheritance of houses by younger generations who had little interest in permanently relocating and expected or had difficulty in selling the house.

Significant both for the community and specifically for the organization, planning, and practice of police is the concept of ‘demographic change,’ specifically in terms of population decline. In the three decades since German (re)unification, the county has lost close to one quarter of its population, which has been attributed both by researchers and in local knowledge to low birth rates and a general exodus primarily attributed to a lack of significant local education and employment opportunities. (Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg 2019) While it is easy to overstate this—the local unemployment rate at the time of the study, at around 8%, was almost three time the national average—many of the most prominent effects were changes or transitions rather than outright decline. Most notably was an increasing urbanization of the population, with residents leaving villages and sparsely populated areas and few moving in, though official estimates generally predict similar urban decreases in coming years. Local officials and police often attributed this transition to primarily older people moving into cities or towns to have better access to resources, medical care, general infrastructure, and to be less dependent on cars. One Revierpolizei officer simply stated that “young people are leaving, leaving dilapidated villages.” Often this was considered to be, apparently from an increase in unemployment, a significant negative effect of reunification (cf. Glaeser 2000) as in the German Democratic Republic (DDR, Deutsche Demokratische Republik) it was stated that even most smaller villages had small shops or kiosks but today residents often need to travel significant distances to shop for groceries and basic needs. This is also reflected in the types of stores, with a high proportion of ‘discount’ or lower-end shops, often in shopping centers, replacing the more ‘upscale’ shops of pedestrian streets. (cf. Eckert and Willisch 2012) Anecdotally, one officer suggested that while in many places Internet technology has brought some benefits—i.e. in the availability of services and ability to order products online—locals, particularly older people, have had a hard time adapting or simply have not made an attempt, and still prefer to visit and speak in person, but are increasingly unable to do so while living in villages.²¹

In terms of images and first impressions, there seemed to be visible evidence to produce plausible narratives of both change and decline. In an impressionistic ethnographic sense (cf. Van Maanen 1988), visiting the area reminded me more of familiar post-industrial areas of the US—New Jersey or eastern Pennsylvania—more than the parts of Germany I was already familiar with. While the prevalence of abandoned or run-downed buildings is often used to symbolize the economic ‘failures’ of the East (cf. Haese and Lantermann 2012) it was common to encounter condemned or simply vacant buildings directly across the street from new ‘suburban’ housing developments. Many storefronts had been closed or had ‘for sale’ signs, but recently opened stores and restaurants could easily be found as well. While the region overall experienced a population decline, the (few) cities experienced slight increases, but, as stated, largely reflected in new construction, with some city blocks resembling ghost towns.

Despite the area being overwhelmingly rural by every measure—including economically—slightly over half of the population lived in the three largest municipalities which, while still small by city standards, were decidedly more urban in character. This was reflected in the division of the Revierpolizei as well, with about half of all officers responsible for city districts and the other half for rural townships or geographically-large towns. Even more residents reportedly worked in the cities, often with longer commutes: infrastructural challenges were presented in the lack of significant highways, with the patrolling of two-lane county roads and concerns about truck traffic playing a major role both in the practice and the discourse of policing locally. Car accidents, including fatal accidents, often were attributed to long-distance truck drivers who “shouldn’t be here at all,” according to some officers. Tragic events such as car accidents often were used as a moral lens to propel narratives about how ‘things should work,’ and the case of accidents where drivers simply ‘passing through’ could be held responsible formed a key issue where insiders—locals or the broader community—could be rhetorically defended against potentially reckless, if not quite hostile, outsiders.

Travel by car was a necessity in most places—country officers typically were responsible for an area that could not thoroughly be patrolled in one shift, and as a result often needed to expend more effort in scheduling appointments and planning visits to avoid spending an inordinate amount of time in transit. This was a cultural factor as well as practical and infrastructural: pre-unification, in the DDR, car ownership was rare, with waiting lists famously lasting up to or over a decade (Glaeser 2000), and this lack of effective ‘independent’ transportation had supposedly been reflected in a more decentralized economic infrastructure, such as a higher incidence of local shops in villages and non-urban areas compared to the situation today. Relatedly, motorcycle or motorscooter ownership was higher, as these were more easily accessible and affordable, and is reflected today in a prominent local motorcycle culture, both in organized ‘weekend rider’ groups and as private interest or hobby. Many of the accompanied officers were motorcycle owners and/or enthusiasts and shared a sympathy for other motorcyclists—sometimes describing it as “typically Eastern”—but also expressing concern for the danger and risk of serious or fatal accidents, particularly among younger or untrained riders: this was often narratively coupled with the overall danger of private transportation and the contemporary need for longer-distance commuting.

While in the more rural areas locations were spatially separate and almost always required a car to travel ‘from scene to scene,’ this was sometimes the case in the urban areas as well (in the largest city in particular), as the forms of public life were not always seen as conducive or relevant to the realities of police foot patrol. Patrolling or traveling by foot was presented—as it often is in the community policing literature (Pate and Skogan 1985, Kelling and Coles 1996)—as a preferable way to maintain a non-threatening but effective public presence and better engage with the community, but also weighed against the benefits of having access to a police van and the included resources (including space for private discussion) and the various downsides of actual foot patrol, such as the distances between locations worth visiting from a police perspective. The choice of walking or driving, for city officers, often appeared to be more of a personal preference, sometimes simply weather-dependent, rather than strategic, as walking the streets was not reliably an effective way to encounter the community. Foot patrol was more often used at specific locations, such as parks or shopping areas, rather than between locations.

Also reflected in the demographic change was the fact that the population was significantly older than would be expected—this was reflected in observations and encounters, with almost no police encounters involving individuals presumed to be between 20 and 30 years old occurring at any point during the fieldwork. Statistically, about 13% of residents are under 18, while over 75% are over 30, with a full quarter of the local population over 65. (Land Brandenburg 2014, Amt für Statistik Berlin-Brandenburg 2019) This further lent to a fractured view of the character of the region—at least from my perspective—as while many areas appeared characteristically “German” and urban in nature, with major pedestrian shopping streets, parks, and cities clearly intended for foot traffic rather than automobiles (cf. Jacobs 1961) cultural expression in public took different forms—i.e. in the sense that the cultural symbols of youth and even forms such as a graffiti were less visible—and the types of public events offered, while still significant in number, tended to be more ‘general audience’ events rather than specialized cultural offerings. Venues likely to skew younger, such as nightclubs, dance halls, or certain types of bars, were rare, but other types of cultural ‘infrastructural centers’ (cf. Barlösius and Spohr 2017) such as cafes, restaurants, and especially ‘canteen style’ restaurants were not only common but often populated by large groups of regulars. Most significant events and encounters involving younger people or youth (outside of visits to schools) involved local village events, such as annual village festivals or, more often, volunteer fire department events: it should, however, be noted that the events attended by Revierpolizei officers better represent the priorities, interest, and knowledge of the specific officer rather than reflect the realities of village life. It was significant, though, which types of events and locations the officers considered central or key in establishing themselves within a community, and these places tended to represent the demographics of the region and municipalities as described.

In many ways the urban areas fit the description by Bude (2012) of an “Anti-Ghetto,” where “not the appearances, but the retreats define the public image.” (16, own translation) Cultural life was, for better or worse, generally perceived and described as predictable. Individuals often brought up their perceived frustrations and the broader narrative of decline, though rarely defining specific problems—at least not problems that could be immediately dealt with by the police or other organizations. These narratives emphasized the lack of opportunities, at least from the perspective of young people or those finishing school, suggesting that those who leave wouldn’t want to come back. While not all characterizations were negative, and few were consistently negatively, they generally reflected the idea of a different pace of life and the lack of significant expectations, contrasting this with the perceived values of young people who value action and excitement. (cf. Goffman 1967) This was even seen in the narratives of police work: I was told that while many officers were close to retirement, and despite overall reductions in the number of planned positions, it was difficult to find enough suitable young(er) officers as most early-career or out-of-the-academy officers were more interested in a “more exciting” assignment in the cities of Potsdam or Brandenburg an der Havel. Officers themselves tended to speak more positively of the region but often based on personal experience, with one officer directly stating “if you weren’t from here, you wouldn’t want to work here.” He implied that the pace of life and the type of work was preferable and more rewarding than that which one might find in the inner city, but could understand why new officers would find it ‘boring.’ A convergence of disparate narratives was clear in how negative elements of social life—economic disadvantage, lack of positive future expectations—could be reconciled with social-world (notably, the local world of policing) which valued stability, predictability, and personal connections.

Community partnerships could be seen as a synthesis of organizational and personal levels of communication and interaction in many ways. (cf. Ohder and Schöne 2018) Community groups, public organizations, and initiatives were prominent within the community but connections between police and community were most present through direct personal connections, which could be done through organizational representatives or leaders but was also manifested through pre-existing relationships between officers and individuals who happened to have an organizational or community affiliation. Some community groups—both official groups and informal collections of ‘concerned locals,’ ‘café regulars’ or ‘busybodies’—were treated openly with respect and concern but afterwards described as individuals who can “safely be ignored.” The division between the symbolic and instrumental functions of community-oriented policing became clear here, in some cases signifying that problems might not arise spontaneously but rather as a function of ‘concerned citizens’ problematizing something and creating a conflict, whereas simply listening to their concerns and negotiating might avoid even the perception of a problem: this was sometimes reflected in a more clichéd “village mentality” where newcomers (in some case even after years of local residency) were considered suspicious by some residents and, in the most extreme cases, accused by residents for every unexplained occurrence. (cf. Geertz 1973) By promising to ‘keep an eye out’ officers could essentially remove the responsibility or ownership of the ‘problem’ from the complaining resident and would likely find no legitimate or convincing ground for further official action.

In comparison to a great deal of research on community policing (and personal experience), churches and organized religion seemed to play a very reduced role in the community, at least in the perspective of the police, and essentially zero role in terms of police-community relations. The only notable events involving religious communities at all involved Christmas concerts where I encountered (off-duty) officials and administrators, but church leaders were never observed to be directly involved in any obvious police-community partnerships. Whether this is simply an oversight based on missing observations, an attempt by the police to avoid a potentially controversial framing, or a result of the general lower levels of religious belief and church participation is difficult to determine (about 80% of Brandenburg residents are not registered with any church compared to 28% nationwide, and surveys have often shown a lack of religious belief among young people in particular, with Peter Thompson (2012), writing in The Guardian, referring to East Germany as “the most godless place on earth”); this played little role within the ethnographic fieldwork as the topic simply did not come up and only became noticeable in comparison to the (primarily US-oriented) literature. (cf. Winship and Berrien 1999) A handful of off-hand comments may speak to a generalized community orientation but arguably should not be given much weight. The German word “Heide” can refer both to heather or moorland, and is often used in local place names or designations of farmland, but the term can also mean pagan or heathen. As Brandenburg was one of the last parts of contemporary German to be fully Christianized (in the 12^th Century as part of the early Northern Crusades), on more than one occasion an officer half-jokingly pointed out signs or names using the word “Heide,” mentioned the comparatively late Christianization of the region or local history generally, and commented along the lines of, “we’re all still heathens here.”

The elements that held the region together, both from the frames offered by the policing organization and the narratives of individual officers, as well as that reflected in the community itself broadly, seemed more about a shared narrative and common problems—both in terms of social change as well as in persistent identified risks including flooding. In the simplest sense, the shared values—though often emphasizing frustration or reflecting negative associations—formed a type of solidarity which police work, especially its more informal incarnations, attempted to reinforce and utilize. Observed encountered and settings were often divisible into ‘scenes,’ with distinct divisions—typically the simple act of traveling by car to a new location—and obvious symbols of “the community” as a whole were not obvious, but the narrative refrain of community concern and values seemed to guide a great deal of observed action, and the work of police officers seemed geared around maintain the idea that there was a shared community. (cf. Anderson 1991) While this study was rather an exploration of police work within a context than an exploration of that context itself, it was quickly clear that the context both defined and reflected the presentation and dramaturgic role of the police in society: as this connection was perceived dramaturgically, it is intentional that the analysis of the context is less empirical or based on outside measurements and more impressionistic, with an understanding of the characteristics and critical elements of the region and local communities based on experiences, observations, anecdotes, stories, and that which was offered by the cultures approached through participant-observation.

3.5.3 Protocol: Field Research

Police officers from the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark were accompanied on their shifts recurring over a period of one-and-a-half years (with additional observations beyond that.) Field stays were typically one or two weeks per month, during which time one officer would be consistently accompanied, though this was not always possible and many adjustments were made to the schedule to accommodate the work to be done, public events which involved evening or weekend shifts, vacations and sick days, etc. Participant observation was conducted in 19 Revierpolizei jurisdictions or beats—because of personnel changes some beats included different or multiple officers, such as due to someone covering a shift, retirement, or an officer transferring to a different district. In some cases, the same officer was only accompanied on-duty for two to four shifts, while others were accompanied for (non-consecutive) weeks—many others, particularly the station ‘chiefs’ were in contact and available for unstructured interviews during or after fieldwork with other officers and were primarily involved this way (though all station chiefs were also accompanied ‘in the field’ several times as well.) Half (9) of the accompanied officers were assigned to city districts, though more ‘unassigned’ time was spent there conducting interviews or with general discussions, as country officers generally have less accessible offices and spend more of their shift traveling by car, meaning that I generally began these shift from the respective Polizeirevier or, in some cases when it was more convenient, being picked up directly (in some cases, particularly when officers live in the communities they police, the distance between the Polizeirevier and the assigned jurisdiction is significant enough that officers have permission to keep their weapon and car at home, rather than spend upwards of 90 minutes commuting to a station and then back to their district.)

Exceptions to planned routines were made in cases that were considered (by me, but often presented by the police as potentially useful) to break the routine—this particularly included public events or the opening of a Christmas Market, where multiple officers would be on-duty, as well as training or inspection; for example, firearms certification was conducted over several days in one week, and in that week I attended with different groups of officers. Additional observations were made with several units outside of the Revierpolizei, some of whom were organized at a different administration level, but in most cases the officers working there had prior experience within the Revierpolizei (which was my reason for being there) and the observations were still enlightening: this included two days spent patrolling in a boat with the Wasserschutzpolizei, the marine police, as one officer had previously worked in the Revierpolizei. Qualitative data was drawn from all observations, recorded either immediately or whenever possible in fieldnotes and then transcribed or reconstructed at the end of the shift or event. Attempts were made in going back to the ‘raw’ field notes to reconcile presumed or already known background information with ‘pure’ observations (cf. Wolfinger 2002)—a complicated task to separate, especially with the consideration that a great deal of Revierpolizei work looks unlike either American policing or urban German policing, two forms with which I was much more familiar, and that fact that many interactions were so dependent on prior knowledge (unknown to me) and were further explained or contextualized by officers post hoc, essentially leaving two ways to interpret the field notes: as a raw experienced or observed situation with no ‘anchored’ meaning, or as an interaction guided (but not solely interpreted) by the narrative explanation given.

No audio recordings were made at any point with the assumption that this would fundamentally alter the nature of interactions if done overtly: as a result, quotations from officers are approximated or reconstructed based on the notes but may not always be word-for-word accurate. Additionally, as all interactions, discussions and interviews were in German, statements were translated into English: in doing so every attempt has been made to convey the spirit, rather than the technical accuracy, of the original statement within the communicative context, and where the use of specific jargon or terminology appeared significant or difficult to convey simply it has been indicated in a footnote—for example, in the US the use of the term ‘cop’ internally by police is normal, but the closest German equivalent of this in terms of slang, ‘Bulle,’ would be considered more derogatory and provocative—the more common internal terms for police in Germany, ‘Beamte’ or ‘Kollege,’ refer respectively to a civil servant or to a colleague or co-worker. These terms may convey additional meaning, but as they are also essentially standard terminology, ‘over-accurately’ translating them into English may convey meaning that is not intended or only significant against a broader cultural background. The Revierpolizei is referred to here as a ‘unit,’ though practically it was more of a role or designation for individual officers and was referred to collectively as “the Revierpolizei” but never specifically as a “unit.” Officers working within the Revierpolizei are generally and generically referred to as ‘Revierpolizei officers’ here for the purposes of clarity, though within Brandenburg they are more parsimoniously referred to as “Revierpolizist” or “Revierpolizistin” (the second case indicating female gendering) or colloquially as “RePo”: the availability of a short, simple term to refer to these officers apart from the comparatively clunky “community-oriented police officer” or other similar terms likely plays some part in making this policing role essentially a household name locally, and this cannot easily be conveyed in translation. In the same way, the previous term “Abschnittsbevollmächtiger” was almost exclusively referred to as “ABV” (the full term only given when explaining the term itself or in an ironic manner) and was often used interchangeably with “RePo” in ways in which the distinction did not matter. (A similar phenomenon can be found in the recurring use of “Mark” referring to the currency existing prior to the introduction of the Euro in 1999—in some cases it could be an indicator that the story being told took place in the past and in other cases the terms were simply being used synonymously despite technically referring to distinct things existing in mutually exclusive contexts.)

The use of terminology is more problematic in referring to the presence and role of non-police individuals within encounters. The term ‘citizen’ is primarily used here, cognate to the German term “Bürger” which is widely used and often intended to refer to anyone police come into contact with, regardless of citizenship. (Ley 2013) Similarly, the term ‘resident’ is similarly used, cognate to the German “Einwohner” which can refer more specifically to a police-involved individual during an encounter at that individual’s residence, to a member of the local community (potentially in contrast to outsiders or non-residents, for example, tourists or visitors to a festival), or simply be used generically and interchangeably with ‘citizen.’ The everyday speech of officers tended to differ greatly from the more formal bureaucratic language or that reflected in the more technical German policing literature (i.e. that used in academy training or described as “Kriminologie”), with words such as “suspect” (“Verdächtiger”) or “offender” (“Täter”) rarely being used in observed encounters or narratives in place of more everyday formulations, along the lines of “the guy who did it,” though the term for victim (“Opfer”) did play a more significant narrative role. The literature often uses the term “polizeiliches Gegenüber,” (Frevel 2015) conveying something like “the police counterpart” to refer to any form of interaction partner: this term was never encounter outside of one or two ironic uses, and despite its potential effectiveness at adequately conveying the idea of a non-police actor in a police encounter it is avoided due to too closely resembling an institutional frame for pre-structuring or pre-coding interactions.

3.5.4 Sources of Data

Overall, data was primarily generated from three sources / settings:

• 1) Direct observations of police-citizen encounters and interactions

• 2) Narrative descriptions provided by accompanied police officers or others in the field

• 3) Descriptions and explanations provided by police officers, administrators and other ‘key informants’ in formal or informal settings

These sources demonstrated a great deal of overlap and the data generated is at times used interchangeably. This distinction was primarily important due to the fact that citizen encounters were often obviously embedded in larger interactions which could only be recounted from specific perspectives—the contextualizing narratives were useful for interpreting the deeper meanings behind gestures, speech, and action generally within interactions but were also interpretable in their own rights both as front stage presentations (cf. Richardson 1990)—of how police officers justify and present their own actions—and as more relaxed backstage presentations—how officers categorize and narratively frame various elements of their work, the community, and human interaction. Dividing encounters into analyzable segments or units could prove difficult even with narrative contextualization—while many encounters were clearly formalized and involved a stated policing goal, such as in responding to a complaint, a great deal of interaction between police and citizens was semi-formal or informal but still involved discussions of relevant matters, such as making small talk with locals in a café who provide information about ongoing concerns. The simplest interactions still bore relevance, at least in a symbolic manner, such as in cases where police officers would wave to passing motorists or pedestrians—the individual might be an off-duty police officer, neighbor, spouse of a co-worker, someone known from a community group or formal organization, someone who has been in contact with the officer to express concerns, or someone who is ‘known to the police’ for having been in trouble previously. These micro-interactions still firmly belong to the observed world of policing, and understanding them requires a hermeneutic approach at essentially two levels: it is necessary to understand the basic ‘rules’ (in this case likely unknown to the officer him/herself) governing when the officer greets an individual without initiating a deeper encounter, and it is necessary to understand the relationship the specific individuals have to the officer (i.e. how their social role and meaning is being constructed.) In a deeper sense, these types of actions reflected the basic construction of the community, of the establishment of ‘insiders’ even if no outsiders were actively indicated, though to the officers themselves this need not be overt and is likely more reflexive and simply a part of everyday life. Exploring the difference between formalized encounters—those in which every participant expresses awareness of what is going on and more-or-less recognizes (if not accepts) the institutional perspective of policing and its demands and concerns—and informal interactions proved to be key to understanding the practical role of community police officers in the specific setting.

The narratives used by police were relevant both as accounts of personal or communicated experience but also as representations of learning processes and models of sharing those experiences. Often the fit between policing values and community values can be observed heuristically based on the terminology officers used in various settings and the extent to which this terminology reflects or guides action. For example, Van Maanen (1978) found that, for the police he examined, citizens were in most cases relegated to the role of ‘know-nothing’ or ‘asshole’ with little opportunity for citizens to provide information that the police would value short of a confession. In contrast, in the present case there was a marked distinction between abstract stories of crime, lacking in identifiable local elements, and richer narratives which, while often stopping short of defending criminal acts, emphasized broader contexts and maintained a separation between the act and the individual who committed it. Additionally, narratives shared by fellow officers, officials, and local ‘contacts’ were a major source of local knowledge in a more general sense to provide meaning and context (e.g. an officer learning and accepting that a certain bar has a bad reputation or that a ‘eccentric’ local man is generally considered kind-hearted and trustworthy by the local community) as well as to learn and identify patterns for emerging issues that need to be dealt with: unlike the more typical or traditional filtering of incidents and calls for service through emergency responses and dispatchers, many observed and handled issues began essentially as rumors or vague stories from officials or residents which were then followed up on by officers, often over a longer period of time, with efforts made to both establish a more ‘workable’ narrative understanding and to manage the connection of the issue to the police, the presumption being that not all issues required an active police intervention as long as the officer can contextualize and keep track of the problematic elements. Tsoukas (1996) states that, “individual knowledge is possible precisely because of the social practices within which individuals engage—the two are mutually defined.” (14) In this, the construction of individual knowledge, which in turn became a resource of symbol of expertise, was undertaken through a variety of social practices within different arenas, such as the broader police culture, the community as a general setting, and against a variety of perspectives and frameworks either shared, semi-trusted, or simply taken as a source for ‘raw data’ for police—for example, in the stories of ‘bar regulars’ who are mostly “safely ignored” the police still recognized narrative elements which they then reinterpreted in a way which let them better contextualize the information. Working with stories was not just a way for police to identify problems, however, but it was also a key part of image work and maintaining the desired relationship with the community, with police needing to narratively position themselves in others in ways that did not rely on (de-personalizing) policing or legal terms.

In an ethnographic sense, attempts were made to approach the police organization, police culture, and police work in a broader (quasi-holistic) sense. The major focus—both by design and by organizational constraint—was on accompanying and observing officers on-duty, but the entire project involved a significant deal of necessary contact with administrators and officers in the Revierpolizei and those with different or additional duties. Perspective was provided by representatives of other agencies, particularly the Ordnungsamt in various municipalities, as well as employees or officials from local governments, fire departments, refugee homes, nursing homes, and restaurants in regards to the problems that concern them and their interactions with the police. A significant amount of time was spent with police officials and administrators both in planning and carrying out research—e.g. in learning the lay of the land and understanding the basic structure and organization of policing in Brandenburg—and later on in a more informal way—I was often invited to private events, and several times to an informal monthly meeting involving the police chief, the former chief and representatives from various government and private organizations in the fields of health and safety. Private events in particular often become storytelling sessions, with officers and administrators reminiscing, many of the stories involving policing in pre-unification East Germany. In this way, information was collected both on specific incidents or anecdotes as well as general perspectives on the local community and the changes it has experienced over the past 30 or 40 years. Entering into the ‘home life’ of officers, though only a minor component of the overall fieldwork, was key to breaking out of a dichotomy of the ‘pure’ outsider perspective which I brought to the field and the institutional perspective inherent in the bureaucratic trappings of the job—it was important to experience how police officers live and talk about their community when they aren’t on the clock. As most officers lived in, or at least near, the neighborhoods they policed, this also often worked as a good introduction into many aspects of community life that could not simply be entered into as, essentially, a tourist to that social world.

3.6 The Drama of Policing: Dramaturgy, Narrative, and Hermeneutics

Viewing interaction from a dramaturgic, humanistic, perspective is a hermeneutic process that involves “’seeing’ human action as creating meanings that can be understood ‘as if’ they were literary texts—embodying metaphorical, poetic, and symbolic meanings.” (Gusfield 2003: 125) The primary focus of the dramaturgical view is centered around the performance and the basic assumption that actors in that performance will attempt to cast themselves in the best light—negotiating, managing, recasting themselves or even pleading to alter possible perceptions. These negotiations are performative and symbolic and certainly constituted through existing, perceived, and evolving power dynamics, though the façade of the performance can often mask the naked exercise of power more commonly depicted in political economy (see also Strauss 1978.) Actors who find their attempts to make serious, bold statements met with ridicule may accept the proffered role as a comedian and even mold that role into one of social critic, maintaining a respected status despite the rejection of their initial performance. (cf. Goffman 1959, 1961) Dramaturgy is essentially a vocabulary of metaphors of theater, of performance, which can be applied to individual interactions, social movements, and image work at all levels. The questions of how and in which way these metaphors can be applied are (ideally) conceptually useful in exploring the nature of interactions between fully deterministic or ritual encounters and uninterpretable chaos. Discarding assumptions that all actions, gestures, utterances, threats of violence, apologies, etc. must be purely functional allows room for these events to have symbolic meaning, either communicating to other participants (actors), to a varyingly engaged audience, or directly to the self-identity of the performer. (Flick 2007) The language of drama is one of metaphor, in which the true nature of a phenomenon must not be fully understood in order to be incorporated into a story, but rather, as in symbolic interactionism, the meaning understood within the scene is that which can further the story and from which actors take their cues. When we address US police officers with, “Officer,” or use the formal tense while speaking with German police officers, we may not be consciously imagining the on-going interpretation in the officer’s mind and considering how our use of vocabulary affects the other’s perception of us, but we do so because this is done: this is the script that is being followed, and while this is not to imply that no deeper meaning lies behind this (as it certainly does) the fact that established forms can be created to give continuity to disparate and unique situations is reason enough for us to explore how these taken-for-granted constructs and ideal types are used as part of a performance.

Dramaturgy is particularly relevant to the practice and institution of policing. Policing has shrouded itself in the mantle of crime control and risk prevention, despite the realization that much of what police do only incidentally involves law enforcement (Bittner 1970) and the difficulties and bureaucratic contradictions created by the institutional demands to demonstrate effectiveness. (Sparrow 2016) The selected case, as with many rural or small-town jurisdictions, further challenges this as effectively presenting crime as the sole or even primary police preoccupation would be, to put it simply, a challenge. (cf. Kröhnert and Lindner 2009) Rural policing in particular has for this reason often been considered to emphasize peacekeeping and general stability over the production and defense of bureaucratic realities. (Banton 1964, Young 1993) The institution of policing in these settings is more constrained in terms of establishing its own separate life-world in which the institution itself defines which people, places, and things are problematic and must be dealt with, as well as how those problems are dealt with. (cf. Manning 2003) Yet even in ‘normal’ police settings (that is, the urban departments which are overrepresented in the literature and media), the conflicts over police interpretations of situations and alternative perspectives within the community (ranging from everyday ‘common sense’ interpretations to medical, psychiatric, or religious perspectives on conflict, deviance, and problem-solving) cannot be simply handled through case-by-case processing: the police are bound to the images they reflect, and have themselves long recognized the need to manage those images. (Strecher 1971, Manning 1988)

Returning to the case at hand, the institutional level of policing—represented by the use of formal public messaging, organizational structuring, and the establishment of formal policies, commissions, and programs (cf. Crank 2003, Mensching 2007)—faces the challenge of reconciling the vision of policing inherited through institutional constraints, bureaucratic necessities, demand conditions, and available resources and measures with a portrait of openness, responsiveness, and concern for not just the concerns of the community but for the very existence of an entity that can be defined as such. Police in Germany, paralleling developments in most Western countries, have developed from a more state-centric purely institutional model to one more concerned with public perceptions and the rights of citizens, with public safety generally touted over criminal punishment as a core goal. (Kreissl 2008, Dübbers 2015) One of the most visible manifestations of this is the creation (or, more accurately, continuation) of the Revierpolizei and the reliance upon them as a principle element of policing, rather than a supplement or ‘token’ unit, and the related establishment of community partnership. The mandate of the Revierpolizei itself reflects a dramatization of what policing is, exemplified for example in the emphasis on cooperation with schools and the safety of children going to or leaving school: using the vocabulary of social problems, this is a “valence issue,” (Nelson 1984, Gusfield 1989) in contrast to a position issue, which can effectively be presented in terms of consensus and in terms of social or community values without the need to even acknowledge or consider any organized opposition.

Organizing efforts around valence issues—and taking efforts to ensure the continuing perceived valence of these issues—is one visible form of image work that maintains a connection between police and community and downplays the potential for conflict. Emphasizing prevention and public safety, and particularly public safety for children, can both frame the police as not actively against any segment of society and also allow for a narrative where ‘nothing happening’ is still seen as a success. Rather than having to outright become “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker 1963) providing new frames of morality or community values or relying on their presumed expertise in recognizing developing problems, police can combine the organization of everyday work and image work by emphasizing and communicating a focus on pre-defined problems and similar valence issues where no community opposition is expected. (cf. Ericson and Doyle 2003) This is similar to the arguments of Bittner (1970) and Manning (2003) that the dramaturgical focus of the police institution has been on law enforcement precisely because this confers a stronger idea of legitimacy and avoids the need for police to morally or situationally justify their decision-making: crime is by the general definition (in play here) an act against society, even if maintaining this positioning requires a great degree of selectivity in who is treated as a criminal (as well as when and where.)

Police often demonstrated a sense of role conflict in needing to carry out their work, particularly in contexts where they developed sympathetic narratives of acts or individuals which from an institutional context were criminals or offenders, but from other perspectives (within the community) may be seen differently. (cf. Johnson 1970, Regoli and Poole 1980) One officer described investigating a potential arson where it was found that the owner was responsible, concluding the story with, “the man didn’t have any money… maybe I shouldn’t have done it,” referring to his own actions leading up to the man’s arrest. While this demonstrated sympathy with the key actor in the story, the sympathy shown in the narrative was not presented as a challenge to the institutional ideals of the police. In a way, the individual was a victim of circumstances but not ‘the opposition’: other issues, particularly drugs or alcohol-related issues, are framed as supported by interest groups who are unlikely to change their values or norms, and, as a result, efforts might instead focus on making compromises in terms of what behavior is considered acceptable in public (if well concealed or not provocative, etc.)

In the same way, police can provide legitimacy for activities, events and settings which are essentially already legitimate within society, and undercut possible expectations that the police are trying to ‘ruin a good time’ or put people on edge. By policing public events in more participatory, non-adversarial, ways police officers (as well as the larger organization) can present themselves as supporting—whether tacitly or officially- what is going on. In the present case this primarily involved attending events and settings such as the annual and traditional Christmas Market, ‘classic car’ shows, parades, fairs and festivals, and sporting events: as will be explored in the next chapter, this further required the manipulation and management of the ‘expected’ police role to allow for a more participatory engagement—both fulfilling the demands of policing, as a process, and maintaining more than tacit membership within the ‘mainstream’ community. Some events—notably an electronic music festival and a nationalist march—were more obviously treated as ‘outside’ the core community, either due to primarily drawing a crowd from outside the region or for being too far outside the mainstream, and policed not through participation but rather through external control and the establishment of fixed boundaries, e.g. in setting up checkpoints to inspect cars entering the area. The institutional and organizational demands for police officers to establish themselves some way within society have often been overlooked (Banton 1964 provides an early and illustrative example) and in the present case, though these demands were rarely explicit, they were firmly seen as part of the job, and a desirable one at that: officers wanted to police a community in which they had some stake.

The involvement of the community was present in encounters more often than not. This reflected a typical ‘ethnographer’s dilemma’ as, especially early on, many interactions were either essentially indecipherable or only interpretable in terms of broad strokes and clear outcomes. In contrast to a great deal of the urban-centric ethnographic literature, encounters tended to be approached by participants (police and residents) as taking place within a larger temporal framework—i.e. fewer people were complete strangers to police, and most encounters involved elements—utterances, references, symbols, or even the stated or unstated purpose of the encounter itself—which had earlier histories and needed to be understood in some way in order to ‘follow the action.’ At the same time, overly depending on officers to explain their actions and decision making seemed to violate the spirit of an ethnographic approach, and this led to the realization that how police talk about what they do is crucial, separately from what they do or how they do it.

3.6.1 In their Own Words: Role and Identity

The Brandenburg Police newsletter “info110” describes the Revierpolizei officer as “seismograph, mediator and problem-solver in uniform.” (2010: 15) Revierpolizei officers could be considered as ‘specialized generalists’ as they are intended to not only work in a specific but broadly defined jurisdiction (i.e. being solely responsible for a variety of tasks in a geographically large area and ‘the community’ in general) but also with a vaguely defined mandate that clearly differs from a more institutionalist view emphasizing enforcement or measurement, but one that is also intended to be more practical and functional, in terms of replacing or at least supplementing standard patrol policing, than purely symbolic. Lehmann (2010) emphasizes the fact that the actual practices of the Revierpolizei vary somewhat from official designations and also recounts the concerns of officers that bureaucratic interference will hinder, constrain, or undermine their work in terms of community relations. In describing their job, officers often distinguished “Revierpolizei work” from other required tasks, with Revierpolizei work covering general, often long term, efforts to “maintain contact” and “keep a positive relationship” and other work including more formalized policing tasks such as traffic control, inspections of various kinds (such as residency checks), and responding to accidents or emergencies. Semi-formalized tasks such as ‘providing advice,’ particularly to schoolchildren or to seniors were ‘core tasks’ for some officers but only tertiary to others, more relevant to the ‘prevention’ unit (where, significantly, some of the officers who most valued these tasks had previous experience.) Generally, though, the core of Revierpolizei work was consistently presented as the idea of “making oneself available,” both by being known and present in the community and by being physically contactable and reachable (with several officers claiming to never turn off their work phone or to regularly give out their private number), and then following up with the resulting expectations from community members. Though it might not be the ‘typical’ start of a case or encounter, ‘cold calls’ where someone who was not closely acquainted with the officer simply called the officer’s mobile phone to discuss a problem or arrange a meeting did occur, confirming this image of ‘availability’ presented by officers. The self-image of community-oriented officers presented in the literature has been generally consistent with that reflected in the fieldwork, though it should be noted that little research has been done to date specifically on community-oriented officers in Germany, and that the extant research primarily has, as in the present case, focused on rural areas where extra weight appears to be given to those units as the major face of policing.

Ohder and Schöne (2018), in their study of the Bürgerpolizei in Sachsen, note that, “in stark contrast to the tendency towards anonymization among police officers… community-oriented officers are properly personalized.” (150—151, own translation) This proved to be a major component of the Revierpolizei both in terms of identity and in the development of individual encounters. Personalization took place on two conceptual levels, both of which were of relevance though varying case-by-case: inside the role of the police officer, and outside that role as a private citizen. These levels very roughly correspond to the dramatization of policing authority (further explored in the following chapter) through personal and situational frames, respectively. Many officers in Falkenmark were local to the area, especially within the Revierpolizei, and so were already known to neighbors, friends, family etc. as private individuals, and were therefore concerned with their reputation as well as with the local community broadly. (cf. Banton 1964) Officers, however, saw a significant component of their job simply as establishing themselves within their given community, regardless of their previous relationship to that community generally or in specific contexts, with most officers stating at some point that it required years to establish oneself as reliable and trustworthy: one officer specifically stated that “it takes at least two years before you can really do anything as a police officer.” Establishing oneself, as a process, consisted both of deciphering formal as well as informal community and social networks—country officers often were responsible for 20 to 40 distinct municipalities or villages with their own representatives and local organizations, and simply keeping track of who was responsible for various tasks and geographic areas could require significant effort—as well as gaining the trust of key individuals and the community in a more general sense.

The experiences and backgrounds of the involved officers varied, though attitudes towards the work were broadly similar; major distinctions or dissimilarities are indicated, but as noted, were generally rare, with more observable differences between officers in other units and the Revierpolizei than within the Revierpolizei itself. Many officers commented on this in particular, emphasizing that, though each officer likely has his or her own preferred ‘style,’ being a Revierpolizei officer requires a belief in the idea of communication and negotiation rather than a strict black-and-white worldview, as well as the ability to know when to be ‘relaxed,’ (lässig) but also when to become strict (streng). This specific formulation came up regularly: remaining relaxed and, when necessary, becoming strict. One former Revierpolizei officer had been transferred out of the unit, and, although the specific details were not indicated, it was suggested by other officers in the unit that “he is a good cop, but he couldn’t talk to people the way that you need to.” It was clear through many other statements that the ‘needed’ way to talk to people was not a specific method or approach, but rather emphasized the idea that the officer simply needed to have an approach at all, essentially that the officer needed to maintain control—through dramaturgical practices and impression management—even in situations involving discretion and the relinquishing of formal control.

Officers tended to be older, though this was also reflective of the overall average age in Falkenmark, and this also translated into most officers having a great deal of experience within and without the Revierpolizei. Officer Karsten had begun as an ABV officer prior to unification, and claims to have been the oldest officer to ‘survive’ reunification, with most over 30 being let go or deemed ineligible.²² He was already eligible for retirement as I first entered the field, but he saw the Revierpolizei as his “dream job,” often abstractly portraying a conflict between the administration which wanted to ‘put him behind a desk’ and himself with his determination to be ‘among the people.’ He had served, with one uniform or another, as the community officer for his specific municipality for almost 40 years, and claimed to have been offered and turned down leadership or administrative positions on several occasions: “too much paperwork.” He approached his job with an unmistakable sense of humor, both in the office and often when talking to residents (though noticeably this quickly vanished in ‘serious’ situations.) Officer Karsten, more so than most officers, described the work of the Revierpolizei as often unappreciated by the ‘bureaucrats’ and (abstract) administration. His independent streak was evidenced by his continuing to patrol an area that was technically outside his jurisdiction (and outside of Falkenmark entirely) with the justification that it had previously been part of the same municipality and that “they know me there.” As a country officer, he spent little time in the Polizeirevier and worked as much as possible directly from his local office, but even then he claims to prefer spending as much time ‘outside’ as possible, and, despite the ‘slow pace,’ often has more than enough to keep him busy; according to him, this is a function of being known in the community: “I don’t even have to go to people, they come to me first.” Showing an interest for ‘little things’ was also essential to establishing oneself in his view, which would give him a fuller picture of what is going on and become essential when something ‘bigger’ happens: “I can’t just show up after a murder, I have to already be there when something happens.” He subsequently linked his knowledge of the community, and the community’s knowledge of him, to a local clearance rate of around 60%, above the county and state average. A clipping from a local newspaper, on display in his office, declared him “a cop through-and-through, available to help day and night,” which Officer Karsten followed-up with, “you’re always in uniform.”

Officer Schmidt was relatively new to the Revierpolizei when I first met him, also working in a rural municipality, but had already spent 30 years working patrol shifts (Wach- und Wechsel-Dienst, or WWD.) He noted that the pay for a Revierpolizei was actually lower due to more ‘standard’ working hours, rather than overnight or weekend shifts, and less opportunity for overtime; he considered this an acceptable trade-off because the Revierpolizei is “better for your health,” even if “there isn’t much to see.” As a newer officer, he spent more time together with other officers—specifically with Officer Karsten, who worked as the ‘backup’ officer for the jurisdiction, and, despite his years on patrol, the difference between knowing the community through responding to calls and the need to proactively make contact as a Revierpolizei officer was a frequent topic. Officer Schmidt saw particularly difficulties in his exceptionally rural (“Nur Felder und Acker!”) municipality, specifically as it has seen comparatively high turnover for Revierpolizei officers, meaning that not only it is difficult to establish oneself personally, but that the institution itself does not seem to carry the weight it does in other places.

Officer Hermann was a city officer, working in the county seat, which meant his offices were within the central police station, shared with two other city officers. Characteristically, as a city officer his work was, at least on the surface, somewhat more structured, with more formal meetings and discussions with officials and ‘location managers.’ In comparison to the country officers previously described, he saw some of the work he described as ‘bureaucratic’ as a crucial part of the job, though also described it as “the things you don’t want to do now.” Flipping through the documents on his desk, he listed off some of the ‘ongoing concerns’: issues with parking at a local school, relatedly his desired solution to replace generic “children playing” signs with those forbidding normal parking during school hours, the need to ‘catch up’ other officials in the Ordnungsamt and prosecutor’s office that a certain individual could not be located and the need to supply more ‘documentation’ (including photographs) and send them by internal courier, and making an appointment to visit a refugee home to follow up on a call from the local administrator. Officer Hermann was also a former ABV officer, though he described the current incarnation as “improved.” Like many officers, he often spoke in terms of familiarity which could be understood both from a police perspective and more individually—describing problematic individuals as “known to us,” but also emphasizing the need to “find a solution that is good for everyone.” Describing those individuals who he sometimes needs to keep an eye on, mostly including individuals who “had problems with—or without—alcohol,” he frequently concluded with “but they’re harmless.”

Officer Reiner was also a city officer, as well as the station chief for a Polizeirevier. He lived in the county capital, however, very close to the main police station, and had been planning to transfer there once a position was open. He frequently made jokes at the expense of the police organization—ranging from pointed criticism of administrative priorities to simple everyday ‘observational humor,’ (when his work computer took several minutes to boot up in the morning, he commented, “high-security computer—it takes longer so that anyone trying to steal our data just gives up,” and later, when a computer crash resulted in some lost data, “computers are funny people.”) He described the local Polizeirevier—which included three city officers and three country officers, and also housed two detective and some additional personnel—as “structurally problematic,” too small to offer much in terms of services or resources and with no potential for advancement for officers there, but also necessary for providing some service at all. He noted that the city had “previously been a county seat, but now it’s a village.” The situation was occasionally seen almost as dire, with increases in resources in other jurisdictions often being framed against a lack of increases in the specific Polizeirevier: when officers were discussing that a new car was needed, Officer Reiner stated that, “realistically it’s more likely that we’ll lose one.” The Polizeirevier had recently moved into a new building, out of the old Volkspolizei station which Officer Reiner described as “frightening, but probably on purpose,” (cf. Millie 2012 for how police architecture overlaps with image work) into a smaller and less obviously ‘police-modern’ building. One advantage was that the new building was not far from the local Ordnungsamt and also a canteen which was used by both police officers and Ordnungsamt personnel, meaning that the degree of formal and informal contact between the two was seemingly higher than in locations simply due to convenience.

Officer Müller was also a station chief, and though this gave her a larger administrative workload than most officers, she always tried to find time to patrol the city by foot. Notably, and admittedly against regulations, she sometimes left her service weapon in the armory, stating that in the rare event that a situation called for violence by the police, a firearm would only escalate the situation, and that “I don’t want to hurt anybody.” She described her work as chiefly governed by routines at various levels—for example, winter was often quieter as people didn’t go out as much but also were quicker to “ignore things that bother them.” Spring and summer kept the Revierpolizei busier, with a great number of public events requiring the police to ‘define their own role,’ often precariously, such as with political demonstrations: “there are two sides who don’t like each other, and we’re standing in the middle.” These fixed demands for activity were sometimes seen as in conflict with the proactive work of the Revierpolizei in determining their own work patterns and networks, particularly as, at the time, an increase in nationalist and anti-immigrant demonstrations was taking place and these events were seen as risky for the police, both in terms of physical safety and in image. Officer Müller’s beats was one of the busiest in terms of stereotypical police activity, with more observed cases of crime (or at least events dramaturgically treated as ‘criminal’) than with most officers, involving several hit-and-runs and assaults, which provided a slightly different context when at one point she stated, “there’s nothing going on right now, it’s better that way.”

Trust was often cited as a significant resource, essentially a form of social capital to be built up and managed, which could lead both to future access (to information and cooperation) and be leveraged or ‘spent’ at times when a more ‘traditional’ police intervention was seen as necessary. Lehmann (2010) quotes one officer:

When I go to someone today and fine them five Euros, then I shouldn’t expect them to have a good deal of trust in me and to tell me something that is, for police work, much more important.

This example equates trust among the community as useful not simply as an outcome on its own, but as a resource or condition that can prove useful in conducting ‘actual’ police work, presumably incidents involving more serious crime rather than minor incidents involving ‘five euro’ fines. Similar hypotheticals were often encountered. Many of these similarly showed a divide between tasks or activities considered important in their own right and those which seen as either not worth the trouble or else likely to unnecessarily hurt the image of the specific officer in the eyes of those involved. Officers took many opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge of past cases, particularly those who had to be sanctioned or fine: for example, while passing a local clinic, one officer commented, “They’re not happy to see me here: I had to ticket the boss for speeding once.” (“Hier bin ich nicht so gern gesehen, ich musste einmal den Chef beim Schnellfahren kontrollieren.”)

At a more serious level, Revierpolizei often expressed reservations about serving arrest warrants, and most accompanied officers stated that very often they would attempt to avoid personally serving it if possible. The reasons for this included both a more general concern for image, presumably from the general community, neighbors, and bystanders, as well as more practical concerns: the arrestee would more likely be back in the community—sooner than later—and it would be best for everyone if that individual was comfortable talking to the specific officer rather than hostile. Keeping in touch with ‘police-known’ individuals, though not specifically stated in the official mandate, was seen as a key part of ‘keeping one’s eyes open,’ or ‘paying attention,’ essentially part of the ‘seismograph’ function. This was linked to maintaining trust as a way to maintain open communication even when other agencies or other others would be essentially shut out, but also was often reflected in a skepticism towards “hard methods” such as arrest, which could have longer term consequences such as making it impossible for someone to have a normal job. Notably, the most vocal critic of arrest and “hard methods” was Officer Wolfgang, who unlike many officers had gone ‘full circle,’ starting as an ABV officer in the 1980 s but transferring to work in almost all other possible divisions (patrol, investigation, prevention, marine) before ‘returning’ to the Revierpolizei. Officer Wolfgang commented that “as you get older, things look different, you can talk [with others], you don’t always have to take repressive measures.”

Revierpolizei officers saw themselves as distinct from the larger police organization both in their group identification and its corresponding roles but also because of their emphasis on being known as individuals. Several officers when first presenting their work specifically stated “the Revierpolizei is not the patrol/response unit.” They emphasized and valued being recognized both as Revierpolizei officers and personally, mentioning the importance of ‘recognizability’ (Wiedererkennungswert); one officer stated “no one is happy to see the [regular] patrol car, but if I show up, that’s the Revierpolizei,” and more made statements along these lines. This was seen not just as a tactic but specifically as a motivating factor and a source of job satisfaction: Officer Karsten poignantly stated, “policing has to come from here –” and gestured to his heart, “and not from here” and showed his wallet. The idea that the Revierpolizei, by mandate and necessity, see their work as something that they need to care about, in that they need to remain part of the community and incidents prior to and after the arrival of police on the specific scene, was often expressed as well as observed. This additionally correlated with a general independence from administrative structures—one officer, for example, stated that he was “theoretically” attached to the main Polizeiinspektion, and his boss could always require him to work there rather than out of the (geographically closer) Polizeirevier or his own local office, but that this “essentially never” happened. Activity reports were produced and reviewed by station or Revierpolizei chiefs, but rarely appeared to be explicitly detailed or discussed critically, with assessments of officer performance apparently reliant more on reputation and, in line with Officer Karsten’s comments about negative feedback, the fact that poor decisions or lack of motivation by an officer would certainly get back to the police.

Key to the perception of the work was not just the capacity to divide tasks between ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ (with the added advantage of ‘community legitimation’ in making this distinction) but specifically the ability to act based on this. Officer Wolfgang simply stated that, for him, the advantage of being a Revierpolizei officer was “the opportunity to do something.” (“Die Möglichkeit etwas zu tun.”) This was immediately contrasted with detectives who must do something. At the same time, there was a general skepticism towards both (though not necessarily simultaneously) the abstract ideas of punishment and to the actual administration of it through the organization. Officers provided some examples of cases where they could not reconcile the choice by the prosecutor to not pursue charges with either ‘community concerns’ or with an institutional philosophy. These examples presented a noticeably different vocabulary than that most typically in use talking about the community or everyday work: one narrative described a “typical purse thief” who was known to police, with a known place of residence, who was randomly caught by the officer on the street soon after a reported purse snatching and in possession of “exactly the right amount of money”; the evidence was supposedly considered insufficient to view the crime as “likely to be repeated” and the individual was not charged. Sometimes this difference in priorities was reflected in officers going out of their way to take actions: Officer Karsten recounted a case where cars had been broken into outside a cemetery during funerals. He had signs made at his own cost advising or reminding visitors not to leave valuables in the car, claiming that it would be possible to ‘find money’ to have it done officially, but this way “it got done.”

Officers often emphasized the peacekeeping aspects and general stability, rather than first pointing out problems—critical issues were often only brought up situationally, such as when we passed or visited certain locations, or when specific incidents occurred, or else as part of other narratives and stories, rather than preemptively in describing the job. Officer Karsten, while highlighting the independence and freedom inherent in working in rural areas, stated that “unless you get negative feedback, everyone is probably happy.” If officers were established, known, and trusted, they could be relatively confident that problems would come to their attention before they ‘got out of hand,’ and would not need to actively seek out behaviors to problematize. Though primarily presented sarcastically or within anecdotes, “waiting” (or else “patience” though this term was rarely used) was often presented as a key policing virtue: essentially, an understanding that it was better to wait until the right time to act—which implied a better and more complete knowledge of the situation and various related factors—rather than to act rashly or become too eager to become involved in private matters (“like American police,” according to Officer Karsten.) Other formulations juxtaposed ‘waiting’ against either the perceived motivations of police officers or a lack of respect or resources (typically from the ‘bureaucracy’): when a court employee encountering another Revierpolizei officer in the hallway of the courthouse commented, “Oh, do you need to wait?” the officer responded, “yeah, but we get paid for waiting, too.” This, of course, occurred against a backdrop of waiting which that officer used to engage in conversation with many people working, passing through or waiting in or near the courthouse, which involved following up one ongoing case and suggestions for two new problems to follow up on.

This related to the need of specific local knowledge—both in a general, long term sense as well as immediately and situationally. Officers, for example, showed pride in knowing their way around their beats without having to rely on GPS, and often on knowing where individuals lived without needing to check the address. Jurisdictions for country officers in particular were very large, and officers described the need to both be able to travel efficiently and to know which places are worth visiting preemptively, because “you can’t be in every village every day.” One officer had the keys to the main gates of a local campground which also served as a shortcut that would not otherwise be located by GPS. Knowing family histories, where individuals worked, where people (both individuals and groups) could be best found and when, and which channels to use to get certain types of information was crucial; at the same time, officers need to be up to date, often starting their day by reading internal reports or logs of the previous day’s events or from the overnight patrol shift. This information could sometimes be immediately necessary or relevant, and otherwise more effective as a type of resource or simply a topic for communication: for example, it was reported at one point that the overnight shift responded to an assault in a ‘home for troubled youth’ and that a counselor or staff member was lightly injured—this event was described, classically, as “one bad apple spoils the bunch”—and the officer later (a few weeks after the incident) took the opportunity to visit the home to ‘check in,’ but not specifically to follow up on a ‘problem’ or ‘incident.’ Demonstrating concern or interest in this way might help to establish rapport with personnel there, and additional help in putting faces to names, but was also clearly seen as running the risk of (further) turning the incident into a criminal event. Officers frequently evidenced their connection to the community by waving or pointing out various individuals as we drove or walked past: “he’s the owner of a large agricultural business,” “she had some trouble with her ex-husband a few years ago but it’s better now,”; these descriptions we’re not always purely descriptive or positive: “those two are just a pair of village idiots,” “[that old man] over there, he just wants to get everyone else in trouble, you can’t really trust him but just have to stay polite.” One quickly resolved case involved a ticket for speeding (resulting from an automated camera) which had already been paid, but where the relatively young person in the picture did not at all appear to be the older man to whom the car was registered and who had paid the fine. Seeing the name and the picture, the officer immediately stated, “oh, that’s his grandson who visits sometimes.” In cases where individuals couldn’t immediately be framed against the local setting, officers usually, rhetorically at least, attempted to hypothesize their role or purpose, such as conjecturing that “they must be tourists” based on the lack of local license plates and the general appearance of the car and family inside, or “I bet he’s the guy who is looking to buy that house in [Kleindorf], I think I saw that same car parked there earlier.”

Becoming involved in the community took place at various levels, both individually and through more formal organizations or meetings, often directly through or facilitated by local government. Even this, however, was often framed as a way to establish oneself personally—many officers attended evening meetings off-duty, rather than having to alter their schedule. In other cases, schedules were often altered so that officers could attend evening events or weekend festivals on-duty, but the need to ‘show oneself’ was narratively seen as more important than specifically ‘being on the clock.’ At most public events, Revierpolizei officers didn’t see themselves enforcing order so much as establishing and maintaining relationships. In cases where order maintenance as seen as a more serious issue officers were ‘ordered’ from the Bereitschaftpolizei (lit: “readiness police”, but effectively the unit for crowd control and policing public event) and a primary function of the Revierpolizei was to evaluate the general security needs; however, officers often seemed to distance themselves from the more formal and impersonal presentation typical of the Bereitschaftpolizei, spending more time at events simply ‘making the rounds’ and engaging in small talk with various known individuals. Some officers emphasized the need to become associated with the uniform, to become essentially, as a uniformed local officer, part of the image of the place, but others (with overlap between the two) talked about the need to be engaged as a private citizen, to “drink a beer in the local tavern.”

Overall, officers spoke very positively about their work—specifically in terms of freedom to set their own goals and boundaries—mostly positively about their local communities, and ambivalently about the broader police organization, expressing insecurities with the seemingly permanent nature of reform and concerned about perceived attempts to channel their work to suit less rewarding and purely bureaucratic goals. Ohder and Schöne (2018) found similar worries about community officers in Sachsen, including the statement, “When the police can’t solve a problem, they send the Bürgerpolizei” (154); this was not intended to highlight the versatility of the Bürgerpolizei as a virtue, but rather constituted a complaint that the ‘defining’ tasks of the unit can easily be put aside when the administration needs to exploit them to get something done quickly. These types of concerns tended to specifically involve making arrests or ‘picking someone up’ as well as prisoner transportation: apart from the use of local knowledge in locating someone for arrest, neither of these tasks was seen as generally in compliance with the core idea of the Revierpolizei, and were presumed to be more related to the ability to keep a patrol car in service while only devoting a single-officer car to a task that is primarily driving. These casual uses of the Revierpolizei as a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ resource were seen as not only unrelated to the core mandate, but sometimes—specifically in the case of arrests—were considered directly contradictory, jeopardizing the goodwill which officers had built up.

Officers were generally positive about the members of their local communities, seeing them as predominantly ‘supportive of the police’ and non-problematic, but the problems of the region and demographic changes were frequently invoked as difficulties to be confronted. Many police-related problems were discussed in these terms, shifting blame directly away from the individual to the broader situation and social structure. Many villages in particular were described with the words, “there’s nothing to do here, nothing really happens.” Problems or incidents involving younger people in particular were often described with some level of sympathy: in several reported cases of youth ‘hanging out’ or drinking in run-down abandoned buildings the officers, in describing the situation, put significantly more emphasis and blame on the absentee owner. In one related case where a fire had apparently been started in an abandoned villa and then put out by firefighters, the officer simply stated, “they should have let it burn down.” The owner was described as a “Wessi” (West German) who came over immediately after unification and bought several buildings, but then moved back to the West and did not maintain most of the properties but involved lawyers “every time local government tried to do something about it.” This fit into a larger trend in many rural areas, with an increasing number of abandoned or poorly maintained buildings coupled with a lack of guardianship portrayed as a significant risk factor, though officers more often spoke of the risk of ‘broken glass’ in a literal sense than the creeping spread of deviance and disorder predicted by “Broken Windows.” (Wilson and Kelling 1982)

The cities were seen a bit more hopefully, though each had neighborhoods, specific buildings, and visible groups in public (i.e. “daydrinkers” in parks or near train stations) which were essentially written off by the police as best managed through avoidance: police approached these locations or groups only when necessary and often accompanied by another officer, and otherwise only claimed to attempt to negotiate or maintain a ‘stability,’ e.g. preventing groups drinking in public during the day from approaching or harassing passers-by. One particular location was described with the statement, “you don’t need a uniform [presumably ‘officer’] there, you can’t regulate anything, it will just make it more chaotic.” Other problems were often presented more in terms of something to be monitored rather than requiring direct intervention, or best solved simply by informing other parties. One such situation involved a class of high school students, apparently 15 or 16 years old, who had begun sneaking bottles of vodka into school and ‘covertly’ taking sips during class; apparently as a result of ‘egging each other on,’ the behavior had escalated and some students started openly drinking in class and outright defying the teacher, who was unable to regain control. In the presented narrative it was unclear how the case had ‘officially’ played out, but it was clear that the officer had only learned of the situational informally by word-of-mouth, rather than through police channels. The officer didn’t specifically want to see the students punished, but saw little that the police could formally do otherwise. The situation was apparently resolved semi-formally, as one of the involved students was the child of an ‘allied’ official (either from the Ordnungsamt or city government administration, the specifics were not clear) and it was essentially communicated that there could be consequences if the behavior were to continue.

Officers had generally high expectations for knowing their community and being known there—the police newsletter “info110” (2010) reports a poll suggesting that 24% of residents could identify their local Revierpolizei officer, further suggesting this indicates room for improvement. However, the goal never seemed to getting to know the entirety of the community, but rather to become established enough to have a detailed local knowledge, trust, and access to various formal and informal networks. The challenges presented were often in reconciling the values and expectations of individual officers, institutional demands and pressures, broad community norms and values, and the role, presence, and concerns of various private individuals, complicated by the fact that officers for the most part considered themselves, significantly, both permanently part of the community and permanently police officers.

3.6.2 Private Lives and Public Police

A major concern of the present study—further explored in the following chapter in particular—is the overlap of private or community roles, that is, as an individual, and officially designated roles, i.e. that of a police officer. The fact that the personal lives of officers almost inevitably becoming intertwined with their work is seen as a major element of rural or small-town policing. (Young 1993, cf. Banton 1964, Girtler 1980) This was generally seen as positive and necessary both by the officers themselves and by the broader policing culture, with the Brandenburg police newsletter “info110” emphasizing the need for a community-oriented officer to “not only have life and career experience, but to also be professionally all around accomplished, societally established and socially recognized.” (2010: 15) The work of the Revierpolizei and the infrastructural and population-related realities essentially demands, and the organization generally encourages, this overlap as well, with the practical decentralization of policing not manifested in the establishment of more official posts or institutional locations but rather in the distribution of policing tasks and authority to established members of local communities (even when the officers require significant time and effort to effectively establish themselves.) In the present case this blurring of institutional and social frames is predominantly set against a rural backdrop.

However, the relation of the police role to personal lives can be viewed another way both through presented narratives from Revierpolizei officers and in the literature on the transformation of German policing post-unification. Veterans of the East German Volkspolizei described their views of West German police as simply ‘playing a role’ or even ‘inauthentic’ in the way that work was performed while on the clock, and once the shift was over the expressed attitude and concerns of the individual would shift. In describing differences in lifestyle between Eastern and Western officers, Glaeser (2000) writes:

Traveling to and from work was a quite different experience for the members of the former People’s Police [Volkspolizei] and the (West) Berlin Police. While most officers of the Berlin Police change from plain clothes to uniforms only after they reach the precinct, People’s Police officers had to travel from home to work and vice versa wearing their uniforms. Since many eastern officers in the [DDR] did not own cars, or because public transportation was free for police officers in the [DDR], and gasoline was very expensive, they traveled on buses, streetcars, and commuter trains to work, while most western officers used their cars. Thus, People’s Police officers were recognizable as such on the way to and from work, and many of them tell stories about the reactions of fellow citizens to their presence in uniform. They were asked questions or used as sounding boards for all sorts of concerns, and at times they were also abused as public symbols—scolded or spat on—to show disapproval of the regime. This also meant that the officers felt compelled to intervene as police officers when something called for their attention… The meanings of the concrete chronotypes of workplace, road to work, and home, therefore, were quite different for members of the People’s Police and for officers of the (West) Berlin Police. Eastern officers perceive this shift in meaning frequently as a loss of meaning. They see, for example, wearing plain clothes on the road to work as a backing out of the responsibilities of a police officer; in extreme cases they interpret it even as apparent shame of being a police officer, suggesting that their western counterparts are acting a role. Western officers see this much more as a positive affirmation of their right to a private life free of the impingement of work. (84–85)

The situational nature of events, the assumption that individuals had stronger ties to the community or location, is further supported by the bureaucratic structure of German governance and police in particular. As individuals are presumed to be registered at their proper address and therefore can be found again in the future there rarely seems to be significant pressure to immediately handle a case or mete out justice, with a focus instead of explaining the situation as it is, resolving the immediate relevant conflict, and dealing with the individual actors at a later date. The bureaucratic meaning of ‘dealing with individuals’ is easily shifted when the officers see their role strongly as individuals embedded in a community and with interpersonal (even “Goffmanesque”) factors such as respect, trust, and ‘saving face’ often being more effective than financial penalties. Officer Preuss, a city officer in Officer Reiner’s district, responded to a minor car accident (‘fender bender’) at a supermarket parking lot. The general situation was quickly resolved, with the taking of brief individual statements and establishing a narrative of what had occurred and who had taken which actions. However, the driver of one car did not have his driver’s license and claimed that it had been stolen—he further suggested he had talked to Officer Preuss about it previously, but the officer later commented, “I know I met him before, but I don’t remember anything about a license, and it was long enough ago that it should have been replaced.” He said he needed to “have a chat” with the driver (“Ich quatsche mal mit ihm.”) He essentially let the driver go with a warning (for not having a license, otherwise both drivers were given minor fines), suggesting that it would start to cost—10 euro for every ‘stop’—as long as he didn’t replace the license. Back in the car after everyone had cleared the scene, he said to me:

I told him “If you were here [in my office] before I would’ve told you to get a new license right away.” He said he would the next time he gets paid. Maybe, but I would bet against it. But next time I’ll remember him.

As a city officer, Officer Preuss had generally fewer unplanned encounters with already known individuals—but even in this case one of the passengers was familiar with the Officer, and extended greetings to his wife and made some jokes at the conclusion of the situation. While Officer Preuss was skeptical of the driver’s claim, he essentially used that skepticism as leverage to ‘give him another chance,’ or else let the problem be resolved by someone else. The implication was clear that, if the officer encounters the driver again and he has not procured a new driver’s license, then it would not only be seen as inexcusable and punishable but essentially as a break of trust, particularly due to the fact that the driver had claimed to have already ‘legitimized’ his excuse by meeting with the officer. This type of warning is potentially, at least rhetorically, effective, as the chance of Officer Preuss responding to specific future incidents is significant, and it would be easy for him to follow up (if he so desired) to see if the driver was involved in any reported incidents, detected while speeding, etc., and could then find cause to personally intervene and/or allow the ‘formal’ punitive sanctions—such as financial penalties and ‘points’ against a driver’s license—stand.

Niederhoffer (1967) describes “ceremonious interruptions” (57) as breaks from the formal routine, for example, a coffee break during work hours which is overtly dramatized to be an injection of ‘personality’ and ‘personal concerns’ into an environment otherwise dominated by procedures and official concerns, and in which the governing rules are either “no shop talk,” or at least none without a healthy dose of sarcasm and irreverence. (cf. Goffman 1981) These types of situations are defined by their spatial-ness, being both hidden from public and from formally organized environments, allowed them to work as “involvement shields” (Goffman 1967: 38) where individuals can “safely do the kinds of things that normally result in negative sanctions.” (39) For the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark, at a much more overt and visible level, this was reverse, with the intrusion of formality and serious concerns often providing the breaks from the personal, individually-defined, and often irreverent attribution of meaning to encounters and interactions. Rather than using these interruptions as a form of “role release” or “breaking role,” they instead seemed to incorporate aspects of the formal role—in terms of basic orientations and institutional concerns and demands—into semi-formal or informal roles played out within contexts which downplayed formality or official-ness. Coffee breaks were notable as a ritual—often shared between different officers or members of ‘allied agencies’ such as the Ordnungsamt, courts, or mayors’ offices—which mixed, sometimes seamlessly, topics of ‘formal concern,’ such as the planning of public events, information about and the prevention of crime, and inter-agency coordination, with everyday gossip, joking, and personal or biographical information. While this type of situation is likely far closer to the norm than an abstract institutional ideal, the fact that even formal ‘technical’ information was more often than not shared within the format of a ‘personal’ conversation adds an important element to the theoretical consideration of “local knowledge” and the basic communication and symbolization of ‘community values.’ Officers who had access to computer records and generally up-to-the-minute information about events (public and criminal) still often preferred to gather information about local ‘goings on’ by word-of-mouth; presumably not despite, but rather because of, the generally pre-coded nature of this communication, that this information was put into an everyday (and/or organizational) context that ‘raw data’ (in this case, information still processed through a formal policing framework) would not as easily transmit. Reading an incident report about a ‘disturbance’ at a certain time and address might contain the same key functional “hinge points” (Barthes 2004) needed to interpret the story, vaguely, but hearing the story from someone with some form of closer connection to the people, locations, and events further contributes “catalysers” which can provide context outside of a purely legal institutional frame (e.g. what really was the cause of the disturbance, regardless of who can be legally held responsible?) and an “index” or form of “ready-made knowledge” which can locate the narrative in time and space. Officers see this as core to their work, as they (like most ‘audiences’) are still able to interpret the story told in their own distinct or unique way, rather than necessarily taking the proffered meaning at face value, and yet engaging in ‘narrative reconstruction’ in this way allows officers to simultaneously define problems as police and as members of the community.

Exploring the creation of (joint) meaning within the situated nature of policing requires a consideration of the “cultural setting.” (Gusfield 1989) Police interactions in society take the form of negotiations over meanings and roles—while these encounters are often self-contained and unique, they are also challenging and re-contextualizing their own guiding elements in ways which can carry over into other interactions. This, in the end, is the core of a community-policing initiative: not simply to handle problems from incident to incident, but to fundamentally alter the relationship between policing and the community, and even to alter the nature of the community itself, in a way that allows for problems to be dealt with at a deeper level, to be dealt with jointly by community members (including the police) and to come to the attention of community representations and ‘policing partners’ before they become emergencies. Based on the observations of the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark in action, in encounters with citizens and in taking official or informal action, the following chapter will explore the practices and situation uses of symbolic action and communication and the management of policing roles as ways to synthesize everyday community norms and the values, expectations and demands of institutionalized policing.