Framing Police Encounters: The Dramaturgy of Authority

Abstract

A key feature of police work, and arguably the defining feature of the entire institution of policing, is the police encounter: any of the variety of situations in which police officers engage in face-to-face encounters with non-police individuals. Encounters between police and citizens take place in public and in private, at work and at home, during the day and at night; in contexts which can be familiar and routine to police or unique and problematic. They can involve individuals known to the police or strangers who only become known to the officers within the context of the encounter.

4.1 Negotiating Authority, Defining Order: Dramaturgy and Institutional Police Roles

A key feature of police work, and arguably the defining feature of the entire institution of policing, is the police encounter: any of the variety of situations in which police officers engage in face-to-face encounters with non-police individuals. Encounters between police and citizens take place in public and in private, at work and at home, during the day and at night; in contexts which can be familiar and routine to police or unique and problematic. They can involve individuals known to the police or strangers who only become known to the officers within the context of the encounter. These situations can range from responding to calls for service or criminal complaints to providing directions or making small talk with citizens in public locations. Yet these situations carry a greater theoretical significance, as it is in these situations that police—representatives of government authority—come into contact with private citizens, and reflect, or demonstrate, their potential of carrying out that authority by engaging in behavior and invoking powers unavailable to others. Peter Manning (2012) states that, “in many ways, the symbolization of governmental power is more important than the actual behavior of government agencies or their agents.” (180) This symbolization at the same time reinforces the ability to police to carry out various tasks, gain the cooperation of citizens, define their own (situational) powers and responsibilities, and establish an interpretable standard of public order.

Police encounters are somewhat unique in that the police wield disproportionate power in establishing the solution to the question of ‘what is going on here’ (cf. Goffman 1961, Bittner 1970), and often their presence enough is enough to drastically alter both actual behavior and deeper understandings of the meanings of social relations and action. (van Maanen 1974, Manning 1980, Meehan 1986, Mangold 2011) The fact that police are often the first actors with official status to respond to scenes of conflict and the ones who can effectively structure both what is happening and what has happened often gives officers a “story monopoly.” (Behr 1993: 58) The police have a significant ability to establish a “constitutive order of events” (Garfinkel 1963, Rawls 2009, Korbut 2014) to which others will likely orient their behavior, and which will also conform enough to institutional frameworks to become established as documented ‘history’ or ‘fact.’ Police as an institution blur the line of bureaucratic organizations as presented by Weber (1958, cf. Kieser 1999) in that, while they almost always are responsible for a strict geographic jurisdiction, the activities, situations and problems for which they are responsible are variable and predominantly only defined as relevant or not by the police themselves. While the authority of the bureaucrat (or the doctor) is only at its most visible as one waits in an office for confirmation that everything is acceptable, and fades quickly upon leaving the office, police bear the core function of intervening into public and private situations that previously did not involve them. The authority of the police to take certain actions and make formal decisions is key to the police social role; at the same time, this social role being understood is generally key to the authority of the police proving effective. The formal function of the police, in bureaucratic fashion, would suggest that police act based on the authority derived from their bureaucratic or institutional legitimacy, and that the individual actor is essentially irrelevant in situations in which bureaucratic concerns and powers dominate. (Weber 1958)

Blumer (1966) has stated that:

It is ridiculous, for instance, to assert, as a number of eminent sociologists have done, that social interaction is an interaction between social roles. Social interaction is obviously an interaction between people and not between roles; the needs of the participants are to interpret and handle what confronts them—such as a topic of conversation or a problem—and not to give expression to their roles. It is only in highly ritualistic relations that the direction and content of conduct can be explained by roles. (543)

This chapter will present the argument that the police fit into the category of “highly ritualistic relations” in which the visible social role dominates over the individual role and even in some cases limits the availability of communicative options. This is not to say that police act only within a generic policing role or cannot act as people apart from the observer’s understanding of the role, but rather to suggest that police require, and have developed, specific practices to manage to what extent they are essentially speaking as the face of the law or simply as an individual: police often attempt to develop a more situational role rather than the expected institutional role. Manning (2003) describes how police work—in terms of presenting and maintaining an image, consciously or as a matter of course—is based on contingency, “the selective emphasis on some aspects of the performance rather than others in order to impress an audience.” (11) A great deal of police work revolves around manipulating or ‘playing’ with the stereotypical police role, assuming that individuals will have predictable expectations of police and interpret the police presence and actions in a specific way.¹ (cf. Fassin 2013) The rural and small town nature of the study area meant that individual relations and personal roles often took precedent over the policing role, even in situations that were clearly understood by all involved as ‘police work.’ This was intensified by the community-oriented nature of the Revierpolizei, where a stated goal is for the officer to become recognizable, individually, within the local community. This could both restrict police in some interactions and provide a greater degree of versatility, when the fluid and subjective nature of the police role (broadly) is considered, and in both cases interactions need to be managed through practices which accent or downplay aspects of the intersubjective police role in order for police to effectively frame encounters and, consequently, handle them. The management and meaning-making processes with regard to the institutional police role will be explored and theorized as central to understanding situational practices and the broader role of policing within social relations in public.

The following sections will discuss the relevance of police discretion to this understanding of police encounters and policing in general, and the symbolic nature of policing, before presenting ethnographically-derived examples of police practices which establish and often dominate negotiated orders (cf. Strauss 1978, Soeffner 1992) and establishing a typology of policing practices used to manage police social roles. Chapter Four will further explore some of these concepts within the realm of (conceptual) violence, Chapter Five will explore policing narrative practices and the establishment of policing identities and cultural frameworks, and Chapter Six will follow-up on the specifics of the situational police role, its management, and the concepts of role transition, role transformation, and liminality within the broader setting of the community. (Goffman 1959, 1967, 1981; Turner 1969, 1974)

4.2 Police Work and Officer Discretion

Contemporary sociological understandings of the police reject the idea of police work as simply enforcing the law, of a series of logical puzzles to be solved by correctly applying the proper label, in favor of a more nuanced and complex view of competing pressures and expectations to resolve situations which may not always have one ideal, universally viewed as correct, solution. Key to this perspective is the idea of police discretion, or individual decision-making power. Discretion involves whether or not an officer chooses to make an arrest when it is legally sanctioned (Goldstein 1960), the tactical choices that police officers make within an encounter (Bayley and Bittner 1984, Bayley 1986), whether they choose to become involved in an encounter at all (Alpert et al. 2005), and nearly any other situation where more than one option is available for the officer. (Macintyre and Prenzler 1998) The most parsimonious definition of discretion comes from Mastrofski (2004), who considers it to mean “the leeway that officers enjoy in selecting from more than one choice in carrying out their work.” (101) Operationalization of this concept for empirical research has proven to be a much harder task, particularly as policing research in the US and UK has in recent decades moved towards a heavily quantitative focus and attempted to reduce discretion to one or a handful of discrete variables. (Mastrofski 2004, Manning 2005)

The idea of police discretion is inherently problematic in that it directly challenges the law-enforcement assumptions of policing: namely that citizens will be punished for breaking the law and only for that, and that police can only use legal factors in determining how to proceed in any given situation. Complicating the topic is the fact that discretion is sometimes defined as to include extra-legal behavior, such as excessive force or illegal detention based on normative rather than legal frameworks (Westley 1970), and, while the majority of empirical research has focused on generally legal or delegated discretion, arguments continued to be made that allowing police officer’s discretion was potentially illegal and undermined the courts and prosecution.² (Goldstein 1960, Davis 1974, see also Williams 1984 for a discussion of this debate.) Discretion can also be portrayed as essentially whether or not police choose to follow the rules, which has led to a significant amount of the research and analysis focusing on ‘control’ of police discretion, which often is based in the compatibility of police practices with courtroom practices, organizational regulations, and Constitutional requirements (LaFave and Remington 1965, Ohlin 1993, Walker 1993a & b, see also Quispe-Torreblanca and Stewart 2019.) This is not surprising, as the ‘discovery’ of police discretion and the expansion of the US and UK-based literature coincided with the more general acknowledgment of police discrimination and the US Supreme Court’s “rule revolution” under Earl Warren (Walker 1993b: 32) and most commentators were more interested in identifying and eliminating illegal or unwanted behavior by the police than in channeling discretion for positive goals.

Apart from a few observations and inter-organizational memos³, little formal mention was made of line-officer decision-making before the 1960 s. One prominent example is the work of William Westley (1953, 1970); his ethnographic work was in stark contrast to the positivistic research on policing that dominated at the time, and his findings reflected this. A student of C. Everett Hughes and the Chicago School, Westley approached the police as an unknown, using participant-observation, and sought to understand the social norms and cultural values that affected the practice of policing. Violence became the dominant theme of Westley’s work, with a specific focus on officers’ justifications for extra-legal force and the complex informal codes that determined what was acceptable, but he also investigated many other police practices and the relationship between the police and the community. Once the law enforcement premise has been rejected, the question becomes one of what standards police are using to guide their decision-making: Westley found that police often used their authority to maintain their understandings of social hierarchies and social status, policing class and status and using violence not only as a tool to take control of a situation but also a symbol of power disparities. Westley’s work would eventually gain prominence, but little was published prior to 1970, and it seems to have had little impact outside of academic sociology, though it would prove increasingly influential as a major pioneering study once dedicated research into police discretion began on a large scale in the US and UK in the 1960 s and 1970 s. (Greene 2010)

The primary significance of the concept of police discretion lies in its impact on the basic role of the police which from the 1960 s on was increasingly being called into question. Shearing and Ericson (1991) present a hypothetical police officer:

Imagine the following. A police officer sees a vehicle being driven along a road and does not attend to it further. What else could she have done? She could have: followed the car to check the speed; run a computerized vehicle check; stopped the car and questioned the driver; checked the driver’s documents; run a computerized information check on the driver; given the driver a breath test; asked the driver about information on fellow citizens, and so on. (487)

This raises more questions of not just what police are able to do, but when and on what basis they decide to take which actions. This view of discretion emphasizes the fact that police decisions have some basis in the ‘craft’ or ‘knowledge’ of policing, whether derived from formal training, accumulated experience, or war stories and informal mentoring through policing occupational cultures. (Chan 2004)

Viewing police discretion as a series of critical decisions, as is often presented in the literature (cf. Walker 1992), portrays the police as reacting to behavior which is already pre-classified as crime, simplifying the processes of how police even involve themselves in situations and the conflicting demands of various actors which can pressure and shape police actions. (Meehan 1992) Prior to the formal acknowledgement of street-level discretion the police were typically portrayed as a ministerial agency in their relationship with the courts. (Sherman 1984, cf. Bernard et al. 2005) The rise of the crime control model and efforts towards police professionalism in the early and mid-20^th century only reinforced the idea that police were expected to enforce the law whenever possible, with exceptions only being made on the pragmatic grounds that doing so would exhaust police resources. While police administrators were certainly aware of the decision-making implicit in routine police work, in a macro-level sense it was seen as simple inefficiency and played little role in policy making or policing strategies. (cf. Rowe 2007)

Although the discussions of police discretion presented here is essentially limited to the US and UK, similar patterns were followed in Germany (more specifically, in the Federal Republic of Germany prior to unification.) German policing theories were heavily influenced by American sociologists of the 1960 s, and their work arguably had an even greater impact due to the inclusion of academic approaches within a larger portion of police academy training than is generally seen in the US or UK. (Feest and Blankenburg 1972, Behrendes 2013, Dübbers 2015) The meaning and relevance of discretion to policing in Germany is compounded by this very emphasis on training, where police legitimacy is often linked directly and specifically to their comparatively high level of training, but which once again can put a burden on individual officers to justify decisions for which no specialized training was offered or may even be possible. (Behr 2006, Feltes et al. 2008, Klukkert et al. 2009) The laws and regulations covering police work, even more so than in the US, essentially ban discretion in many situations and reduce it in others.

Practically, however, discretion has been less problematic in the German context due to the use of administrative law alongside criminal law, essentially meaning that the question becomes less one of how a decision was made and more one of whether the police were authorized to be involved in the situation at all. Linnan, in an older but still relevant analysis, states:

In comparison to Americans, the Germans try much harder to channel police actions through training and through accountability for actions after the fact. For jurisprudential and historical reasons, both popular and scholarly opinion are uncomfortable with the implications of unbridled governmental discretion. Nonetheless, current empirical work examining German police discretion reaches the not very surprising conclusion that German police do make decisions and control outcomes beyond the bounds of their theoretically strictly limited freedom of action. (1984: 186–187)

The regulatory framework only allows for discretion to even be reviewed as a legal concern in situations where decision-making authority was clearly overstepped. (§ 114 Verwaltungsgerichtsordnung [VwGO]) Newer supervisory structures in the police are becoming less oriented on legal frames and more on ‘understanding’-oriented academic perspectives drawn from sociology, psychology, philosophy and communication studies. (Behr 2006: 162–164) In any case, German police are trained to be fully aware of and to make use of their practical discretionary authority (see de Maillard 2016 for a comparison of the use of discretion between French and German police.) The situation is conceptually not different from that identified in the US, in which police discretion in practice raises both potential issues and avenues of concern as well as the ability to actually deal with situations based on immediate factors, and that these general ‘pros and cons’ differ greatly and can even become reversed between street-level police work and strategic or administrative work. (Reuss-Ianni 1983) The relevance lies particularly in the specific practices used in carrying out police work and what they reveal about the police role as seen by officers on the street, police administrators, and the community.

4.2.1 Beyond Discretion

As discussed, previous approaches to discretion have been both enlightening in uncovering the diversity and complexity of street-level police work and also constraining in their attempts to reduce diversity to single measures or specific, identifiable points within interactions. More recent work on officer discretion, in particular within the US, has tended to stay firmly within the realm of positivism, with only hints of the ethnographic roots of the topic to be found in the trends towards quantitatively-dominated ‘mixed methods’ research using official data. (Nickel 2007, cf. Buvik 2016 for a notable exception based on Norwegian police.) These simplifications of police-citizen interactions imply that police work can be made more effective by instructing police officers to always make the correct decision, which in turn minimizes the importance of unique, local, and situational factors. (cf. Brent and Sykes 1980) More importantly, treating discretion as a singular variable, as essentially a specific action by the police officer which can be applied to a decision-making flowchart, downplays the consideration that almost all actions taken by police—consciously or not, intentionally or not—can affect how a situation is interpreted more broadly and how it continues to develop. Police decision-making has typically been applied in positivistic theories which presume that specific decisions or decision paths will lead to predictable outcomes, confounding the often coterminous but distinct processes of interpretation and definition. (cf. Prus 1996) Police officers must, using whatever frames or perspective take precedence for whatever reason but presumably oriented around a generalized ‘policing perspective’, decide exactly what it is that they are observing both in a direct physical manner, (e.g. a vague shape in the shadows could be identified as a person, an animal, or simply an object giving the appearance of something living) and at a deeper social level (e.g. if it is in fact a person, are they simply a bystander, or attempting to hide or flee, or the person who made the call in the first place?) In interpersonal interactions they must “ascertain… the meaning of the actions or remarks of the other person” and then define the situation, “conveying indications to another person as to how he is to act.” (Blumer 1966: 537)

Officer discretion can refer to both the strategies used to control how police work is carried out as well to the specific decisions made by officers and the variance that can be identified within the pattern. Discretion as a sociological concept presumes that decisions are not by necessity formally deterministic: officers may utilize a significant number of often difficult-to-communicate factors in interpreting a decision as well as interpreting an ‘ideal’ reaction and in deciding how they will actually attempt to enact their desired outcome. The fact that the role of the police is primarily an abstract concept in the singular and otherwise heavily situational further complicates the analysis of how officers make decisions. Schaible and Gecas (2010) write that:

Considering the coexistence of competing visions of policing, it is important to note that not all officers experience conflicting expectations in the same way. Some may wholly embrace the premises of recent changes in policing as noble, necessary, and central to policing, whereas others may reject change in favor of [real police work.] Depending on which blend of perspectives an officer favors and internalizes into his or her identity, he or she may have difficulties with executing the role expectations associated with competing visions of policing. (320)

This adds another layer to how officer discretion can be considered, without necessarily conceptualizing discretion itself as central to the police role: discretion can refer to the extent to which police attempt to adhere to (the officer’s interpretation of) current social and institutional expectations of the police. At an analytic level this might be indistinguishable from simply the choice of basic strategy or tactics by an officer, in the sense that some officers might consciously choose to be tougher, more aggressive, more tolerant, employ humor to defuse situations, etc. However, the implication of Schaible and Gecas’ comment here is that police may not themselves see this variance in how police work is done as a choice among alternatives, but rather as one centered around competing understandings of what police work is and should be, and most likely one in which only one vision, here reflexively referred to as “real police work,” is deigned to be correct.⁴ The relevance of policing reform to policing practice is primarily, in this conception, to what extent it is able to alter the way in which officers do their job; the fact that the authors here refer to a gap between ‘reforms’ and real police work suggested a cynical assumption that reform will never truly be acceptable to police officers unless it reinforces the values (including preferences for approaches and tactics) that they already hold.

Officer discretion can refer to specific actions taken, for example in the common operationalization of discretion as ‘the decision to make an arrest’, but it also can refer to less individually obvious forms of communication: the reference to symbols, the invocation or implication of violence, the spatial positioning of the various parties as well as how that reflects or affects the perception of differences in power. Demaree (2017) describes observing proactive policing activities “dedicated to an active and creative framework of clearly defined but carefully concealed patrolling activities with a high level of autonomy and discretion, though hardly any supervision, in which ideas and preferences about ‘real’ policing and police roles gave shape to a dramatized crime-fighting ritual.” (70) The question of how the uses of discretion impact police work is not simply one of understanding deterministic cause-and-effect, as officers’ understandings of how discretion should be used is related to their understandings of what police should be doing as well as their understandings of what police are authorized to do; the fact that policing organizations have historically tended to downplay the existence and significance of officer discretion does not mean they have had no effect or control over how it is exercised; rather they have attempted to channel it to the extent that they have defined the broader goals of policing, as an institution, which in turn have an effect on how individual officers approach any given policing task. (Crank 1994, cf. Wilson 1968) Police operate primarily within their broader policing institutional framework which provides them with vocabularies of motive, definitions of situations, and generic values; in communicating with outsiders (i.e. all non-police individuals) information is being transferred between contexts, or (likely intentionally) being ‘translated’ for the purpose of clarity. (Reichertz 2003, cf. Manning 1982) Viewing discretion simply from the perspective of the institution of policing and its teleological assumptions (e.g. that encounters have concrete beginnings and end as well as spatial and social boundaries, that every case can be identified as a crime or not a crime, that involved individuals can rationally be divided into suspects, victims, witnesses etc.) ignores the basic elements of the sociology of policing, which is exploring how meaning is made that gives substance (namely, authority and legitimacy) to the concept of policing which can in turn be perceived and experienced in everyday life. Classical definitions of discretion imply conscious decisions, but the most routine elements of police work still generate meaning for those who come into contact with the police, and variations in how police interact that may not be seen as strategic or tactical by police may effect significant differences in how the actions of the police are interpreted and responded to. Discretionary power at its broadest also refers to the dramaturgical uses of policing power, the minor variations on a theme in how police officers present themselves in front of various audiences and how they adapt or tailor these performances based on experience, in a long-term sense, and immediate reactions in the course of an encounter. (cf. Girtler 1980) The symbolism of police and the heuristics of policing are highly significant to understanding police interactions with citizens, both in how they can reveal broader cultural assumptions of the police and policing roles—further implying assumptions about societal order and social structure—as well as in how their presentation and invocation within encounters dramatizes these roles within

4.3 Symbolism and Police Encounters

“Symbols can be so beautiful, sometimes.”

– Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Breakfast of Champions

Dawley (2000) in his analysis of community in the 19^th century US describes the creation and development of a local police department as a reaction to a supposed “gangs of rowdies.” (106) Politicians and local leaders soon decided on a professional force rather than a primarily part-time or rotating watchman structure. The man—the son of an influential church leader—appointed to lead this force insisted on a progressive civil service model, with long-term appointments of officers, written rules, and strict recording keeping. He further insisted on the need for a uniformed force, writing:

In police matters, as in military affairs, uniformity of discipline, practice and dress is considered an indispensable condition of efficiency, and wherever a city is patrolled by a well organized police force, the same importance is attached to the proper uniforming of such officers as to their discipline and good behavior. To those unwilling to conform to the requirements of the laws, police officers are constant reminders of the necessity of good behavior, and a uniform being emblematic of power, and strongly suggestive of authority, he who wears it is enabled to exert a great influence over such persons, and brave the violence of the brutal with increased confidence; and I believe that an order requiring every member of the department to appear in uniform would contribute as signally to the effectiveness of the force as to its neatness and appearance. (107–108)

In a broad sense, police work is culture work. The task of the police—whether conceived as the institution as an abstract whole or individual officers patrolling a consistent beat—is to establish a dynamic of communication in which the defining of an act, situation, or individual as a problem has an immediate and concrete social effect which allows the police to effectively manage it without needing to problematize a broader array of problems or constantly explain and justify their actions and their intended consequences.⁵ Policing in practice is a “game of control” (Manning 2003: 21) which is played through the establishment and successful defense of versions of, or understandings of, reality. Consistent with a dramaturgical orientation, identity is not a thing but rather a claim, and the relevant ability of the police in this context is to establish a framework for which claims will be more or less effective in various scenarios. (cf. Burke 1989) Apart from any immediate practical concerns such as identifying potential suspects, securing potential crime scenes, or managing potential threats, police arriving on the scene need to establish their legitimacy and authority. The police, even when communication relies on personal relationships and shared experience, function as symbols who are readily identified both by their more abstract social legitimacy and authority and their more direct capacity to use varying levels of force to effect their immediate goals. At the same time, it is the symbols of policing—most obviously the uniform and badge but also including tools such as handcuffs, handguns, and batons—which often serve to identify the bearer as not just a specific individual but as a police officer, and establish an association to the observer between the individual and the broader concepts of legitimacy and authority. The symbolic power of the police is dependent on the effective (i.e. interpretable) use of symbolism (Bourdieu 1991), the power of the symbols lies in their invocation of pre-existential potential understandings of the police, specifically a multitude of differing understandings which can be invoked through the use of symbolism in different manners, settings, and contexts. Loader (1997) writes that:

The iconography of policing—the handcuffs, fingerprints, cop shows, uniforms, photofits, picture postcards, memoirs, cars, sirens, helicopters, riot shields and so forth—connect with and re-articulate dispositions towards, and fantasies of, policing that already pertain within the wider culture. (4)

The use of these “sign vehicles” (Goffman 1959) can, in cooperate or contrast with other symbols and indicators within the social space, can suggest a ‘preferred’ reading of a social situation. Roland Barthes (1977), in his analysis of symbols as a rhetorical communicative device, emphasizes the fact that symbols in all cases have the potential to represent multiple concepts, objects, or logical statements. Context and juxtaposition play an important role, as well as linguistic messages; i.e. police are identified both by using typical police imagery and coloring (police blue) which is almost always ‘anchored’ by the conspicuous use of the word “police,” “Polizei,” etc. to avoid any potential for confusion. Identifying individuals as authentic, official representatives of the policing institution is just the first step in a process of understanding, however, because the very presence of police (or use of police imagery) can evoke very different meanings and expectations, what Firth refers to as the “gap between the overt superficial statement of action and its underlying meaning.” (1973: 26)

Signs, by their very nature, assume some form of cultural literacy among their recipients (White 1980, cf. Eco 1979), but the more complex the represented form the more potential interpretations can exist which may increase the difficulty in shared communication: while the typical symbolism for ‘women’ and ‘men’ on public restrooms is unlikely to be misconstrued as ‘people wearing dresses’ and ‘people without dresses,’ the situational use of police lights and sirens may signal ‘emergency’ or ‘something important is happening’ to most observers without making it clear what type of event is happening or how the observer should react to it. Barthes notes that, “[i]n every society, various techniques are developed intended to fix the floating chain of signifieds in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.” (1977: 39) Because the police need to mean many different things to different people at different times, a major component of their work is, by necessity, managing their own symbolic communication to elicit the understanding they expect. (Manning 1982, 1988, cf. Mills 1940, Burke 1966) The legitimacy of the police is confirmed by the presentation of certain signs, but this only serves the function of identifying the bearer as a police officer; the authority of the police to define a situation and take up situational social roles is managed through the use of various interactional practices. (cf. Spencer 1970) These practices often take the form of violations of general or everyday social norms with regard to the place and the time, violations which would likely constitute an irritation, conflict or misunderstanding if committed by someone without an authorized social role. The presentation of policing symbols in a specific context essentially provides an accounting for the violation and a very basic narrative (cf. Scott and Lyman 1968) which justifies this violation of norms: a difference could be noted in a police cruiser traveling at high speeds with red and blue lights but only activating sirens while crossing intersections, and one which more-or-less holds to the speed limit and where sirens and lights are only used to avoid waiting for red lights; in the first case the complementary elements suggest that somewhere a situation is occurring where the police are required and therefore the normal rules of traffic are simply a hindrance, in the second case one might rather comment on police exploiting their privileges or simply being too impatient to wait at a red light. Similarly, the use of lights and sirens can both indicate that a driver is to pull over and wait for further instructions or it can simply indicate that the driver should change lanes to allow the police cruiser to pass; the difference in interpretation would depend on whether the cruiser appears to be targeting one specific car, such as by only selectively using sirens, or where the cruiser is heard before seen, as well as on the dynamic of reactions starting from how the cruiser reacts to the other car’s lane change. Legitimate authority, i.e. the authority deriving from the recognition of the police, implies some form of trust which will lead observers to assume that the violation of ‘normal behavior’ is similarly legitimate, but this trust is still negotiated and constructed throughout the course of interactions. (cf. Garfinkel 1963, Manning 2003) The invocation of police authority, constructed intersubjectively, is highly dependent on how observers view themselves: are they being personally identified and engaged in an more intensive encounter (such as being pulled over), simply being given a basic command which, once complied with, will essentially end the engagement, or are they only an observer who—assuming their continued behavior doesn’t bring them under greater scrutiny—can continue on normally?

Katz (2002) describes how the construction of a shared reality, or a commonly agreed upon (though not necessarily mutually desirable) definition of the situation, includes a suppression of doubts as to whether this reality is actually being shared or agreed upon, asking:

How is this suppression accomplished? Most generally, by the same process that raises the necessity for suppression, the embodied ongoingness of action. Consider a common experience that occurs when a person struggles to use a foreign language. One becomes unusually aware of the need to fake understanding while waiting/praying for a moment to connect with the meaning of another’s talk. One nods on and on, encouraging the other to continue in the hope that before long one will detect an opportunity for coherent intervention. Something similar is more subtly present in our most familiar environments. We do not, after all, hear meaning word-by-word but in large retrospective/prospective swaths. For everything we understand of the other, we suppress a constant, infinite range of possible interpretations that flare up and are as quickly extinguished. And, aside from our emotional or bodily registering of comfort or dis-ease in the process, we suppress the process of suppression… We go on with the rituals of interaction as vehicles that, we trust, will keep us connected with the orientation of others. (264)

Police interactions often involve the violation of everyday norms and imply imbalanced power hierarchies: those involved in police hierarchies are not concerned only (though certainly also) with embarrassment or losing face but also with actual and difficult to defend against consequences involving formal sanctions, labeling, and the use of force. The process of suppressing ‘alternate’ definitions of the situation is not simply one of parallel understandings continuing to guide interaction and conversation until one becomes unsustainable, but rather are overt—and often ritualized and symbol-laden—practices used by participants (primarily the police, though not exclusively) to actively ‘anchor’ a certain image, to accelerate this suppression. These practices orient themselves towards understandings of the authority of the police, i.e. the legitimized power and abilities of the officer with regard to the involved individuals. The situational role of the individual is defined based on how the police treat them, and at the same time the way police treat them is often willful and conscious and intended to communicate that the person is involved and has certain expectations to conform to or else face (potentially risky) re-categorization; for example, a non-cooperative witness may find themselves being treated as a suspect—key here is that the individual finds their self treated this way, and understands not only that this treatment is not only specifically a recasting of their role based on the exigencies of the situation (i.e. actual suspicion of guilt or of having more knowledge that hasn’t been freely given) but also as punishment for not being cooperative in a way that the police had expected and desired. (cf. Davis et al. 2017)

Van Maanen (1978) describes how “affronts” to police attempts to define and control a situation can lead to a new interpretation of the individual and their role within the encounter (notably and often transforming them, in the officer’s estimation, from a “know-nothing” to an “asshole”.) An attempt to challenge either an officer’s interpretation of a situation or their authority to even make that interpretation leads to the scene taking on the forms of a larger symbolic conflict. Van Maanen writes that:

In a very real sense, the patrolman-to-citizen exchanges are moral contests in which the authority of the state is either confirmed, denied, or left in doubt. To the patrolman, such contests are not to be taken lightly, for the authority of the state is also his personal authority, and is, of necessity, a matter of some concern to him. To deny or raise doubt about his legitimacy is to shake the very ground upon which his self-image and corresponding views are built. (1978: 316)

Clarification becomes necessary in cases where individuals act as if they may not, or openly state that they do not, agree with the actions or understandings of the police, even if more for defending the self-image and internal legitimacy of policing than for any law-enforcement or even order-maintenance purposes. (Alpert and Dunham 2004) Individuals ignoring direct police orders may simply have not understood or may for other reasons be unable to comply, e.g. an individual being asked to move a car which will not start, and in these cases the officers may be able to elicit an account from the individual which removes the affront to the authority of the police. Importantly, these accounts will not necessarily have to be believed by the police, they must simply incorporate a narrative of police authority, for example an individual ignoring a police request responding, “Sorry Officer, I didn’t hear you” in an otherwise quiet setting, or in some cases even “I didn’t know you were serious,” followed by immediate compliance. A narrative account needs to be constructed that hews closely enough to the narrative desired or required by the police officer, and a variety of policing practices have been analyzed in the literature which cooperatively or unilaterally ensure this. (cf. Niederhoffer 1969, Westley 1970, Reiss 1971, Skolnick 1971, Rubinstein 1973, Girtler 1980, Ericson 1982, Crank 1990, Meehan 1992, Pepinsky 1984, Weisheit et al. 1994, Dick 1995, Martin 1999, Campbell 2004, Moskos 2008b, Hendrijks and van Hulst 2015.)⁶ Several observed incidents involved drivers who were unable to present a driver’s license claiming to have either lost it or have had it stolen, with the officer seeming both to accept and to doubt these claims, but rather than outright confronting the driver on this point simply using it as (rhetorical, situational) leverage for a warning, e.g. “Well, get a new license and don’t let me catch you without one again.”

While a great deal of research has focused on the type of ‘street justice’ which Van Maanen suggests can be used by police—whether legally sound or not—in reaction to affronts to their authority (cf. Westley 1970, Skolnick 1971, Parnaby and Leyden 2011, Quispe-Torreblanca and Stewart 2019), a likely more common outcome invokes the ‘teaching’ function of police. Van Maanen describes teaching methods as “numerous, with threat, ridicule, and harassment among the more widely practiced,” but that “[o]ther examples are readily available, such as the morally-toned lectures meted out to those who would attempt to bribe, lie, or otherwise worm their way out of what a policeman sees to be a legitimate traffic citation.” (320) While ‘teaching a lesson’ is in some ways a policing end in its own, its use as a tool to further the broader purposes of law enforcement have a longer history (visible for example in their stereotypical use in the police and FBI sponsored radio and television programs of the 1950 s and 1960 s such as Dragnet / Badge 714, cf. Bielejewski 2016.)

Analyzing the practices used by police to manage situations can reveal the types of order that officers are seeking to enforce as well as the assumed meanings behind the signs and symbols used in communication between police and policed. (Soeffner 1992) Peter Manning (1982) writes that, “the order of social life arises from the signs we read off as indicating order, predictability, meaning and the like,” (231) and the signs police use to communicate their goals reflect broader assumptions about what ‘order’ looks like and how individuals in society should relate to one another. Long term trends in how social control is organized not only at a structural level (cf. Elias 1988) but also in interpersonal encounters can be revealed in how the police routinize forms of coercion and persuasion and by the types of messages—whether formal commands, implications, threats, gestures, or the juxtaposition of symbols—that are considered ‘sacred,’ or non-negotiable, (Bittner 1967, Turner 1969, van Maanen 1978, Manning 2012, 2013) and which form part of interaction ritual chains in which meaning is intersubjectively determined. (Collins 2005) The type of outcomes which are reached, and to what extent they are dramaturgically negotiated in cooperation or authoritatively implemented, can frame the way in which police view the community they are operating within or working for, as well as how the specific individuals in this encounter are seen to be related to the broader conceptual community or society in general.

The following section will further discuss interactional orders related to police encounters and analyze specific examples drawn from fieldwork with the Brandenburger Revierpolizei. The case of violence and weaponry was found to be both significant in its symbolism and extremely rare in its practice—consistent with general findings in the literature but of increased relevance due to the characteristics of the region; violent crime was uncommon and almost no calls for service personally observed involved ‘serious’ interpersonal violence, violence was primarily brought up by police in discussion in a negative way (or as a contrast to stereotyped American police,) and physical coercion by police was only observed in cases where the officer was reacting to being physically touched or struck. Therefore, the following chapter, Violence and the Police, has been dedicated to violence in its theory and practice, symbolism and narrative, and the examples used in the following section are analyzed primarily based on the abstract symbolism of authority, rather than the more immediate symbolism of physical force.

4.4 On the Scene: Police Presence and Negotiated Order

Approaching police encounters as a negotiated order (cf. Meehan 1992) allows for a better understanding of the techniques police use to manage them, both routinely or even ritually as well as less commonly in response to the varied reactions of participants. How a police encounter is understood later on—how it is recorded in official accounts, broken down into statistical data, recounted among police officers as well as by victims, suspects and bystanders—is a result of how the encounter is understood intersubjectively through an ongoing and dynamic communicative process. Negotiated order implies the use of existing ‘lines of communication’ or at least common forms of communication, with implied assumptions by all involved parties; these lines of communication are relevant in their perception by those parties rather than in the actual structures comprising or supporting them; that is, the links consist of “primitive phenomenologies.” (Manning 1982: 236, cf. Strauss 1982a, Fine 1984a, Soeffner 1989) These make up the situations which police seem to be attempting to establish as ‘real’ as well as the concessions, compromises or overtures made to the parties assumed to represent contrary, conflicting, or overlapping viewpoints. Negotiated order could refer both to the expectations of how an immediate, ongoing situation should be carried out (e.g. ‘norm-violating’ behavior such as shouting by police or shining a flashlight into other’s eyes to reinforce the idea that the others should stop and listen) as well to the presentation of a model for how behavior is expected to continue (e.g. the use of moral lectures, shaming, or sympathetic comments to victims or bystanders either reaffirming their legitimacy or proffering advice for how to avoid future victimization.) Direct interaction between police and citizen generally ends for most participants once the encounter has ended, but the interpreted meanings are likely to, and often intended to, carry over into future situations, particularly in cases where the same police officers return to the same locations or come into contact with the same individuals, at which point, for those who are observing the scene once again, the significance of their very presence increases.

Importantly, police encounters should not be analytically reduced to situations involving crime, violence, or any other of the defined categories which policing is often empirically reduced to. (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963) Nils Christie (2004) notes that when discussing deviance and social control:

Crime is not useful as a point of departure. But people have troubles and create troubles. And we have to do something with these troubles. The danger is too hastily to define trouble as crime. By doing so, we lose sight of interesting alternatives. We might move even one step further away from the concept of crime and say as follows: Our basic point of departure ought to be acts. The next step, then, is to investigate what sort of acts … are seen as bad. … What are the social conditions for acts to be designated as crimes? (3)

Police encounters exist in the moment, in situations in which the police involve themselves in any interactions with non-police individuals and through the interaction either party acts as if, or bases their understanding of the situation on the assumption that, the formal authority role of the police is in effect. Official definitions and categorizations are only applied retroactively or in the course of the negotiation: a significant portion of interaction between police and public can often revolve around what type of interaction is even occurring, for example if the person who called the police finds that the responding officer not only does not share their definition of the situation but even begins to find their behavior suspicious. (cf. Manning 1977) Invoking the notion of ‘crime’ or labeling an act as ‘punishable’ is a practice in its own right that further invokes special authority and ultimately alters the power dynamic. Openly or formally defining behavior as deviant or undesirable plays a significant role in boundary maintenance and everyday social control, but the police identifying something as ‘punishable’ further implies that the police, and specifically the police officer making the statement, bears the authority to take the first step in the formal process of punishing, but at the same time may put a burden on the officer to act in a specific way. The typologies used to make sense of social situations and in presenting them narratively—e.g. the more legalistic divisions into ‘victim’ and ‘offender’, as well as the more subcultural and unofficial categorization presented by Van Maanen (1978) dividing actors into ‘know-nothings’, ‘suspicious persons’ and ‘assholes’—are contextual and depend as much on the events preceding the situation, cultural and local knowledge, and the course of the interaction as they do on specific rules or regulations.⁷

Police officers can become entangled in a situation not just through the command and control structure or orders over the radio, but often by coming into contact with various actors which further triggers responsibilities to communicate, investigate, or question further. As Bittner (1967) notes, “the uniformed patrolman… finds it virtually impossible to leave the scene without becoming involved in some way or another,” (703) while discussing how the arrival of the police can transform any situation.⁸ The traditional—and still very common—form of police patrol using squad cars has essentially tried to minimize this by systematizing policing demands and linking performance to the amount of time officers spend in cars on patrol and stopped dealing with requests for service; this form has been increasingly criticized and seen as problematic with regard to community relations and overall police effectiveness. (Kelling 1999, cf. Maguire and King 2004, Sparrow 2016)

The very issue of in which manner police involve themselves in situations has been critical to the generic mandate and function of policing. The original intent of Robert Peel’s Metropolitan Police has been interpreted as an attempt to have policemen function as visible symbols of the presence of ‘order,’ rather than actively serving a law enforcement function—which at the time was handled separately by the courts.⁹ (Lyman 1964) Rather than a reactive or interventionist police, the Metropolitan Police were specifically intended to increase a feeling of public safety primarily through their presence, rather than through handling incidents on a case by case basis. (cf. Rawlings 1995) Police in the early years were instructed to use “the mildest possible means” in maintaining public order, as the very concept of policing had been met with significant hostility by the London populace. (Lyman 1964: 153) Police developed in the US, and especially in Continental Europe, to be less reticent to intervene in interpersonal matters, the reasoning being that local police in the US ostensibly had some form of democratic mandate, i.e. they represented the people rather than the government per se, while European police specifically and unapologetically represented the authoritative state. (Uchida 1993, Bayley 1979) More critical views, and today a much broader consensus of scholars, see Pre-war policing in both North America and Europe as overtly taking on a role of class control and playing little role with regard to ‘respectable society.’ (Silver 1967, Rumbaut and Bittner 1979, cf. Weinhauer 2003 who describes pre-1960 s views of policing in Germany as a “life-bond” between officer and state against a hostile and childlike citizenry.) Police in the US in particular were seen as firmly entrenched in urban political systems, “an extension of different political factions, rather than an extension of city government.” (Uchida 1993: 10–11) The legacy of the continental models of policing developed in France and the German states—particularly in Prussia and Austria—lies both in the Soviet-inspired East German Volkspolizei as well as the state-oriented police organizations of the Weimar Republic and the Post-war West German police prior to the 1960 s. (Liang 1992, Shelley 1999)

The development of differing policing traditions—specifically Anglo-American (with significant variations between the US and the UK and phases of convergence and divergence) and continental models—have led to a variety of not only strategies and sources of police knowledge but also relationships between police and actors ranging from residents or witnesses to state prosecutors, judges and legislators. How police are expected to engage with society is determined by a range of factors, and the development of more formalized systems of ‘knowledge’ have led to a new emphasis on considering the implications of reactive and proactive policing behaviors. (Behr 2006, Hendrijks and van Hulst 2015, Sparrow 2016)

Police interactions were broadly analyzed through encounters, but based on a more heuristic operationalization than a pre-defined policing category, though these were often synonymous: the accompanied police officers for the most part spend the better part of their shifts inside their cars and traveled from place to place, with encounters with citizens tending to begin with or shortly after the arrival of the police and ending once the police left. Many exceptions demonstrated the difficulties with even interpreting individual encounters outside of their ‘historical’ context; significant examples were found in many cases where police simply drove by and were reacted to by passersby and cases where police stayed in one area or location longer and had multiple fleeting or hard-to-define encounter with the same individuals. Tasks often involved responding to non-emergency calls or complaints as well as following-up on previous or ongoing cases, which was often reflected in encounters with less emphasis on ‘taking control’ (cf. Brent and Sykes 1980) or overtly demonstrating police authority: these encounter raised the question of how police authority is being communicated in the types of encounters which do not fit to the ideal type bureaucratic model.

4.5 Three Sources of Police Authority

The specific and contextual form of policing of interest here—the Brandenburger Revierpolizei—are in some sense a hybrid, in that officers are expected to proactively involve themselves in the community but also to take on more traditional roles primarily as a reaction to calls for service and identified crime. As these officers are primarily community-oriented but still carry out normal policing functions the practices they use to manage their various policing (and personal) roles are likely more complex and visible than those assumed within more compartmentalized urban policing institutions, as is often the case with rural and non-urban policing. (Girtler 1980, Weisheit et al. 1994) Observation of the Revierpolizei elicited an understanding of how police established interactional relationships based on three distinct conceptualizations of the role of the individual officer within the encounter: authority derived from the institutional role, mitigated by or negotiated through a situational role, and that attributed to personal roles.

Authority, though a core concept in sociology, has only occasionally been further explored or critically analyzed within the study of police work, and is often taken for granted as something which private citizens must adhere to, i.e. conflating the ‘authority of the police’ with ‘respect for the authority of the police.’ (Terpstra 2011) Authority has typically been discussed in cases where police give commands or orders, with its presence or effectiveness being measured based on whether these commands are followed. (Tyler and Wakslak 2004) Interactionist or dramaturgical perspectives, in contrast, would view authority as being constructed in various ways in the course of the encounters, with the binary of accepting or rejecting police commands only providing one—dramatic—example of how authority is situationally constructed. The presence of police officers affects even ‘normal’ ‘legitimate’ behavior, and this suggests that the authority of the police plays a role in situations where the police are merely present. (Muir 1979) Police authority presumes that the powers being claimed by an officer are legitimate—legally-sound—as well as being exercised in the pursuit of legitimate policing goals; the perception of authority and how it should be reacted to therefore also encompasses perceptions by those encountering the police of the what policing powers are legitimate, what goals are legitimate, and whether the current situation and actions being taken correspond to these. (cf. Manning 1995) Spencer (1970) interprets Weber as viewing authority and norms as “polar principles of social organization.” (124) In this sense, authority-guided situations are able to violate, alter or transform social norms provided that the source of authority can be established as legitimate: in the case of the police authority is presumed to be legal, and the symbolism of the social role—uniform, badge, police car etc.—are almost always enough to confer legitimacy and support the authority of the police if further invoked. The specific source of the authority, however, is not always as abstract or rational as defined by its institutional background. As previously discussed, police encounters are not a simple binary where actions are either taken or not taken and commands are respected or rejected: police authority is communicated or demonstrated through different practices which can take place at different levels. While at a theoretical level police officers may be interchangeable, in that every officer in a hypothetical police-citizen encounter would bear the same legitimate form of authority and the same potential powers, in practice the perception of this authority will vary. Officers may be treated differently by citizens based on the officer’s appearance, age, gender, ethnicity, etc. Officers often find themselves dealing with “repeat customers,” or returning to the same locations on consecutive shifts or even on the same day: “Some people are seen again and again. Time defines their existence as regulars or repeat players.” (Manning 2003: 211) In rural areas in particular the likelihood of police officers encountering individuals known outside of work while on duty is high, raising the question of how police can interact simultaneously through policing frames while maintaining informal personal relationships.

Police authority was observed, and could theoretically be assumed, to operate on three basic non-exclusive levels, to derive from three different sources: institutional, situational and personal, determined by to what extent the presumed social role of the police officer takes precedence (Figure 4.1).

Figure 4.1

Sources of police authority

Institutional authority refers to the basic ascribed police role, in which the officer serves a symbolic role but, individually, is more or less interchangeable; the authority which derives from the legitimacy of the individual as a police officer communicated through the symbolism of the office or formally communicated evidence of legitimacy, such as a uniform, a badge, an ID, or the word of another authorized individual. Institutional authority implies that officers in a specific situation will be treated or reacted to the way police officers would always be treated in a similar situation; it conversely applies that the actions of officers will be more-or-less consistently interpreted and placed against a background of police norms and expectations, rather than everyday or routine practices. It is the authority implied in the hypothetical interaction where an officer calls to an individual, who then turns around, and “by this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he comes a subject.” (Althusser 1976, cited in Fassin 2013: 5) This role includes elements of the traditional and rational-legal authority described by Weber (1958) in that, within the institutional framework of policing, citizens are assumed to either be cooperative or hostile, and the logical basis for adhering to the authority of the police is not something that requires explanation. Additionally, this role corresponds to the bureaucratic assumptions of police work, primarily that cases can be and need to be identified as either police-relevant or not, that police-relevant cases imply clear and police-specific solutions, and that cases are centered around primarily self-contained, categorizable incidents. (Bernard et al. 2005) Institutional frames apply a “regime of truth” (Foucault 1977) which not only take ownership of the conflict but allow the police officers, as representatives of the state, to manage it. Pressure to maintain the basis of this authority stems from institutional goals and the surrounding bureaucratic framework which require categorizable and reportable outcomes, most strongly in cases which be viewed by the officer and the larger institution as law enforcement or crisis related. Institutional authority represents, in its ideal form, the broader tenets and appearances of ‘police professionalism’: “the comforting idea that we can be kept safe by a heroic corps of high-tech guardians, applying objectivity and expertise, and operating in the background, without requiring our involvement.” (Sklansky 2011: 7) While some have called for a renewed emphasis on maintaining and invoking institutional authority as a way to defend police legitimacy (Proenca and Muniz 2006), many scholars have recognized the primarily symbolic and abstract nature of the institutional role and the difficulty in sustaining it in complex or repeated encounters. (Bittner 1974)

Situational authority is an extension of the institutional, but based on and negotiated through direct interaction; that is, the officer negotiates their own encounter-specific authority through repeated or continuous interaction in which the defining of the situation is to some extent a collaborative process. As institutional authority is often based in assumptions of professionalism and law and enforcement, it is, for most people in most places, something for other people in other contexts, and lacking a recognizable or clearly defined ‘police situation’ (e.g. an acknowledged crime or violent conflict) the formal authority of the police may not always be easily sustainable or made obvious simply through the presence of the police. It is often invoked as police overtly indicate and implement their discretion in deciding how to define or handle a situation, establishing a (dramatized) negotiation which could otherwise be handled more ‘forcibly’ or ‘coercively.’ Situational authority applies when a police officer is known to those who are encountered but solely or almost exclusively through a formal policing role, in the case of repeated encounters or interactions with the same individuals in which policing authority was invoked. Some level of personal identity beyond the institutional role is injected into the interaction, with the officer effectively claiming an identity beyond the basic stereotypical police officer, but the interaction still remains broadly framed by the concerns and goals set by the institutional background, in that the officer is on the job and concerned with resolving potential conflict situations (or preventing future conflicts) in some way. As situational authority is still dependent on defining situations and problems so as to resolve them, it is dependent on the inherent assumptions and realities surrounding the institutional role—e.g. the ability of the police to enforce their definition of the situation—even if they are able to introduce additional ‘problem-solving’ practices into the situation¹⁰. While institutional roles transfer ownership of the problem to the police, in practice the involved individuals will often attempt to maintain their stake in the situation, and the police officers might either agree with this, or tacitly allow for the others to present themselves this way so as to avoid conflict, in both cases implying a shift toward situational authority. Situational roles can be reliant on traditional or legal-rational understandings of the authority, as well as on situationally negotiating cooperation and compliance in ways that subvert or downplay formal institution roles, approaching Weber’s (1958, Kieser 1999) conceptualization of charismatic authority as well as interpersonal power-dynamic factors such as social and cultural capital. (cf. Bourdieu 1991) Pressure is exerted toward situational roles from institutional goals and the bureaucratic framework, primarily in situations which can effectively be categorized as order-maintenance or peacekeeping, i.e. cases where the officer may have some institutional pressure to do something but have greater freedom in deciding what to do. At the same time, social relationships can exert pressure toward situational relationships, in the sense that existing personal relationships will be leveraged or invoked to encourage a police officer to do something and adapt a more police-oriented role but not to such an extreme that the personal relationship is irrelevant, thereby constituting an appeal to situational authority. Examples of this could range from cases where known individuals are involved in identified criminal incidents—causing a contest between institutional goals and social relationships—to police officers intervening in minor incidents between acquaintances, adapting a police role to the extent that it reaffirms their ability to resolve the conflict but while maintaining their personal, individual role within the situation.

Personal authority refers to the power of action which stems from and is in differing ways extended and restricted by personal relationships outside the boundaries of a formal policing role. Many of the individuals encountered by the police during fieldwork had some degree of familiarity with the officer; it often appeared easy to discern, based on the levels of formality, use or lack of humor, and apparent ‘comfort level’ of the encounter, which individuals knew the police officer more as a private individual and who knew the officer primarily from being the target of previous police suspicion or primarily as a police officer. Personal authority is in a sense the polar opposite of institutional authority, in that it derives almost exclusively from personal experience, shared social norms, and an understanding of the individual (or at least from social roles based in more individualized institutional frameworks, such as parent, or neighbor.) Trust is assumed to often be the basis of relations invoking personal authority, which subsumes or outweighs the framing impact of the legitimacy of the institution. (cf. Garfinkel 1963)¹¹ Personal authority was often observed as playing a role in informal encounters, both because officers often ‘randomly’ came into contact with people already known to them, and because those who had existing relationships with police officers often first went to them before, or in place of, calling the police directly. Those who know police officers personally will often turn to them with questions or concerns, for example, turning to them first to ask whether a minor incident is ‘worth reporting,’ treating them as an authoritative source of information; on-duty officers will by the same token occasionally encounter individuals personally known to them and still be expected to perform their duties, give commands, take statements, apply various forms of sanctions etc., as a police officer, without jeopardizing personal relationships. The status of the individual as a police officer is still relevant, but it is here considered relevant in ways that apply fewer or no limits or constraints on individual interactions and instead work more as a source of insider knowledge or as a more informal gatekeeper to the policing world; personal authority related to policing is often manifested as a form of social capital, where the abilities and powers associated with the police are given additional value specifically because they are not overtly being invoked and ‘normal’ power dynamics between police and non-police individuals are not in play. (cf. Bourdieu 1991) The pressure from social relationships towards personal authority will depend greatly on the nature and closeness of the relationship as well as on the types of conflicts and plausible institutional pressures that may result: personal authority is dependent on the essential lack of an immediately defined policing situation, and the more formal or unavoidable the policing context becomes, the more pressure there will be towards a situationally-negotiated authority; if institutional pressures are high enough due to the seriousness of the situation, this may force institutional roles to dominate, e.g. if a family member becomes a suspect in a crime, the police officer will either be forced to accentuate an institutional role to avoid any appearance of impropriety, or else to essentially step back and deal with the issue, even with other police officers, purely as an involved individual (though likely one with useful insider knowledge.)

These three levels of authority are relevant in determining how police problem-solving is given meaning. Situations dependent on institutional authority are ones in which ‘the police,’ essentially the individual as a symbol for the organization and the abstract concept or institution, deal with a problem and then leave, either having resolved the problem sufficiently or having made communicative overtures (or threats) in a way that the problem will be resolved or minimized enough to avoid future complaints. Institutionally, the incident (very often the call for service) is the problem which needs to be solved. (cf. Meehan 1992) Situational authority establishes a broader narrative, as the characteristics or values dramatized by the individual officers can be leveraged (by any party) as part of the negotiation. The problem here could be considered as the incident, but also as the underlying behavior, condition, or pattern, whether identified by the police organization strategically or by the individual officer. The value of letting someone off with a warning can often be exploited to, at a minimum, great rhetorical effect if that same person is later encountered by the same officer doing the same thing, and for an individual officer, might be seen as more effective in preventing a re-occurrence than issuing a ticket and moving on. If officers make it clear they are invested in the longer-term situation and will follow up, rather than simply handle the immediate conflict or complaint and leave, it is communicatively more effective for them to set standards or ultimatums for what type of order they expect to be maintained both now and in the future. As these sources of authority are constructed intersubjectively (cf. Prus 1996) they are contingent on specific interpersonal relations—meaning that they vary from person to person within an encounter or even be ‘misaligned’ between actors, i.e. a police officer attempting to maintain a strict institutional role and handle a situation by the book may be recognized individually by others who consider that officer, personally, to be a ‘hardass’ and attempt to negotiate their own desired outcome based on their reading of the officer’s expectations and concerns. An officer who treats every situation as an individual incident may find that his or her future-oriented threats might not be taken seriously by local teenagers who have often encountered that officer but never seen the threats followed through, with an understanding of situational authority here undermining the premises of institutional authority. What matters is the types of practices used which either reflect an understanding of the role of the officer and relevant source of authority or attempt to ‘anchor’ understandings between participants, most often practices used by officers to either maintain institutionally-derived authority or to negotiate and develop authority within the situation.

Personal authority and situational authority are the most likely forms to overlap, as effective situational authority presumably relies on the officer demonstrating decision-making power or negotiation skills and differentiating his- or herself from the standard ‘ideal type’ officer, establishing a relationship in which the individual can be seen beyond the uniform. Both forms share some similarities to Weber’s (1958) concept of charismatic authority, with one of the major ‘extraordinary qualities’ of the person being their (potential) access to the institutional authority of the police. Similar to Bittner’s (1970) emphasis on the capacity to use force as core to the police role, the authority of the police can be effectively enacted when police can—or at least are perceived as being able to—back up their words with action, whether physical force or involving additional authoritative actors in the situation. Both forms were often invoked at the onset of the encounter simply by the fact that the officer knew where to find an individual and was not simply on patrol and initiating an encounter based on an observed violation, but theoretically would differ based on whether the officer is perceived as or acting ‘on the job,’ such as in cases where an on-duty officer regularly walks through a certain park and often encounters the same individuals, or is only incidentally a police officer, such as an officer who eats lunch in the same restaurant every day and is familiar and friendly with the owner. Emotional labor practices (cf. Martin 1999) are highly relevant to ‘anchoring’ either of these source, though the forms of these practices differ; personal authority likely proves complicated in its management, in that it requires both some differentiation from a more traditional or stereotypical image of police authority—which could be expressed, for example, in the use of humor to set oneself apart from a more ‘serious’ expected police role (Horan et al. 2012)—but still, as conceived here, implies some form of authority conditional on police legitimacy and the understanding that the individual can defensibly act in ways, make demands, apply definitions, or formally make determinations, in ways unavailable to others. Personal authority could be seen as either augmenting institutional authority or as providing a buffer, depending on the type of situation or the goals, interests, or understanding of the other encounter participants: being acquainted with a police officer might make one more likely to follow instructions or to take their word as law, but in other cases the friends or family of officers might disregard the potential risks of disobeying an officer based on their personal relationship. The boundaries between the concept of personal authority as presented here and the more general interactionist interpretation of an individual as a social actor are necessarily blurry, and will be further discussed at the end of this chapter.

Situational authority fits the dramatized image of the ‘beat cop’ which is often invoked in arguments for community-oriented policing. (Crank 1994, Crank and Langworthy 1996 cf. Kelling and Coles 1996) Local knowledge plays a significant role, as encounters not only do not, but cannot, occur in a vacuum and, for every individual to whom situational authority is interpreted, the situation can be viewed as a possible prelude to further encounters. Officers do not necessarily expect to get to know everyone in a given neighborhood, but they may expect to know enough key individuals, or gatekeepers to specific social groups, as well as that their preferred way of doing things will become recognized as generally normal. Hunold et al. (2016) provide an example of police ‘peacefully’ establishing a more immediate, situation-derived form of authority:

At the beginning of the interaction, one of the two police officers introduced himself by name and established a personable relationship. Yet he did not lose his authoritarian presence at any time. The young people already seemed to know the procedure and complied with the policeman’s request. Further, they seemed to attach little importance to the police as they continued their conversation on the sidelines. On this basis it was possible for the policeman to reduce the distance between himself and the individuals concerned, while actually letting himself get involved in banter that led to laughter amongst the adolescents. The atmosphere became more and more relaxed during the encounter. Therefore, the parting from each other seemed almost friendly. (598)

This example fits best to situational authority, in the present conception, as the relationship of the police to the youth is still established and developed through the course of legitimate police work, specifically an ID check. It also demonstrates the similarities between the practices used to attempt to establish situational authority and those likely to be used where personal authority comes into play; specifically, the use of humor and “approximating their behavioral style to the adolescents’ life-world” (Hunold et al. 2016: 598) to either distance the officer from a generic institutional role or to alter how that institutional role is perceived.

Personal authority, on the other hand, presents the risk of role conflict, as the perception of a personal relationship can imply that the formal police role is reduced in immediate relevance. Acting in a formal police role with a friend, family member, or even acquaintance could strain that relationship, even if the person did not consciously or overtly expect rules to be bent to their benefit. (Bracey 1992, Macintyre and Prenzler 1998) Personal authority essentially precludes acting in a formal policing manner against, or in a manner restricting the decision-making ability of, the individual who is personally familiar to the officer; implementing institutional authority by taking ‘normal’ policing actions and providing normative police investigations could easily be interpreted as a personal affront, essentially valuing impersonal and conceptual relations between police and public in the abstract over personal experienced relationships. Although the issue of police personal relationships and police work is often discussed in the context of ethics, e.g. with the assumption that personal contacts present a greater risk of police breaking the rules or becoming corrupt, little research has examined this context of policing in terms of the police role or community relations. (cf. Hunter 1999) In this case, however, the point is not to explore misconduct, but rather to examine the practices police use to manage personal relationships in a setting where they are both likely to and institutionally encouraged to come into contact with friends, family, and neighbors in a policing role.

Importantly, however, there are few significant loci of control for how situational and personal authority are perceived in encounters. While some departments in the US or UK have attempted to restrict officers from working in communities where they live or have lived, others have attempted to encourage this, particularly in the context of community policing efforts. (Allen and Parker 2013) Rural areas where officers are individually responsible for a wider geographic area—though not necessarily a larger population—generally negate any formal decisions in this regard, and officers have little choice but to live in or close to their jurisdiction of responsibility. Revierpolizei officers in Brandenburg are specifically encouraged to reside in the communities they work in—or rather, they are encouraged to work within the communities they reside in. This was not the case for every officer, though almost all lived in close proximity to their jurisdiction; some had permission to keep their police cruisers and equipment at home so as to be able to begin their shifts in their local communities or within the neighborhood office intended for community meetings, rather than having to drive potentially an hour to reach the district station only to then drive back.

The source of police authority, as perceived by those involved, also affects how far that authority extends in terms of making situations ‘police work,’ that is, something which the police are expected to handle or assumed to have control in handling. Peter Manning has analyzed police communication from an interactionist perspective focusing specifically on the use of signs and codes in filtering, processing and interpreting information through police emergency call centers—“911” in the US and “999” in the UK. (Manning 1982, 1988) Identifying processes through which information is made to conform to a police understanding, he argues that this presentation of reality reaffirms the institutional division of social worlds into non-problems and problems which the police can (and should) deal with. The current study differed in the basic form of police work under analysis, as only in the rarest case was an encounter begun in response to an emergency call, a high number of calls were scheduled appointments made directly with the Revierpolizei officer (or another officer in the same unit), and the pre-sorting of information described by Manning took on a less bureaucratic-rational form and a large number of cases fell into the category which in Manning’s study was labeled “miscellaneous” or “residual” in which officers were advised to “have a look around” or “speak to the [person] at this address.” (1982: 236) This meant that a higher proportion of cases than might be otherwise expected began without a clear explicit police definition from the outset, and the process of defining the situation—either more-or-less unilaterally by police, or in cooperation with residents, witnesses, bystanders, victims, or cooperating agencies—was potentially more dynamic and possibly transparent, at a minimum involving different types of communicative practices than those typically found in the policing literature. (cf. Westley 1970, Van Maanen 1974, Meehan 1982, Reichertz 1990, Behr 2000, Buvik 2016) The formal organization of policing presumes that cases are individual—but at the same time easily categorizable (cf. Meyer and Rowan 1977, Terpstra 2011)—and that police arrive on the scene armed only with the knowledge interpreted and relayed by dispatchers; practically, officers often enter scenes with assumptions based on factors such as the neighborhood or type of location, local or personal knowledge of events and relationships, and prior experiences at the same or similar locations or even with the same individuals. (Smith 1986, Crank and Langworth 1996) Highly relevant for the Revierpolizei was the fact that many incidents or concerns were reported directly to the officer, essentially privately, rather than through formal channels, and the role of the Revierpolizei officer as an individual came to the forefront in these cases. For examples, multiple cases were observed where potential crimes—petty theft or non-residential break-ins—were only reported directly to an officer after that officer returned from vacation even though the incident had occurred several days or even up to two weeks earlier. If the reporting of cases is affected by the type of relationship between the officer and the person making the call—professional or personal—then the course of the encounter once the officer arrives on the scene is certainly similarly affected. The dominant source of authority in an encounter or series of encounters plays a significant role in how that encounter is defined, inasmuch as the police are typically seen as having ultimate authority to formally define encounters based on their institutional authority and ability to enforce it. (Feest and Blankenburg 1972) Ad hoc typologies, such as that presented by Van Maanen (1978) may not always be as effective when the officer personally has a more complex or long-term understanding of those involved, but at the same time these relations could become a hindrance in the exigencies of the situation when commands are given and expected to be followed and procedures need to be adhered to.¹² Police work involves establishing relationships; it only sometimes—with the notable exception of the Revierpolizei and efforts towards community policing—emphasizes maintaining them. (cf. Weisheit et al. 1994, Martin 1999, Hunold et al. 2016)

4.6 Establishing and Maintaining Authority

The sources of policing authority operate on a rough axis spanning from institutional authority as one pole to personal authority on the other. Situational authority, although in many respects similar to personal authority, operates as the injection of attributes of personal relations into an otherwise role-oriented relationship, e.g. allowing not only police officers but other engaged individuals to develop ‘personalities’ relevant not only to the immediate interaction but also with presumed relevance to future interactions. This model of policing authority also assumes a (metaphorical) ‘magnetic pull’ towards the institutional end, stemming from the fact that police officers experience pressures from various sources in terms of goals, outcomes, and framing their own activity, but the pressures they face from their own institutional background and its bureaucratic organizational setting will—if not always win—always need to be appeased. Many cases began based on citizen calls or were assigned from higher in the department in which the responding officers knew (and communicated) immediately that nothing ‘critical’ needed to be done, but responding and demonstrating a minimal level of commitment was important; even in cases where the complaints were pre-emptively judged to be ‘unfounded’ or where no legitimate police goal could be identified, the police would often act as if the response and the communication with the complainant was a crucial institutional function, informing the complainant that nothing could be done at the moment in the specific situation, in doing so fulfilling their obligations with regards to (their conceptualization of) the demand condition. Citizens interactions with police officers are prerequisite on them having some basic understanding of ‘police’ as an abstract concept—in the ideal type sense—presumed here to stem primarily from cultural narratives mediated by police efforts towards image work (cf. Manning 2012) and while more immediate meaning-making factors—such as a more personalized understanding of one’s local police, or relationships with individual officers—will mediate these higher-level images, it is the rare case for an individual to view every encounter with a police officer in terms of their understanding of that officer or purely personal factors.¹³ Appealing to institutional authority gives police the best opportunity and ability to “take charge” of a situation. (Sykes and Brent 1980) Police often need to maintain some form of their ideal type image as a reminder of where their ‘real’ authority comes from, and citizens, regardless of whether the officer sticks to the script or goes off it, will rarely forget what it means that the officer’s responsibilities and goals are backed by the legitimate force of the law. Van Maanen (1974) writes that:

In most threatening situations, the officer attempts to maintain his edge by managing his appearance such that others will believe he is ready, if not anxious, for action. The policeman’s famous swagger, the loud barking tone of his voice, the unsnapped holster or the hand clasped to his nightstick are all attitudes assumed to convey this impression. Decisiveness is readily apparent in such a posture, although the officer himself may have little, if any, idea of what he is about to do. (107)

This reinforces the association between institutional authority and formal police decision-making power which takes into consideration the ‘facts’ and formal interpretation of the situation more than the concerns of other encounter participants or the outcome of negotiations. Appearing to be decisive emphasizes that the officer acts based on his or her interpretation of the situation, and others can only react and attempt to present themselves in a way that conforms to the officer’s understanding to minimize potential conflict.

Table 4.1 provides some examples of practices which can either reflect an appeal to a specific type of authority or which are more likely to be associated with an understanding of that form of authority taking precedence. This list is non-exhaustive, and several of these practices could possibly, in differing contexts, be more closely associated with a different source of authority, but are here presented as a general theoretical basis for how these forms of authority can be both expressed and effectively implemented.

Table 4.1 Some practices for establishing and maintaining police authority

The defining factor of how police authority is constructed is primarily how the situation is defined, and thereby specific participants’ corresponding role or agency within it. (cf. Goffman 1961, Collins 2005) While many different practices could be associated with establishing the source of authority relevant to the immediate encounter—either conceptually in terms of the basic communicative offering, or based on how these practices framed or altered the encounter based on their reception and interpretation by other actors—it is necessary to further categorize these practices by their interactional level, or the role they play in terms of framing / defining the situation, establishing power-dynamics, and as interpretable (in some cases ritualized) action to further the interaction or push for a desired (and agreed upon) outcome. Sykes and Brent (1980), using a general systems theory approach, consider “information, order, respect, and resolution” (184) as the desired goals of police encounters. Applying an interactionist perspective and the consideration of interaction ritual chains, these categories will be expanded and removed from the institutional assumptions of the policing context. Information is primarily relevant in how police define a situation in terms of formal or informal encounters (or possibly no encounter at all), as this determines what elements, actions and actors are considered relevant, how much freedom is given, and how important it is for the police to maintain control over the situation.¹⁴ Order is the way in which police actively take control of situations, related to how the situation is defined in terms of needing order applied to it, needing a resolution, and, in general, something needing to be done.¹⁵ (cf. Bittner 1974) Apart from the construction of order by the police in more general terms are the overt and dramaturgical practices used to represent this order; practices such as maintaining an aggressive posture or keeping a ‘safe’ distance from others can demonstrate both to encounter participants as well as onlookers that a ‘serious’ formal police encounter is taking place. Respect is better considered as how the power dynamics of the situation are presented and enacted, as well as how the situational roles of different participants are constructed—often a function of power dynamics—and how effectively the formal institutional ideal type role of the police can be upheld. In an ‘ideal’ situation, a police officer can maintain a strict institutional role, which will be enough to communicate the coercive potential of the officer over others and thereby ensure cooperation without resistance or superfluous negotiation, allowing for the front-stage presentation of ‘respect’ or “deference patterns.” (Goffman 1961) Resolution refers to not just how a police end a situation, but to how they present the situation in terms of something that needs resolution at all; what is being presented as the goal of the interaction, if a joint goal can be constructed at all?

Several factors were identified in how authority was constructed and maintained, related to how officers structured encounters, presented themselves and represented others, emphasized or de-emphasized the hierarchy of power, acted on the basis of intersubjective social roles, and communicatively established goals. These categories and how they are reflected for each source of authority are presented in Table 4.2.

Table 4.2 Interaction elements of police authority

4.6.1 Form of Interaction

The form of interaction refers to how an encounter is jointly structured (if at all) with ‘distant’ encounters, i.e. the simple visible presence of police, already serving to appeal to institutional authority, and other policing encounters taking place at a more formal, explicit level: i.e. when institutional authority is in play and perceivable, involved participants will always be aware that they are in a former policing encounter and generally of what their ascribed role is, though conflict between role ascriptions are still possible, for example if a witness suddenly becomes a suspect. Distancing here also refers more generally to the type of social practices and even the rhetoric and language that will be used: more formal language (e.g. in German with the use of the formal second person “Sie” rather than the informal “du,” or the use of last names rather than first names, or even by the specific choice of words) will establish the boundaries of the interaction, as well as the lack of narrative elements that emphasize ‘personality’ beyond formal or generalized policing roles, e.g. humor at the expense of or subverting the police role. (Humor at the expense of others within the interaction or in cases where it is unclear if the joke is intended for the others or only for the police will likely reinforce the ‘distancing’ between the police and non-police, cf. Van Maanen 1978; Fassin 2013 presents many examples of police maintaining ‘formal’ and controlled situations despite speaking more directly, typically rudely, with residents, suggesting that the use of racial slurs and offensive stereotypes within encounters simply reinforces the social and power distance between the police and minority youth.) Shon (2000) points out how, in police-citizen encounters, “politeness can be used to be impolite.” (162) Using rhetorical practices to establish and fix identity (cf. Burke 1969, Branaman 2016) can be seen in how police either maintain a ‘common front’ (e.g. the situational reflection of ‘us vs. them’) or work to establish more dynamic forms of identity, where individuals have more control over how they present themselves symbolically (through gestures, spatial arrangements, their role within the interaction and turn-taking, etc.) as well as verbally. Situational authority is invoked when police structure situations more overtly as negotiations: dramatized, because the formal level is still interpretable and the ability of the police to revert to an institution-based form of authority is never truly removed, and even in situations where police officers act informally, casual, or friendly, other participants in the encounter may remain wary of doing something to upset the police, incriminate themselves, or even feel that the appeal to situational authority is a trap or a trick, or simply a form of rapport building that will be later used as a way to coerce cooperation. (Davis et al. 2017, cf. Goffman 1981) Personal authority will be maintained in cases where there is no overt or police-maintained structure to the encounter, or else that authority itself will be challenged; in cases where a ‘formal’ structure has been established but personal authority is invoked, it will be necessary for the officer to maintain an overtly informal style of communication, at least informal when compared to the formalized style of police interaction: e.g. in a case where a witness to a crime is a close friend of the officer it is likely that the officer will use ‘everyday’ informal language not only out of habit but to specifically avoid the type of role strain that could result; in cases where a personal acquaintance is identified as a suspect or having committed a violation, it may be necessary to either maintain language of institutional constraint, “I’m sorry I have to do this, but I don’t have a choice” or else change footing and revert to an institutional form of authority essentially denying the relevance of the personal relationship to the situation. (Goffman 1981)

4.6.2 Spatial Ordering

Spatial ordering refers to the range of processes and practices of arranging actors and controlling access to locations, items, and other actors through which police demonstrate that a police encounter is taking place, as well as how strict (i.e. formally defined and controlled) that encounter is. Within formal policing encounters, maintaining spatial ordering of encounter participants is considered central to maintaining order and safety, as well as related to a potential need to secure a crime scene for further investigation. Strict control as a practice refers to the formal separation of groups, whether that means a spatial as well as social divide between the police and others or in the separation of different parties within an encounter. From an institutional perspective, the police objective is to quickly and efficiently define a situation, and this might involve avoiding allowing the situation to change prior to any formal judgment: for example, police showing up to a noise complaint and discovering a party they consider to be relatively harmless may not show concern if individuals leave or enter different rooms at will or attempt to leave the party while the officers are talking with the host; they might make overtures toward establishing situational authority conditional on the cooperation of those whose cooperation is required, but still consider the geographic and social space to be ‘controlled’ simply by their presence and the lack of overt resistance. If they, however, show up to a scene of reported violence involving a weapon they might be more concerned about immediate risks or the reduced chance of a resolving the situation in an institutionally desirable way if, for example, the offender, key witnesses, or even the victim are able to flee the scene or dispose of evidence. Situational authority is related to more contingent forms of spatial ordering, as in the example of the noise complaint at the party. Individuals may be more free to come and go, or to move around the location or even approach officers, but this will still remain dependent upon and often part of the negotiation over the situation itself. The following category, indicators of control, is often necessary for effectively communicating what type of spatial ordering is practically being enforced. Who is considered engaged or disengaged from the encounter will be contingent on the interpretation of the situation, but unlike in the stricter control of institutional authority, individuals will often have some leeway in negotiating their own power to orient themselves socially and spatially. A spectrum could be imagined here, with one extreme being cases where police take physical control over individuals, either with commands such as “stay still” or “lie down on the ground” or with the application of handcuffs or physical force, and moving in the direction of complete freedom of movement with no attempt by the police imply any control over the movement of others or their ability to address (or ignore the presence of) the police. Spatial ordering in terms of personal authority is considered minimal, but may also be conditionally dependent. The lack of a structured policing situation limits the ability of the police to set ‘boundaries’ in the ways that would otherwise be implicit in the police role, but individual-specific elements of control certainly impact situations; for example, on-duty officers would almost certainly allow close friends or family members to approach closer than they would most strangers, but would likely stop them if they tried to reach for the officer’s gun even if they interpreted it as a joke simply to provoke a reaction.

4.6.3 Indicators of Control

The indicators of control are the applied behaviors and enforced social norms to maintain the desired spatial ordering. This often at the same time defines the broader encounter in terms of how ‘focused’ or ‘engaged’ participants must be. (Goffman 1961) Stricter forms of control will make it clear that the actions of the police (and reactions by participants) are the only things that matter within the situation, while more relaxed forms will allow for multi-focused encounters in which multiple interactions can take place without needing to reference one another or overlap until attention is specifically drawn to authoritative action. In formal situations police will often maintain facing—i.e. keeping the other individuals in their sight and in a fixed location as they consider necessary. This also includes maintaining a distance between the officer and others that is considered to be ‘safe,’ while this distance is not consistent and is often determined more by the physical surroundings than by any strict rule, the character of an encounter can often be determined by how close an officer stands to other individuals, if they make attempts to specifically keep their holstered weapon out of the immediate reach of others, and how officers react when others make unexpected movements or gestures. By establishing a more personalized, situational relationship with individuals (or possibly with a location, such as a café or restaurant that officers regularly frequent) a more conditionally relaxed approach will be taken—again with the awareness that this can always be altered. In the previous example of a noise complaint where the guests are allowed to overtly ignore the presence of the police etc., the sudden outbreak of violence or any sign of ‘resistance’ (insults to the police, conspicuously turning up the music after the police arrive) may result in the police deciding to temporarily ‘lock down’ the situation and demand (not request) that everyone remain still, that the music be turned down, and thereby signal that control is being asserted and not negotiated. In terms of personal authority, the ‘normal’ rules for everyday actions would apply in terms of how ‘personal space’ is considered. Overt violations of the normal expectations of police behavior would be signals that personal authority is being appealed to: during the policing of soccer match (described later in this chapter), several individuals approached Officer Hermann from behind and tapped him on the shoulder, sometimes following up with jokes at the expense of the police role—by allowing this behavior, Officer Hermann was accepting this interpretation of his social role with regards to that individual and maintaining personal, rather than institutional, authority. In another case, an individual reporting a break-in had been a high school friend of the officer; the two greeted each other with first names and shook hands, and then the other individual said to me, “normally you don’t greet a police officer like that,” essentially setting off the informal and personal tone that the rest of the encounter would take on, including several complaints by the officer about “the bureaucracy in the police” and the lack of “interest in finding out what is going on” among patrol officers, statements which would be unimaginable in most other contexts.

4.6.4 Dramatization of Power-Dynamics

The power-dynamics between the police and citizens—the hierarchy—remains implicit in most encounters, though they may possibly be supplanted in cases where personal authority is dominant. Even though the institutional role provides police with a dominant role in legitimized encounters, this role cannot be used to entirely remove or subvert its own power-dynamics (at a minimum, related to the earlier observation that citizens might simply see these attempts as a trap or a trick.) How these power-dynamic are rhetorically expressed, however, can establish what type of encounter is being acted out, even if some or all parties only believe it to be superficially so. At the formal level, police issue commands which are expected to be followed and backed up by the ability to issue formal sanctions and employ coercive force (cf. Bittner 1970, Proenca and Muniz 2006); Brent and Sykes (1980) state, in regards to the police officer maintaining this type of role, “his authority is not effective merely because he has the right to use force, but because he acts, quite literally, in a commanding way.” (185) The use of commands is, of course, in most interactions involving strangers deeply norm-violating behavior, and a significant and command practice for establishing situational authority is by framing these commands as requests: in some cases these may truly be requests, and ignoring them may have no significant consequences, but more often they serve as a ‘face saving’ option, allowing the other party to comply but maintain that it was their own decision. (cf. Goffman 1959) While the police might establish a strict form of authority by telling a group to leave, issuing a “Platzverweis” or order to disburse, they may instead allow some leeway while expecting the same outcome, e.g. “you can stay here for another hour,” making the specific choice of when to leave at least superficially one for the group and not the police to make, although this might not be interpreted the same if the group finds the time constraints unfair or essentially the same as a command, e.g. “you can stay here for another two minutes.” While formal commands may often be technically phrased as requests, (“Your papers, please.”) what is relevant is how these are interpreted by the recipient, and secondarily the attempts by the police to make these overtures more likely to be interpreted as requests. These practices may include spelling out the available options and outcomes, such as telling the host of a party where a noise complaint has been received that, while the police themselves don’t find the noise excessive, in order to avoid future complaints, the host can either choose to keep all the guests inside, or provide the police with their phone number and they can call back if another complaint is made. Personal authority, in this case, will often preclude making either commands or requests from the position of police authority, but in general are relationship-dependent: parents who are police may just as easily issue command to children, and may even back them up with pseudo-invocations of police authority, but attempts to make commands to neighbors or friends may in some cases verge on abuse of authority.

4.6.5 Police Role Integrity

The integrity of the police role—that is, the formalized, institutionalized, ideal type role of the police—is theorized to be almost always present in policing encounters due to the expectations of the non-police participants in that encounter. However, the use of differing practices—or even missteps, errors, or “unprofessional” behavior by an officer—may erode or transform this role. The idealized police role is one which is most easily maintained in situations which correspond specifically to that role: that is, formal, bureaucratically definable incident-based interactions where the officer follows a set proper procedure and works to achieve institutional goals. (cf. Manning 1995, Terpstra 2011) Any deviations from this ideal type—and these are certainly inevitable—may cause a ‘disjointing’ between the role being enacted and the perception of the situation, but as the power-dynamic related to the institutional authority of the police role still essentially allows the officers to determine the interactional order of the situation, this disjointing may serve more as a reflection of that power-dynamic, by making it clear to the citizen that only the ‘official’ definition of the situation, and not their perceptions, matter.¹⁶ Maintaining (or reasserting) an authoritative institutional role provides a stronger basis for the officer to take charge and control the encounter through other interactional elements, such as spatial ordering.¹⁷ (cf. Reiss 1971, Rubinstein 1973, Sykes and Brent 1980) Other times—very often among observed cases—as the formal definition of the situation became less tenable police made either made fewer attempts to maintain a purely institutional authority or used role-distancing practices here associated with situational authority (cf. Goffman 1961, Stebbins 2016) i.e. in cases where no immediate conflict or emergency was identified or where the police decision to initiate an encounter was based more on gaining ‘local knowledge’ or maintaining relations, where time factors were less important, and where individuals had some familiarity with the police. In some cases, this ‘matching’ of a less formally defined situation with a less formally defined role was described as a way to pre-emptively ‘defuse’ potentially escalating situations or “not make anyone worried,” although in others it was less obviously a conscious choice and arguably a more ‘natural’ reaction: it is likely unreasonable to expect police officers to maintain a front-stage ‘on guard’ posturing in every situation, particularly when they have no reason (or desire) to view the immediate situation as important from a policing perspective. (cf. Goffman 1971) At the same time, it is presumed that citizens in most cases will, unless a preponderance of overtures alter the interpretation of the situation, initially approach and react to police based primarily on assumptions of institutional authority. The significant exception here is where personal relationships are able to subvert role expectations or challenge the master status of the authoritative role, most obvious in situations where the officer is making no or little attempt to play the role of an officer, but also evident in formally defined situations, such as responding to calls or the scene of an accident, where pre-existing personal relationships significantly erode the predicates of hierarchical power-dynamics.¹⁸ One example of this was found in the case of a minor traffic accident (without injuries) which involved a close friend of one officer’s wife; while the formal processes were followed in a technical sense, the officer spoke much more openly and at greater length about what was being done, why it needed to be done, how long things would take, and what could be done to simply things than was seen in cases involving strangers (or with the others who were involved.) At some level this might reflect the friend of the wife simply being more trusting that her interested would not be put in jeopardy and allowing for greater transparency within the interaction with less risk of it being viewed as a contest of claims or identities. (cf. Burke 1969) As (perceptually) police officers present the great risk to those who are involved but are unaware of why they are involved and therefore not only lack the ability to define the situation formally but even a clear basis for how to define it, the ability to refer to personal relationships and establish a pattern of trusts can also lead to officers relying less on maintaining institutional authority, at least in situations where the outcomes to be negotiated are relatively benign.

4.6.6 Attribution of Roles

As the party with the greatest ability to define a situation, the police limit what roles are able to be taken or dramaturgically constructed by the other participants. This is most visible within an overtly structured or defined encounter, such as when police respond to a call or stop a passerby, but also applicable when police are simply on patrol and observe individuals on the street and based on their impressions (e.g. of appearance, behavior, suitability to the time and place) decide if they should intervene or in which manner they should present themselves, e.g. the use of civil inattention, “turning a blind eye” (Manning 2003: 19) or by actively and obviously looking at the person (with a “Kontrollblick.”) In this case of structured encounters, the actions of other participants will often be restricted based on their role within the typology being applied by the police, e.g. a person considered a potential subject will be more closely watched, if not physically restrained, and prevented (verbally or with other means) from leaving the immediate area and usually the sight of the officers, while bystanders or victims may conditionally be given more leeway in moving around, talking to others, making requests of the officers, or even involving other participants. This also includes the use of rhetoric or rhetorical constraints to limit the vocabularies available to the others, confining them to desired roles: Shon (2000) writes that, “when police officers enact their interpretive structure into speech production, other possibilities and modalities of understanding the situation are repressed.” (175) Davis et al. (2017) discuss how police (in interrogations) tended to ignore questions directed at them and instead respond with more of their own questions, demonstrating without overtly stating that the role of the individual is to respond to questions and provide information but that that role does not require understanding the broader context or even the immediate goal of the police in asking specific questions or within the encounter in its entirety. Establishing a formal definition of the situation which itself defines the possible roles, the cast of characters, can enforce authority by encouraging or coercing others to either take up the role ascribed to them or else to be resigned to take up an even less desirable pre-categorized role, e.g. “the asshole” (Van Maanen 1974, 1988) or “the hysteric.” (Shon 2000: 175, see also Watson 1983) Rhetorical practices in this vein could extend to include degradation ceremonies (Garfinkel 1956) in which the status of the individual is challenged but in a way which permits no viable means of defense or reconstitution within the frame of the interaction taking place; addressing individuals in a certain way (e.g. alternating first and last names between individuals to demonstrate who is more valued within the interaction), allowing individuals to express concerns or cutting them off, or showing disinterest in response to statements of concern or expressions of identity (e.g. “I don’t care who you are, I’m just telling you to move”) can all serve to anchor an institutional role and corresponding source of authority for the officer. Appealing to situational authority, not only distancing from the institutional police role but also from the institutionally-defined encounter, will involve the potential for approaching and interacting with individuals more visibly outside of or apart from fixed pre-categorized roles, though this will not always be case: police encountering the same group of young people skateboarding in a park several times over a weekend may still treat interact with them more distantly and within the context of police-applied institutionally-derived categorizations of the role they are playing within the encounter, but still act more informally in other ways, refer to past and potential future encounters, and act more towards establishing a police role that is not fixated on solving an immediate conflict or making immediate demands. (cf. Hunold 2011) When personal authority supplants the institutional role, the attribution of roles will be made on a more overt individual case-by-case level—which may manifest in ways similar to how situational authority is invoked, but with the minor but significant difference that the other engaged actors have a much stronger position in claiming and enacting their identity—or else role attribution will take place within an entirely different institutional context; for example, to a police academy instructor, a police officer may primarily be a former student, and to that student the other will be a former teacher as long as on other context changes make institutional roles unavoidable.

4.6.7 Interactional Goal

In general, the stricter the formal structure of an encounter or interaction, the more necessary (or at least useful) it is for all engaged parties to have a common understanding of which outcome(s) are desired. Institutional pressures often require specific types of outcomes; for example, in domestic violence situations police are essentially required to remove one participant from the scene or else make a formal determination that no violence occurred. Formal goals generally are centered on the understanding of the situation as an incident, in which resolution requires a (more-or-less) formal determination of 1) if the situation is something the police need to handle and 2) what steps should be taken to resolve the incident or prepare it for further processing. (Bittner 1970, Reiss 1971, Manning 1988, 1995) This can range from dealing with immediate life-or-death emergencies to making reports for minor incidents of vandalism; these types of cases lend themselves to pre-existing codes which can be applied and indicate the severity and nature of the incidence, which further implies priority as well as how strict institution roles are likely to be followed. The general category of goal will often be indicated or implied when the encounter is initiated, though it can be modified or negotiated in the course of an encounter, and in cases involving strict institutional roles the goal may not be communicated to other participants beyond making it clear that the police are attempting to take control.¹⁹ Police arriving at the scene of a reported crime are aware of too many institutional risks and pressures to engage in ten minutes of small-talk, unless doing so serves another relevant purpose such as eliciting information, gaining cooperation, avoiding future conflict or resistance, etc. (cf. Rubinstein 1973) The visibility of relatively clear and immediate goals—the demand condition—means that too much could be at risk if something goes wrong, the complaint is not effectively resolved, or a chance to establish a measure of success (i.e. through the use of official reports, arrests, and other official determinations) is missed while the police were engaged in what could be considered ‘personal,’ ‘unprofessional’ or even lazy behavior which is later determined to have not fit to the situation. The idea of “just the facts” in police interactions with citizens (specifically witnesses) is an ideal type institutional construction, of course, and police engage with citizens using a variety of rhetorical practices, levels of formality and politeness, and vocabularies based not just on the ‘seriousness’ (i.e. fit to an institutional ideal) of the situation but on a multitude of factor including characteristics of the individual officer and readings of the overall scene and social roles. These practices roughly fit along a spectrum, however, ranging from the institutional ideal—situations in which a police officer is there to do police work²⁰—to purely private interactions in which the interaction goal can be varied (a neighbor who is a police officer may still need to borrow sugar) or unclear or open-ended (as in a police officer meeting a former classmate while on patrol and stopping to say hello.) When personal authority is being established or maintained, a significant visible goal of the interaction is specifically the maintenance of this role and avoiding it being subsumed by institutional roles or concerns—as in the earlier example of an officer providing more detail and information to the friend of his wife. The use of humor at the expense of former police roles—both by police and non-police—serves this goal in that it renders even more absurd or unexpected the prospect of resorting to institutional authority: cases in which a police officer went to greet a friend or acquaintance and was met with a sarcastic “am I under arrest?” or “oh no, what did I do now?” numbered in the dozens and are cliché among police officers. In some cases, these types of responses were used to gauge the type of encounter, essentially asking “business or pleasure?” and the officer’s response—not just verbally but in every communicative sense, and especially with body language—would determine if an institutional situation with specific goals was being established which would imply (though not necessarily force) a reliance on institutional authority. The presentation of interaction goals most clearly demonstrates the contrast between institutional and personal authority within a situation—with situational authority essentially falling in between as the institutional role is altered, weakened, or conditionally set aside as the interaction involves more ‘everyday’ generic interactive forms. Situational authority may involve an attempt to establish an alternate basis for legitimate control of a setting to replace the institutional assumptions that police demands will be met either because citizens are expected to cooperate and, more importantly, if they don’t they can legitimately be forced to as required. (cf. Bittner 1970) The capacity to use force may lose its power to resolve situations when police either attempt to negotiate a solution that is acceptable to other involved groups as well as when police are no longer present and not necessarily expected to return soon. This was observed in some cases in which individuals committed violations or demonstrated behavior that was seemingly intended to provoke the police, e.g. crossing the street on foot or by bike against a red light while looking directly at police officers stopped at the intersection, but which was at the same time simply not seen as worth the effort of the officer to get more involved with: both parties seemed to share the assumption that an escalation to the use of coercive means was unlikely (though miscalculations here are also possible, cf. Alpert and Dunham 2004, Peterson 2008), and so the authoritative power of the police based in the institution essentially failed. The idea of situational authority implies that the police can establish an alternate, more-or-less unique to the specific setting, means of maintaining (or delegating) control, and the goals of these respective situations will vary but will also be based in the considerations of institutional objectives or related concerns (cf. Meehan’s [1992] depiction of how officers take actions “prevent calls.”) Similar to personal authority, a interactional goal—in this case often the overarching purpose for police to choose to engage in a situation—is specifically to establish or maintain a form of situational authority: police may patrol a specific area and talk to residents in an area or location viewed as potentially problematic with the purpose of ‘normalizing’ their presence—the specific officers, rather than the police in general—and getting of idea of which people—both individually and as a ‘type’—are likely to be found there. Situational authority is often oriented towards establishing an interactional goal of dealing with a conflict, issue, or problem, the boundaries of which are set outside of the specific encounter: repeat visits by the police may not be necessary, if a joint narrative can be established suggesting that the problem will be resolved and that no further police intervention is needed, often at the same time framing police intervention as something undesirable and framing a situational compromise essentially along the lines of, “you don’t want to see us (the police), so you won’t give us a reason to come see you.” The practices of expressly invoking police discretion to give warnings or ‘let someone off the hook’ work this way, communicating a common interactional goal of simply ending the encounter without recourse to institutionally-defined goals or means.

4.7 Managing Authority in Community Contexts

“When an individual becomes involved in the maintenance of a rule, he tends also to become committed to a particular image of self. In the case of his obligations, he becomes to himself and others the sort of person who follows this particular rule… In the case of his expectations, he comes dependent upon the assumption that others will properly perform such of their obligations as affect him, for their treatment of him will express a conception of him. In establishing himself as the sort of person who treats others in a particular way and is treated by them in a particular way, he must make sure that it will be possible for him to act and be this kind of person.” (Goffman 1967: 50–51)

Formal institutional goals in terms of incidents may often come into conflict not only with the individual officer’s understanding of the situation and desired outcome or the expectations of citizens, but often with the quasi-formal strategic goals of the organization, i.e. in terms of problem-solving or risk management approaches. This means that officers might often purse a more informal goal than would be associated with a strict institutional role, and negotiating the desired outcome would be aided by the establishing of situational authority.

One case demonstrating this occurred during a relatively routine shift with the Revierpolizei. I was accompanying Officer Meyer, and we had already made several planned stops to meet with officials or to discuss ongoing cases. As we passed by an apartment complex, and without telling me what was going on, Officer Meyer stopped the van and addressed a woman walking alone down the street; it was clear he already knew her, and he made reference to an ongoing case but only vaguely; at the time I was only aware that some police-related issue was being discussed. We both exited the van and Officer Meyer continued the discussion with the woman on the sidewalk—the situation became more clear as it went on, although many details were only filled in afterwards.

The woman had previously been in contact with Officer Meyer, and had expressed her desire to file a complaint against another woman, a neighbor, for allowing her dog to defecate in a cemetery and refusing to clean up after it. The complaint had not yet been filed, and Officer Meyer discussed both the background of the case as well as the likely processes and outcomes that would result from it being filed. The woman had a personal history with the target of the proposed complaint, and evidently complaints had been filed in the past between the two going in both directions. Officer Meyer later commented to me that the two had been friends many years ago, but “because of a man” had a serious falling out, and since then had a mutual animosity serious enough to be known to the police.²¹ Already in this basic scenario several relevant practices can be identified: 1) the establishing of the encounter and the form it took (“friendly discussion” more than “bureaucratic incident,”) 2) the framing of the encounter within a larger ongoing personal relationship, with a recognized history going back before the start of the immediate encounter or even the police-relevant situation at hand, 3) the framing of the situation as something that is not able to be resolved within the immediate encounter, 4) the lack of a clear shared goal within the encounter coupled with the implication that the situational goal is to be determined by the woman herself, which relates to 5) the acknowledging of a stronger self-determined situational role of the woman, who does not (at this point) fit easily into a specific pre-defined bureaucratic category. Once the woman saw Officer Meyer inside the van, it was possible for her to contextualize the encounter based on her personal relationship to him based on previous encounters: this possible (but not inevitable) understanding would be further anchored by his demeanor and body language as he approached her and began to discuss the case. While perhaps not a conscious choice as much as one of applying normative behavior to a specific reading of the situation, the officer’s eschewal of overt ordering practices and dropping of a more ‘anonymous’ police persona would additionally establish the type of situation occurring and the forms of negotiation that could take place.

This management of appearances and distancing from the ideal type role—not only through the pre-existing personal / situational relationship, but specifically through the practices of defining the situation only weakly within an institutional framework—was necessary for carefully drawing the boundaries of the negotiation and avoiding either an escalating conflict or the appearances of impropriety. The difficulty in this situation was specifically in the apparent belief by Officer Meyer that filing the complaint would not be helpful, would serve no ‘legitimate’ concerns, and would only lead to further problems; these are reasonable and defensible points even from an institutional perspective—the filing of the complaint, even if a sign of ‘activity’ would not benefit Officer Meyer any more than he believed it would benefit the woman or the community in general. At the same time, in his public role as a police officer he is not able to express this quite so directly, as the choice to file is effectively up to the woman alone, and any overt attempt to provide advice could be interpreted—either directly or externally in review—as an attempt to coerce the ‘correct’ decision. The establishment of a situational role better allowed for a presentation of ‘observations’ or ‘comments’ less likely to come across as commands or statements of fact minimizing the decision-making power of the woman.

After discussing the case outside for several minutes, Officer Meyer invited the woman into the ‘conference’ area in the back of the police van—a dedicated space with opposing seats and a table either for working (on a laptop, filling out paperwork, etc.) or for more private conversations with citizens. The framing of this invitation was important, as this set a standard not just for the dramatization of power—i.e. whether this was truly an invitation, or a command—but it was also establishing a new spatial order. The door of the van was left open to maintain the appearance of ‘free’ spatial ordering, i.e. that the woman was there by choice and theoretically free to end the conversation and leave at any time.²² This fit with the offered frame of the situation as a more casual encounter to follow-up and exchange and receive information, rather than a formal incident which needed immediate resolution. At the same time, despite Officer Meyer’s role-distancing efforts (almost constituting an ‘ideal type’ situational encounter, in that all the defining elements of situational encounters were present and no overt practices for maintaining institutional authority were) the ‘pull’ of the institutional role was present. While the conversation was conducted at a more ‘relaxed’ level which would not easily be conflated with an interrogation (cf. Reichertz and Schröer 2003, Davis et al. 2017) it would still be identifiable to an outsider or bystander as a ‘police encounter,’ and while the spatial ordering was not overtly enforced or conflict-oriented, it remained a fully-focused encounter that signified that police-related issues were involved. The formal tense was used for the second-person (which would be normal in most cases barring a close personal relationship or specific circumstances) and Officer Meyer referred to the woman against whom the complaint would potentially be filed by her last name, (“Frau Schmidt”) while the other woman simply used the first name. A significant amount of more personal or local information was included in the discussion, particularly in terms of past relationships and encounters, and though it was not all presented in a ‘just the facts’ style, it was still clearly relevant to the issue at hand. The woman had a friendly demeanor and spoke in a familiar way (though still using formal language) with Officer Meyer but also appeared to be very aware of the possible seriousness of the matter; essentially (in my interpretation) she seemed to be aware that she was still speaking to a police officer involved in the matter and not an advisor, counselor, helper, or friend. To what extent she viewed this situation and the interpersonal relationship fully in terms of situational authority and to what extent her awareness of institutional roles and ideal type images of policing influenced her perceptions of the ongoing situation is a cognitive issue that cannot be further disentangled from the overall situation beyond that which has already been discussed, but the progressing situation and the presentation of relations and agency conformed to this conception of situational authority. In the end, the woman expressed that she was having second thoughts about filing the complaint—to the best of my knowledge, no complaint was filed, but it would have been entirely possible for the woman to file the complaint separately even without Officer Meyer’s immediate knowledge, though he certainly would have been interested in following up beyond that.

A second case demonstrates drastically different dramaturgical practices of establishing police authority. Two Revierpolizei officers and I had just concluded an unrelated encounter—two officers were present because the involved individual was known to be ‘chaotic,’ and while not considered to be dangerous, two officers were sent in this case—and were returning to the car. A car left the parking lot, passing us, with four men inside, and one of the officers signaled the driver to pull over, which he did. The officer approached the car, with one moving to the driver side and one to the passenger side. None of the men were wearing seatbelts—at first it had only been clear that the driver wasn’t, which was the stated reason for stopping the car. The men were all foreign, which had also been presumed based on the specific parking lot they were leaving, and the driver didn’t speak any German; only one passenger, in the back seat, was able to speak German enough to establish a verbal dialogue, though the officer still used gestures to refer to the fact that the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

It was not entirely clear—at least not immediately to me—why the encounter had been started: whether or not the either or both officers had been aware that the driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt before indicating for the driver to pull over was not clear or in any way communicated. While leaving the parking lot the car had accelerated quickly (in my interpretation, not fast enough to be clearly in violation, but sudden and loud enough to draw attention) and this, although not mentioned at all in the encounter, seemed to be at least part of the reason for the stop. At a formally dramatized level, the interactional goal was clear; the police have the responsibility and authority to conduct ‘police work’ and the individuals being policed receive information on a need-to-know basis. However, in this case even at a dramaturgical level the interaction goal was one that could only be effectively dramatized at the institutional level: there was no insinuation that anything was being negotiated, no invocation of ‘deeper’ problems or social harm, and no overtures towards ‘everyday understandings,’: while officers often emphasize the personal risks of getting caught in violation of the law or public ordinances, e.g. “you’re lucky I’m being generous, that could’ve cost you,” in this case no similar rhetoric was used apart from signaling to the driver (with gestures) that he must fasten his seatbelt. Interpreting the ‘meaning’ of this incident based on the researcher perspective is essentially impossible, in that even accompanying the police officers and (briefly) discussing it with them immediately afterwards it was impossible to discern exactly why the encounter began or proceeded the way it did. Certainly why is the wrong question here: the availability of institutional explanations can mask the ‘true motives,’ even presuming that these were simplistic enough to state outright and separate enough from institutional perspectives to be ‘translatable’ outside of policing life-worlds. One possible, admittedly heuristic, explanation is that this type of situation—fully dependent on maintaining institutional postures—represents a case of acts as “ends-in-themselves” rather than as “means-to-an-end.” (Gusfield 2003: 123) Sometimes the police need to maintain a formalized, identifiable institutional role for the sake of having that role (whether one considers this relevant to maintaining an ‘active vocabulary’ of roles, practicing professional roles, or simply “because we can”) and this case provided a situation which could be engaged in and followed up on in which the institutional role could be maintained—the lack of in-depth dialogue and the limited verbal capacities of the others prevented any ‘erosion’ of the ideal type policing role, the spatial ordering was inherently fixed by the nature of the encounter, and the presence of the police officers outside of the cars, even if necessary for communication, indicated a form of control by implying that the passengers and driver should remain inside the car. The situated meaning of this encounter may have simply been that the men in the car had no standing, within this situation, to negotiate their situation and must simply do as ordered.

This situation stood out primarily for how much it differed from most observed encounters involving the Revierpolizei: random stops of strangers often took on a more conversational tone, and most encounters were planned to some extent, if not with fixed appointments. The fact that men spoke little or no German reduced their ability to negotiate authority or establish their own social roles within the encounter, though this might not always be the case; an encounter earlier the same week involved non-German speaking individuals and required two-step translation using English as a bridge, and though that encounter did not display all the indexical forms of situational authority, it was also not as ‘ideally’ institutional as the previous example. The fact that the men were inside a car and in public may have also played a role, as there was essentially no situating spatial context here which could be rhetorically leveraged: as Goffman (1971: 5–8) suggests, the more complex codes governing the behavior of pedestrians in public—taking into consideration traffic and free movement as well as communication and signaling—are much more restricted with motor vehicles, where the ability of government to fully enforce acceptable behaviors is relatively unchallenged and the only consistently legitimate purpose for a driver to be in a specific place, with some exceptions, is to be in transit and moving to a destination.

This example also demonstrates the separation between institutional authority as a concept that needs to be dramaturgically presented and institutional structure or formal processes: in the end, the situation was effectively ‘handled’ informally, the driver was—depending on the interpretation—either let off with a warning or had his non-conforming behavior corrected and was free to go, with no official sanctions or record. Though police discretion might often be associated with an appeal to situational authority, this was not the case here.

The managing of authority often perceptibly involved various levels of emotional labor or the regulation of emotional displays. As suggested, emotionality in the expression of happiness or amusement as well as more negative emotions such as anger or bitterness were primarily associated with the indication of more personal or situational narratives, that the officer was not speaking purely as a police officer. The implication is therefore that the institutional role either leaves little room for emotionally-guided comments—whether anger at someone’s actions or amusement or embarrassment in a misunderstanding—or else is actively challenged by them. This analysis runs the risk of tautology, as displays or indications of emotion are seen to challenge the dominance (or effectiveness) of institutional authority but at the same time the presence of these displays is considered suggestive of an appeal to situational or personal authority. However, it should be considered that institutional authority and acting from these roles can be reconciled with emotional displays in various contexts, and while in general the correlation between ‘emotion-indicating’ statements occurring in contexts where institutional authority was either being subverted or downplayed was the norm, officers in many encounters spoke in the vocabulary of emotions or acted in a way suggestive of emotionality rather than the stereotypical ‘calm reasoning’ while still effectively managing the situation under the rubric of the formal institutional frame. For example, while preparing to block off a major road for a parade in the county seat, a driver quickly and suddenly attempted to make it through the intersection rather than become the first to have to wait. The officer first attempted to flag the car to stop but the driver either didn’t see or ignored the signal, but then stopped anyway directly in front of the patrol cruiser as the passing crowd and line of cars from the side-street made the passage tight. The officer, standing outside of the cruiser then aggressively flagged the driver to continue driving, and yelled quite loudly, “Just get out of here!” (notably, using the informal second-person pronoun.) The officer muttered aloud and/or to me, but audible to passers-by, about “idiot.” Once the intersection had been ‘secured’ the task became more semi-formal, as the parade—a procession of children and parents walking to the Christmas Market—and the officer greeted several passing individuals before we needed to move on to the next stop, and then spent the rest of the evening more informally patrolling (by foot) the main town square where various events and the Christmas Market itself were taking place. The interaction with the driver was a situation in which the institutional and formalized basis of the ‘scene’ was never visually in doubt: the physical iconography of a police officer blocking an intersection and directing traffic to stop unequivocally indicated an attempt to control a situation formally, including the movement of other individuals and regulating access to physical space. The driver of the car tacitly acknowledged this by eventually stopping, but at that point having traveled far enough into the intersection as to make the officers commands essentially obsolete for the new situation—the lack of personal face-to-face communication avoided the potential need to explain or factor in the communicative friction or conflicting intentions that led to this being the case, and the officer simply wanted the car to leave immediately. The outburst and situational labeling of the driver as an ‘idiot’ played a less significant role than it may have in a more engaged face-to-face encounter, but could also be interpreted (specifically and most relevantly from the perspective of the driver) as an indication of seriousness and that the officer essentially ‘means business,’ that the emotionality of this micro-interaction was still related to broadly identifiable policing concerns and not overtly a challenge or conscious withdraw from an institutionally-derived authority. The officer essentially displayed his annoyance within the context of performing representative (to the point of stereotypical) police work and took no further actions that could supplement this utterance to suggest that the officer was ‘acting out of anger’ or acting primarily as an individual shorn from a policing frame.²³ The broader setting in this case—the presence of the police in the city during a parade and community event—allowed, as such situations often do, for a more prominent and yet less contextually obvious police presence: the police could primarily rely on their presence alone to enforce the already existing norms governing the procession, and the ‘awkward’ situation of the driver entering the intersection when it was being actively constructed as ‘restricted space’ could be situationally constructed as a violation of immediate on-the-street social norms, a violation of more formal policing goals (specifically in that it could have been more formally perceived as a challenge to authority) and as the actions of an “idiot.” This type of encounter is in many ways suggestive of police liminality (see Wada et al. 2010), the existing of policing roles essentially as consistently both individuals and as formalized constructs, as the officer was both able to interact with individuals as part of the event (even, in a way, as part of the scenery), able to intervene with full police powers, but, by virtue and general knowledge of these powers will often not need to actually intervene beyond the tiniest invocation of the suggestion of action, and is still free to offer or share in everyday attributions of the relative competence of others.

4.8 Managing Situations: Prevention

Ethnographic work on police discretion has demonstrated how officers manage not just practices within situations, but even their visibility and very presence. (Meehan 1982, Rowe 2007) Police officers are aware of the effect their formal definitional authority can have on public situations, even in the simplest of ‘encounters.’ This can be seen in cases where the police actively avoid situations where their presence or attention could be interpreted as ‘observing for criminal activity’ even when that is not the intent of the officers, either by avoiding entering a certain location (e.g. a bar or club where their presence might be disruptive) or by avoiding any sign of participating in an encounter. The police are able to assess a situation to identify risks or any type of behavior that they think might warrant intervention without initiating a type of encounter that might provoke conflict. (cf. Demaree 2017)

On several occasions while driving past or near the train station in the county capital officers would point out to me that the local ‘bums’ (“Penner”) hung out in the area and usually drank alcohol in a small park in the afternoon or even late morning.²⁴ Most notable, however, was that while clearly noticing the group of four or five men, the officer or officers never actively stared or even obviously looked in their direction. In contrast, the men in the park most often stared at and followed the police car until we were out of sight.

The use of gaze is “one of the principal indicators by which participants assess that they are being taken into consideration by another.” (Kidwell 2006: 748) By avoiding eye contact, but still being visibly present even by simply passing by, the officer injects a certain ambiguity or uncertainty into the encounter—which may not even be considered an encounter at all, and apart from the comments made to me inside the police car, there was no obvious indication that the men were brought to the officer’s attention. The role ascribed to others by the officers is either undefined or unclear, as it may not be clear to which extent the police are even paying attention or prepared to respond: similar observations have been made with regard to the use or mirrored sunglasses by police officers. (Boyanowsky and Griffiths 1982) Any attempt to respond to the officer’s presence by the men could easily be overlooked or ignored; the men were essentially robbed of the chance to perform any aligning actions. (cf. Stokes and Hewitt 1976) There was no (stated) reason to believe the men were doing anything illegal, and yet even making eye contact with anyone in the group might be enough to establish a form of encounter which might require further communication of negotiation over what is going on. From the perspective of the police, simply driving by and being aware of the group’s presence was considered to be an effective enough check, while any closer scrutiny might theoretically lead to a situation which obligates the police to go in for a closer look and initiate a face-to-face encounter. The men in the park had no ‘official’ reason to believe their presence was being challenged, evaluated, or morally judged, while at the same time they were likely more acutely aware of the passing of a police car than most residents would be based on prior encounters with the police and the fact that the men were “polizeibekannt”, that is, known to police. The police in this case avoided a direct challenge, but also did not directly give legitimacy to the presence of the men or their actions because the narrative that the police simply did not see them, however implausible, remains as a possibility. The men would have no effective recourse if the police car suddenly turned around and the officers demanded to search them or instructed them to leave the area, but because this has not happened they would also have little reason to expect it, assuming they don’t give the officers any additional reasons to think their behavior or presence merited scrutiny. In this sense, two policing functions were accomplished through this relatively simple practice: identifying or observing potential risks (from the perspective of the police); and establishing a presence for the purposes of prevention and social control.

A similar policing practice is described by Meehan (1992: 463) as “showing yourself,” in which police feel the need to be seen by the portions of the population they consider likely to cause problems or that need to be ‘controlled’: in the cited case this is primarily teenagers and young adults in American suburbs, where underage and public drinking is common but complaints from neighbors due to teenagers simply being in public are equally common. In that example, the presence of the police alone is seen as an intentional provocation both by the officers and by the citizens, due to the lack of power by the mostly underage residents, and direct (and sometimes inconsistent) statements of warning by officers directed at teenagers assumed to be engaged in undesired behavior were common. The case at hand differed, in that police tended to avoid direct interaction and the behavior of the men was not visibly or clearly illegal. The police in Falkenmark did not necessarily seek the men out, but were simply driving past and noticed them, while also avoiding giving the obvious impression of surveilling the group. The suburban US officers observed by Meehan described their goals as ‘preventing calls’ for service by managing public behavior that might cause offense to individuals likely to call the police—even if by simply moving that behavior to a less visible spot or out of their jurisdiction entirely—while the Revierpolizei officers work is less driven by calls for service and, as discussed, the presence of the men and their behavior seems to be less likely to warrant complaints or demands for action that will directly impact the officers, though it is still ‘of interest.’

It is within a discussion of situational proprieties that Erving Goffman introduces his concept of “civil inattention” (1963: 83) He contrasts a “more proper in most situations” civil inattention with a “hate stare” or a “not seeing” which effectively treats the other party as a nonperson. Civil inattention instead is seen as a courtesy in which the presence of the other person is acknowledged while also making it clear that no special scrutiny is being applied:

By according civil inattention, the individual implies that he has no reason to suspect the intentions of the others present and no reason to fear the others, be hostile to them, or wish to avoid them. (At the same time, in extending this courtesy he automatically opens himself up to a like treatment from others present.) This demonstrates that he has nothing to fear or avoid in being seen and being seen seeing, and that he is not ashamed of himself or of the place and company in which he finds himself. (84)

Police encounters, like most social encounters, are not simply a back-and-forth exchange of communication. (Ericson et al. 1993) Even in cases where responses are awaited, commands are given and enforced, deeper meanings and implications between each act will be interpreted by all involved in the encounter in any level. The choice of which participants in the encounter are allowed to provide accounts will weigh heavily in understandings of who is being treated as a problem or irritation, and action that could reasonably be taken solely for the sake of organizing the situation, e.g. asking a participant or witness to wait somewhere out of earshot of the ongoing conversation, can have vastly different undertones. (Kidwell 2006) The decision whether to discuss certain matters with individuals on the street or inside the police vans could often be critical in establishing what type of discussion was being had.

A form of intimate coordination takes place once an encounter has taken on a recognizable or predicable form in which all participants have some ideas about, essentially, what is going on; though these forms can vary from ‘casual conversations’ to official interrogations (cf. Reichertz and Schröer 2003, Davis et al. 2017) in every case it is necessary that this structure be established and tentatively—though usually non-verbally—agreed upon. This includes understandings of how policing authority is being constructed and implemented, i.e. more abstract and based on the institution of policing, based on more immediate or situational understandings based on the ongoing or previous encounters, or based on existing personal relationship. Individuals may feel themselves at risk, or at risk of hurting others, by revealing certain information to police officers, particularly those who they perceive primarily as a police officer rather than as an individual. Often this harm is minimized or countered by the use of not just accounts but also by vocabularies of neutralization (cf. Maruna and Copes 2005), such as by first describing an individual as ‘aggressive’ and then reformulating the sentence to state, “well, he seemed a bit weird anyway.” Engaging individuals through different practices can elicit different forms of information, and often downplay the immediate assumptions inherent in the presence of a (symbolic) police officer, allowing the officer to interact more as an individual, i.e. appealing to personal and situational authority: allowing for ‘deeper’ emotional work, personal relationships, and differing forms of social capital to come into play.

The practices of ‘civil inattention’ here represent one manner of relying on, if not specifically invoking, institutional authority as a way to control situations socially. Civil inattention can avoid the problem of institutional roles ‘eroding’ as interactions become more complex, dynamic, and less ritualized. As the police are essentially relying on their presence from a distance as an interpretable symbol, they are denying the others a chance to establish an alternate meaning (e.g. along the lines of situational authority.) ‘Distancing’ practices in general will tend to reinforce institutional authority to the extent that this source of authority is the default in police-citizen encounters, though exceptions could certainly be found in cases where, for example, an off-duty police officer is stopped by a colleague who did not recognize him at first. Situational authority could potentially be mutually recognized in a similar case if the officer had previously made himself personally known to the individuals, had made it clear that it was his jurisdiction and expressed his general expectations of what is acceptable behavior, and if the individuals were able to individually recognize the officer simply from his driving by, either by identifying him inside the car of by specific markings, etc.

The situation involving those in the group could be contrasted with other situations where others similarly described as “Penner” or “Alkoholiker” were greeted or treated informally and closer to friendly than cold or distant: some of these encounters seemed to even involve the same individuals, though notably informal engagement seemed to then be limited to when individuals were on their own and traveling. One man was pointed out by Officer Hermann on several occasions and sometimes greeted as he rode his bike through the city: Officer Hermann told me that the man “always rides to the store to buy one beer, and then rides back to the park to drink it, and then back to the store.” His behavior was obviously well known to the officer, and he was portrayed in this context more as a ‘known local entity’ than a problem. At the same time, approaching or engaging with the man while he was actively drinking, rather than riding down the street, would be more likely to either suggest a formalized policing encounter and put the man on the defensive or to tacitly legitimize and demonstrate police acceptance for his behavior and presence, while only selectively engaging with him in transit or in other ‘temporary contexts’ both establishes the grounds for selective and situation authority and reserves the right of the officer to unironically invoke formal definitions at any point.

4.9 Policing Public Events

One specific planned task performed by the Revierpolizei was monitoring and attending public events, such as festivals, parades and sporting events. There were two stated purposes for involving the Revierpolizei: the officers could better evaluate the type of event and the ‘atmosphere’ to determine what type of police presence might be required, and that these events were good opportunities to improve police-community relations and to maintain a good relationship with local organizations and clubs, key individuals and the community in general.

Public events such as seasonal festivals, parades, political rallies and demonstrations play a significant role in community life in Germany. (Putnam 2002) Managing these events—through crowd-control strategies and tactics but also through administrative-bureaucratic actions such as issuing permits, planning routes and involving community organizations—can affect how the police are viewed by the community—as hostile or benevolent, involved or detached, communicative or stoic—as well as affecting or legitimizing the events and the movements behind them. (Della Porta and Fillieule 2004) While protests, unplanned demonstrations and riots draw the most media and scholarly attention, more ‘uneventful’ events can serve the function of establishing normal, normative relations between police and public, where the police, rather than simply defining the spatial borders of an event or taking on an oppositional role, can intermingle with attendees or even be seen as participants themselves.

During my field stay, I attended several such events along with the Revierpolizei—generally following a similar plan of arriving early to scout out the area and make preliminary estimations of the expected crowd as well as any potential for conflict, making recommendations or requests for additional support, attending the event in a more participatory role while remaining in contact with certain stakeholders or organizers, and remaining until any assumed potential for conflict has passed or enough attendees have left so that a significant on-site police presence is not seen as necessary. These events ranged from relatively short one-day activities taking place over several hours to multi-day festivals such as the annual Christmas Market which lasts for several weeks. Apart from political marches and one larger music festival primarily drawing a crowd from outside of the immediate area, few of these events were seen by the Revierpolizei officers as presenting much of a risk in terms of violence or crime, with public order and general safety, as well as the opportunities in terms of community-relations, being the primary concerns. Unlike similar festivals and public events in the US and UK, even ‘family-friendly’ events in Germany tend to attract a heterogeneous mix of age groups including teenagers and adults without children and almost always include alcohol.

4.9.1 The Big Game

One such event took place during a week-long stay in one of the largest towns in the county in the summer. A ‘friendship match’ between a ranked Bundesliga²⁵ team and a local soccer club had been planned as part of a larger celebration. The town’s soccer field and facilities were bolstered by various temporary stands and wagons offering food and drink, and additional bleachers set up for the expected higher-than-usual turnout.

I accompanied Officer Hermann, one of three Revierpolizei officers specifically assigned to the specific city district. We arrived while the event was still being set up, and although in theory only the organizers or those working at the event should have been present, it was far from empty, apparently because of the various community connections; many people already present seemed to be friends or family of those with a more ‘official’ reason for their presence. Walking through the area, we greeted or stopped to talk with various people—a few were known to me, including the spouse of another Revierpolizei officer who was working a food stand, but most people were known to Officer Hermann but new to me and I was only introduced to a handful of new people at this point—eventually we met up with Officer Schütz, also of the Revierpolizei, and there was a brief discussion about the expected turnout and whether or not the previous estimation of what type of additional police support would be needed should be altered. It was decided that this estimation was reasonable and that two squads of officers from the Bereitschaftpolizei, or BePo—the crowd-control division (which in most German states, including Brandenburg, is also used as a continuing training unit for officers leaving the police academy)—would be sent.

We moved casually around the field and between the stands as the crowd grew in size. Surprisingly to me, many people approached Officer Hermann to say hello or make small talk, sometimes tapping him on the shoulder from behind, using physical contact to get his attention. Small talk took place joking about the role of the police, e.g. “I hope you don’t have to arrest me!” or “oh no, it’s the police!” used as opening lines or icebreakers. Other topics of discussion included the ongoing week-long celebrations and the other planned events, personal matters (most of which I was ‘out of the loop’ on and didn’t specifically involve police work) and the weather, generally not going into much detail. The presence of the individual police officers seemed relevant—with a dozen or so people coming up to greet Officer Hermann before the game started—and significant possibly in a symbolic way beyond the substance of any communication: to what extent this is based on Officer Hermann’s social role as a Revierpolizist, or on specific individual interpersonal relationships seems impossible to disentangle, and even though his presence at this point was official and formally one of a police officer, apart from the jokes described above the types of interactions I observed were in no way essentially policing actions.

Eventually the Bereitschaftpolizei arrived—two squads each of about 6 or 7 officers in two vans. There was another brief discussion with the apparent squad leaders and the Revierpolizei officers, and the BePo squads took up positions on opposite corners of the grounds. Although the specific tactics hadn’t come up in any discussion that I was present for, one squad took a position forming a line, hands behind their back in a military-esque posture, and remained that way for most of the match. The other squad mostly remained inside their van with the door open, taking turns to have one officer stand outside the van to observe the situation, with the officer on watch generally leaning against a railing. Despite seeming like two extremes of policing approaches to the task at hand, I didn’t witness any comment or criticism by any of the Revierpolizei officers.

Along with Officer Hermann I watched the game and occasionally we circled around the field or back towards the parking lot, but nothing particularly noteworthy occurred until the end of the game (the home team, as expected, lost.) At the end of the game both BePo units assisted in clearing the crowd, and came into what seemed to be a—and was communicated to me by Officer Hermann as a recurring—potential conflict situation. Approximately ten ‘fans’—one officer would later describe the group as “wannabe hooligans”—who seemed to be drunk remained in a section of the stands and continued to sing, chant and yell with the apparent attempt of provoking the police. The group—all men and closer towards middle-aged than ‘youth’—became louder and more focused on using conventional derogatory terms for the police, the equivalent of “pigs.” The two Bereitschaftpolizei units, accompanied by two Revierpolizei officers, simply stood in a line in front of the bleachers with the same military posture held by one unit during the game, but the individual officers scanned the scene looking either to the left or right: the officers apparently made conscious efforts to not look directly at the group as they tried to provoke them. One-by-one the members of the group gave up and left, some first approaching the police line but without successfully provoking any overt reaction by the Bereitschaftspolizei officers, and after about 15 minutes the stands had been cleared and the officers began to return to the vans.

The event in its entirety, and especially the (non-)incident at the end of the game illustrates several policing practices related to either maintaining an institutional or personal authority role, as well as reinforcing both the generalist aspects of the Revierpolizei role in determining policing demands within their community and specialist aspects in managing formal and informal policing roles in communication with that community.

4.9.2 Spatial Ordering, Indicators of Control, and Civil Inattention

Police authority or legitimacy was at no point overtly or verbally invoked in the described scenario. Neither the Revierpolizei nor the Bereitschaftpolizei officers ever specifically gave orders to any member of the public or even gave any direct instructions for the crowd to disperse. The authority of the police, and the style of ‘order’ that authority appeared set to enforce, was visible at a more symbolic level, in relation to actions—or in this case lack of action—by the police. The officers, by strictly maintaining and enforcing a social distance—by refusing to verbally negotiate or engage, and the use of facing to make it clear that the police viewed the group as something that needed to be dealt with, but not necessarily through verbal communication or overt negotiation—drew on the assumed institutional authority which implied that they could escalate or intervene if necessary. The use of civil inattention by the BePo officers avoided the need to defend or enforce that authority—the challenge was essentially to the ‘hooligan’ group to accept it or actively deny it by escalating their behavior, in which case it would (presumably) be understood by both sides that the formal institutional definition of the situation would ‘kick in’ and any leeway that the group held in terms of negotiating their own resolution might be lost as the police re-defined the situation to remove any semblance of power or agency from everyone else.

Notable here is the implied view of the ‘hooligans’ that civil inattention by the police towards them is in some way already provocative or irritating. While Goffman considers civil inattention to be a more general social rule for how strangers interact when nothing significant connects them apart from proximity, the police are expected to show interest or concern for certain types of behavior, and without delving too far into the realm of the psychological, it may be fair to assume that the displayed behavior was intended specifically to not only gain attention but specifically the attention of the police. (cf. Müller 2013, Stott et al. 2018) Despite their attempts, the members of the group were unable to transform the situation into an overt conflict beyond what was already occurring—the type of police presence, specifically the facing and arrangement of a line of officers directly in front of the stands—made clear that the event was over and that the group was expected to disburse and leave, but the lack of any ‘communicative offers’ by the police left the group with no alternatives other than to continue what they were doing, escalate and risk a similar escalation by the police, or to leave and possibly save face only because they had not been officially instructed. While very little may have been at stake in this case compared to examples such as public demonstrations or cases where arrest or violence seem more likely, the symbolic power of the police presence and gaze was effectively demonstrated. Communication between the two groups—the ‘hooligans’ and the police—was two-way, but only in the sense that the hooligans communicated with overt, (primarily) verbal communication, while the police communicated through symbolism and normative action. This form of communication, framed within a context that identifies the situation as manifest, i.e. the police are actively aware and visible as ‘working’ and concerned with what is happening, lets the institutional authority of the police speak for itself.

The involvement of the BePo officers here also transforms the situation due to the specific role they are intended to perform: BePo officers are intended for crowd control and managing the public in a generalized way, but not specifically for ‘problem-solving’ or community relations tasks. The BePo work essentially on a case-by-case basis and not only is their authority primarily institutional, but they are intended to function as a unit rather through individual dynamics. They leave once the potential for future conflict has been estimated to be sufficiently reduced, and their use of civil inattention in this case can be assumed to be tactical rather than strategic: their goals are short term rather than long term. The use of similar techniques by officers with a fixed geographic territory, in particular the Revierpolizei, can present differing meanings in that the officer may have a more individual or personal relationship with those involved, rather than a more typological approach as seen here, in which the individuals are treated based on their actions and appearances in the moment. Bittner describes how police officers’ understanding of people on skid row was heavily based on skid row residents being “of radically reduced visibility.” (1967: 706) The assumption there was that if problems weren’t dealt with immediately, the offender or ‘problem person’ might simply vanish and continue to cause problems at a later time or somewhere else. This assumption is also functionally different from the situation described by Meehan (1992) in which teenagers could in most cases be easily located either at home or at whatever spot was being used as a hangout at the time, and so it was less important to deal with the behavior itself than it was to deal with the visibility of that behavior.

The bureaucratic and administrative assumption in Germany is that almost all residents are accurately registered at their current address and in almost every case, barring serious and immediate threats of physical harm, can be contacted or apprehended later on. The relationship between the police officers, as individuals, to the public, as individuals, is relevant here as well, as an officer applying civil attention may not simply be indicating, “I don’t want to see you right now” but at the same time may be implying, “but I may be able to see you later.” This relays an immediate invocation of situational authority, but one in which the more formal institutional role of the police is still identifiable, and while interactional goals are structured over a longer scale and less-incident based, formal institutional concerns are still in the forefront. Civil attention was often observed in cases, including in the current example, where it was indicated to me that the target individuals, and their behavior, were well known to police; that is, these individuals were seen as ‘high visibility,’ and the use of civil inattention seems to assume that the individuals themselves are aware of their visibility to the police. While the BePo officers themselves had little or no connection to this community or to these offenders, they were operating alongside the Revierpolizei officers who did, and therefore dealing with the situation in this way did not necessarily preclude it affecting future situations or interactions involving this group or these individuals and the police within the community. The establishing of a ‘weak’ situational authority here was based on the presumed effectiveness of the institutional role at communicating (in a way that could alter behavior, at least for as long as the person thinks they may be observed) simply through visible presence, but the strategic use of that presence without formally defining an incident (i.e. by directly engaging participants or attempting to demonstrate physical control of the space) constitutes an appeal to situational authority to establish a common, if unstated, understanding: I may be watching, but I don’t want to see anything I shouldn’t see. Whether the individual further interprets this as “I shouldn’t do anything that might get me in trouble” or “I shouldn’t do anything in a place or time where I might get in trouble” is a question of tactics and strategy, but this process demonstrates how managing their various perceived roles can serve, and, in some contexts or if improperly managed, undermine, the ability of the police to have the effect they want to have on behavior in public.

4.9.3 Defining Participation

As in this example, police encounters often fall into the realm of “fully-focused gatherings” (Goffman 1961, 1963). Any other activity or action has its meaning altered or transformed to be re-contextualized into the ongoing police encounter, and even continuing the same behavior that was ongoing prior to the arrival—or attention—of the police may be seen as a provocation or challenge, e.g. in the case of a noise complaint at a party, where the participants are expected to turn the music down immediately upon recognizing that police officers have arrived, even if the police deem the volume levels to be acceptable or only provide a warning. Even as the police take actions that demonstrate their unwillingness to engage in verbal communication, their presence offers meaning and suggests one specific purpose of the presence of the police in the specific space that they occupy: to coerce the group to leave and ensure that they do. Unlike other forms of social encounters, the relevance of the police authority and ability to define situations in an enforceable manner means that choice of participation in a situation is often up to the police themselves. Bystanders for the most part need to remain at a significant distance, continue moving, or else may tacitly become part of the engagement even if in an undefined role.²⁶ Individuals may approach the police or attempt to engage with them, but ultimately it is up to the police to determine who has the right to provide information, present their version of accounts, or rebut or clarify conflicting accounts. The attempts to engage the police in this case lacked any characteristics that might have led to a more interactive dialog, as the type of behavior and communication never fundamentally veered from its ‘non-serious’ character, none of the participants attempted to negotiated one-on-one with the police and all communicative offers were presented loudly and in a way intended to be heard by all parties at once. This was a clear attempt by the police to maintain an authority derived from institutional legitimacy, as well as evidence for how this type of authority relies less on verbal negotiation than on the use of symbols and presence, i.e. institutional authority as the default assumption by all participants. While in other observed cases more ‘reasonable’ individuals were able to separate from the group and out of earshot of the others, provided accounts or apologies, and were able to attempt to negotiate, this case was one in which neither party made any overtures likely to be immediately accepted by the other, and, to paraphrase Bittner (1974), the police always win. The constraints and assumptions of the broader context had already defined that the event—and the tolerance of certain types of behavior that accompanied it—was over, and the police saw no need to overtly negotiate. The police had successfully established their presence and immediate goals as more legitimate, essentially supplanting a competing social world without needing to directly engage with or challenge their values; the conflict remained one of authority and legitimacy. (Strauss 1982b) By disregarding the ‘hooligans’ but still maintaining a visible and unavoidable presence they were able to successfully define the situation.

At the same time, the police are not entirely free to disregard citizen pleas or ignore anything they do not wish to deal with. The police, while in theory not obligated to provide accounts of their decisions or interpretations of situations to citizens, face pressure and expectations to clarify and thereby essentially adjudicate what, in an almost official verdict, is going on. This constitutes a push towards institutional roles and authority, at last based on citizen expectations, which is often ‘countered’ by the use of practices to establish situational authority; police can eschew or downplay strict institutional expectations (i.e. how the citizen might perceive the institutional role) by making it clear that the decision of whether to even treat the situation as an incident is one made by the responding officer and refusing to take any stronger (punitive) measures at the time. Invoking situational authority in this manner conspicuously asserts the right of the officer to revert to strict institutional authority at any time and potentially for reasons only interpretable to the police; this manner of expressing situational authority attempts to encourage cooperation by making it clear that an appeal to involve the police in formal decision making—e.g. one engaged participant encouraging an officer to arrest or question another participant—could make the situation (in terms of negotiating power and ability to influence outcomes) worse for everyone involved. This case stood out primarily for the lack of verbal negotiation about what was going on, presumably because both sides of this standoff were already aware of what was ‘really’ happening and the conclusion was already foregone. Civil inattention is effective primarily when the target group or individuals are not only able to interpret the presence of the police as implying certain possibilities and outcomes, but specifically when they have no choice but to consider those possibilities. Whether the individual behavior is something specifically illegal, such as underage drinking, or simply something undesirable and seen as likely to lead to an order to disburse (“Platzverweis”), the tension lies in the distance between the current actions of the police—remaining generally passive but still present—and the potential and even likely actions if certain, imagined, conditions are met. By not explicitly indicating these conditions—i.e. by specifically not telling the individuals that they need to leave within 30 minutes, or once their beers are empty—the police remain free to intervene more ‘aggressively’ at any moment and essentially for any reason, while the targets of this form of civil inattention are forced between maintaining group without any specific negotiating demands or separating from the group to individually provide accounts or explanations. Practices which emphasize an overt negotiation rather than coercion—those attempting to establish situational authority—may restrict the ability to make immediate demands or give orders, if the police have previously made overtures in the form of ‘requests’ or provided alternatives but the alternative preferred by the police was not chosen. While a ‘fallback’ to relying on institutional authority is always possible, this would often require police officers to contradict themselves or weaken their own position or to negotiate further; Meehan (1992) however, observed suburban police officers often first making ‘situational’ agreements and then retracting them, ostensibly with the goal of keeping teenagers nervous and wary of the police and therefore less likely to come to the attention of either the police or those who might call the police. This form of ‘unpredictable’ negotiating with stated police expectations changing from situation to situation over the course of several encounters was not observed in the case at hand.

Discussions of civil inattention and similar practices have generally focused on its use in creating boundaries, or in ‘insulating’ social groups from one another. (cf. Lyman and Scott 1967, Strauss 1982b) However, its use by the police seems to be more complex than simply avoiding contact—the police are uniquely capable of legitimizing or sanctioning ‘borderline’ types of behaviors, i.e. things that may not be strictly illegal but may be considered by some to be undesirable, things that may be illegal but with no demand for police intervention, or behaviors that might not be strictly problematic on their own but might be considered by police or onlookers to bear other associations that might become something the police will directly deal with. This is relevant in maintaining the balance of police intervention in cases of community interest with institutional and legal concerns. (Ericson 1982, Waldeck 1999)

4.10 Public Space, Community Space and Ordered Space

Lyman and Scott (1967) describe public spaces as:

those areas where the individual has freedom of access, but not necessarily of action, by virtue of his claim to citizenship. These territories are officially open to all, but certain images and expectations of appropriate behavior and of the categories of individuals who are normally perceived as using these territories modify freedom. First, it is commonly expected that illegal activities and impermissible behavior will not occur in public places. Since public territories are vulnerable to violation in both respects, however, policemen are charged with the task of removing lawbreakers from the scene of their activities and restricting behavior in public places. (237–238)

They further describe how these public territories are considered at least temporally inaccessible or unwelcoming for certain categories of people: e.g. children on a playground after midnight, or minorities in white neighborhoods. These caveats challenge the public assumptions of these public territories, and for the purposes of discussing the role of the police they may be better described as “community territories.” Negotiations over community territories are processes of identifying insiders and outsiders. (cf. Sack 1993)

The purpose and assumed role of the immediate police presence once the game ended was affected not just by the actions of the police in moving but also by the various background activities—the walking out of players and officials, the closing of food and drink stands, and the gradual emptying out of the crowd. The presence of the line of BePo officers in front of the bleachers now indicated a fully-focused gathering, where for any member of the ‘hooligan’ group to ignore the fact that the officers were there or the obvious implications would make the participant seem disingenuous or socially ignorant. The situation had been effectively transformed from a “multifocused situation”, where the specifically connotated meaning of one or more police officers was more dependent on immediate interpersonal relationships and interaction, to “one that is exhausted by one face engagement.” (Goffman 1963: 164) This corresponds with a transformation from public space to policed space: even as the ‘stand-off’ between the police and the group dragged on, dozens of others continued to mill about around the soccer field, but by tacitly acknowledging that the situation was ‘winding down,’ or in a state of flux, these others rightfully did not see themselves as a target of the implicit police message to disperse, and for the most part did not need to legitimize their continued presence: this group was likely made up of a mixture of employees, family, friends and simple stragglers taking the long way home, but it never became relevant to any police-related interaction. The ‘hooligan’ group, on the other hand, presented a clear form of resistance by escalating their behavior, at least in comparison to the remainder of the attendees, instead of signaling a willingness to leave sooner rather than later.

Manning (2003) writes that:

Policing selectively marks that which is notable, sustains it by repeatedly marking the same types of behaviors and making them visible to others, and re-marks on the sustainability of such conventions. The institution provides the language within which the risk or contingency is described. Exaggerated and simple police typifications are often cited as tools of the trade. (20; cf. Reiner 1992)

Defining behavior as undesirable, as something that should be ordered, does not necessarily require the police to intervene against that behavior; positioning themselves in a certain way, as embedded within the community, as arbiters of moral correctness, if performed effectively, means that the police can force actors engaged in that behavior to position themselves as (situational, at least at first) outsiders. Even as outsiders, it is presumed that these individuals, like most of those who come into contact with the police, have been “educated to format their questions and respond verbally and bodily to commands, requests, and suggestions.” (Manning 2003: 20) The institutional framing of policing at this level is less oriented on the physical practices of taking control, but rather on the symbolic imagery of police boundary work and divisions into insiders and outsiders. The moral practices of policing are here essentially the control strategy.

A consistent finding in the sociology of policing has been that police work is performed differently, different services are offered, and different situations are considered routine or unique, dependent on the neighborhood, or, more specifically, how the neighborhood is perceived by officers. (Banton 1964, Bittner 1967, Wilson 1968, Feest and Blankenburg 1972, Muir 1979, Black 1980, Ericson 1982, Smith 1986, Herbert 1996, De Lint 2000, Marks 2004) The expectations held by officers of how their presence should be reacted to, conversely, is determined by the neighborhood, which in turn serves as a proxy for the type of people believed to live or spend time there. (Sampson and Raudenbush 2004) Hunold et al. (2016) argue that police officers often fall victim to the ecological fallacy, in which they make determinations about individuals based to a large extent on assumed characteristics of the neighborhood and location, a concern that has played a major role in many critiques of the basic criminal justice model and of the assumption that police can equally and equitably enforce order. (Waegel 1981, Bittner 1990, Crank 1994, Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001, Christie 2004, Aden 2012, Huey and Ricciardelli 2015, Behr 2018) This becomes especially problematic as police do not formally distinguish between neighborhoods or spatially-determined norms, apart from at the strategic level i.e. in determining jurisdictions, assigning officers, or specific policing initiatives (cf. Sparrow 2016), but rather determine what is normal or acceptable in certain public spaces at certain times—and implicitly by specific individuals, groups, or demographics. Yet the police do approach different spaces significantly differently, particularly in terms of neighborhoods and different parts of cities—because of the dynamic of police encounters, this can often mean that the neighborhood determines the outset of the interaction, i.e. police in areas believed to be crime-prone, dangerous, or suspicious are more likely to maintain an institutional posturing and only negotiate when it can provide leverage. As Manning (2003) states, “within known areas of ‘trouble,’ [police] may drive more slowly, stop and talk to people, search them” (207); the default approach is indicated by a complexity of factors but dominant among them are the expectations of the dynamics between place and individuals.

Those engaged in suspicious behavior by virtue of being out of place—i.e. teenagers in a park at night, ‘street people’ in a higher-end shopping district—may simply be ‘reminded’ of the existence of the police, i.e. ‘showing oneself’ or a ‘show of force.’ Notably, being out of place is a function of space and time, as in the case of the ‘hooligans’ who could only be effectively dramatized as out of place once the game had ended and the majority of the crowd either dispersed or took actions to indicate that the event was over. The general presumption in this case is that the exhibited behavior, even if it is merely the presence of an individual or a group, conflicts with the norms governing the social space, and while the police do not need to, and realistically may not truly be able to, appeal to the community for support, the presence of observers or outsiders was not constructed as a risk by the police to the extent that their behavior itself demonstrated the ‘wrongness’ of the behavior being targeted by the police: the police did not need to escalate the clearing of the crowd after the game or warn friends and family against hanging around, because the change in the overall situation signaled that the event was ‘winding down’ and, complimentary with the presence but lack of direct action of the police, indicated that the ‘hooligan’ group’s behavior was essentially unsustainable—even if they had been allowed to stay, the event and atmosphere would disappear around them further highlighting the difference between their public attitudes and level of excitement and that of the departing crowd.

In other cases, individuals or groups are considered suspicious purely due to being in an area or setting that is generally considered suspicious. While very few neighborhoods in Falkenmark were outright labeled as ‘problematic’ by the Revierpolizei, some settings were either specifically claimed to be ‘chaotic’ or risky, or else were approached as if they were. Some specific buildings had a reputation for being unfriendly to the presence of the police, and the mannerisms of the officers both when approaching the location and within interactions there was very different—for example, bystanders or observers were kept in sight rather than being obviously ignored or even greeted, as occurred in many ‘trusted’ locations. The basic assumption governing these situations seems to be that the potential conflict lies not between the individuals and the community, but rather between the broader community and the specific local environment, though this binary would only fit to the most extreme examples. In many cases ‘problematic’ locations (particularly those described based on specific individuals rather than abstract groups) were only approached once another form of ‘civilian’ authority was invoked—in housing projects or refugee homes often on-site staff or building managers were approached first and often involved directly in the encounter, in other cases the Ordnungsamt or other local government agencies were involved before the police approached someone at home. These efforts could be read as an attempt to allow the police to maintain an institutional face while appealing to a representative of ‘community values,’ e.g. a local manager or warden of public space, in line with police expectation and avoid having to enter into the type of negotiation that might potentially escalate into deeper conflict or hostility. The police, while seeking to classify and essentially ‘solve’ a situation need a way to define the role of the individual both within the situation and against a background: this process runs more smoothly if the police can maintain a plausible image of unity, and the more complex a negotiation over defining the situation becomes the weaker this illusion becomes. (cf. Harcourt 2001)

Garfinkel (1967) describes the “et cetera clause” (73) as a tendency of individuals to give meanings to events which complement their own actions and meaning-giving communicative acts within the interaction: someone who is identified as ‘out of place’ or treated as undesirable might find that any action they take or word they say becomes interpreted as simply confirming this account, regardless of perceived legitimacy—after all, someone who truly belongs in a place should not have to justify it, etc. The police can thus conclude many encounters by hewing closely to the institutional role and assuming that the other participant(s) is/are either aware, or should be made aware by the presence and involvement of ‘representatives of the mainstream,’ that they should correct their behavior in a way that satisfies the police (and presumably those members of the community who brought the problem to police attention.) This can often overlap with the involvement of community or organizational partners in policing, both through the active involvement of groups and community members who can more generally represent ‘the mainstream’ than a uniformed officer and through the symbolic association established by this cooperation which essentially holds various segments of up as models. In this way, police can theoretically maintain institutional facing and posturing but adapt more overtly discretionary practices and elements of situational authority through the selective involvement of representatives/representations of the community: in essence, still a focus on determining insiders vs. outsiders, but one which attempts to construct a larger community outside of a policing life-world. The difference in strategies and how they relate to individual and encounter-based practices are primarily a question of policing orientation towards the community as a concrete actor and as an abstract concept.

The most obvious differences have been well identified in the literature, primarily following Wilson (1968) who defined different policing orientations determined by the relationship of the policing organization to the local community; essentially, police can perform policing for the community, in which they act to protect the general existing order from either outside threats or from change or tendencies within the community, or they can police the community, in which the local area itself is seen as inherently problematic. In practice, these two orientations can be similarly constructed. (cf. Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001, Sampson and Raudenbush 2004) Police can identify specific groups, typically youth, immigrants, or young men, as ‘high risk,’ and work to establish patterns in which the behavior viewed as problematic is either reduced or hidden from public sight. (Meehan 1992) This can include cases in which the police downplay or spend less time and effort investigating crime against these groups, either claiming that they ‘brought it on themselves’ or that the group itself is too uncooperative and is hindering any investigation. (Waegel 1981) Anecdotal evidence from ethnographic work, however, often portrays the police as being more sympathetic to these ‘problem groups’ than to the generally older, more private, individuals who tend to make complaints based around public behavior and social activity. (cf. Reuss-Ianni 1983, Hunold et al. 2016)

A key factor in defining territories and space is management and control. (cf. Gieryn 2000) Private residences and a number of locations frequently visited by the police—workplaces, restaurants and cafes, government agencies—have clearly delineated ownership. These local managers generally are the arbitrators of what are “normal appearances,” when “misconduct is occurring” and if there is “cause for alarm” (Goffman 1971: 240) at least in terms of connecting these determinations to the specific setting spatially and socially. When police arrive at these locations it is typical for the authority source that is guiding the developing encounter to be immediately manifested—police approaching private residences were almost always clearly maintaining a ‘business’ (i.e. institutional) posture and professionalism—which would often be relaxed during the course of the encounter—or else, particularly in cases where the individual(s) were well known to the officers, make it clear that the visit was more of a ‘social call’ right from the outside, which would occasionally be reflected in more ‘unguarded’ behaviors such as the officers being invited in and taking a seat; in institutional settings especially this often was reflected in an almost ceremonial round of coffee. The overall message being conveyed is that police can only approach or enter private residences either when fully conforming to the limits and demands of the bureaucratic policing role, or when primarily taking up the role of community member and only secondarily that of the abstracted policing role (cf. Banton 1964, Young 2003) There are private domains and spaces which police can only enter by locking themselves into an interpretable authority-defining role—though once they are there, things may change.

Managed spaces are temporally variable: that is, while the police might approach a private residence in a certain case-dependent way at 3 pm, an entirely different set of considerations would be in play at 3am (at a minimum removing the plausibility of a random ‘social call.’) Public areas that are managed in other ways undergo similar and significant shifts; storefronts where owners maintain some form of legitimate authority in managing social space will take on a different meaning once the owner has closed up for the night, and anyone hanging around once stores has closed may be seen as suspicious if their presence can’t be accounted for. Fassin (2013), for example, states that “at night, any individual walking or driving is potentially suspect, particularly in certain neighborhoods,” (72) emphasizing that in some jurisdictions simply existing in a place beyond a certain time is enough to warrant further intervention by the police. Suttles (1968) refers to “impersonal domains”: “nonresidential areas where the safety of a passerby is mostly in the hands of impersonal authorities who are either acting on behalf of someone else’s interests or whose major responsibilities do not include the entire day.” (36) These areas can be subject to “periodic anomie” as the types of expected and routine public behavior change and overlap throughout the day. The provided examples include a hospital and a main street housing several businesses but with little activity after dark. This term could easily be applied to the more urban areas of Falkenmark: while the streets of the inner-city area and pedestrian zones were rarely empty during the day, there was a marked drop-off after dark as stores even many restaurants closed relatively early. While there were some nightlife spots, many officers stated that the city was generally “dead” at night, attributing this to the higher average age and the relative lack of younger people without families. This meant that the city at night was both essentially unmanaged and lacking in the “normal, casual enforcement” (Jacobs 1961: 32) created by the presence of passers-by. Police (Revierpolizei officers, at least, who almost never worked late at night) did not seem to consider the streets at all dangerous at night, but it was clear from a handful of interactions that the presence of individuals on the street alone might be seen as questionable activity warranting further investigation if no obvious explanation could be discerned.²⁷ Due to both the lack of local managers to whom police could defer and the lack of effective resistance to the formal (or semi-formal) ordering of public space, the police, essentially by default, were the effective managers of most public spaces after dark or later at night: in contrast, the more rural areas were, unsurprisingly, much less frequently patrolled or watched at night, though patrol units purportedly paid extra attention to unmanaged sites that could be considered at risk of theft or vandalism, such as construction sites.

The use of social spaces in this way showed the invocation of two sources of knowledge—that related to police expertise (including ‘common sense’ understandings), and that related to specific readings of local norms. Police may not need to indicate ‘community values’ to justify their suspicion of individuals walking the streets after midnight, but their consideration of suitable explanations is also dependent on a knowledge of local factors, such as which destinations the individual might be headed towards. Other individuals who might have plausibly been considered suspicious, out-of-place, or even ‘eccentric’ or ‘colorful’ were often known individually to officers and were considered acceptable in spaces and at times where their presence and behavior might otherwise merit direct intervention and questioning.²⁸

4.11 Dramas of Authority and Control

The police—specifically the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark—are given a set of tools (symbols, powers, literal tools) and a set of expectations and demands by nature of their office, and simultaneously have adapted, inherited, or crafted a more ad hoc set of tools (rhetoric, social capital, relationships) through their ability to manage their role and authority within situated interactions. These situational forms of managing interactions, however, bring with them their own expectations and demands and risk varying forms of role conflict, including the disparity between police institutional concerns for criminal enforcement and reducing the perception of irresolvable yet legitimate issues and community values which problematize specific behaviors or patterns of behavior, trends (including cultural expressions), people and places with a larger focus on situation and setting. The police cannot easily extricate themselves from the classic bureaucracy dilemma of needing to make one decision within a specific context and frame but also needing that decision to be defensible and representative when viewed in the context of all decisions. The police, in cultural terms as well as institutionally, have tended to emphasize both the exigencies of situations—i.e. incidents simply require the application of the correct categorization and adequate and effective measures can be taken—and the broader institutional perspective which views crime as the major police focus and emphasizes the crime-fighter image and the production of crime statistics to both demonstrate the existence of definable problems and the effectiveness of certain styles of policing. (cf. Bittner 1970, Sparrow 2016)

Individual officers cannot, in every situation, maintain a purely institutional role, and the present context essentially undermines this source of authority in a great number of cases: police officers may not be entirely prevented from acting in a purely institutional or bureaucratic fashion, but the simple fact that the same actors often take on different roles in policing encounters, and that the individual can in many cases be separated from the role or placed into several roles at once, gives officers an incentive to manipulate, downplay, or subvert the ideal type role. The new demands taken up by police—many of which are, in the words of Officer Meyer, “to let people express their frustration”—are often both symbolic and also most conducive to a non-institutional source of authority. A local resident meeting with his local community officer to report graffiti or vandalism may not be as concerned with ‘the state’ taking his problem seriously as he is with the individual officer, whom he knows and trusts, speaking to him on his own terms. This was visible in the fieldwork, as a great number of encounters never resulted in formal follow-up measures or investigation, though it was exceedingly rare for the officer to entirely discount concerns shared by residents as not being police-relevant. The realm of issues relevant to Revierpolizei offers arguably exceeds that of ‘normal’ patrol policing by a great deal, with local knowledge and the need to know ‘what’s going on’ serving as major factors here, but the dramaturgical presentation of these issues is even more significant: officers must show that the consideration of phenomena outside of ‘core policing issues’ is part of their job while also demonstrating that their interpretation of seriousness is not fully dependent on an institutional perspective; the officer cares about the problem because the community cares. In a way, this was consistent with the narratives presented by many officers, where the greatest challenges to policing and to the local community were not in term of crime or even immediate risk, but rather longer term structural problems—particularly demographic change and the lack of economic development or opportunity—and for many officers in particularly political involvement in the police and constant reform programs were seen as threatening an acceptable though precarious status quo.

The practices used to handle situations demonstrated—consistently with much of the literature on police interactional practices and specifically that on rural and small-town policing (Bittner 1970, Manning 1977, Sykes and Brent 1980, Ericson 1982, Meehan 1992, Young 1993, Herbert 1996, Peterson 2008, Hunold 2011, Fassin 2013, Buvik 2018, cf. David et al. 2017)—that encounters were often broadly defined in ways that allowed them to be more effectively handled rather than routinely relying on the powers specifically allocated to police in order to ‘take control.’ The proposition that the core of policing is the capacity to use force (cf. Bittner 1970, 1974) is not intended to mean that individual situations are universally or even regularly guided by this force, but rather to imply a form of symbolic authority given to the police, essentially mirroring a key sociological aspect of violence: that its significant social power lies primarily in its potentiality and shared assumptions of what is possible. Police do not always need to shoot dangerous suspects but can often persuade them to stop by aiming their weapon and issuing an order (backed with a threat); police do not need to always draw their weapon if it is understood that they could draw their weapon, and so on. Yet far before situations reach the contingent point at which force may be applied or the threat of force may resolve the situation in the desired manner, there are countless points at which the police communicative, subtly or overtly, casually or theatrically, that the current encounter is a serious or everyday situation, that an encounter is even occurring. The invocation of force and various ‘police-specific’ practices (arrest, issuing fines, even unofficial warnings or ‘civil inattention’) exhibit how even the specific construction of the police within the community can affect social practices in public and the societal²⁹ execution of formal social control

The interactional model of dramatized police authority presented here is proposed as a general model of analysis for police interactions, but is considered most applicable to the case at hand and the manner and setting of policing in which less-categorizable personal relationships play a role and appeals to “crime fighting” and “law enforcement” to reinforce the functional authority of the police organization are less likely to be rhetorically effective or unironically reproduced or represented in the media. It is specifically the conditions that define policing in Falkenmark which increase the visibility (and almost certainly the prevalence) of ‘alternative’ policing roles to the dominant, ideal, and inevitably unsustainable institutional image. Among other embedded practices, this tendency to distance situational policing from this bureaucratic stock role includes a distancing from a downplaying of the role of physical force in policing: this poses a challenge to the presumption of the “monopoly on force” which is reflected not only in everyday practices but also in the narratives and ‘backstage’ presentations of self among the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark. Lucia Zedner (2006) writes that, “whether the modern state’s claim to a monopoly of violence was, in practice, realized through the engine of the police or was rather a highly effective, though illusory, ideological construction is open to question.” (78) The nature of community policing in Brandenburg demonstrates both general principles of how policing can work as well as challenges to normative concepts, particularly in the visibility of alternative constructions of power and order.