Community Tales: Storytelling, Experience, and Local Knowledge

Abstract

Police culture is often cited with regards to practical explorations of the police, in particular as a hindrance to effective reform. Yet the term itself very often seems to be haphazardly used without regard to understanding what a police or policing-specific culture would be beyond daily work routines. The relevance of police culture to police practice tends to focus on two connections: the police culture, in abstract, as a source of policing norms; and the realm of police storytelling and mythologizing.

6.1 Narrative and Storytelling as Action

“Two voices is the minimum for life.”

– Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s poetics

Police culture is often cited with regards to practical explorations of the police, in particular as a hindrance to effective reform. Yet the term itself very often seems to be haphazardly used without regard to understanding what a police or policing-specific culture would be beyond daily work routines. The relevance of police culture to police practice tends to focus on two connections: the police culture, in abstract, as a source of policing norms; and the realm of police storytelling and mythologizing. The first connections remain significant and will be discussed in the context of the police mandate and relationship with communities and institutions in the following chapter, but the second connection warrants deeper investigation, as examinations of storytelling and narrative presentation, especially within studies of policing and depictions in media and popular culture, tend to emphasize the content of the stories told but overlook the storytelling itself as social action. (cf. Burke 1989, Fletcher 1996, Waddington 1999, Cockcroft 2005, Van Hulst 2019)

Police officers often tell stories related specifically to their work—most specialized professions have their own forms of narrative, clichés, and moral lectures. (Becker et al. 1961, Crank 1994, Paoline 2013, Tangherlini 2000) Often the stories themselves are used as evidence to claim either for a fixed set of policing values, i.e. the use of stories involving potentially extra-legal violence to demonstrate that police officers value the use of violence against ‘outsiders’ or those who disrespect them personally (cf. Westley 1970, Van Maanen 1974, Westmarland 2001), or to argue for their functional use within policing institutions, for example as ‘coping mechanisms.’ (Hunt 1985, Scrivner 1994, Chan 1997, Martin 1999) Without necessarily rejecting the idea that police values are reinforced or communicated through the use of stories or that the telling of stories may have some functional use within policing organizational culture, the case at hand serves as a reminder that storytelling is a complex social action establishing (often dynamic) relationships between storyteller and audience, presenting images of both self and other and establishing chains of events, ideal types and logical assumptions which may depend entirely on pre-existing shared or communicated understandings. Peter Manning has emphasized the ritualized aspects of police storytelling, suggesting essentially that while some stories might be functional or intended to convey specific or contextualized meaning, other stories are more-or-less told just to be told. (Manning 2012, cf. van Hulst 2013) Exploring the worlds of policing ethnographically means treating the use of stories as a form of interaction bound by its own—fixed or flexible, prescribed or negotiated—rules and forms and assuming that the story itself cannot be separated from its telling. (Fletcher 1996, Cockcroft 2005)

At the same time, storytelling often—arguably always—is a key practice within police work, in the sense that narratives need to be crafted as a way to define situations, ascribe roles and motives, and set or negotiate interactional goals. The way police talk and the specific rhetoric used may reflect the worldview of individual officers or the policing culture, but it is most interesting in how it shows the dramaturgical construction of shared meaning, embedding the audience into the story or inviting them as co-narrators: the uses of police discretion in particular often imply the need for officers to frame or legitimate their decision making power and the (institutional or situational) meaning of their actions, as well as which others participants are being included and what the story might mean to them. (Shon 1998) Police can define problems not only at a social level but at a way that puts pressure on others to alter or explain their behavior. As Loader (1997) notes, “the police’s entitlement and capacity to speak about the world is seldom challenged. They start from a winning position.” (3)

One extended passage (reconstructed from fieldnotes taken during observation) demonstrates the centrality and also ambiguity of narrative and storytelling to community-oriented police work:

After lunch we plan to drive to Schloss [Musterstein] because a woman had reported being photographed by a neighbor without permission, but had been unable to make the Sprechstunden [consultation hours.] She had reported the case to the Polizeirevier, who then informed Officer Karsten, who made plans to visit her at the castle…

We arrive at Schloss [Musterstein] and Officer Karsten points out ‘tourists’ and notes that the castle is primarily a museum. We enter the museum and go directly to the office, we speak to a younger man working on a computer, but the woman who reported the complaint is not here now. We pass through the main museum collection and Officer Karsten provides some background: they host an annual reception here including various ‘community groups,’ the mayor’s office, and the police. The mayor is new but otherwise he knows “fast alle” [almost everyone], We soon meet and say hello to two women who Officer Karsten seems to know, and then the boss of the woman who reported the complaint. She says that she had considered calling because kids have been spray-painting graffiti, she claims she didn’t see them personally but someone else did. Officer Karsten asks what was sprayed and (making a hand gesture) asks how big it is.

[Later that afternoon, after returning to the Polizeirevier and talking to Officer Reiner…] Officer Karsten tells me that the woman from the museum who registered the complaint needs to give up her driver’s license, but “it” will be investigated later, others are handling it now and “wir sollen warten.” [we should wait.] He concludes, with: “oh aber sie kam mir langsam sympathisch vor. ” [essentially: I was starting to like her.] It is unclear if the reported incident of the neighbor taking a photo is related. Officer Reiner asks “who is being looked for?” Officer Karsten gives him the name and then “case closed for now.” He begins looking through the event calendar on the computer, indicates an “Over-30 Party” and says to me “that could be something for us” and laughs.

While relatively uneventful, this series of semi-related events shows how fractured and second-hand narratives are converted into useable or ignorable forms and how narrative framing can be used structurally as transitions, bookends, and justifications. The original reported case had little background information, but the reported action (“someone had taken a photograph without permission”) led to it being obviously interpreted as a non-emergency, non-threatening case. The descriptions provided to me (almost as asides) contextualized the decision to visit the location beyond the originally stated reasoning of “the woman couldn’t come to my office hours,” suggesting it would be a useful opportunity to simply ‘be present’ in the community. This essentially proved to be the case, as the original complaint became less relevant and instead the focus became on minor small talk (insignificant enough in content to not even be recorded in the original field notes but still a form of police-community interaction) and then on a new spontaneously reported issue. The case of graffiti began, and essentially remained, a very simplistic narrative, “kids have sprayed graffiti.” The use of the word ‘kids’ (Kinder) seemed to both work as ‘actionable’ information and as contextualization: this wasn’t serious crime; it was simply kids. The term ‘kids’ is non-specific, potentially referring to 17 or 18-year olds, but the choice of this word rather than ‘juveniles’ (Jügendliche) further downplays the seriousness—in English a similar distinction would be between ‘kids’ and ‘teenagers.’ As the woman hadn’t seen the graffitists herself, it would be of course difficult to distinguish between an ‘accurate’ estimation of the offender’s ages or potential ‘risks’ to the community and a simple use of preferred vocabulary: we are not aware of how the information was originally presented to her or in which context—the sparse narrative from the fieldnotes was essentially the entire conversation, which lacked an explanation of who had actually seen the kids. Officer Karsten’s follow-up questions focused solely on the problem object, the graffiti, rather than the subject, the sprayers, and it was not immediately clear if his asking questions at all was related to actual personal or police interest or simply continuing and then resolving the interaction in an acceptable way. However, the unstated but obvious framing of the encounter—a resident and ‘local manager’ of a space and place presenting something likely to be soon as either ‘criminal’ or ‘disorderly’ in nature to a police officer presumably tasked with investigating and further reporting such things—sets the woman’s description of the graffiti and the officer’s response of “how big?” a simplified form of joint communicative action to agree on a shared reality. (cf. Clark 2006) While Officer Karsten is in no way committed to any kind of follow-up, his response was, if loosely, in line with the presentation, rather than rejecting the unstated or understated implications of the woman’s claim; at the same time, his response did not appear to suggest a prioritizing of the issue or an earnest attempt to collect information, and the size of the graffiti appeared to me at least to be less crucial information than what was written or drawn. Whether the officer himself took to be a ‘serious’ issue or was simply going along with the flow of the interaction was unclear: the case never came up again during my field stay, at least. The relatively unceremonious ending of the case is standard in a great deal of police work—problems ‘resolve themselves’ or the responsibility is transferred to someone else—and while Revierpolizei officers often see a need to still follow up and stay in the loop, this isn’t always possible or practical. In this case it didn’t appear that Officer Karsten had actually met or knew the woman apart from a phone call—admittedly, I didn’t think he would ever confess to not knowing someone in his jurisdiction—and so his ironic closure of the case with “I was starting to like her,” is essentially a backstage performance, intended either for me, for Officer Reiner, or for both of us, for a situation where the frontstage is suddenly unavailable. The final comments of the section were essentially a transition into the idea of ‘something new to do,’ fitting to a broader narrative of ‘showing the field researcher the variety of work’ while also making a joke.

Storytelling as a collection of social practices fits more broadly into narrative sociology. Narrative sociology has, since its development as a major topic of interest, primarily focused on storytelling and personal narratives, but can include additional communicative forms such as a everyday conversations, formal reconstructions of events, chronicles or lists of events with less emphasis on storytelling elements, and the practices used to development shared narratives cooperatively or in conflict. (Presser 2016, cf. White 1980) Roland Barthes (2004) writes that, “narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.” (65) Narratives can tell us a great deal about how human action and experience is perceived by the narrator or within a specific frame. They “allocate causal responsibility for action, define actors and give them motivation, indicate the trajectory of past episodes and predict consequences of future choices, suggest courses of action, confer and withdraw legitimacy, and provide social approval by aligning events with normative culture codes.” (Smith 2005: 18)

6.2 Values and Cultural Narrative

“Less and less do we encounter people with the ability to tell a tale properly. More and more often there is embarrassment all around when the wish to hear a story is expressed. It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.”

– Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller [Der Erzähler] (1936)

“The experience! The experience! Haven’t you learned?”

Profane didn’t have to think long. “No,” he said, “offhand I’d have to say I haven’t learned a goddamn thing.”

– Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963)

Narrative serves many roles, and is considered both to be an expression of values held as well as an important component in processing, adapting or testing out new or existing conceptual values. (Baumeister and Newman 1994, Berger 1997, Tangherlini 2000, Presser 2012, Maggio 2014) Within criminology, autobiographical accounts, the use of neutralizations, justifications, and excuses, and self-motivating rhetoric have all been seen as not only useful for understanding individuals engaged in crime or violent behavior, but also as key to that person establishing an identity that allows them to engage in that behavior. (cf. Hunt 1985, Maruna and Copes 2005, Presser and Sandberg 2015, Kurtz and Upton 2017) Internalized narratives can provide the motivation for behavior; Presser (2012) states that, “people talk themselves into engaging in some behavior even as they talk after doing it.” (9) Expressed narratives, even stories told to diverse audiences, can thus be both subjectively framed accounts of how events or actions were understood as well as invitations (and instructions) for aligning actions (Stokes and Hewitt 1976), practices and vocabularies for synchronizing accounts and establishing some level of shared meaning. (Schönbach 2010)

The analysis of narratives has often focused on formulaic stories: those that follow set patterns, whether told ritualistically (Malinowski 1922, Geertz 2010, Goody 2010) or through the filter of popular and news media culture. (Cawelti 1976, Gripsrud 2017) Even these examples—anthropological, linguistic and cultural studies explorations of the uses of storytelling—have tended to emphasize creativity and situatedness in how stories are told over deeper embedded meanings represented through plots. The plot itself, that is, what happens within the story that leads to a ‘satisfying’ conclusion, is of relevance in how stories represent generalized morality—i.e. are ‘the good guys’ destined to triumph? Is revenge presented as justified when employed by the hero? (cf. Cawelti 1975, 1976) But the specific elements used within the story—how things, people and places are presented and described in vivid, sparse, or no detail—tells us something not only about the structure or ritualized nature of the telling or the narrative as a representation of structural background as well as an individual but also about the presumed audience. (Ochs 2004, Maggio 2014) Narratives are not simply found in formally presented stories, but occur within dynamic interactions—even scripted and standardized formats ranging from theater to film and television are considered to be responding to and commenting on interpretations of society, social problems, and societal change: proverbially “holding the mirror up to society.” At the same time, these representations are creatively, often intentionally, constructed and often the choice of images and presentations within a narrative can say more than the overall plot or specifically indicated connections between elements, such as consistently referring to management and business-oriented individuals as “suits” as a way to separate them from both the narrator and corresponding identity group and the presumed audience. (Bathurst and Monin 2010)

Narratives are constructed and, by necessity, often minimally constructed; that is, the elements included within the narrative serve some function in that narrative either to establish and further the plot or to provide additional indicators or details. (Ochs 2004, Colville et al. 2012) Hayden White (1980) notes that “every narrative, however seemingly ‘full’ is constructed on the basis of a set of events which might have been included but were left out… in which continuity rather than discontinuity governs the articulation of the discourse.” (14) For the purposes of analyzing narratives or setting them against a cultural framework, it is often precisely what is left out that is of greatest interest, as these elements are often simply assumed to understood by the audience based on the clues already provided. (Austin 1962) The social setting of the presentation can play a role as well, i.e. the level of embeddedness—to what extent the telling is part of a larger social encounter with back-and-forth communication or more formally a ritualized presentation (Drummond 2016)—or the use of co-narration, (Ochs 2004, Ochs et al. 1989) as the audience or other participants may at times ask questions about unclear elements, present plausible interpretations, or directly challenge the storyteller’s account. Other times, however, ‘missing’ elements might form part of the narrative and its presentation itself, such as in the case of a story about mistaken identity or a mystery where the actual identity of a character is only revealed at the end, if at all. In most cases, however, narrative ambiguity will be minimized where possible to make the story broadly understandable to the immediate audience.

Narrative ambiguity is reduced by the establishing of common practices—reinforced by aligning actions—and the reliance on cultural narrative, existing ideal type connections between objects, actors and actions that most of the audience will be familiar with. These narratives, or the specific elements which constitute them, or the processes of giving them broader cultural meaning and resonance, have been discussed by scholars including Levi-Strauss (1963), who referred to bricolage, the ‘building up’ of social structure through narrative ordering¹, and Antonio Gramsci (1976) who described sedimentation, a process through which various images, stories, and elements of other types come together and form a broad ‘common sense’ view. (see also Berger and Luckmann 1967, Geertz 1975) Essential to both of these views is the idea that potential narratives—and potential concepts or objectifications to explain the deeper reality being observed or otherwise sensed—need not be accepted or rejected immediately upon their (internal) conception, but rather can remain narratively—structurally—dormant until invoked in some capacity which tests their applicability and robustness. If an explanation of a phenomenon ‘works’ in a given situation it may not even be questioned what made it work (i.e. was it the authority or definition power of the invoker of the image, the similarity to already shared understandings, or a more basic ‘herd effect’ in which the story is accepted without needing to be understood?) If one asks, “why did that man steal?” and the response is, “Because he is a criminal” this answer may be accepted, despite its tautological nature. The availability of cultural narratives of crime and criminals makes the simplistic narrative “the criminal stole” tacitly and conditionally acceptable, but more complicated narratives, connections and images will be played out and challenged in more interesting ways: how is the criminal imagined to look or depicted so as to be recognizable as a criminal even prior to any mention of crime? Is the criminal permanently relegated to the villain role, or might the character instead be described as a ‘rebel’ or ‘outlaw’ with whom some audiences can draw sympathy? (cf. Katz 1988) The more stories that are told—especially those widely told, through mass media—about a type the more narrative connections become available even with conflicting logic: a police officer shooting a wounded suspect could be a heroic character willing to damn himself to protect those he cares about, or a violent killer. (cf. Klockars 1980) The present use of the term cultural narrative, as opposed to bricolage, sedimentation, or another term entirely, is simply to emphasize that 1) these narratives are essentially infinite and span from rough images or conceptualizations (e.g. the general image of a police officer in uniform) to iconic and specific patterns of images (e.g. a specific scene and piece of dialogue in which a suspect is asked if he feels lucky), 2) these narratives need to be made manifest through use to remain relevant and develop meaning—regardless of whether they are widely believed, represent the true state of the world or society, or reflect visible structural or power dynamics, and 3) individual or local emphasis of certain narratives over others reflect in in some way beliefs or expectations of order and normality, but when challenged or put up against conflicting narratives may be modified or negotiated to establish an intersubjective reality. (Burke 1969, Branaman 2016, cf. Levi-Strass 1963) In terms of police authority, this simply means that the police are aware that multiple stories can be told about them—or that they are performing a role which can have infinite interpretations—and attempting to ensure that the ‘correct’ story is followed, which means considering the audience and how various potential narratives are, with every action and moment, being highlighted or made unsuitable for the new dramatized reality.

While culture can refer to the beliefs, assumptions, and expectations of a social group (ranging from smaller ‘subcultural’ groupings to societies or society, as a singular concept) these cultural understandings are not fixed or unalterable, and can be observed to be challenged both in larger social movements as well as in interactional micro-processes; a useful way to understand these cultural elements is specifically as narratives which present propositions for belief that may essentially remain latent as understood concepts but only become manifest once they become necessary to provide meaning to a situation or action.² (Manning 1996) Gusfield analyzes how various understandings of not only alcohol consumption but the role of social life were challenged and changed not just to reflect changing social structures but as a reaction to perceived deeper changes to the meaning of those social structures (essentially seen as threats to the ability of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants to determine the moral compass of the US) and the use of differing alcohol narratives began to take on associations in terms of social status and class beyond the simple belief in a mechanistic process (i.e. that one drink will turn an upstanding Christian into an irredeemable alcoholic.) These mechanistic narratives are not always immediately linked to a deeper analytical level (e.g. many of these ‘facts’ were taught in schools or presented in literature by the Temperance Movement and could easily be taken at face value without the audience supporting the ontological hegemony of the Nativists.) However, the fact that multiple narratives can co-exist at the same time allows for the dramaturgical assumption that culture is that which is lived more so than that which is believed. (Austin 1962)

Narratives typically operate on a normality principle (Van Dijk 1975: 287) in which events and basic cause-and-effect connections are assumed to be normal and unsurprising in most contexts; the telling of a story, however, implies some level of unexpectedness in events that merits telling the story at all, and these unexpected elements will likely not only form the core of the story but be explained in greater detail or described in contrast to ‘normal’ events: everyday narratives often emphasize these complications (Van Dijk 1975: 289) with expressions such as, “and you wouldn’t believe it, but…” or “and then, out of nowhere…” to emphasize that these actions are essentially violating the normality principle. These complications are breaks with normality, in which a continuous series of events which could be understood without overly specific detail (e.g. “I was shopping…”) is interrupted by actions which alter the state of the initial situation and suggest that the narrative will continue until some form of resolution is introduced (“… when suddenly the power went out…”) The reliance on cultural narratives can be found primarily in the un- or understated uses of ‘normal’ action but also in the emphasized use of breaking normality, in cases where larger connections or understandings are still assumed to be interpretable. In the previous example, ‘going shopping’ is a very basic cultural narrative which may not necessarily imply deeper normative connotations (as opposed to, for example, “I was out partying,” “we were out looking for trouble,” or “me and my partner were out on patrol” which provide some context in terms of social role, emotionality or values which the audience could read more into than simple action) in that it implies a series of continuous events which taken together make up a consistent unit of narrative action—only the injection of some complication breaks the action up. “Going shopping” in this context implies that the specific location, items being purchased, whether those items are still being looked for or are being carried in a shopping basket, etc. are not immediately relevant—but at the same time it implies some generic ‘normal’ sense of the phrase which specifically does not require any further clarification: the audience would not be expected to assume that the narrator was shopping for houses, cars, helicopters, or (in most cultural contexts, at least) firearms.

The institution of policing has depended on image work and public / community relations if nothing else for the fact that cultural images of policing have varied so drastically from the actual everyday work of policing and the most likely ‘peeks’ into the world of policing that ‘outsiders’ are likely to be afforded. The ability of individual officers to alter mainstream culturally-imprinted image of the police is minimal. Funke (1990), referring to police in Germany, writes that:

Raids, attacks on protestors and “hunts for criminals”—because the majority of citizens primarily come into contact with these types of police action through information media...—imprint the image of the police more than their other tasks do… This image stems not only from spectacular and occasionally dramatic interventions of the police, but in the end because citizens who become the victim of criminal action or who fear becoming such want to see the police that way. (34, own translation)

The various images of police visible in the media and in everyday life—through observation and personal involvement—are in contest, and yet still can all exist. The relevance is which images can dominate and be invoked within given situations, and what happens when involved parties are essentially viewing different images of the same object. The police are linked both through their institutional constraints but also through narratives and image with crime and violence, regardless of the day-to-day reality of the individual officer.

Cultural narrative is often presented in the form of enthymemes, “truncated syllogisms in which one of the premises is understood but unstated.” (Gusfield 2000: 91, cf. Edmondson 1984) These can be found both in the detailed mechanisms of cause and effect—such as in describing a gun being drawn followed by someone being taken to the hospital or dying, without needing to explain the gun being fired, the chemical reaction that leads to the bullet being expelled, the physical effects of the bullet on the body, etc. The narrative of the Stasi in the case of a suspected child molester presented in the previous chapter is one example of an enthymeme: the narrator simply presented the involvement of the Stasi and then the disappearance of the man, but the audience was presumed (at least in this telling) to understanding the connection between these two events and not view the story as a mystery. Enthymemes are essentially the everyday or common sense elements of how understood can be understood, but understanding changes in these perceptions or understanding is complicated specifically by the fact that they are not openly stated and can be used in narratives where alternative understandings are, at least theoretically, possible: the specific narratives presented by Revierpolizei officers were often dependent on ‘obvious’ assumptions and connections which were not apparent or clear to me, particularly in the invocation of stereotypes which I didn’t understand or recognize: for example, commenting on the relatively long driving times between destinations in once shift, said to me, “I guess this is normal for you,” and only later in the discussion did I realize he was referring to the presumed greater distances between locations in the US when compared to Germany.

Enthymemes are also found in ‘higher level’ connections within stories, that where the overall plot and moral of the story are expressed; many narratives rely on symbols or stand-ins for characters, events, and connections that are not explained or explored within that narrative. That is, important elements for understanding a story are often found outside that story—as in parodies or homages which require a basic familiarity with the plot or major elements of the original story, such as the many uses of ‘loose cannon’ or maverick cops modeled on the Dirty Harry films which, rather than presenting that character as an ‘interesting’ reaction to changing conditions present it as a stereotypical form of police office. (cf. Bielejewski 2016) Cultural narratives are essential to personal everyday narratives, but are also important in popular culture or mass media, where many are first presented as models to a general audience. They are often used as idioms or metaphors, sometimes ironically or subversively, such as how calling someone “Einstein” will rarely imply that they are of exactly average intelligence. (cf. Ewick and Silbey 1995, Gusfield 2000)

Cultural narratives here are essentially the starting point of everyday interpretations within the hermeneutic circle. (cf. Gadamer 1998) The basic idea of the hermeneutic circle is that a ‘text,’ here referring to any interpretable sign or identifiable communicative format, can only be given meaning by referring both to the entire text in its socio-cultural and historic context as well as to the individual sections and elements of the text in their immediate exigencies; these dual processes of interpretation are both sequential and simultaneous, and the ontological implications are that the process is never truly complete, in that a text can never be ‘fully’ understood in its entire meaning for society and all of its component elements, references, and residuals, but (in a more pragmatic sense) the text will likely at some point be imputed with enough ‘useful’ meaning to allow it to be categorized, summarized, or acted towards. (cf. Ricoeur 1984 for a similar interpretation of how the past can be narratively structured with meaning beyond that which is used to interpret the present.) It is not necessary for these narratives to be fully located within a socio-cultural realm, as the process of meaning-making, interpreting existing cultural assumptions, and fitting them to lived experienced is continuous and never-ending (cf. Bourdieu 1993) and, more importantly, the relevance to social action lies in how these interpretation are used, once again, as starting points for further meaning-making—even if there were such a thing as “false” narratives or unsuitable applications, they still be “correct” in some way if one actor were able to anticipate this or recognize this and modify their own behavior to ‘update’ the joint action. A simplistic example might be a tourist who doesn’t speak the language being shouted at by an approaching police office: the words need not be linguistically interpreted, and the historical context and various political interpretations of the police specific to local cultural frameworks need not play a role, but the basic understanding that the one social actor is something similar to a pre-existing understanding of ‘a police officer’ and that the other is being approached and communicated to would likely be enough to make the most ‘normal,’ pragmatic and estimated least likely to result in further conflict or misunderstandings appear to be stopping and waiting as if the officer had asked the tourist to stop and wait. The police officer, in return, would likely recognize which of his gestures and communicative overtures are culturally common, or at least situationally interpretable (assuming the officer’s intent is to convey meaning and not intimidate.) Not only are a great deal of social control functions essentially universal to most cultural perspective based on their diffusion and the adaptation of practices, but those used by formal control agencies (i.e. the police) are often intended to aid in this hermeneutic understanding by being broadly and easily interpretable: as discussed in Chapter Three, this often resulted in police adapting an overt institutional role when in contact with ‘outsiders,’ specifically those who could not speak German, because the generalized institutional role presumes or requires less flexibility in interpretation than a situational or more relaxed posture.

The hermeneutic approach following Heidegger and Gadamer emphasizes pre-understanding and the assumption that social meanings cannot be effectively interpreted in a way that allows ‘being in the world’ without reference to prior understandings (cf. Reichertz 2007); Laverty (2004) explains this by stating that, “meaning is found as we are constructed by the world while at the same time we are constructing this world from our own background and experiences.” (24) The use of the term cultural narratives here refers to this large, varied and subjective realm of pre-existing interpretations which can serve as starting points or aids to interpreting situational meaning. Cultural narratives can include basic everyday symbolic associations, but at the broadest refer to ‘modern myths’ which:

Symbolize complex events, as ways to understand social problems in personal terms. As such they redirect attention from structural and institutional aspects and support a theory of social behavior, and the politics related to it, that sees social policy as geared to remake the person. They make the world a more interesting place, a place where bad people are responsible for evil. (Gusfield 1989: 434)

Cultural narratives and (institutional) myths may not always guide action, but may serve a significant role in the intersubjective construction of meaning; the use of myths by the police—specifically within the context of violence as discussed in the previous chapter—can show how police attempt to frame specific individuals, classes of actors, or ideal type constructions as sympathetic or hostile. In some cases, this narrative framing on its own may be a strong enough action to be considered a form of boundary maintenance. (cf. Goffman 1981) Groups or individuals with identities that have been effectively established as a cultural image in a way that leads to stigmatization or further loss of status, for example certain types of drug users, may seek ways to narratively redefine themselves or separate themselves from broader stereotypes. (Copes 2016) Police officers are common cultural and mediatized characters who can be fit into a variety of different narratives and settings using various and contradictory trope and stereotypes, but unlike many other similar ‘quilt of community life’ characters who can represent fixed social roles and jobs in differential manners (construction workers, priests, doctors) the police also frequently represent a higher level construct of social control, unequal power, authority, and force. (cf. Wilson 2000, Reiner and O’Connor 2015) Individual police officers often act to subvert or distance themselves from various broader narratives, i.e. through the appeal to situational authority within interactions through various practices such as the use of everyday informal language, discussing personal interests or identity (discussing a preferred football team, etc.), or humor. At other times police will actively identify with broad cultural images as a symbol of a specific concept or orientation or a generalized depiction of value, such as the celebration of ‘maverick’ images of policing as part of a ‘backstage’ police culture (Fassin 2013) or the modern trend among US police officers to adapt the imagery of the vigilante comic book character The Punisher. (Riesman 2017)

Narratives of social problems, or of behavior or behavioral patterns that can be / have been problematized, could be expected to differ between policing life worlds and different elements of the community in which policing takes place. This divergence, however, is expected to be the strongest in the most formal, institutionalized situations, this in which individual responsibility and agency is restrained or defined out of existence; situations in which the authority of the police is more situational or based on personal relationships, that is, the closer the police officer is to what is actually going on, are presumed to allow for a greater bridging of the myths and cultural explanations between police and community. It should be kept in mind that cultural narratives, like social roles or identities, are also not unchanging fixed concepts but rather are claims—propositions for belief—that can be presented, negotiated, modified, and accepted or rejected. A police officer responding to a call might be convinced by the account presented by the purported offender and decide to use his or her discretion to overlook the incident, only to have some minor utterance or symbol re-contextualize the event and result in the officer resorting to a familiar institutional role. A police officer responding to a disturbance might be assuaged by the individual reporting that it was simply an “episode” or having a family member confirm that the individual is in therapy and that outbursts or altercations are rare. Differing cultural narratives can be found here in between vocabularies of motive: is the individual “crazy” or “mentally disturbed”? Both formulations were used in different situations within the Revierpolizei in differing contexts—for example, the man described in Chapter Four who attacked a police officer was “crazy” (“verrückt”), a word with everyday uses in terms of labeling deviance or establishing boundaries but not necessarily defining a social problem or pathology. Other individuals, particularly in cases of known individuals reporting by strangers (to the individual and the police) for ‘acting strange’ were described as “mentally ill” (“geistlich krank”) suggesting either the need to involve additional referral agencies or invoking a narrative of understanding, attempting to anchor an image of the person as “troubled” rather than a “troublemaker.” A typical negative descriptor is “asozial,” a generalized characterization which can imply a plethora of negative attributes and characterizations without making any specific claims about ‘causes’ or ‘pathology.’ (Funke 1990) In several instances different officers made statements about specific individuals ‘with migration backgrounds’ claiming, “he’s not a fundamentalist [or “Salafist”] but think he has a socialization problem.” These statements removed the ascription of an individual from a field that might require a more technical, serious, or institutional re-contextualization (as fundamentalism would then imply terrorism and be well out of the scope of most Revierpolizei work) whereas ‘socialization’ is a more general concept which can have both macro / structural dimensions (properly outside the scope of most if not all police work) and micro / interactional dimensions, which would be (and often were) reflected in officers approaching maintaining formal posturing and matter-of-fact communication when encountering these individuals. Similar patterns were found in many other cases, in which more ‘definitive’ problems or labels were indicated but essentially waved away to be replaced with a more general labeling with more relevance for everyday interaction then for official documentation: “he’s not exactly a Nazi, but he gets aggressive sometimes,” “

One single narrative will rarely dominate a concept, situation, or form of action, but instead they form an array or set of narratives which can be compared or combined; narratives themselves may undergo change over time as they are presented and depicted in different ways or with reference to different related or conflicting understandings, with some essentially falling out of the ‘collective consciousness,’ and others developing or being refined based on more frequent or visible use or their application to identified changes in society. (cf. Burke 1966, 1969, see also Bourdieu 1991) The use of cultural narratives related to ‘moral panic’ in the 1980s tended to emphasize danger to children and the risk of strangers or ‘seemingly normal’ neighbors who might be serial killers (Best 1993, Jenkins 1994), and while these images are still visible and these narratives can be found, their public visibility has been reduced to some extent and replaced with images, clichés and stereotypes related instead to terrorism, mass shootings, and politically or racially motivated violence. (Altheide 2009, cf. Best 1999, see also Garland 2008 for an argument for how these changing narratives are framed by societal power dynamics.) Similar to how the concept of moral panic has sometimes been interpreted (Best 1999) it is here irrelevant to what extent these cultural narratives are ‘true’ or based in reality or even truly believed to be realistic: the relevance here lies in the fact that they can be used as a basis both for interpreting current and future situations as well as for establishing intersubjective communication; conflicting cultural narratives will only need to be reconciled when both are simultaneously invoked but cannot both fit to the same proffered interpretation or outcome. For example, similar images of fear or insecurity related to the Post-9/11 US were used in parodies and comedies (ranging from the TV show Arrested Development to the over-the-top Team America: World Police) in which the target audience was (most likely) not intended to interpret those symbols (caricatures of ‘terrorists’ and heroic, zealous government agents with little restraint or oversight) as ‘realistic’ but rather as comically representing the cultural narratives taken seriously by others: communicating with narratives and related symbols does not imply a belief in those symbols, but simply the availability of a relevant communicative frame. This can often be seen in the use of policing stereotypes in police humor, or more general in the selective and subversive use of East German stereotypes by East Germans: officers were familiar with Rainald Grebe’s parody anthem Brandenburg, and at one point began an impromptu sing-along, including the (translated) lyrics:

There are states where something’s happening

There are states were something’s really happening, and there’s

Brandenburg…

In Brandenburg, once again someone crashed into a tree

What can you do when you’re 17, 18 in Brandenburg?

Cultural narratives are often presented and referred to through popular culture, mass media, folklore and so on, but in this understanding they are not limited to those formats, and are could essentially refer to any form of pre-existing understanding that fits in some way to a understanding that links process to structure, that is, how the world is believed to work, with the presumption that even these elements are built on additional larger scale narratives. As David Garland (2001) notes, “without a grounded, routine, collective experience of crime, it is unlikely that crime news and drama would attract such large audiences or sell so much advertising space.” (158) Policing fits in the same way, in that, for most people, ‘routine’ experience is limited to de-contextualized outsider observations (seeing a police car passing by, seeing a blocked off car accident) and a significant media saturation of wildly divergent but institutionally bounded depictions: police can be good or bad, effective or incompetent, but are almost exclusively portrayed within the broad realm of policing, law enforcement, justice, public order, and crime, which makes them still recognizable as police. For example, cultural narratives about police training are often shown in comedic form in US popular culture (and rarely shown in serious, dramatic form), where police training is widely (though not necessarily inaccurately) seen to be underemphasized and consisting of relatively low academic standards. (Chappell 2008) The use of these narratives depends on an existing understanding not only of what it is police do and should do but also basic understanding of what education and training even mean, allowing for a conceptual division between, for example, classroom training and on-the-job experiential training under the supervision of a field training officer or mentor. An audience, observing a reference to police training, might at first be unsure or ambivalent about whether this best refers to knowledge and professionalism or, as previously suggested, a lack of either, but which generalized narrative is seen as the ‘best fit’ will have more to do with which best provides meaning to the ongoing storyline than to which interpretation of training the individual audience member believes to be more correct.³ Peter Manning (1996) describes how cultural images are selected from an array of existing images based on assumptions of what the intended audience will interpret ‘correctly’:

The images represent a sample from a population of known images. An image must be seen as both sampled properly and as a proper sample of core elements that constitute the scene. For example, a “police stop” should contain core elements seen as typical of such an idealized stereotypical police scene. It should resemble others of this common-sense set or type in the viewer’s experience. On the other hand, editors, film producers, and commercial makers may be wholly ignorant of viewers’ tastes or what resonates with viewers. Although inaccurate, they believe that can imagine the viewer’s memories, tastes and associations and, more importantly, they think they can effectively manipulate those factors. (268–269)

Even if the images—and resulting narrative—are selected or created based on ‘incorrect assumptions’ it can be presumed that in most cases the general representation which is intended can be understood by the audience; for example, the ‘mistakes’ or inaccuracies in presentations of policing is a common topic of discussion for both police officers and students of criminal justice, but both groups still seem able to enjoy TV shows about police or crime, and certainly are able to recognize policing characters and policing actions even when they differ significantly from what would be ‘normal’ to a real-life officer: this is an essential function of suspension of disbelief, which allows one to interpret symbols and images through their use within a narrative and not strictly based on their fit to a true experiential-derived ideal. Understandings of cultural narratives and their meaning within a specific context are not simple reflections of identifying images from other cultural contexts, but is also a process of challenging, modifying, or calling into question those images, whether they come in the form of personal anecdotes, urban legends or folklore, dramatic plot-driven stories in film or television, or news media accounts.

The overlap between popular culture narrative and everyday personal narratives is complex and often blurry (see also Fassin 2014 for an exploration of ethnography and fiction), but anecdotal evidence has emphasized the relevance they exhibit when individuals engage in social worlds or institutions which they have previously only encountered through fictionalized portrayals: within criminal justice the “CSI effect” is often brought up as an example, in which jurors are underwhelmed by evidence in criminal trials which would previously be considered ‘normal,’ as their expectations of overwhelming evidence have been shaded by the highly stylized and over-the-top use of scientific-looking forensic science methods in TV shows including the CSI franchise. (Cole and Diosa-Villa 2009)⁴ As cultural narratives are presumed to be essentially infinite in light of the countless varieties, subversions, and retellings, it should be assumed that most cultural narratives would not take precedence in how situations are immediately understood—for this reason cultural narratives often require ‘anchoring’ to explain to the audience what kind of story is being told and which of all possible narratives are the most likely to fit to the story being told.⁵

Cultural narratives are not necessarily dominant or exclusive, and often can be found in direct conflict or contradictory forms even when presented together, such as in the case of redemption stories, in which a flawed character becomes a heroic figure by overcoming adversity and possible self-sacrifice, which may also overlap with other narratives about ‘warning signs,’ certain types of behavior, such as violence, substance abuse, or compulsive lying, which are often used to suggest that a character is likely to engage in other negatively-portrayed actions, shouldn’t be trusted, or is unlikely to find redemption. Cultural narratives can include broad narratives which suggest the entirety of the plot, such as the ‘star-crossed lovers’ element in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and its countless repetition both in direct homages or parodies (such as often found in classic children’s cartoons) or in more modern retellings such as West Side Story. The use of this type of narrative, which is essentially taken as a durable pre-existing frame to which newer elements can be fitted to their precursors, means that the eventual outcome of the story will likely not be a surprise, but the art, so to speak, is in the telling. Other uses of cultural narratives focus more on applying specific elements without adapting an entire plot from beginning to end: the star-crossed lovers may also be included in a story that doesn’t end in their deaths, or that continues after it. For example, the 1997 film Titanic invokes most of the typical narrative elements of a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ type story, but with only of the pair dying, and the overall story is in no way a simple retelling; yet the fact that the characters are viewed as being held apart by society’s expectations and class differences is presumably part of what makes the audience see their developing relationship as authentic, whereas the characters who express the (normal, in the world of the film) view that their relationship is unacceptable are certainly intended to be ‘bad’ characters for whom the audience has little sympathy.

‘Buddy cop’ films tend to the rely on the premise that two police officers with different backgrounds and contrasting working styles and personalities can learn from each other, overcome their initial distrust, and use their newly developed complementary skillset to catch (or kill) the antagonist; the basis of the plot development is centered around the audience understanding the two different styles or philosophies which the characters represent, by-the-book cop versus loose cannon, streetwise cop versus scientist cop, etc.; the cultural narratives used in establishing this premise has become so recognizable and cliché that most modern examples move in the direction of self-reference or parody. (cf. Wilson 2000, Bielejewski 2016) As specific film / TV tropes, the elements of ‘buddy cop’ movies are not expected to be translatable to everyday life or actual police work, but simply reflect the narrative and plotting practices used in telling stories involving police: most of the attributes of the character are already included in different versions of the basic role, and only minimal icons and framing are necessary to show the audience—who are expecting easily interpretable characters—what kind of cop they are watching.

Cultural narratives in fiction often serve not just to identify characters’ attributes, but often to set the ‘moral tone’ of the character, i.e. to tell the audience who is the hero and who is the villain. Many of the typical narrative practices used for this purpose have become cliché and are today resigned primarily to parody (e.g. Police Academy [1984] lampooning the ‘rescuing a cat from a tree’ trope by having Officer Tackleberry shoot the cat out of the tree) but some version can be found in most fictional narratives, usually unrelated or only indirectly related to the major plot. These types of constructions of characters based on actions have often been explored in terms of social construction and media analysis (Bielejewski 2016), but of more relevance to the case at hand is the use of value signifiers in everyday narratives; the types of descriptions and framing of actions to (attempt to) make clear to the audience that a specific character is ‘good,’ bad,’ ‘noble,’ ‘cowardly’ and so on. (cf. Wagner et al. 2009)

6.3 Time and Narrative Action

“How did it get so late so soon? It’s night before it’s afternoon. December is here before it’s June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?”

– Dr. Seuss, How Did It Get So Late So Soon

A narrative presentation is not just an action, but at the same time it presents its own conceptual forms of action. All narratives propose a temporal sequencing. (Ricoeur 1984) The ordering of events, even stripped of any descriptions of causality or correlation, suggests connections which will be filled in by imagined action. The fact that, as in lived experience, not all elements of a narrative are brought to attention, highlighted, or made visible at all means that crucial elements to understanding how a narrative ‘works’ can be found both in what is specifically emphasized as well as in what is left unsaid, either leaving the audience free to fill in the details or with the assumption that they will already share the narrator’s understanding: this is the essence of Weber’s ideal type. (Weber 1958)

Narratives highlight violations of norms or expectations as the ‘interesting’ part of the story, but by using existing forms they can maintain an emphasis on action over description as necessary. As narratives are (re)tellings of events with a causal sequence—not necessarily told chronologically—the tension and conflict within the stories is generally centered around what will happen, which outcomes follow—and are therefore likely to be interpreted as being caused by—which acts. (Van Dijk 1975, Barthes 2004) This tension is often established with a break from normality, by having a character take an action or something to occur which is not necessarily fully interpretable on its own, either by situationally establishing a dissonance between states and/or actions, (e.g. “I was hungry but I had no money for food.”) or by describing actions with variable, difficult to predict, or unknowable outcomes (“The guy pulled a gun on me.”) Ending the narrative at either of these points would leave the story essentially plotless, lacking additional knowledge—this tension could be resolved not only by concluding the story, but also by prefacing it, for example, “I only stole something from the supermarket once” or “let me tell you about the time I almost got shot…” Either way, the introduction of a break from normality can be curated, fit within forms or formats, genres or tropes, to establish the type of story and to what extent the audience should have an idea or expectation of how it can be interpreted. For example, the tradition of American ghost stories often follows consistent forms, avoiding comparisons to existing popular culture images and instead emphasizing breaks with normal expectations of cause-and-effect, along the lines of “the door slammed shut, but no one was in the room,” tending to remove otherwise ‘logical’ explanations rather than simply posit the supernatural as the most obvious explanation. (cf. Waskul and Waskul 2016) The audience will likely understand—apart from the setting and context of the story—what is being insinuated, in the fact that action is being presented that could not occur without a human actor, and yet (within the narrative) certainly occurred. The concept of ghosts and hauntings serves here as a specific cultural narrative; that is what allows the genre of ghost stories to be told in the way they are as well as to be depicted on film and television. Additionally, these stories often center on an element of doubt or hedging (Stokes and Hewitt 1976, Potter 1996), e.g. with the storyteller prefacing the story by claiming to have never previously believed in ghosts, which essentially challenges the audience to infer an alternative explanation. This narrative device is also often found in crime and deviance stories, e.g. “I don’t know if that guy was on drugs, but something was up with him.” (cf. Jenkins 1994b, Revier 2017) As described earlier while discussing narratives of social problems, this practice was often used by Revierpolizei officer to present something as problematic within a situation but while avoiding larger or overt ‘clinical’ labels while still invoking the idea that structural factors could be—in this case or others—playing a role: “I don’t really think he was an alcoholic, but this time he was so drunk that he couldn’t even understand that he was talking to a police officer.”

The genre of a narrative further guides the assumptions and expectations the audience are most likely to have of the unfolding narrative: the story is framed in a way that need not make it predictable but that can manage expectations enough to make it broadly interpretable. For example, a slightly different framing story could transform a ghost story into a crime story, in which the assumption of the supernatural is replaced with the assumption of a burglar (or worse.) In ghost stories, the use of phrases such as “I never believed in ghosts, but…” not only serve as a form of narrative credibility, but more importantly work as genre anchors which establish the plausible bounds of the current narrative format. Anchors support or cement understandings of how the genre could be interpreted, and could include elements such as the use of laugh tracks in television sit-coms or even laughter by the storyteller, the use of humor in otherwise ‘serious’ situations to undercut the seriousness (e.g. a character losing a limb in a swordfight and then declaring “it’s only a flesh wound!”) or conversely the emphasis on ‘menacing’ imagery in thrillers or ‘gritty dramas’ to maintain a sense of tension even before any danger, risk or violence has appeared (for example, the depiction of a badly burned teddy bear floating in water in the opening title scenes of Breaking Bad, which first occurs long before the object appears in the storyline.) The type of ghosts stories described by Waskul and Waskul (2016) have a basis in folklore and urban legends, and while the narrator will often attempt to make them shocking or scary, often the major narrative concern is to make them credible or realistic to some degree; as the narrator or protagonist in the story essentially pleads ignorance of what is really happening, the audience is intended to quickly catch on to the obvious answer: ghosts; in other ‘modern classic’ genre narratives, the presumed answer could alternatively be aliens or the government. Other uses of genre anchorages, both in TV and film as well as in everyday narratives, are to identify a story as comedic, problem-defining / tragic, or illustrative / informative. Different forms of narrative practices are used depending on the format, but most are easily recognizable, ranging from simple things such as the title or style of the text in movies to the use of phrases such as “I saw the craziest thing yesterday!” Establishing the genre of a narrative allows for a different set of cultural narratives to become more prominently available while excluding others, or at least setting them aside until specifically invoked. The depiction of police officers in comedy (such as TV shows Reno 911 or Brooklyn 99) almost always show police doing illegal, dangerous and implausible things that if taken seriously would make them villains or the overall story harshly critical of policing. Occurring within comedy shows, however, these actions are not intended to be taken as representative of actual police work, but rather the story plays with expectations and stereotypes either specifically to make comments about the irony of some of those elements (almost every sit-com featuring a police character includes a scene in which a family member is in trouble with the law, and the role strain between being a police officer and a family member is depicted in some way) or simply to advance other narratives without specifically focusing the story on policing issues, such as in countless plotlines where a police officer character learns to trust him/herself or overcome some personal obstacle, in the end single-handedly capturing a major criminal or personally leading a raid on a mafia hideout, often making jokes to other officers or directly to the ‘bad guys’ while doing so—the actual dangers are downplayed here and the audience is not expected to feel tension because of the comic setting. The long history of policing narratives in popular cultures means that police work can be fit into multiple genres each with a variety of unique and shared cultural narratives; just in the way that police often talk about policing in ways that have direct little relation to what they do (Waddington 1999) there is no reason to believe that every ‘interpretable’ image of policing in media or everyday narratives is directly related to a sincere belief about what police is or the what police routinely do. The concept of genre anchors, however, is applicable to everyday policing situations, as the diversity of policing cultural narratives can mean that citizens may need additional context to understand the situation they find themselves in when encountering the police; a division between, for example, comedy and tragedy can often be found simply in the practices and phrasings officers use to explain why some behavior is dangerous or unacceptable, or why a specific decision (i.e. giving a fine rather than letting someone off with a warning) is being taken. Policing stories could be at the same time funny and frightening, and the use of genres frames not just how the audience should interpret this story in terms of following the plot or expectations, but also what type of lessons could be learned, essentially emphasizing why the story is being told: to amuse, to educate, to establish facts, or some combination of these goals and more.

Emphasizing a break with normality does introduce a form of narrative tension and communicates to the audience that ‘something is happening (in the story) that will need to be explained’ but this does not necessarily mean that nothing is explained at this point in the narrative; cultural narratives work as models of potential explanation that can be presumed or assumed (by the audience) as potential resolutions to this narrative tension, even if they are not confirmed or ‘anchored’ by the storyteller until later in the narrative. For example, characters may be introduced into the narrative and described, either directly and specifically or through the use of described actions or history, as ‘strange,’ ‘abnormal,’ ‘deviant,’ or ‘unpredictable.’ This may give the audience reason to distrust this character or suspect them of deception, etc., even though the protagonist or other characters in the story may lack a ‘legitimate’ reason to think this way within the context of the narrative. Various stock characters or ideal type images based on extant cultural narratives may fill this role⁶, whether it be drug addiction, mental illness or concepts of ‘craziness,’ or basic concepts of personality and psychopathology. If this character is later revealed to, in fact, be duplicitous or a villain within the context of the story, the audience may feel justified in their previous assumptions: at a basic level the cultural narrative reinforces itself, in that it was assumed to exist—likely necessary for the narrative to be broadly interpretable—and is then confirmed, rewarding the audience for being clever enough to predict ‘unexpected’ events and outcomes. This establishes a form of credibility by both having the narrative unusual enough to be worth telling while adhering closely enough to established bounds of interpretability to avoid becoming so unusual that it cannot be followed up on or applied in any way. (cf. Labov 1982, Ochs 2004) Other prominent examples could include underdog stories, in which a character specifically described as weak, powerless, or undervalued is able to accomplish something great or at least unexpected; this contrast alone can make the story into something seen as worth telling, and the ‘entertainment value’ of the story is likely increased by emphasizing the weakness of the character.⁷

6.3.1 Breaking from the Norm and the Tellability of Narratives

“The trouble with writing fiction is that it has to make sense, whereas real life doesn’t.”

– Iain M. Banks, The Guardian, “Iain Banks: The Final Interview” June 14, 2013

Breaks with normality within narratives are invitations to explain the break: as actions are primarily narratively constructed to be intentional or motivated (Van Dijk 1975, cf. Sandberg 2010) these breaks often speak to questions of the character; breaks with normality can be explained either by suggesting that the context was incomplete or misunderstood (e.g. the action was not actual abnormal or deviant, it was simply seen in the wrong light) or that the character incorporates some characteristic which can explain the action: the deviant action is simply the result of a deviant actor, with the causal mechanism implicit but unexplored. (cf. Becker 1963, Schur 1969) The use of narrative as a social action—storytelling and cultural production—here overlaps with the sociological explanation of dramaturgy and face-to-face interaction, where narratives are required in certain interactions to account for behaviors that may violate social norms (Scott and Lyman 1968) or that can be used to justify actions that may still be deemed unacceptable when performed by others. (Maruna and Copes 2005) Narrative structure pays a role in negotiating the definition of the situation by allowing, restricting or disallowing certain forms, controlling who is allowed to play which roles, and whether action can effectively be presented or normal or if it needs to be specifically justified, reformulated, or present a challenge to the norm. (cf. Van Maanen 1978a)

Analysis of narrative structure has often considered speech acts or statements to be narratives per se only when they fulfill this criteria of establishing a break with normality, often but not necessarily accompanied by elements such as introductory exposition providing a setting, background and context: Van Dijk (1975) specifically makes a distinction between the kind of narrative one might share of a dangerous or violent encounter and a police report in which specific details are more central than emotionality, tension or suspense. Leaving aside the question of whether official reports would be considered narratives in the sense intended here, police descriptions of events—either as ‘canteen’ stories or in describing the events to encountered individuals in the process of formally defining them certainly are. A significant difference is that the break with normality found here is often implicit; the deviance or unexpected behavior is often routinized and rarely as unexpected, tense, or suspenseful as it might otherwise be, as crime (and stories of crime) firmly fit within the habitus of policing. (Fletcher 1996, Chan 2004, Van Hulst 2019) Police are considered assessors of deviance within society (Sacks 1972), and the identification of something that police consider deviant is not inherently unique or a break from routine. As Van Hulst (2013) notes, “after a while, police officers find what might be considered unusual for the average citizen not worth telling a story about to one’s fellow officers,” but also that “if police officers were to only talk if they had experienced something out of the ordinary, it would be awfully quiet at the police station and in the patrol cars.” (637–638)

The correlates of tellability in policing stories are unique to that institutional culture. Behr (1993) writes that, “in the professional lives of police officers there were (and are), alongside daily routines and repetitions, events that bear such distinguishing experiential qualities that they become firmly anchored in the memories of the officers.” (50) Making these experiences recountable as policing narratives requires an emphasis on those experiential qualities which fit in some way to pre-configured policing values or perspectives but not in a way that makes them simply routine. The ‘interesting’ elements of narratives which are told within policing occupational cultures are not so much that someone did something wrong, but rather specifically who did something (either individually, “the Smith kid,” or as an a stand-in for a broader identity, “some punk kid covered in tattoos,”) what it might represent (e.g. establishing something as part of a pattern or growing trend), or some other incongruity between how things appear and how they were experienced, for example in comedic or shocking stories which often reveal assumed social norms or values by challenging them or describing them being broken in some way; policing stories often reveal expectations of expected normality by showing how these do not apply to police officers, who should be (rhetorically) expecting the unexpected.⁸ (cf. McNulty 1994, Ford 2003, Conti 2009)

In policing narratives, especially, the breaking of norms is not ultimately presented as the core conflict or question to be resolved; more relevant are questions of how social norms are applied, to whom, in which circumstances, and how the violation is interpreted more broadly both by other characters within the narrative and at the ‘meta’ level by the audience. (cf. Van Hulst 2019) From either a narrative or interactionist perspective, social norms are not seen as inviolable—their violation is the very basis of a great deal of social interaction—but social practices and forms are developed and negotiated specifically to manage whether these norms have actually been broken, what that means, and how it can or should be responded to; one way of examining these practices is by focusing on the use of motive and how it is used narratively to frame social action.

6.4 Vocabularies of Motive

“The mind commands the body and is instantly obeyed. The mind commands itself and meets resistance.”

– St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

Mills (1940) has emphasized the use of specific vocabularies of motive, which, despite the social psychological basis of the concept are “in effect, no more than words used by actors in situations where they need to account for their conduct when questioned by others.” (Campbell 1991: 90) These vocabularies therefore are not necessarily causal or even directly related to the actions, but can provide insight both into the (inter-)subjective understanding of the situation which guides that action, as well as the (perceived) structure which constrains, channels, or provides a model for interactional processes. (cf. Burke 1989) Motives “are a way for an observer to assign relevance to behavior in order that it may be recognized as another instance of normally ordered action,” (Blum and McHugh 1971: 99–100) suggesting that their invocation to describe one’s own or another’s behavior can be practically similar but involve significantly different structural practices in terms of power, status, and interpretation. (cf. Austin 1965) Mills notes that vocabularies of motive are often specific to their institutional background and the types of behavior that are either required or valued there: for example, a doctor may present his handling of an uncooperative patient differently than a police officer, as the doctor can attribute his actions to an ultimate desire or mandate to heal, while the police officer has a mandate that may emphasize helping society over specific individuals and here use the language of punishment. (Kurtz and Upton 2017 cf. Manning 1995) A more extreme example could be found in the work of Westley (1953, 1970) where police officers often described violence as a form of punishment specifically against individuals who didn’t conform to police expectations of them (often based on race)—yet at the same time Westley noted that actual occurrences of violence were predominantly legal and based on ‘legitimate’ policing exigencies: it is unclear whether the police are interpreting their actions differently than the guiding framework which gives them formal legitimacy, or simply telling stories in a way that asserts their authority but does not immediately correspond to the actions they would normally take. (Manning 1977, 2012, Waddington 1999)

Narrative constructions of self—through the frame of motive—are refined in the course of social interaction, whether conversation, monologue, or primarily ‘symbolic’ interaction based on gestures, the presentation of symbols, etc. (cf. Ricoeur 1984, Maines 1993, Ezzy 1998) The vocabularies on offer are not unlimited, and also not fixed. While Mills suggested that they were likely a product of broader socio-cultural changes, such as the increasing use of ‘public service’ justifications by businessmen in the 20^th century as pure ‘profit seeking’ became unfashionable, further explorations have focused more on the situational factors and interactional processes that provide meaning to various justifications and accounts, and thereby allow them to become useful. (Scott and Lyman 1968, Goffman 1981, Labov 1982, Ewick and Silbey 2005, cf. Foucault 1970) Burke’s (1989) conception of vocabularies of motive emphasizes how structural changes in the social world can lead to ‘disjointed’ situations, where experiences do not firmly or clearly match any available vocabulary, causing individuals to feel alienated, similar to the Durkheimian understanding of the condition of anomie. Burke argues that individuals—making up society as a whole but each acting through their own understandings and personal motivations to establish a common solidarity—will search for, or attempt to create, new symbols of authority which can serve to establish, essentially, a common language which the speakers feel adequately conveys their understanding of (and position in) society, shared symbols which can serve “as an active way of maintaining cultural cohesion.” (Burke 1969: 174, cf. Branaman 2016) While Burke’s position is more macro-sociological and less overtly practical for analyzing day-to-day institutional routines, it does raise the question of how the police, as the public face of the government and justice (both institutionally and conceptually) manage to alternatingly and simultaneously include and exclude individuals from their common image of ‘the public,’ ‘society,’ and ‘our community.’ Common policing practices, such as separating individuals physically and deciding who is allowed to speak and when, often specifically limit the ability of individuals to provide suitable explanations, and while these types of interactions may be routine for the officers they will often be new and possibly frightening experience to others who are both lacking a ‘proper’ vocabulary to locate themselves in a social space and also find themselves constrained in attempts to develop one. Rhetorical and symbolic practices of inclusion and exclusion will be discussed in greater detail in the following chapter, as understanding how police practices shape their (imagined) communities requires a deeper understanding of the sources of and practices of establishing a police self-image within a culture of policing: that is, the use of narrative practices and vocabularies of motive internally within policing social worlds in ways that will affect how police view (or at least present and interact with) non-police social worlds.

Specifically relevant for policing occupational cultures is the establishing of ‘common sense’ as a motivation for action. (cf. McNulty 1994) Police decisions often—by their very nature—lack a specific inflexible basis, and attempts to systemize the type of behaviors, appearances or statements that police should ‘legitimately’ consider suspicious have for the most part failed, leaving police discretion as something of a black box where officers are assumed to make decisions based on experience and learning from other police but at the same time being aware of which contributing factors are not sufficient on their own and which factors are best left out of official documents. (cf. Muir 1979, Meehan 1986, 1992, Manning 1988, Bittner 1990, Kelling 1999, Harcourt 2001, Marks 2004) This common sense basis has been described in terms of challenging institutional or bureaucratic frames; however, Bittner (1965) considers it simply a function of the embedded properties of the bureaucracy within the practices of everyday life. (cf. Schutz 1953)

Geertz (1975) describes four ‘quasi-qualities’ of common sense representations, defined in terms of being “natural, practical, thin, immethodological and accessible” (18) Naturalness, considered to be the most significant factor, refers to how common sense understandings are matters of course, where acceptable explanations require no deeper explanation; some local men were using drugs and almost died as a result (cf. Revier 2017) or, to use an example from Brandenburg, a teacher was insufficiently strict with students who brought vodka to school, so of course the students continued to bring alcohol—it is the nature of teenagers.

Practicalness, or practicality, does not refer only to a utilitarian or functional concept but rather to how effectively this knowledge can conceptually be applied to existing taxonomies or phenomenologies of social behavior and cause-and-effect, as well as how useful this knowledge might be in terms of cultural values which prize certain types of knowledge, and certain types of applicable explanations, over others: criminological theories are more likely to be of practical interest to the police if they can aid in extrapolating crime prevention or identification techniques, whether by identifying certain individuals or groups as criminals or by ascribing certain visible qualities to criminals and deviants; theories attributing crime or deviance to structural inequalities, poverty, discrimination, late-stage capitalism etc. are easily dismissed as too impractical to ring true in a ‘common sense’ analysis. (cf. Reuss-Ianni 1983, see also Worrall’s [2013] description of the ‘police sixth sense’) Practical common sense explanations, however, were also used to rhetorically separate observed or known behavior from otherwise likely explanations, e.g. describing someone as a ‘good kid’ who made a mistake getting involved in drugs while maintaining that other (abstract) drug users deserve little sympathy because they voluntarily decided to take drugs in the first place; these types of explanations were also commonly used to mediate the descriptive role of violence, as described in Chapter Four. Not entirely unrelatedly, thinness refers to how uncomplicated the common sense explanation can be, to the avoidance of appearing to ‘try too hard’ to make connections. The invocation of the fact that “some people are just bad” is a thin enough explanation to also be of practical use to provide a satisfying conclusion to a story or an episode. The importance of thinness seems to vary based on the social distance from (and narrator’s disposition towards) the subject, with more abstract or anonymous actors being fully explainable with simple cause and effect statements and known actors often being allowed more ‘wiggle-room’ in allowing for various accounts and explanations to be taken seriously. (cf. Schönbach 2010) The variance in uses of common sense explanations speaks to their immethodologicalness (a term Geertz admits is terrible), to their ad hoc nature and selective, sometimes seemingly random, invocation and acceptance or rejection. Common sense comes in forms such as proverbs, slogans, jokes, anecdotes, and rhymes which may have little acceptance or latent meaning apart from their tactical use—evidenced for example by the use of “the exception proves the rule”⁹ as a defense of a rule which has just been observed to not hold up to testing. Common sense arguments are not applied methodically, but rather are used in a variety of often inconsistent or contradictory ways, but their strength is deigned to be specifically within their common sense nature: it is those who question or challenge these assumptions, rather, who are engaging in rhetorical games.

Geertz’s final ‘quasi-quality’ of common sense explanations is accessibility, the emphasis on the common aspect of common sense: essentially anyone within the relevant community should be able to understand the common sense explanations used within that community, if not necessarily apply the ‘correct’ lessons to the ‘proper’ situations. This is again what helps to make common sense practical and applicable: the burden of explanation is taken away from experts and instead a burden of understanding is put on the other. A police officer postulating that crossing against a red light is not only incorrect from a legal standpoint but also dangerous is not an opening for a spirited debate about public safety, personal responsibility, or the ability of the individual to make personal judgements of safety, but is rather an admonishment of the individual for doing something that, in this case—and it is of course highly relevant that this behavior was observed by the police—needs to be commonly thought of as ‘wrong.’ Common sense explanations, in a context where they are accessible, can be powerful rhetorical tools particularly within police work. The ‘art’ of them, however, lies in learning how to apply and establish them in a way that maintains the speaker’s preferred definition of the situation as well as the overall ability to define situations: despite its ‘commonness,’ common sense as a source of knowledge is a learned skill, in the same way that individuals must be socialized into a community, society, and life world. (Cohen 1985)

Van Maanen (1974) notes that, based on his experience and observations within the police academy and field training, rookie officers will often be given ‘general advice’ but that “no veteran officer would consider telling a rookie who was not under his direct charge how to handle a particular call or what to do in a particular instance.” (70) Rather than practical information on how to handle specific cases—according to Van Maanen, likely to be dismissed as irrelevant to the realities of the street anyway—officers learn motive talk and ways to present narratives so that they can satisfy both cultural expectations (i.e. in terms of shared expressed values) and institution necessities (as constructed against the cultural backdrop.) The presentation of narratives in line with cultural considerations serves not only to demonstrate a (tacit) acceptance of general cultural values—i.e. how things should be done or, more specifically, how things should be presented as being done—but also works as a form of boundary maintenance by demonstrating ‘insider status’ allowing for the ascription of motives and moral de-valuing of actors unable to construct and defend their own identity narratively. (cf. Hunt 1985, Cancino and Enriquez 2004, see also Copes 2016) Justifications for police actions such as the use of force—while not necessarily ‘true’ reflections of the police worldview—can show how the police dramaturgically legitimize their authority with respect to ‘mainstream values’ or ‘mainstream society,’ and evidence how different authorities are seen as relevant to different settings, contexts, and social actors. (Kurtz and Upton 2017)

6.5 Storytelling in Police Culture

“When the detective in a police romance stands alone, and somewhat fatuously fearless amid the knives and fists of a thieves’ kitchen, it does certainly serve to make us remember that it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure, while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies. It reminds us that the whole noiseless and unnoticeable police management by which we are ruled and protected is only a successful knight-errantry.”

– G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Stories (1901)

Police work can be boring. A significant amount of time is spent simply driving around, completing routine paperwork, and in various bureaucratic tasks. This reality generally doesn’t conform to the idealized expectations of the general public, as police narratives have become a part of mass culture—and tend to emphasis scenes of action, drama and mystery. Simply put, police officers have a great deal of time in which to tell stories—particularly in the common case where two officers are assigned to work together for a longer period of time. While not unique to policing, the telling of stories has taken on a special significance in the occupational culture of policing. (Waddington 1999) The telling of stories, apart from simply an activity to pass the time, plays two significant roles: the stories, and their telling, has value as social capital, and the stories are often sources of knowledge which can be drawn upon.

Stories serve as social capital through their symbolic meaning as a commodity; stories represent models of experience, (van Dijk 1975: 286) which has been typically highly valued within policing occupational cultures. (Chan 2004, van Hulst 2013) These stories need not even be personal, simply collecting second-hand stories can demonstrate that the storyteller has experience, as well as the necessary access to networks where such stories are shared. The access to ‘insider information’ presents the storyteller as connected or important, not just through personal connections but by applying the proper cultural-institutional frame to the available facts—even if the source of those facts is publicly available. This was often observed in how personal details were incorporated into stories even when it was clear they would require further explanation or would trigger follow-up questions, e.g. referring to public officials by first name. McNulty (1994) describes how stories of the on-duty deaths of police officers was used as a reflection of the risks of policing and the fact that dangers can often be unexpected, but also included insider details to personalize or connect the stories to the details and make them more relevant to an audience of police recruits: even though most officers would likely never be in a similar situation, the stories were made more visceral to make them something more relatable. These types of stories are often interpreted to reflect the core values of police work; often at odds with the routine experiences of most officers. As a result, ‘effective’ storytelling often includes elements of conflict or violence (as described in the previous chapter) although stories emphasizing conflict-resolution or more banal situations such as basic misunderstandings were also commonly told.

From a functional perspective, many of these stories could be interpreted as ‘tests’ of the audience, attempting to shock, push boundaries, or simply gauge reactions: many of these stories could be categorized as either ‘war stories,’ emphasizing some of the hardships of police work while presenting classical value attributions, or ‘horror stories,’ which challenge presumed mainstream values and sensibilities and, without necessarily glorifying violence or gore, tend to suggest that a competent police officer has either a strong stomach or a robust sense of humor. (cf. Ewick and Silbey 1995, Crank 1998, Ford 2003, Kurtz and Upton 2017) The challenge to the listener is not just to react to the story in a normatively ‘correct’ way, fulfilling their ascribed or desired social role, but to do so in a way that imagines the story as a real event, putting themselves in the place of the narrator or protagonist: for example, stories demonstrating graphic scenes of violence may emphasize the amount of blood or physical damage to human bodies, not simply attempting to ‘gross out’ the audience but implicitly communicating, “this is the kind of thing I have to deal with.” The telling of the story may reinforce that the specific event is unique, uncommon or unexpected, but at the same time it emphasizes the binding of the storytelling context and the narrative itself, that a police officer may have to deal with this type of situation, and that a good police officer will be able to handle listening to the story just as they would in some way be able to handle similar experiences. (Conti 2009) This fulfills an emotional function (van Dijk 1975: 286) in which certain reactions by the audience are anticipated, centered around the normative or moral interpretation of the story. While these stories may include learning / teaching components, generally the most overt purpose of the story is to be told, to present or explore values, and the most likely learning function of the story is in presenting models that can be loosely applied to future situations.

Marks et al. (2016) emphasize the fluidity of policing culture based on the fact that:

cultural knowledge is not fixed, but is continuously and contextually contested, and is arguably far more dynamic than is comfortable for easy analysis. Indeed, even axiomatic knowledge (i.e. the police mandate or mission) that might be considered the apex of police cultural knowledge is not uniformly received or espoused. Police officers are furthermore drawn from many walks of life, and do not necessarily share similar outlooks or draw on the same pools of cultural knowledge; this means that they have different perceptions of their environment and the people they police. (319)

The similarities between police stories and storytelling format may be a stronger representation of the culture than the content of the stories themselves, as the background and shared assumptions may lead to police ‘telling the same old stories’ when appropriate but taking the stories told by others with more than a grain of salt. (Waddington 1999) The genres and forms of stories may be relevant in broadly determining to what extent stories are ‘functional’ in terms of being entertainment, ritual, informative or some combination. This includes examining in what ways stories establish common sense arguments or include mutually identifiable elements, e.g. including known actors or locations to say something about those elements.

The settings of how and where stories are told likely affects the choice and structuring of the story, though to what extent stories are molded to fit certain audiences or simply not told in ‘mixed company’ is unclear and in either event unlikely to be a universal factor common to all policing organizations. (Fletcher 1996, Cockcroft 2005, Van Hulst 2019) Dozens of policing narratives were recorded from officers (both within and separate from the Revierpolizei) in Brandenburg, in settings including over morning coffee in unit offices, in one-on-one settings in squad cars or walking through town, in meetings with other official agencies such as the Ordnungsamt or the fire department, in public settings such as street festivals or the Christmas Market with audiences including acquaintances of the officer, retired officers, and public officials, at private events, in restaurants, or in officers’ homes. Fletcher (1996) describes using one-on-two interviews to encourage officers to ‘tell each other stories,’ to attempt to maintain or approximate the ‘normal’ context of policing stories: the majority of witnessed narratives were in one-on-one situations due to the fact that Revierpolizei officers generally work alone on normal duty, but the situations in which officers told stories to audiences of other officers (and, at least not obviously, not only for my benefit) tended to fit better to the models of storytelling presented in the literature. Unlike the examples presented by Fletcher, larger audiences were rare, as it was already uncommon to encounter more than four or five officers in a room at the same time; the cases where larger audiences came together tended to be less common events, though the performative nature of these was generally more evident.

6.5.1 War Stories

The traditional police ‘war story’ is often cited as being central to policing culture. (Van Maanen 1973, Reuss-Ianni 1984, Fletcher 1996, Ford 2003, Kurtz and Upton 2017) The term itself is inconsistently defined but used in a way that is assumed to be self-evident within the culture; essentially a war story is a story of one’s experience in the field consistent with the perceptions of values, risks, desired traits and potential outcomes that are highlighted, valued, or communicated through the broader policing culture. Ford (2003) describe war stories as:

a recounting of idealized events, entertaining humor, or police-related social commentary. They carry a message celebrating police values or techniques. They are aptly named war stories because they often deal with the physical side of policing. War stories deal with the heroic, the extreme, and the cynically humorous. They paint a picture of policing that is often at odds with daily tedium and frequently contradict official ways. (86)

Fletcher (1996) refers to stories in which “the narrator plays a heroic role against a criminal” (39), though many stories seem to be ones of failure or almost failure: the point, however, seems to be to provide not only an account of one’s experience but to offer some general lesson about police work, often presented in contrast to (presumed) ‘outsider’ assumptions. As Van Hulst (2019) notes, the point of the lesson might not necessarily be to teach, however; rather the inclusion of the cautionary element is what makes it into an effectively tellable story. War stories are, by this interpretation, often identical to the types of cautionary tales described by Hughes (1958) but emphasizing some specific forms to make them relevant to policing. War stories become cultural capital for police and developing a hardened attitude towards violence and its use becomes a rite of passage. (Marks 2004) This proved to be the case even when the violence itself wasn’t actively celebrated; the status benefits from the telling of the stories were derived instead from the experience and knowledge of the events, from their use as potentially useful lessons, and from their divergence from every routine or expectations. (Ewick and Silbey 1995, Martin 1999, Van Hulst 2013)

Maurice Punch (1979, also cited in Van Hulst 2013) provides an example of a war story less focused on heroism and more on the potential for risk and violence even when the officer himself is the only danger:

My very first night duty I nearly shot someone dead. Not intentionally though! Suddenly there was a call that a man had been seen creeping into a school. My mentor was a constable first-class, fifty-three years old, really great bloke, and we went into the school to carry out the search. The school had separate toilets, all the toilets were in rows, and you had no idea what you might come across. I saw my mentor pull out his pistol and I did the same. I’m not usually frightened, but if you walk through a dark school at night it is not like sitting at home eating fish and chips. Suddenly I pulled open a toilet door. Nothing. Another door. Again nothing. Then the next door, with your in your hand and your finger on the trigger, and there sat the bloke. I shit myself. I felt a muscle-cramp shoot through my finger and, dammit, if the thing had been cocked then the bloke was a goner. But I jumped out of my skin. (105)

For police officers, especially less experienced officers or recruits, war stories are an opportunity to “pick… up on tactics people use to make things happen. And some of those things are really funny.” (Fletcher 1996: 38) As in the above example, these are not always positive examples of how things should be done, but very often examples of how things can happen if an officer is not mentally prepared for the situation or makes the kind of mistakes that officers are supposed to avoid specifically because they have heard stories.

War stories may be first-hand or at least believable accounts connected to known elements (places or people), but these types of stories often “transform into tall-tales or parables becoming further exaggerated with time.” (Kurtz and Upton 2017: 548) Storytelling is often associated with informal or semi-formal situations, i.e. in canteens or during ‘down time’ between formal situations such as briefings or meetings. These stories have often been recorded within sessions, in which various stories are chained together, linked, or serve as inspiration for a follow-up. (Van Hulst 2013)

Just as Hughes (1958) found, many of the war stories were highly cautionary, with those involving violence often implementing a consequences of failure mechanism, or else describing warning signs which were not taken seriously enough (or only taken seriously at the last minute.) A notable feature of many war stories recounted to me was the inclusion of a level of abstraction—often it was unclear, at least in the original telling, if the narrator had actually been present, or who was actually doing what. For example, the story of a suspect fleeing from the police who was accidentally killed by a warning shot was presented in a way where I was unsure if this had happened prior to or after the unification of East and West Germany. This fit to this conception of war stories, as the important elements for drawing a lesson are found in the actions and mechanisms: the story is a warning to take the use of potentially deadly force seriously, and not intended to communicate anything about a specific officer, location, or even really a specific event beyond the proposition that this sequence of events did in fact occur. These abstractions may have been related to the fact that the audience (an audience of one field researcher, in this case) was unlikely to be at all familiar with additional elements and so they were better left out, but in contrast many stories were told specifically about local places or individuals even when those details could easily have been omitted. In this particular narrative there was no additional background on the suspect / victim or on the officer nor on the aftermath of the scene: as a war story, the narrative works as a parable specifically because it is not constrained by prologue or epilogue.

6.5.2 Horror Stories

Horror stories, apart from war stories, seemed to be designed in contrast to ‘mainstream’ values (at least in terms of tolerance for disgusting, shocking or bloody situations.) Horror stories can “serve to denote the peculiar attributes of the police occupational code and also serve to detach patrolmen from the more polite social world of their origin.” (Van Maanen 1974: 94) They can often serve as a form of secondary initiation, as a way to test who is ‘too squeamish’ to handle (hypothetical) possible incidents. Behr (1993: 58) describes not just stories but cases of officers copying and sharing photographs of car accidents and using these essentially, informally, as ‘tests of inner strength’ with the sometimes stated reasoning that officers need to be able to handle such scenes when they happen and should therefore have no problem viewing or learning about them in outside contexts.

While actual examples show a great degree of variety—and also a good degree of overlap with other forms, making the actual cut-off for horror stories highly subjective—these stories as a group could be generally divided into those that were darkly comedic and those that were more horrific. The difference here is not at all determined by the shock value of the content, but rather by the background and juxtapositions being constructed: horrific stories emphasized how brutal, remorseless, or hateful individuals (or “the world” or “society” etc.) can be, while dark comedy stories contrast everyday routine police behavior with the non-routine shocking (at a minimum, shocking to ‘mainstream society’) behavior which they encounter. One example of a dark comedy story was presented by a police officer to me in the presence of several officers from the Revierpolizei in the typical ‘canteen’ setting, in this case in a break room over coffee:

We had a report of a suicide out in the woods [outside a nearby village] and when we got there the body was hanging from a tree. It had rained, and everything was muddy. We drove out and found the body hanging, and then called for a car [presumably an ambulance], and then we found out that our car was stuck in the mud. The tires just spun. We called for someone to get us out of the mud. Then a tow truck showed up, and hooked up our car, and got stuck in the mud. Meanwhile more officers [“Kollegen”; lit: colleagues] showed up, and right away everyone was stuck too. It turned into something like a party, everyone just chatting about nothing [“quatschen”] but there’s just this guy hanging from a rope in the background. We were there for a few hours before we could do anything. (Reconstructed from field notes)

The story here emphasizes the absurdity of the image of co-workers having normal ‘water-cooler’ conversations against the backdrop of a dead body hanging from a tree. At the same time, it emphasizes the everyday absurdity of basic mistakes or things that could go wrong, rather than police-specific problems, in this case having multiple cars, sequentially, getting stuck in the mud. While few policing values are specifically highlighted in this story, there is an implication that police officers are able to find downtime whenever possible, or at least to treat a situation as everyday or routine when there is nothing immediate that can be done to remedy a problem.¹⁰ There was no emphasis in this telling on anyone specifically being responsible or needing to learn a lesson, and very little attribution of motive to any characters beyond simply ‘doing their jobs.’ The closest thing to an antagonist was the mud itself, but no one is admonished for failing to deal with it. The horror story in its usage seems to be more of a story of things happening around police officers, which they may have to deal with, but unlike war stories, which emphasize what happens to officers, there is less emphasis put on how the officer reacted and the moral value of it (in terms of whether it was risky, necessary, good, bad, etc.) Horror stories seem to be more like ‘residual’ narratives, stories which have been collected that are interesting primarily because of their break from everyday normality (by their gruesomeness, etc.) but which have little to offer specifically in terms of how to do police work; it is likely for this reason that horror stories seem to be often presented either comedically or with a heavy emphasis on the shock value. Likely, many stories which could be told as horror stories simply are not told because they would not work in either of these formats. Van Hulst (2013) describes how ‘tragic’ stories such as fatal car accidents seem to be the type least told; the stories of this nature which were encountered primarily had some type of “outside consequence” mechanism, in which the outcome was not simply randomly tragic but also served as a warning against whatever mistake led to it, such as drunk driving or texting while driving, and were usually not told entirely spontaneously but rather only offered up as we were passing the scene of a previous accident or a stretch of road considered to be especially dangerous.

6.6 Police Culture and Policing Narratives

The officers in the Revierpolizei tended to be older than most patrol officers—both a result of the specialized unit as well as demographic factors and the rural character of the region—most newer officers prefer to be assigned in more urban areas, at least early in their career. This certainly affected the types of stories that were told: many of the officers had been members of the Volkspolizei prior to German reunification, or at least had worked with many officers who had been. Stories about the 1980s—not always specifically about police work but more in general about the region of specific towns, villages or people—were often prefaced with an almost ritualistic, typically self-ironic, “I wouldn’t want those times back, but…” (“Ich hätte die Zeiten nicht gern wieder, aber…”) Somewhat in contrast to the description of hegemonic masculinity presented by Fletcher (1996), Behr (2000) and others, gender was less openly specifically brought up (though not never!) This may have been a result of the fact that while women were generally underrepresented locally in the police compared to the general population—consistent with policing in Germany and most countries—the women working within the jurisdiction had relatively high positions within the Revierpolizei, with a female officer in charge of one of the three jurisdictional units. The types of social networking described in urban policing ethnography—where multiple squads will regularly meet for beers after shift while excluding other squad members—simply did not seem to exist in the same way, likely related to the rural characteristic of the region (many officers lived somewhat far away), the fact that Revierpolizei officers tended to be older, married, and from the region (meaning they may be more likely to have social circles outside of the police than someone who moved for the assignment), the mix of consistent morning shifts with occasionally evening shifts to cover special events, festivals etc., and the relatively small size of the organizational overall when compared to the type of departments more typically examined ethnographically. (cf. Young 1993, Huey and Ricciardelli 2015)

The way in which stories were told was otherwise similar to that generally established in the extant literature in terms of form and function. Narratives were used to entertain as well as to teach general rules and provide specific information about locations, people, and problems. In some ways, the need for relying on transmitted second-hand knowledge was even stronger, as personal and situational relationships were highly significant and officers attempted to get a broader context whenever possible (cf. Banton 1964, Young 1993), but in other ways less practical within a police-specific context, as outside of cities officers were solely responsible for their jurisdiction and the knowledge they gained would rarely be useful for other officers unless another officer were to take over. Bittner (1970), after describing the range of individuals and locations which officers demonstrate detailed knowledge of, states that:

No matter how rich such factual knowledge of an area and its residents is, however, it can never encompass more than a fraction of reality. Many places have not been visited and most persons are not recognized. Thus it appears that though interest is directed to the accumulation of factually descriptive information, as opposed to the desire to achieve a theoretically abstract understanding, the ulterior objective is to be generally knowledgeable rather than merely being factually informed. That is, patrolmen seek to be sufficiently enlightened to be able to connect the yet unknown with the known through extrapolation and analogy. By this method they are always in the position to reduce the open and unrestricted variety of interpretative possibilities that baffles outsiders to a far more restrictive range. They always have, as it were, something to go on. (91)

Bittner further compares this gathering and application of knowledge of police to an ethnographic understanding: no cases are truly unique nor truly exemplary, but are rather interpretable “particular instances of a class.” However, while Bittner finds that officers are typically left on their own to learn their neighborhoods and the general classes of things they will encounter, the case of the Revierpolizei demonstrated a stronger continuity of narrative understandings. Even as officers worked alone in their jurisdictions, it was important for them to maintain common narratives with key partners, such as local officials—often the Ordnungsamt—or community leaders. Additionally, stories were often shared specifically to provide instruction in terms of explaining a person, place or thing, as events do not always respect jurisdiction boundaries, and often officers would cover for others or collaborate. City officers, in particular, needed to work together and keep other officers up to date. The teaching function of narratives could be observed both in providing ways of interpreting scenes as well as in providing direct, already interpreted, information.

6.6.1 Teaching through Narrative

“Officers cannot readily state the principles that they use to simplify the situational complexities they face. The best they can do is to tell anecdotes.” (Bayley and Bittner 1984: 49)

The use of narratives in instructing police officers is evidenced both in academy training and in how narratives, especially war stories, can be used, contextualized, or curated by experienced officers to be meaningful for other officers in ways that can be applied to their own experiences. (Ford 2003, Conti 2009, Van Hulst 2013) A hostility towards the concept of training has often been identified—at least within US policing cultures—and theoretically linked to the idea that police work is social, reflexive, and contextual: that there is rarely an effective one-size-fits all approach. (cf. Bittner 1970) However, the literature focusing on the use of narratives has found that police training often takes place not so much through formal lectures as it does through the recounting of war stories not dissimilar to the typical canteen stories. These stories can provide a “vocabulary of precedents… and a worldview that provides a way of seeing and experiencing the world.” (Shearing and Ericson 1991: 491) A major emphasis of these stories, discussed among others by McNulty (1994), is on identifying incongruities. As previously described, policing narratives tend to be unique by having a different emphasis on what elements are considered ‘interesting’ and which are simply mundane; McNulty describes how academy instructs introduced this way of thinking to police recruits:

The focus on incongruity was especially evident in the strategies that the staff recommended for initiating action in the disordered world. For example, they taught the recruits to avoid the abstract question, “Where does the truth lie?” Instead, they proposed a more concrete question, “What’s wrong with this picture?” as a means of recognizing whether things were “out of place.” The class sergeant told recruits that looking for something suspicious was less effective than looking for the unusual, because suspicious was so difficult to define. (286)

Looking for something that is out of place is not obviously a more analytically helpful practice for police work than looking for something suspicious: both concepts still need to be given meaning and then applied to situations. However, the concept of suspicion and truth implied by the instructors are likely interpreted as more related to strict structures, rules and procedures which would remain applicable across situations; the skills for identifying problems or situations in this case would be based on collecting formal knowledge of how to proceed. Police learned to consider the process of identifying things as incongruous as common sense; at the same time, the specific examples of where one could look, of tell-tale signs that something wasn’t right, of what kind of behaviors, characteristics, or signs might be indicators for other problems, and of what kinds of things should and should not be tolerated when, where, and by whom, are things that need to be learned, tested out, and applied. McNulty’s recruits, looking for signs of serious crime in every situation, shared stories and examples, such as inspecting the rear license plate of abandoned cars for dead flies, which could indicate that the plate was previously on the front of a different car likely reported stolen. Another example of looking for congruity is similar to the uses of civil inattention discussed in Chapter Three; an officer describes aggressively shining a flashlight at a potential suspect—who had done nothing to merit suspicion—and then deciding to search the individual based on the fact that he did not flinch or react. The assumption here is that officers anticipate what kind of reaction to their presence or actions would be normal and can then attempt certain practices which might lead to a (guilty) individual over- or underreacting as a way to avoid suspicion, but by doing so making themselves stand out more. These practices are found in the type of stories that are highly valued, because they demonstrate both clever police work and provide examples of the type of incongruities that provide ‘common sense’ justifications for suspicion. (cf. Van Maanen 1973, 1974) Understanding the processes of understanding situations as one of common sense in this way allows for experience to be translated into knowledge, even if that experience is second-hand and transmitted through stories told by instructors, mentors and colleagues. Officers are given examples of ways to view objects, people, and behaviors as ‘abnormal’ and act upon them in different ways based on explanations that may not be methodologically consistent, but are practical, understandable (‘natural’) and accessible (at least to other police officers within the same situated encounter) enough based on their simplicity. (Geertz 1975)

This understanding of police work, and how its knowledge is transmitted, is reminiscent of the sociological mandate to make the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. (cf. Berger and Luckmann 1966) The construction of policing narratives mirrors the attempt to develop an eye for viewing things in terms of incongruities relevant to the immediate goals of police work, of approaching situations and individuals both in consideration of the immediate visible situation and of the countless essentially unknowable potentials. The example here emphasizes determining incongruities as a way to still legitimately detect objective crime, on the basic of ‘common knowledge’ as a legitimating factor, but similar perspectives could be identified in how police learn to identify what type of behavior should be considered acceptable or unacceptable and how community or institutional values are interpreted.

The stories police officers tell each other establish can be intended to, or have the function of, establish(ing) a sense of normality or routine; not necessarily even in what will happen in a typical shift, but of what types of problems are seen as something that can be predictably handled and what types of problems will require clever solutions or additional resources. Bayley and Bittner (1984) find that:

American patrol officers recognize these variable features of the work they do and can talk about them with discernment. They have an acute sense of where danger lies and what kinds of situations cause them the greatest difficulty in deciding what to do. In fact, they are so accustomed to thinking about the place of discretion in policing that a favorite in-house joke is that their most problematic situation during each shift is deciding where to go for lunch. (37)

Bayley and Bittner describe typical patterns in how police learn what types of situations or locations are predictably risky or risk-free and what types of encounters qualify as a true ‘break from normality,’ as opposed to what might be considered the ‘routine chaos’ of police work. Worrall (2016) considers the adaption of a common sense view of situations developed through stories, through training and experience, to be a likely foundation for the police “sixth sense.” An important distinction could be made in the mechanism of the stories: sometimes narratives are general or common sense, telling something about social processes and the routines and expectations of police work, and sometimes they are specific local knowledge, giving a basis for making predictions about known places, people and events.

6.6.2 Linked and Linking Narratives

Narratives are rarely entirely specific in terms of provided details, but rarely so abstract as to be completely detached from time and space. Two contrasting qualities of narratives were identified that played a significant role in how these stories were or could be used in terms of transmitting knowledge, imparting moral lessons, or simply participating in the police culture practice of storytelling: whether the narrative was primarily linked or linking. These terms refer to how the setting, characters, and other relevant elements of the narrative were connected to specific identifiable subjects or more abstract in a way that implied an ‘everyman’ quality. While these forms are not necessarily mutual exclusive and may be differently interpreted depending on the individual and their own knowledge of people, places, and events, the relationship between the form and the overt practical use of the narrative made it clear in most cases whether the narrative was ‘best’ interpreted as linked or linking. The use of linked and linking here refers to narratives in their entirety—and therefore in their application and interpretation—so that while specific elements of a narrative may be identified or abstracted, the narrative as a whole will become, within its institutional setting, either one of a general rule or one of specific characters and settings. The narrative will either be about something that can happen anywhere or something that did happen, somewhere.

Linked narratives connect directly to identifiable elements—people, places, specific actions, events, etc.—with their own qualities that are not assumed to be universal. While many policing war stories simply refer to “an officer,” the types of stories told among co-workers who have shared many of the same or similar experiences often identify specific officers as major characters and involve plots based around perceived characteristics of that officer: a story about an officer who refuses to use his car’s navigation device, gets lost, but refuses to admit so might not be as relevant or tellable as a story about Officer Schmidt, who is known for his stubbornness and refusal to even attempt to use new technology. Stories often focus on specific known offenders or people who often come into contact with the police, or on specific towns or neighborhoods which are then associated with specific qualities, such as villages where the inhabitants are known to call the police frequently and with little justification, or an apartment complex where the police need to always be on guard. These kinds of narratives may often work just as well without the specific links to identifiable subjects, but including these links allows the narrator to transmit knowledge: while some stories may primarily be told to entertain, others are overtly intended to instruct, to warn, or to make an example.

Linking narratives, on the other hand, apply general rules, as the characters are more abstract and closer to ideal types. A story of a violent police-citizen encounter which offers no details as to the location may imply that such encounters could happen anywhere (though these need not be the main point of the narrative or even implied at all.) Linking narratives better fit moral lessons as a result—rather than being linked to specific, possibly unique, things, they provide a link to a broader understanding of how the world works. Some linking narratives are explicit, e.g. outright stating that this is how things always work.¹¹ To be accessible—that is, readily understood and therefore understood as a matter-of-course—these narratives must also be practical and offer some lesson or function that can be applied. (Geertz 1975) Linking narratives are essentially propositions for belief—further refinement might be needed by the audience for the narrative to completely make sense or have expressible meaning, i.e. “a man attacked a police officer” may still suggest a certain type of man or at least exclude others from the list of possible visualizations, but the overall narrative is broad and becomes, in its implications, more about things that could happen than about connecting what has happened with specific attributes of the included narrative elements. This type of narrative is then more likely to be accepted (or rejected) as plausible or real based on the fact that it emphasizes risk and danger—e.g. to many police the idea that someone would want to attack a police officer is believable enough without further context, and the use of these symbolic assailant narratives is relatively common in the literature on police storytelling as well as in the case at hand. Stories do not necessarily need to be accepted as true to be able to teach a lesson, but linking narratives especially are based on at least an element of implied truth—that an identifiable case actually happened as described, either based on attributes imputed to the actors and setting, or allowing the audience to apply these attributions as way to explain the events. The basic narrative “the chief of the fire department attacked a police officer” would not readily be interpretable or applicable as a major lesson relevant for police (depending, of course, on the particular jurisdiction) but if the fire chief was already a known character-individual with a history of violence and a personal and public ‘beef’ with a certain police officer, it might be. Or else it might lead to the establishment of a new understanding by those who accept the story as true, who might now view the fire chief as violent, unstable, anti-police, or even establish new narratives of rivalry between the police and the fire department. The lessons drawn in this case are only applicable to specific situations; police narratives, however, rarely come this stripped down and almost always include framing elements indicating what type of lesson could or should be taken from them. The elements that identify linked narratives—personal details, etc.—at the same time identify knowledge as a value (in the same way that McNulty [1994] describes officers incorporating ‘unnecessary’ personal details into second-hand stories to make them more credible.) This sets these narratives apart from those which emphasize more general skills which can be used in a variety of situation.

6.6.3 Linking Narratives: Skills and Knowledge

The ‘common sense’ basis of police decision-making would here be more associated with linking narratives, as they are more about potentialities and general rules that could be applied in a variety of situations, in contrast to linked narratives which are less useful as general guides for action and only situationally useful as sources of knowledge. They establish a narrative of ‘natural order’ which, once understood, can often be taken for granted, but also can be wielded to legitimize or delegitimize the accounts of other within the context of communal or social values.¹² (Geertz 1975) However, it should be noted that linked narratives can easily be extrapolated to serve essentially the same function, and this practice was often observed as part of the narrative: individual elements can be defined as part of a larger case, for example “we had a similar situation with Stephan, one of those drunks who always hangs out near the bar across from the train station.” In this case, the specific individual is being identified but is also ‘lumped in’ with a larger group, meaning that one could make the same (negative) assumptions about Stephan whether they were aware of him, his group, or the bar and its surroundings, or not. Ford (2003) presents an example of a policing ‘parable’ from an academy instructor which, in his analysis, is intended to teach a lesson about possible policing strategies but also seems to generally make a comment about possible offenders:

As a cop, everybody wants to tell you their side of the story. I remember once at a fight call, the perp ran up to me and wanted to tell me what happened. So, I said to the guy, “I can’t talk to you unless you waive your rights.” He wanted to explain his side so much that he waived his rights… and I made the case. (96)

This narrative is framed by giving a general rule right from the start: everybody wants to tell you their side of the story. The remainder of the narrative is then an example of this happening in a non-descript place with few details—that the person telling his side of the story to the narrator might have a legitimate claim or actually be the victim is not considered within this narrative, invoking a related generalized lesson along the lines of ‘perps are dumb’ or ‘perps don’t consider their best interests.’ (cf. Van Maanen 1978, see also Wagner et al. 2009) In this case, however, it is not relevant to the narrative to know anything more about this individual other than that he is already established as guilty before it is established in the narrative how his guilt has been proven. The tactic the officer employs—in this case tricking the individual into waiving his rights—is then demonstrated as a clever way to take advantage of the general rule presented here. Accepting this story as demonstrative would be accepting that a) the guilty party will often want to tell their side of the story and b) a clever police officer can use this to his or her advantage, as demonstrated.

This story is an example of a story used to “teach street skills,” and this categorization and function fits to the linking nature of the narrative as well as its basic framework. Overall, Ford divides war stories into ten mutually exclusive categories: these are, however, not entirely convincing, as the categories seem to overlap to a significant degree and over half of the stories are considered to be primarily focused on “teaching street skills,” with a quarter primarily about “danger / uncertainty”¹³ and several of the remaining categories only significantly used as a secondary classification. These categories emphasize the moral lessons or function of the story, rather than specifically what elements make them into policing stories, or stories worth telling. The applicability of ten distinct categories does, however, emphasize the diversity of stories told, as well as the contrast between them, even in an academy setting where communicating skills and knowledge seems to be the primary function. The fact that these types of parables are intended to teach skills to police recruits means that almost are of these narratives are structured in a linking manner: the use of personalized details, if at all, serves more to give credibility to the narrative. The linked portions of the narrative serve more to identify broader groups or types of offenders, but the examples presented in the text tend to refer to individuals as “dirtbags,” “perps,” “the guy” or, solely in the cases of victims or bystanders, “the man” or “the woman.” These unlinked elements are essentially pre-coded in the narrative: applying the lesson to a scene would require an officer to already know what makes an automobile with four occupants into “this car full of scumbags” (Ford 2003: 96)

The most notable division here is not entirely dissimilar from the distinction previously made between war stories and horror stories, with the ‘teaching skills’ stories often focusing on what officers do and ‘danger’ stories focusing on what others do to officers.¹⁴ Some of the examples are more about uncertainty and seem more to amuse (and are likely based in police folklore rather than experience) than educate in the manner presented for ‘street skills’: one example describes officers mocking a drunk for reporting seeing an elephant, only to then encounter an escaped circus elephant. The narratives which focus on actual danger seem to consistently employ symbolic assailant mechanisms, focusing more on the fact that anyone, even the victim or bystanders, can suddenly become violent. Overall, the examples presented by Ford demonstrate one specific model of communicating police knowledge-based skills—that based on linking narratives, establishing general rules applicable to society broadly, and in this case essentially reinforcing the concept of a strict, consistent policing culture. Other examples demonstrate police officers interpreting situations based on linking narratives even when they don’t seem to be otherwise supported by the immediate situation, essentially a case of the ecological fallacy: this is particular prevalent in descriptions of encounters between French police and minority youth presented by Fassin (2013) and de Maillard et al. (2016) in which police would openly state that “Arabs / North Africans are all criminals,” and use this premise as a basis to justify further investigation. Linking narratives make broad statements—whether justified or not—which can be fit to diverse and unique encounters in order to make sense of them. These types of stories emphasize that police work is about knowing what to do without needing specific guidelines for individual situations, “convey[ing]… a general sense of what to watch, whom to watch, and in a most general sense, how to proceed.” (Ford 2003: 103)

6.6.4 Linked Narratives: Knowledge and Skills

Observation of the Revierpolizei in Brandenburg (as well as additional examples based in small-town, rural, or community-oriented policing settings) suggest an additional ‘teaching’ model, which would conversely be based more on linked narratives. Police working in fixed areas are able to share experiences using more insider and specialized knowledge of people, places, and events. The types of stories described by Ford (2003) as ‘teaching street skills’ were not uncommon—some have been described in the previous chapter—but the core function of the Revierpolizei, at least as presented through narratives, very often seemed to be knowing. The stories shared which best served a teaching function in terms of what-to-do were often negative examples—often employing outside consequence or consequences of failure narrative mechanisms—which instead emphasized what-not-to-do. (cf. Hughes 1958)

The skills of policing were instead emphasized more based on knowing what to look out for, closer to the idea of establishing ‘common sense’ as a basis for decision-making and action (McNulty 1994) but in terms of experiential or shared specific knowledge. This was often related to geographical knowledge and understanding connections between spaces and social relations. (cf. Van Maanen 1974) Officer Karsten (retroactively) described one minor incident where a local representative (Orstvorsteher) flagged down his police car to complain about a local resident burning trash in the yard: the family was fairly large, and had “previously” held a good reputation in the community until a dispute over construction and property rights had put them at odds with their neighbors. As a result, problems that would otherwise be handled locally or informally would often involve the police, and Officer Karsten saw his role as more typically institutional, presenting the face of authority, rather than one of representing the community, and that, in this case, the more communicative approach typical of the Revierpolizei might not be effective in light of this bit of local history.

An extended example of this was found as one Revierpolizei officer was being trained on-the-job to take over for a retiring officer. Over the course of a week, I accompanied the two as they visited various key locations, met with officials, and dealt with some minor issues. Practically, the major portion of the work was a semi-formal ‘passing of the torch,’ as Officer Becker, the retiring officer, introduced his replacement, Officer Weiss, to various individuals and community partners, both informing them of the change and essentially attempting to provide some legitimacy to the incoming officer: one consistent refrain from officers was that it takes 3 or 4 years to establish both trust and an effective and reliable ‘network,’ and that help from and the support of a previously trusted officer is invaluable. However, apart from the introductions, the key function of these training shifts was the various descriptions and explanations both before- and after-the-fact inside the squad car. Statements made various places were often generally descriptive but also indicative of norms in some way; for example, Officer Becker described one area of a few small villages with “very calm, nothing ever happens there, but I try to drive by at least once a month.” With regard to a different village, Officer Weiss was instructed that he needed to get to know local officials first, because the “they can be fussy… you need to register one year in advance just to have a family party. A key descriptor of most locations was regular or annual events where the Revierpolizei officer would be expected to extend, but the type of reception to be expected varied from places where it was seen more as a “check-up” to others where the officer would be expected to join the celebration (“mitfeiern.”) The shared knowledge was less of a step-by-step guide—though some shifts were essentially ‘normal days’ most were spent attempting to visit as many locations as possible even though most were rarely visited in routine work—and more of a narrative compendium of broad expectations and local norms, cautionary indications (e.g. “watch out with those abandoned buildings, sometimes teenagers are in there.”) and key individuals which could be used as a basis to structure future interpretations and guide decision-making: the knowledge itself was a skill, but would need to be accompanied with an understanding of how to perform the work.

6.7 Serious Jokes: Humor and Institutional Frames

An officer observes a woman standing in the middle of the street. He approaches her and asks, “Are you okay?”

The woman replies, “Yes, but how do I get to the hospital?”

The officer replies, “Just keep standing there.”

(POLICE Magazine, October 2018)

Humor has long been recognized as a useful tool (both in its actual usage, as well as in secondary academic analysis) in understanding cultural and institutional frameworks of ‘normality’ and public definitions of values. (Fine 1984b) Humor, specifically darker or gallows humor, has been found to play a role as a coping mechanism in dealing with stress as well as in establishing a form of subcultural communication. (Horan et al. 2012) Humor allows for the altering of real or hypothetical circumstances to explore, challenge, or subvert common definitions of situations, examine which topics and relationships are overtly or publicly part of interaction-negotiations and which are excluded (e.g. by being considered taboo) or only used through symbolic representations (e.g. in forms of ‘deep play’ which maintain cultural understood but unstated associations, such as how Hollywood used specific mannerisms to represent gay characters while avoiding censorship or possible moral outrage for openly depicting homosexuality in a non-moralizing way.) “Humor’s critical role thus lies in poking a hole through often-undiscussed but official versions of everyday reality, exposing their contradictions and the arbitrary basis of their social power.” (Paolucci and Richardson 2006: 334) The use of humor can be seen to resolve a (theoretical) conflict between the adherence to institutional roles as a source of identity and normative ordering and interactional behavior based on generated intersubjective meaning: strict conceptual institutional definitions can be challenged or subverted to create more freedom of movement within the confines of a set institutional role. Externally monolithic or fixed roles, such as the classic depiction of the bureaucrat (Weber 1958), may avoid problematic forms of role strain that affect interactions based on interactions between the role itself and outside ‘clients’ by maintaining an internal culture which maintains practices based on poking fun at or ridiculing the seriousness of that role. The police serve as an excellent example of this.

Jokes were, unsurprisingly, common in more backstage situations—between other officers in the station, or told to me by officers while in transit. Often these were very simple uses of humor that simply indicated a lack of overt formality in what could otherwise be a business setting, something that could be expected in many workplace settings. For example, when Officer Reiner, as station chief, tells another officer to “come over here!” in an informal and direct way, the response was often “I didn’t do anything!” These types of jokes and comments could often escalate: Officer Reiner and Officer Karsten at one point ‘argued’ over whether to turn up the thermostat or not; when Officer Karsten dramatically made an exaggeratedly threatening face and slammed his fist on the desk Officer Reiner responded (using the formal tense) “I will shoot you!”

Humor can be seen as establishing a form of solidarity by allowing for flexibility in forms of communication and making it clear that, essentially, everyone who is in on the joke is on the same side. (Pogrebin and Poole 1988) The descriptions used by police of people and places—the sharing of local knowledge and linked narratives—often used more humorous, or at least irreverent, wording which both served to undermine the ‘neutral formality’ of this information and likely also aided in making it more memorable and, therefore, communicable. Rather than using more technical, formalized, and dry, vocabulary, officers more often used either everything speech or slang (e.g. referring to a “guy” [“Typ”] rather than a “man”) but very often ‘colorful’ idioms and stock phrases, whether in referring to someone as a “village idiot,” or an officer describing himself as “the village sheriff.” These narrative elements often reflected both cultural narratives, often subverted and used ironically, (an officer accepting minor praise from a colleague saying, “Yeah, I’m Superman.”) as well as the ‘immethologicalness’ of common sense presentations. (Geertz 1975) The use of more ‘playful’ insults in a private context—particularly when simply between the officer and myself—often corresponded to an ‘ordering’ function through the officer simply attempted to adapt, even if only in his or her own mind, an explanation for the observed juxtaposition of a person, setting, and behavior: for example, on occasions where an officer was passed on the road it commonly resulted in a comment such as “Freche Sau!” (lit: cheeky pig) but no additional action: the internal narrative labeling of a person in a more irreverent way often seemed enough to properly establish a basic sense of order, with the need to ‘punish insolence’ almost never stated directly and essentially only in contexts referring to more abstract or mass media contexts rather than encountered and known individuals. (In a similar but contrasting situation, an officer pointed out a car behind ours and stated, proudly, “he’s too afraid of us to pass.”)

Humor served both to distance but to also imply a deeper, more intrinsic (or at least less expressive) communicative level, as it was not always entirely objectively clear when the humor is ‘serious’ or when it is simply demonstrative or even decorative: an officer describing a not particularly noteworthy or exciting case to a colleague states, “who says nothing exciting ever happens here? Is the joke at the expense of the people involved in the case, the community in general, the abstract structures and conditions of the region (or whatever “here” is), the police organization, the officer himself, or the institutional idea and broader cultural image of the police? It is potentially all and none of these, with the joke being more indicative of a code or a way officers talk that skirts around taking things ‘too seriously,’ especially in cases like this where any attempt to present the case seriously or as important would likely seem disingenuous or else just become a failed narrative (as in the presented by Van Hulst 2013, where an officer’s story about freeing a sheep from a ditch is met with metaphorical crickets.) At the same time, officers made more serious statements suggesting that they did take even minor cases seriously even if they recognized and openly discussed the disjunction between idealized policing images and the realities of most incidents and community concerns. More everyday and irreverent language was used to transmit knowledge both in storytelling and in updating colleagues on cases, for example warning other officers that involved individuals are unpredictable (“crazy” / “verrückt”), prone to talk back or insult officers (“der hat eine Fresse!” essentially meaning “he has a big mouth”), is a gossip (“der ist so eine Dorf-Oma” lit: “he is a village grandmother”) or stands out and is therefore recognizable or well-known in the area (“er ist eher ein bunter Hund” lit: “he’s a brightly colored dog”); these and similar expressions were used to essentially give depth to described character but in a way that could relate to or be applied in upcoming encounters, rather than being purely performative storytelling, and yet the use of these idioms and descriptors was significantly performative and culturally relevant. Backstage humor in particular seemed to be more about finding a shared outlet as a way to demonstrate that officers could communicate as officers without speaking in institutional vocabulary, and the depictions and expressions they used—though in this case rarely offensive or hostile—were typically of the type that would be neither appropriate nor diplomatically practical in front of more involved individuals (though officer sometimes did talk in this way about members of the community in front of others, though this was more common with ‘allied’ organizations such as the Ordungsamt and community partners who could be seen as affiliated both personally and organizationally. This may not even suggest that this backstage talk is indicative of the officer’s “true” feelings—and the more serious and in-depth narratives tended to suggest the opposite, that the jokes were more often than not simply jokes with little deeper meaning—but rather that officers talked this way to demonstrate a form of cooperation which would suggest that a backstage could exist, particularly relevant considering that officers spent the majority of their time outside of the office and in contact with citizens and were aware that even basic everyday social interactions with no overt policing relevance were still a form of image work. An essential feature of humor’s position in communication is deniability (Fine 1984b): the fact that a joke can both be a proposition for belief and critique of institutional reality but also simply a harmless, essentially meaningless comments, means that the communicative offer of that joke is often simply for the audience to understand at the same level of ‘seriousness’ and establishing a shared, if temporal, identity. The social context of the joke was often simply that it was being told by police officers and rejected, subverted, or at least poked fun at both the institutional frame and the more generalized, idealized idea of a community frame.

Humor and irreverence are often seen as a way to diffuse the seriousness of risks; this use of humor corresponds well to the generalized value system attributed to most policing cultures, as an overt fixation on what might have happened could imply that the officer is overly nervous to the point of unreliability. Making jokes about dangerous or tragic situations can fulfill many of the narrative functions described under ‘horror stories,’ specifically in presenting ‘everyday’ (rather than more formal or official) values of policing, such as having a strong stomach or not being easily offended. Though rarely observed in the field research, the use of offensive or derogatory terms for offender and even victims has a long history in the ethnographic literature—the strongest examples from Falkenmark included residents in one village who had reported gasoline theft who were described by one officer as “idiots who probably all just stole from one another until one dropped the canister,” but humor at the expense of victims was still limited to minor non-violent incidents. In other cases, narratives about dangerous situations can be presented sarcastically or humorously to emphasize a consequences of failure mechanism, essentially as a way both to downplay, rather than dwell on, the risk but also to emphasize how things could have (and possibly even should have) gone worse for whatever reason. Pogrebin and Poole (1988) describe a situation where an officer found himself in a standoff with a man, both of them armed with shotguns; the arrival of backup ended the standoff peacefully, but afterwards one officer commented:

“It’s a good thing Wayne didn’t have to shoot that scumbag, because we haven’t qualified with the shotgun for I don’t know how long. He would have shot and probably hit the front window, and that son of a bitch would’ve opened up on us.” (198)

The role of humor to establish situational or personal roles was more prominent and has been less often discussed in the literature. The use of humor by police has typically focused on backstage presentations and just-between-us interactions, but in the current study a great deal of humor was expressed within police-citizen encounters. The ‘serious’ nature of the abstract police role can often prove absurd when put in a context where police-issues are seen as either rare or often petty and ‘everyone knows everyone.’ Subverting this role through humor can both further establish the officer individually and clarify the current situation as relaxed rather than one of control. This was observed in a variety of situations where its use could theoretically be explained as a way to avoid friction between police and residents.

For example, while responding to a call to an accident or potential hit-and-run at a restaurant and event venue, the officer recognized the owner walking through the parking lot (in the direction away from the car.) Pulling up alongside him, he quickly turned on the lights and sirens and yelled (using the informal pronoun), “You! Stop! You’re under arrest!” While coming as a surprise to the owner, this essentially served as nothing more than a greeting, but one establishing a more friendly relationship, which first lead to basic greetings and small talk before moving on to the obvious reason for the interaction—that the owner had requested the presence of a police officer. Other subtler examples occurred when officer visited individuals known to them privately in uniform (including one visit to deliver a birthday card to the former chief) where officers would knock on the door and then loudly declare “Police! Open the door!” with the assumption that the resident would immediately recognize it as sarcastic rather than serious.

Humor was similarly used by citizens both in this more ‘extreme’ form of situational mismatch (i.e. citizens approaching a known officer and saying “Oh no it’s the cops!”) and in more general irreverent or idiomatic descriptions of events or within small talk: both uses are here considered overt practices for establishing situational or personal authority, with the primary difference being the existing relationship and whether the topics being joked about are ‘police-related’ or more general. In only a few examples were humorous overtures by citizens ‘rejected’ by police, and in those cases this rejection was expressed more by ignoring the statement and moving in with the conversation rather than pointing out the disparity (a situation often depicted in popular culture but also occasionally described in the ethnographic literature.) The use of humor as an ‘ice breaker’ or as a gauge of the type of encounter being entered into was among the best indicators of how the institutional role of the police was perceived (specifically as ‘serious’ and ‘humorless’) and one of the clearest and more direct practices for establishing, or attempting to establish, a situational or personal relationship are dominant within that encounter. Humor both served as a justification for initiating an encounter—allowing for ‘institutionally-relevant’ information to be later introduced without sacrificing the illusion of a more cooperative or friendly relationship—and as a test of how an encounter could or would proceed, essentially asking “am I in trouble?” While small talk could also fulfill these functions, humor in its presentation was a more overt challenge to the strict institutional role, and often was used within small talk even in the choice of vocabulary and minor ‘emotional displays’ to further distance a more bureaucratic perspective: phrasing and wording that at least appears to be unsuitable for a wider audience suggests a level of trust and, at least within the situation, a mutual insider status. This was key not just for managing encounters but also for establishing trust in the long term.

The two significant uses of humor—within policing backstage settings and within citizen encounters—were seen as both expressive (as ‘realistic’ statements that may not have a strict, functional use but simply belong to a moment, lacking in a deeper ‘method’) and instrumental (in establishing and identifying relationships and power structures guiding the immediate situation.) Most notable in the context of the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark is the setting for jokes and irreverent talk—officers, especially country officers, had a more limited arena for ‘canteen culture’ performance, and this is seen as relating both to the extensive breaking of institutional norms and distancing from an institutional role in public encounters as well as to the systemic use of sarcastic quips or ‘one-liners’ within a more institutional context (i.e. within the station, in contact with other officers) as the opportunities to establish and maintain a mutual and shared policing culture are reduced compared to a more structured unit or type of police work. The relative lack of broader, simple policing values which lend themselves to ‘tellable’ narratives—e.g. crime fighter war stories or gory horror stories—in place of more nuanced, community-bound understandings of the role of the police alters the manner as well as function of storytelling in the police in this context. The stories—including jokes, anecdotes and parables—that police tell reflect both their knowledge of community but also demonstrate a shared commitment that might not be more easily expressible.

6.8 Policing Cultures or Cultures within Policing?

Shearing and Ericson (1991) write that:

In studying policing, sociologists have examined the fit between legal rules, viewed as instructions, and police decisions. Typically they report that police officers deviate from these legal instructions. Instead of using these findings to question the assumptions of the rule-based paradigm, however, they have accepted as axiomatic the belief that all action is rule-generated and concluded that there must be some other set of rules that is generating police action. (483)

The Revierpolizei pose an interesting challenge to discussions of police culture(s). The mandate and basic idea of their work within the institution essentially undermines the rigidity of the institutional culture and encourages both the adaption or at least consideration of outside / community perspectives and the deference to alternative, often informal, forms of social control. The goals of the unit are essentially to avoid developing the type of insulated culture that has often been attributed to police in the professionalism era. The institutional rules guiding police work, as Shearing and Ericson state, simply do not for the most part and instead perform other functions. Similarly, the function of the institutional perspective for most observed Revierpolizei encounters was to exist as a possible that was rarely selected or invoked in its full form (an analogy here could potentially be that the purpose of a police firearm is to not have to be fired.) Police powers and authority are drawn broader, stronger, and more unassailable than are actually required in most situations, but this is not to imply—as the law might—that police should either deal with every situation fitting within a ‘police-relevant’ typology (or even every case coming to their attention) nor that every case should be dealt with in the strictest and most severe terms. Discretion, it has long been observed, is the understated but necessary glue that holds the conceptual criminal justice system together; culture has often been considered one of the key drivers of that discretion in that it simply provides a framework for police officers to decide which things are important (or at least narratively justify their decisions in front of an audience of their peers.)

Funke (1990) provides a typology of four influential factors for the organization of police activity and decision-making at an individual level.

• 1) The officer’s social situation (including their private, social contacts, their educational level and close/familiar relationships)

• 2) Official requirements for their actions

• 3) Their occupational contacts with their “clientele” and

• 4) Their personal, psychological cognitive mechanisms of experienced social reality (41, own translation)

This typology suggests a more diverse view of the sources of police decision-making than simply positing “culture vs. institution”; this model, however, lacks the central elements of police culture considered relevant, namely the construction (and celebration) of values and the sharing of stories of accomplishments which can serve as a model for future action or simply become part of a visible and imaginary culture. (cf. Waddington 1999) At the same time, these conceptualizations of police culture tend to presume a separation of police—physically and socially—from the social space of their work, and that the arenas of policing culture can exist solely for that function. In the present case, both the social situation and occupational contacts were influential not only in establishing conceptualizations or cultural narratives but immanently by often overlapping. The social situation of the officer was often the occupational situation; occupational contact was with those not far removed from known social circles. The ‘personal, psychological cognitive mechanisms’ may not necessarily have differed greatly from that of any other residents (or at least this was the impression conveyed by words, if not always action.) Encounters between police and citizens were less driven by rule than by loose rituals and by everyday norms—in some cases the desired outcome was immediately clear (at least from the perspective of the officer) and actions were performed in such a way as to lead to that inevitable conclusion, in others the officers adapted to changes and essentially took on new roles in the course of encounters, raising or lowering their guards, changing demeanor, etc. (cf. Behr 2000b) The broader culture of the police may provide a vocabulary for identifying ideal outcomes (in consideration of institutional demands and pressures) but primarily seems to be an outlet for expressing, sharing, and dramatizing the various understandings and expectations which more immediately guide how situated events are realized.

The function of police culture may have been less visible or reducible to a simplistic typology: officer decision making was only loosely related to specific institutional concerns (at least, without considering that institutional concerns in this case seemed to emphasize the discretionary power of the Revierpolizei) but was also mediated or at least related to understandings of community norms and expectations rather than directly governed by subcultural policing values. Indeed, the stated values of the police tended to emphasis this, with the more ‘demonstrative’ aspects of police interactions (teaching lessons and punishing resistance or the questioning of authority) not particularly evident in the narratives shared by police in the office, on patrol, with citizens, and off-duty. Generally, the function of police culture did not appear to be to establish set practices or offer examples of ideal practices, though the extent to which the culture could be considered functional depends especially on how strictly culture and work are separated. The broader cultural aspects of the Revierpolizei occupational culture, unsurprisingly, valued the type of work done by the Revierpolizei and the more unique characteristics of that work, including involvement in the community and the ability to make decisions without overt reliance on official guidelines: this also reflected the general trends in the literature suggesting less conservative / authoritarian attitudes among older and rural officers (cf. Paoline 2003, Dübbers 2015) The vocabularies and narratives of Revierpolizei officers saw their work as important and valuable in the same way that officers performing other tasks tend to value the work they are intended (or believe themselves) to do, yet were variable enough and visible enough in the actual implementation of police work to be convincing, especially when comparing the narratives of those who had spent entire careers in community-oriented work and those who had only come to it after years of experience in patrol or investigative units: officers valued the general slow pace of the work (when compared to the idealized emergency-to-emergency pace and general unpredictability of patrol / response work) but also the regularity of the work (both in scheduling and in predictability) and the ability to interact with others in a more informal manner in situations not driven by immediate policing exigencies.

The more overtly dramaturgical aspects of police culture—the “canteen culture” and the more exaggerated performances—were for the most part similar to that described in the general and international literature: police told war stories and horror stories mostly simply because they were entertaining but also including lessons. The lessons told, however, were more often cautionary than prescriptive—relevant to the idea of police valuing ‘cleverness’ over ‘raw power’ or even ‘common sense’ over ‘theory’ is the fact that narratives emphasizing these values will display a variety of situational different approaches, and what is clever in what situation, if accepted as proper procedure, will rarely be clever in all other cases. In the same way, positive outcomes were less clear and definable—e.g. arrests or closed cases were never presented by officers as a sign of individual success—while negative outcomes were often negative both from an institutional perspective as well from a more general cultural frame: injuries or death were almost exclusively presented—at least within local or first-hand accounts—as negative outcomes regardless of the victim.

However, the occupational culture of the Revierpolizei was more visible in the everyday work and cooperation between officers (both Revierpolizei officers and those from other units.) The strict separation between “canteen culture” presentations and storytelling and routine encounters was only sustained to the extent that dramatic storytelling took place in “backstage arenas,” that is, the backstage elements of the social space were constructed as ‘backstage’ but the presentation happening was performative and generally unrelated to current or routine work and—invocations of police values aside—primarily functional and demonstrative in that stories were being told among police officers. These situations were rarely confined to the Revierpolizei and involved not only officers from other units but depending on the arena also involved Ordnungsamt employees or retired officers; for example, in one Polizeirevier, the break room tended to be used by two or three Revierpolizei officers and two or three station personnel with varying experience, in another station the breakroom was rarely visited for longer breaks as most officers ate lunch at a nearby public cafeteria, and another contained a similar public canteen-style restaurant specifically called a “police canteen” but also frequented by a wider assortment of residents. Revierpolizei officers for the most part spent less time in the station or around larger groups of officers—only the city officers routinely spent time in break rooms or these canteens, with country officers either having private spaces (kitchenettes or simply coffee machines, kettles etc.) inside their offices or routinely visiting cafes or canteen style restaurants for lunch (usually though not always as the only uniformed officer.) Overall, officers had limited opportunity to specifically share stories and experiences with other officers outside of ‘work-related’ encounters, at least when compared to their encounters with citizens or community partners—the manner, content, and frequency of policing narratives shared by officers with non-police varied from officer to officer, though this was a significant enough practice to challenge the singularly of “police culture” within the context of the Revierpolizei, suggesting instead that the officers had a police-ish frame of reference and authoritative narratorial perspective but the telling of the stories did not establish an enclosed police-specific culture. The police occupational culture was more widely seen in the use of everyday irreverence and the use of vocabulary (informally, rather than institutionally driven) while conveying institutionally-relevant or institutionally-necessary information. These types of routine interactions essentially emphasized the message of most canteen horror stories: that police officers need to know what to take seriously and talk about seriously but, more importantly, what to take seriously but talk about unseriously. Yet even this language rarely demonstrated a clear break from ‘frontstage’ work: the attitudes and vocabularies used here were often seen in cases assessed as appeals to situational or personal authority, such as situations where even if the police invoked the concept of force or violence the audience would not regard it as a serious threat but rather as a joke at the expense of normative images of policing and/or confirmation that the audience was involved in a more personal non-confrontational interaction.

The Revierpolizei demonstrate more a broader culture within policing than a strict policing culture. The perceived rise of an aggressive, masculine policing culture in Germany in particular is attributed with a stronger reliance on the institution frame of policing. (cf. Behr 2000, 2018) The fact that officers cannot effectively simply ‘follow the guidelines’ to conduct their work and make decisions and yet need to be presented in a way in which they do exactly this suggests that role strain and shifting typologies of people and social space play a significant role in how policing is constructed by officers. Following a pure institutional model leaves little leeway for outside perspectives and removes any aspects of ‘negotiation’ from policing encounters, at the most extreme contradicting the concept of democratic policing. Yet the common realization among officers that decisions must be made and priorities must be set raises questions of how this is done. The police culture has been claimed to act as a ‘blue line’ both guiding officers in navigating the ‘office politics’ of institutional demands but also in separating them from outside criticism embodies in the simple existence of contrary viewpoints outside of the policing occupation and institution. Community-oriented policing has argued for replacing this with the setting of priorities based on ‘community concern’ though only vaguely defined what form this could take or how it could be accomplished in light of changes not only in the ‘dominant police culture’ but in mainstream, mediatized and common cultural images of the police. The policing culture of the Revierpolizei is lacking in coherent borders—the narratives, goals, and values expressed by officers are often shared with other community members, secrets and information (as forms of social capital, necessarily data, or simply entertainment) are shared with some known individuals or community partners but hidden through omission in some cases even from the police organization. Many expressions of police culture were essentially ritual, doings things because they are done, but also establishing “a story they tell themselves about themselves.” (Geertz 1973: 448) The ways the officers talked about their work was in many ways simply talk, expressing frustration, performing boundary maintenance, simply ‘being a cop’ etc. (cf. Waddington 1999) but in many more ways these narratives were the work. The officers of the Revierpolizei could not exist in a world consisting solely of ‘the institution’ and ‘the outside,’ struggling to find a safe space to hide their identities from both, but instead need to be able to work within a living community. The ways in which police construct their communities—with words and action—are not simply cognitive processes or labeling, but bear larger meanings even beyond the symbolic in establishing the reality of those who might also claim those communities for themselves.