The Police and Community Maintenance

Abstract

Police work, as described in the research literature, as well as popular culture, media depictions, and within the war stories, jokes, and anecdotes of the occupational culture of policing—is full of contradictions. The mandate of the police to enforce the law has long been identified as superficial at best, and generally undesirable as a priority, with law enforcement instead serving as a capability which serves the greater function of order-maintenance or peacekeeping.

7.1 Knowing the Police / Knowing the Community

“What is true of people generally is true of the police as well.”—Egon Bittner (1974)

Police work, as described in the research literature, as well as popular culture, media depictions, and within the war stories, jokes, and anecdotes of the occupational culture of policing—is full of contradictions. The mandate of the police to enforce the law has long been identified as superficial at best, and generally undesirable as a priority, with law enforcement instead serving as a capability which serves the greater function of order-maintenance or peacekeeping. Bittner (1974) asks:

[W]hy can the police mandate not be conceived as embodying the law enforcement mandate inherent in criminal law enforcement? The answer is quite simple. Regardless of how strenuously criminal law enforcement is emphasized in the image of the policeman and in police administration, and regardless of how important police work might actually be for keeping the administration of criminal justice in business, the activity of criminal law enforcement is not at all characteristic of day-to-day, ordinary occupational practices of the vastly preponderant majority of policemen. In other words, when one looks at what policemen actually do, one finds that criminal law enforcement is something that most of them do with a frequency locate somewhere between virtually never and very rarely. (156–157)

The role of law enforcement in policing is therefore considered one of high significance in terms of image and domain in terms of taking ownership of problem and resources. In terms of practices and interactions, however, law enforcement is often seen as being in contrast with an order-maintenance or peacekeeping perspective precisely because each invokes differing legitimacies and values that in turn invoke vastly different political philosophies. Skolnick (1971) writes:

The phrase “law and order” is misleading because it draws attention away from the substantial incompatibilities existing between the two ideas… “Law and order” are frequently found to be in opposition, because law implies rational restraint upon the rules and procedures utilized to achieve order. Order under law, therefore, subordinates the ideal of conformity to the ideal of legality. The actual requirement of maintaining social order under the principles of legality places an unceasing burden upon the police as a social institution. Indeed, the police is the institution best exemplifying the strain between the two ideas. (9)

Fassin (2013), after observing French police actively researching obscure ordinances as a way to ‘throw the book’ at darker-skinned youth while letting ‘Europeans’ off with a warning, describes the law as primarily a legitimation for desired outcomes rather than an end in itself:

The law generally functions to give an acceptable form to decisions taken in line with a certain vision of order in the social world; on the other [hand], the law is applied unequally to different individuals in such a way as to maintain a specific social order. (84)

By this reading, the discretion inherent to police work is not simply a kink in the system unable to be worked out, but the very mechanism that allows that system to work, and the disparity in the treatment between individuals and groups is less an unfortunate outcome and more the point. This unequal treatment demonstrates the construction of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders,’ painfully conspicuous in this case of the French police (see also de Maillard et al. 2016 for a similar account) where police officers viewed almost all members of a certain social / demographic group as morally equivalent, regardless of observations or experiences: the police rarely invoked the form of situational authority often observed in Falkenmark, as they rarely actively conceptualized those they encountered as individuals with a past and future, but simply as a series of individual problems to be dealt with. The French police often described individuals as deserving punishment for “showing off,” which Fassin found to have little relation to observed behavior apart from minority youth simply existing in a place and time. Even cases where nothing was ‘suspicious’ were at times seen as provocative by the police for being a waste of time, with officers often expressing their desire or plan to ‘provoke’ individuals into insulting or assaulting them as a reason to “put them away.” Though Fassin’s examples are extreme when compared to the slow-paced and relaxed realities of Revierpolizei work, what they share in common is the use of outside (i.e. non-legal) standards of acceptable behavior which is not universal but rather situated and differentiated by the perceived status and ‘belonging-ness’ of individuals. The police enforce order and sometimes in doing so also enforce the law.

The resultant emphasis on order-maintenance then raises the question of how order is defined and maintained, assuming there are no formal rules to be followed in terms of what should be allowed, and who, essentially, determines the boundaries of conflict. (Christie 1977) This has led to a variety of different approaches to the police looking for (and inevitably finding) the source of policing behaviors in structures ranging from the occupational policing culture (Chan 2004), local community coalitions or politics (Wilson 1968, Kelling and Coles 1996) or the base and superstructure of modern capitalism. (Spitzer and Scull 1977 cf. Garland 2001) Even as policing research accelerates in the direction of policy evaluation and efficiency improvements for policing, a general consensus is still lacking in terms of how to conceptually and analytically discuss what police do.¹

Bittner (1967), in his study of police on skid row, illustrates the problem of attempting to understand police behavior from a purely institutional or criminological perspective:

The prevailing method of carrying out the task [of containment] is to assign patrolmen to the area on a fairly permanent basis and to allow them to work out their own way of running things. External influence is confined largely to the supply of support and facilities, on the one hand, and to occasional expressions of criticism about the overall conditions, on the other. Within the limits of available resources and general expectations, patrolmen are supposed to know what to do and are free to do it. (704)

Bittner’s further analysis emphasizes the practical ways police handle the types of situations which (to them) present themselves as problems; he notably frames this analysis as how police respond to the demand conditions of a unique and specific setting, implying that different (perceived) structural contingencies will provide different sets of possible practices. (cf. Huey 2007) A recurring issue here is the (inevitable) generalizing of findings about the police: the police continue to be treated as a relatively fixed organization, even globally, with a fixed system of values or at most hinging on a few modifiable variables. (Bernard et al. 2005, cf. Mawby 1991) This is complicated by the fact that there must be some universal elements worth examining to make the police institutionally interesting and to make the sociological study of policing more than advocacy. Peter Manning’s (2012, 2013, see also Brodeur 2007) recurring criticism is that the concepts and frames introduced by Bittner have become widely adopted as a basic theoretical frame but stripped of their critical approach: the police are not unique or interesting because they have a “monopoly on the use of force,” but rather because of how they, as an institution made up of individual actors, manage their roles, appearances, and actions to conduct work based on some level on coercion without giving up appearances of legal norms, democratic considerations, negotiation, or community norms and standards. Bittner’s is “not a theory of the nature and function of the police organization. Rather, it is a conceptually-grounded rendering of the situated nature of police work and its rationale within the organization.” (Manning 2012: 174)

A sociology of policing therefore must take this situated nature as a starting point and not merely as a singular variable—there are at least as many varieties of police work as there are police organizations, even more when considering the variation in how that work is conducted over time, place, and by changing personnel (both in the sense of turnover and new hiring as well as in personal changes in how officers experience and conduct their work.) Even in his discussion of how police view the residents of skid row and frame their practices around those understandings, Bittner (1967) notes that, “in practice, the restriction of interactional possibilities that is based on the patrolman’s stereotyped conception of skid-row residents is always subject to revision and modification towards certain individuals. Thus, it is entirely possible, and not unusual, for patrolmen to view certain skid-row inhabitants in terms that involve non-skid-row aspects of normality.” (705) Even within specific demand conditions and expectations of individuals, police practices can vary significantly from case to case and individual to individual, with authority being constructed differently, the potential for coercive force being presented (or hidden) in various ways, and understanding of what is best for ‘the community’ varying based on how the officer presents the individual in the specific encounter apart from an ideal type or stereotyped role-burdened social actor. At the same time, situated actions follow existing forms and expectations and attempts are made to reconcile them, in word and in deed, to desired pre-categorized outcomes—the complexity of police interactions should caution us against accepting one particular frame as the correct perspective, but should not dissuade us from attempting to read the deeper meanings and perceptions of structure which guide those interactions.

The practices of policing discussed in the previous chapters are best considered possible forms of interaction between police and citizens or forms of meaning that can be effectively established and communicated which are often used by police in the area and organization of study because of their (perceived) effectiveness in light of the various factors and considerations which facilitate, hinder, or otherwise affect authority-based communication and the presentation of (coercive and social) power which is the basis of the policing of public life on a case-by-case basis. That is, police officers themselves hold varied and conflicting views of police work: in a narrative sense they often compare their own decisions or actions to an ideal type routine or expectation, making a contrast based on specific cited factors, in this case commonly based around the rural or small-town character of the area or pre-existing relationships with those involved. But this should not be taken to assume that there is a specific ideal type for police work—the fact that policing occupational cultures and (in some respects) the policing institution and mandate can emphasize ‘clever’ decision-making and problem-solving suggests that officers can present themselves in a more favorable light, as well as establish a more durable and robust self-image (of themselves as police officers and of the police as a concept) by emphasizing the variations in how the work is done and the need to first select skills and knowledge from a variety of sources and then usefully apply them to unique situations.

The use of the rhetorical ‘normal’ in these cases serves the purpose of grounding a generic baseline for police work to establish that there is some commonality in terms of goals and perspectives, but not to imply that this baseline sets out the correct or proper response to any of the types of situations that police are expected to handle. (cf. Sudnow 1965) As Bittner (1970) suggests, the rhetorical norm is more often invoked when making an exception to a purported rule than as a guide for actually making decisions. The use of phrases such as “Most cops would do this…. But I sometimes do this…” in this way demonstrates both a consistency in policing values as well as a flexibility in how those values can be presented. Among the most prominent examples along this vein observed among the Revierpolizei in Brandenburg were the cases of officers who either preferred not to carry a weapon or downplayed the usefulness of firearm proficiency in everyday work. These officers maintained a stated goal of public safety, and instead framed the presence of a firearm—even in the possession of a police officer—as more likely to lead to greater harm, impede efforts to establish rapport or be friendly, and rarely be necessary even at a symbolic level.² This rhetorical break from the normal or ideal type could take place at many levels, but the most relevant was likely that which generally referred to the region—either as a direct linked connection or by emphasizing its rural character or some related aspects, e.g. “it’s quieter here than in the bigger cities.” This provided a broad-stroke identity which allowed for different forms of generalizations; a simple urban—rural divide is not tenable or theoretically helpful, considering that the region still had a significant diversity in terms of settings, with a mix of smaller cities and towns, villages ranging from only a few houses to several dozen, farmland with houses few and far between, and woods or less-developed ‘wilderness’ areas. This categorization of the area as purely “rural” (both in its invocation by police and by myself reflexively) speaks to the assumption of specific unique factors assumed to be related to the conditions of the area that affect police work in fundamental ways. While a significant amount of policing still occurred in urban areas against backdrops that would not seem to fit a “rural” characterization and in terms of appearance were rarely easily distinguishable from most parts of Germany, the organization of policing—as well as its implementation—needed to consider the significant sparsely populated areas that needed to be covered, the generally low rate of crime or calls for service, the strength and breadth of private interpersonal networks, the importance of certain activities of greater relevance (i.e. hunting and the higher rate of firearm possession compared to most of Germany), the generally older population (including among the police), and the problems and risks associated with automobiles in less populated areas. This means that the police—individually and institutionally—take on a new level of expertise, not only in possessing the skills necessary for the various tasks, but in identifying which types of skills are needed in which situations in light of the situated nature of their work. Several officers declared their preference for the region (specifically or as a type) with statements including “The city is not for me,” but the specific reasoning they gave and how they presented the rural—urban divide rhetorically varied from case to case—though these presentations were generally consistent and tended to emphasize the current familiarity which officers had with the area and the community, also including statements such as “the people around here mostly like us.” These distinctions between the character of the local area and the generalized ‘standard’ was however most relevant not for the specific characterizations as much as for its significant implication that the police were aware of, and acted in accordance with their understanding of, the ‘reality’ of everyday community routines, expectations, norms, demands, histories, and social relations. The police often present themselves as experts not only at doing things, but more often—in the present case, at least—they presented themselves as experts at knowing their community.

Knowing the community refers here to both expectations of the types of risks and problems that are routine and common, as well as anticipating them, and also the expectation of what is normal in terms of demand conditions, what types of behaviors are more or less tolerated, how citizens are expected to reaction, and what priorities anticipated risks and problems should have. It essentially means establishing a concept of routine work which can be used as a guideline for decision making and at the same time embed the use of police discretion within ‘expertise’ or ‘knowledge.’ (Behr 2006) The police identify their situation and setting in a way that allows them to demonstrate some control or understanding over it—reflected in the extent to which institutional authority is relied on or how situational authority is developed, in how conflicts are negotiated, and in how problems are framed at various levels and temporal points ranging from the reporting of the problem or call for service, to the decision of the police to intervene in a certain way (e.g. sending a patrol car with flashing lights and sirens or planning for a Revierpolizei officer to arrive at some point during the next day or two), how police narratively frame the problem in engaging with those involved or bystanders, how official reports are constructed, and how the event is later discussed by officers informally. Understanding the community does not necessarily mean that police internalize or adapt pre-existing understandings or values from within that community however; Kurtz and Upton (2017) note that, “a departmental narrative can substantially differ from the broader community and may simultaneously assist, and yet reject, the community it serves.” (543) The narratives of organizations, institutions, and communities are not fixed or ‘falsifiable’ but are rather constantly in flux, often existing in parallel or in contrast, and are most visible and ‘real’ when applied to situations with identifiable outcomes, e.g. police decision-making and justifications. Officers intervening against certain types of behavior on the basis of its unsuitability to a time or space are proposing a narrative of that time / space which may conflict with or support existing narratives; at this level, police work is not simply gaining and applying knowledge of a social space but also of actively constructing it through speech and action.

7.2 Constructing the Community

While primarily cited in terms of police micro-interactions, Egon Bittner viewed his work as an attempt to set the police within situated social contexts. He viewed the police as existing with a role and mandate to organize (urban) societies which already maintained varying, sometimes competing, systems of organization. The role of the state—in this context, specifically, though not exclusively, the police—is “creating conditions for the orderly coexistence of strangers.” (Brodeur 2007: 111) 20^th century developments in policing—particularly in the US context though highly relevant to Germany and Europe generally—have essentially viewed the acknowledgement of pre-existing systems of community as antithetical to the operation of the police, and varyingly attempted to centralize or sequester the police to shield them from corrupting influences and to decentralize them to legitimate the policing institution apart from the larger political apparatus of government. (Walker 1993, De Lint 2000, cf. Elias 1988) Yet the practical realities of policing have rarely, if ever, worked this way, with police needing to respect or at least recognize the extant community structures, politics, trends, and transformations, and this has been especially true for remote, rural, and small town policing. (cf. Banton 1964, Young 1993) The institution of policing and “the political legitimacy of the police under liberal democracies has also depended upon the careful structuring and balancing of state jurisdiction, community representation, and expert knowledge.” (De Lint 2000: 57) Community representation and expert knowledge are both concepts which require further presentation to effectively support the legitimacy of policing: which community is being represented? Is this representation purely symbolic or does it imply some degree of participation? Is expert knowledge confined to the realm of criminal enforcement, or does it rely to the proper understanding of how to handle situations with respect to community concerns, civil and human rights, etc.? Rather than supplanting the structures and systems of norms, values, and symbols that make of communities and segments of society, the police through their immediate actions and image work at various levels offer their own constructions of ‘legitimate society.’

A few excellent examples demonstrate specific ways in which police construct their communities in terms of perception but also practices. Bittner (1967) describes at length what the residents of Skid Row are to the police, which assumptions are made prior to any contact and which assumptions can be made within an interaction based on actions and statements. Among the key criteria that govern how police approach their tasks is the assumption of ‘reduced visibility,’ that individuals can essentially disappear. The public nature of street life reinforces the need for increased visibility, and the transitory nature of ‘skid row identity’ makes framing and predictive long-term consequences for social action difficult from the perspective of the police:

Just as the past is seen by the policeman as having only the most attenuated relevance to the present, so the future implications of present situations are said to be generally devoid of prospective coherence. No venture, especially no joint venture, can be said to have a strongly predictable future in line with its initial objectives. It is a matter of adventitious circumstance whether or not matters go as anticipated. That which is not within the grasp of momentary control is outside of practical social reality. (Bittner 1967: 705)

Bittner’s understanding of how police view the exigencies of the situations they encounter lies on a spectrum, distantly separated from the situations in many small-town or suburban police departments that have subsequently become the subject of sociological analysis (cf. Wilson 1968) and the case of the Revierpolizei in Brandenburg specifically. Bittner’s skid row police need to become masters of immediate problem solving, relying on crafting and communicating a version of institutional authority and public visibility which can help them maintain order in a social setting which they themselves perceive as disordered, chaotic, and only predictable to the extent that more problems are expected (compare the ‘high risk’ units in South African townships observed by Marks 2004 or the French ‘anti-crime’ units described in Fassin 2013.) In this situation there is essentially only one opportunity to ‘successfully’ resolve a conflict or defuse a potentially explosive situation, and little direct feedback in terms of what consequences or outcomes result. Kelling and Coles (1996) present this as a key characteristic of the “old model” (i.e. pre-community-oriented policing) of policing:

The old model of policing dealt with incidents. A chronic neighborhood quarrel erupts: police respond. It erupts again: police again respond. And so on. In practical terms for police, incidents have neither a history nor a future. Consistent with their reactive, unintrusive model, police are to refrain from taking action until an incident erupts. (163)

This reading of a policing perspective on ‘incidents’ is rhetorical, framed as part of an argument for community policing, rather than based in observation: Kelling was well aware of Bittner’s observation that most police work is order-maintenance rather than law enforcement, and so his claims that police blindly follow law enforcement models and require an institutional acceptance of order maintenance as a legitimate goal and practice should not be taken too literally. Kelling himself claimed to develop his understanding of community policing based on participant-observation of police officers and examining what they really did. His argument should be read more as one attempting to change the broader institutional and cultural values surrounding policing to accept this view, with the (arguably overly optimistic, cf. Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001) assumption that these practices can then be refined, improved, and make police work both more transparent and at the same time more palatable for a wider swathe of society. Kelling’s reading of police work overemphasizes the use of formal outcomes—arrests, crime reduction—which imply that law enforcement is the primary (if not sole) institutional concern and therefore the primary concern of officers; this overlooks the fact that how officers handle cases at the individual and situational level is almost certainly predicated on their reading of the situation not only as a localized ‘incident’ but in terms of the likelihood of it leading to future problems they will have to deal with: “Thus, if a police department has fifteen repeat calls to an apartment building over a period of several weeks, the obvious question in a problem-oriented department is ‘why wait for the next call and the possibility that someone is going to be seriously hurt?’” (Kelling and Coles 1996: 163) Braga (2015) writes, “[b]ehind every recurring problem there are underlying conditions that create it. Incident-driven policing never addresses these conditions, therefore, incidents are likely to recur.” (18, cited in Sparrow 2016: 121) Yet it has often been found through ethnographic research that police officers, regardless of official policy, administrative concerns, or institutional goals, think exactly this way. (Niederhoffer 1967, Rubinstein 1973, Reuss-Ianni 1984; Meehan [1992] notably titled his work, quoting a patrol officer, “I don’t prevent crime, I prevent calls” reflecting a deeper understanding of the relationship between crime as a construct and problems reflected in things police have to deal with, but certainly not a pre-occupation with law enforcement as a goal in its own right.) The contextual emphasis or de-emphasis on certain forms of institutional outcomes—i.e. seeing certain forms of police ‘activity,’ such as vice arrests (Rubinstein 1973) or even traffic tickets (Van Maanen 1974) as a measure of effectiveness—has much to do with constructions of the neighborhood and community (see also Herbert 1996, Moskos 2008b); De Lint (2000) comments that, “in societies like the United States, many sites are already pre-packaged for policing according to the respectability of their constituencies.” (76) Patterns and structures of daily life can be recontextualized or reframed through the lens of policing to be ‘suspicious’ or evidence of disorder, with the Broken Windows claim to be supporting ‘community concerns’ rarely being effectively challenged to produce evidence of widespread concern within the community being policed. Police can claim to be serving a community by enforcing laws and regulations which bear little resemblance to “the code of the street,” (Anderson 1999) precisely because their key audience might lie outside of that community. At the same time, a significant body of evidence suggests that police officers often take institutional concerns with a grain of salt and are usually content to simply satisfy the minimum requirements to keep supervisors satisfied. (Banton 1964, Skolnick 1971, Manning 1977, Schubert 1979, Ericson 1982, Rowe 2007, Moskos 2008a) Simply realizing that handling incidents using institutional and bureaucratic categorizations does not solve the ‘root causes’ does not mean that police necessarily have the capacity, resources, knowledge, ability, or even political backing to address these root causes (much less identify them) in a way that is received with widespread acceptance. Community policing, for this reason, has also at times emphasized the appearances of concern and addressing fear of crime and images of disorder regardless of their relationship to reported crime. The question becomes: on which stage is police work being performed? Is the nature and function of policing—the institutional role—being negotiated in communication with members of the community (and, specifically, which members?), being superficially acted out by rote for the benefit of the powers that be, or being played with at various levels to satisfy, entertain, and maintain the members of the cultural field of policing and their supporters and adherents (increasingly visible through the turn of individual police officers to ‘pro police’ social media outlets, cf. Goldsmith 2015)?

The situation in Brandenburg and the case at hand, in any event, prevented a stark contrast to the ‘incident-based’ model. Cases were clearly interpreted by police as embedded within society and networks of personal relationships: even if this wasn’t immediately apparent within the interaction (i.e. in cases where institutional authority was dominant and the officer maintained or was unable to break out of a generic and formalized ‘police role’) officers regularly explained the situation against a broader backdrop, to me or to other officers, pre- or post-encounter, with additional background information relating to specific stories, neighborhoods, problems, or recurring incidents.

One story was recounted to me while riding with a Revierpolizei officer, apparently prompted simply because it happened nearby. An older woman, who lived alone, had on several occasions become confused and mistakenly entered her neighbors’ house and sat down to watch television. She did not cause any damage and was cooperative once she was discovered by the homeowners. The Revierpolizei had been contacted, not so much for the coercive ability to remove the woman—the neighbors were capable of taking the woman home—but because in this case it seemed like the problem might be more significant than just the immediate incident, and that some following up may be required. The story was concluded with two statements setting out essentially what could be learned from this anecdote. The first linked the story to the local area, emphasizing that this story reflects the simple fact that people often leave their doors unlocked and “don’t panic if the neighbors come in.” The second was a linking narrative connecting this situation to stereotypes of institutional policing: “if we had treated this situation like a break in, someone could have gotten hurt.” Bittner (1970) emphasizes the fact that individuals rarely call the police (first) when they don’t know what to do, although this is often assumed, but rather call when they know that something needs to be done but aren’t sure how exactly it should be done or are unable to do it themselves. Removing an unwanted individual from a private residence is a common enough ‘normal’ policing task, and calling the police might be predicated on the basis that the caller either has been unsuccessful at getting the person to leave, is attempting to avoid escalating a conflict or getting into a violent confrontation, or else doesn’t know where to send the person that won’t result in them simply returning. Calling the police in this case may fit into the latter category, but the stronger conflict assumptions in line with Bittner’s skid row setting seem to play a weaker role here: the neighbors are likely still calling the police as a way to ‘hand over’ ownership of the problem (cf. Christie 1977), but a relevant fact of the case was that the Revierpolizei officer, as a community contact officer, was contacted first and had some level of familiarity with some of the individuals involved. This might not be as immediately interpretable (to the involved parties) as ‘turning a private issue into a state issue’ if the officer himself is being and acted towards in a more personal / situational role rather than strictly as a police officer, and if the involved parties trust the officer to make a decision in line with their own expectations.

This narrative and its telling—though simple, second-hand, and still a front-stage presentation—refer to the presumed reliance on situational forms of authority within the types of situations Revierpolizei officers often become involved in. Taking this narrative at face value would imply that both parties—the caller and the officer—saw the relevant police role as slightly more flexible than a fixed institutional role and the interactional goal as something to be jointly determined but still with the police officer as the ‘expert’ with greater leverage or weight in the process of handling the encounter: the officer is not strictly responsive to the citizen in terms of defining a formal police problem based on the citizen’s presentation of a problem, but also not entirely free of the expectations of the citizen in terms of how the problem is framed or what actions are taken. (Behrendes and Stenner 2008)

This is not to imply that a situational form of authority will always or even usually be assumed at the outset of non-emergency cases in this region or rural areas in general. The case involving the attack on Officer Karsten (described in Chapter Four) had begun first with local government officials and then the Ordnungsamt and only then was the Revierpolizei called in, with Officer Karsten’s greatest asset being his authority to implement sanctions and utilize coercive force as necessary, such as potentially breaking down the door to a private residence and overcoming physical residence: in this case the institution role was demanded by other agencies lacking in full police powers. One encounter in particular stood out for how well it demonstrated the tactical use of institutional ‘posturing’: Officer Schmidt needed to make contact with an individual living in an apartment building on the outskirts of a city with a bad reputation. He described the location as “Triple-A:” explaining this as, “Arbeitslose, Alkoholiker, und Asoziale” (lit: unemployed, alcoholics and anti-socials, cf. Funke 1990.) When we entered the parking lot he commented to me on the large number of German flags hanging from balconies³ and the fact that many of the balconies were occupied: “they don’t have anything to do during the day.” (“Tagsüber nichts zu tun.”) No one addressed us as we left the car, but about a dozen individuals continued to stare at us from balconies or windows, with more appearing over time. I was instructed to stay near the car—“it’s less threatening that way.” Officer Schmidt moved towards the building and spoke to a shirtless man through a window, but the specific man he was looking for was reportedly not there. The conversation was brief though relatively tense, with the officer sticking to ‘formal matters’ (in German: sachlich) and the other individual providing terse and direct responses with neither party making any other conversational overtures. This case was one of many ‘residence checks’ in which the Revierpolizei simply needed to confirm if a person lived at their registered address—the majority of these cases I observed were similar to this example, in that the officer (or different officers) had been there before and though the individual was not there, and often it seemed evident that no one lived there, there was no legitimate basis for concluding that the person was not there, requiring additional follow-up visits: it was unclear to me whether there simply was little that would serve as legitimate negative confirmation—neighbors very often reported not knowing the person at all or never seeing anyone in the home, or if the officer simply felt it better to give the person the benefit of the doubt, as reporting them as ‘address unknown’ would trigger financial and other consequences but not necessarily any benefits. After a brief and inconclusive conversation, Officer Schmidt returned to the car and commented to me “I don’t want to stay longer, I can’t take any actions here.” (“Ich will nicht länger bleiben, ich habe keine Maßnahmen hier“ lit: “I have no measures here.“)

The strict maintaining of a visible institutional role was used in this case to avoid closer to deeper interaction, in line with the expectations and understanding of the situation and setting by Officer Schmidt. The primary practice for maintaining this role was simply maintaining a distance, rather than one of taking control of the situation. (cf. Sykes and Brent 1980) At a certain level this could be interpreted as a self-fulfilling prophecy (Merton 1949: 475–490), as the officer’s expectation of a basic skepticism, if not hostility, towards the presence of the police resulted in the establishment of an institutional role intended to maintain a separation—physically and socially—between police and public, which better allows the residents to view the officer as ‘just another cop’ and is also unlikely to soften their shared or individual images of the police. This is a particular acute and relatively modern issue in the German policing literature: populations with which police are broadly seen to have conflict potential, or which in which mutual distrust is often invoked as a source of further problems, i.e. immigrants, refugees, and arguably the political far-right, are treated in a distant, formal, and heavily institutionalized way to avoid the appearance of bias or misunderstanding, but at same time this institutional image is likely harsher than the presentational strategies used by police in most ‘normal’ encounters. (cf. Behr 2000, 2018, Sauerbaum 2009, Hunold et al. 2010) It must also be considered that the immediate goal being pursued by Officer Schmidt was institutionally-driven: the need to conduct registration checks has little, if any, correlation with generic community values and in the immediate local context was (from the perspective of Officer Schmidt, at least) more likely to be interpreted as bureaucratic overreach rather than peace-keeping, public safety, or taking local concerns into consideration.

Part of the consistent construction of community that was appreciated by officers was the basic level of homogeneity and familiarity: while there was diversity in terms of groups who might be seen as responding and reacting to the presence of the police in different ways, these were generally still seen as individuals within a community—their expected behavioral patterns, attitudes, and varying propensities for becoming a problem were not directly attributed to their broader backgrounds but more often to life experiences and opportunities. Some people might be considered “not worth taking seriously,” (in the words of one Revierpolizei officer regarding bar regulars who were happy to share gossip) but it may be because “they never really had much in their lives, so they just want something to tell to feel important.”⁴ The officer, while on one hand completely disregarding the individuals, established a connection with them and expressed sympathy for their concerns, even as he was more concerned with the expression than with the reality, because he could view them as part of his own community that while individually identifiable (based on their behavior and setting, i.e. being daytime regulars in a local bar) were still broadly inseparable from the community, and despite the admonition against taking them seriously, could in other cases be useful for providing information—according to the officer their interest in gossip, while fueling their use of embellishment or outright fabrication, also lead to them often being up to date on many under the surface problems. In essence it didn’t matter if these were “good people,” they fit within the community and could work with the police in that capacity and were therefore “our people.”

Foreigners and ‘outsiders,’ in the sense of those who didn’t grow up in the area, in general were rare—this is not to suggest that foreigners were necessarily outsiders, but simply that by virtue of not being local, alternate narratives were available and the chance (as in previous examples) of police maintaining a strict institutional policing and social distance is plausibly higher.⁵ The same officer who both demeaned and accepted the bar regulars within his beat reserved his highest contempt for an art collective that had been formed several years prior out of a previously empty village. The residents were allegedly all “from the West,” and primarily or entirely women, but they “didn’t fit in” within the broader community. I wasn’t given much more explanation for how exactly they didn’t fit in, though it became clear that the officer personally had had only fleeting or no contact with any of the residents but rather disapproved of what they represented—artists from the West in somewhat non-traditional living situations. This was most notable as the same officer had earlier expressed disapproval for other corners of society, not only the bar regulars, but in ways that considered them incorporated into the community, and it remained unclear of whether the ‘lack of fitness’ narrative was second-hand, i.e. based on recounted events of conflicts or interactions, or was derived from assumptions about their ‘outsider’ qualities.

Groups that were considered to be ‘outsiders’ were otherwise rare, and when they existed—as in the previous examples—encounters between them and police were exceedingly rare. This fits with the presumptions that institutional authority will dominate police-citizen encounters under many or most conditions, but the effective establishing of a type of shared community can constitute one exception in which situational authority often plays a larger or dominant role. Huey (2007), examining police practices on skid rows in three cities, concludes with “the idea that communities articulate their values through their policing practices.” (201) This, however, presumes that the values identified through policing practices are not only reflective of the community but are in some way derived from community expression or interaction with community members. While one of the stated goals of community-oriented policing has been to adapt to existing communities and strengthen their internal bonds, critics have generally likened it to simply importing outsider, middle-class ‘standards of decency’ often with an emphasis on making neighborhoods ‘profitable’ in terms of outside investment and tourism. (cf. Marat 2019) It should also be considered that Revierpolizei officers very often came into encounters by direct invitation—when contacted directly by citizens who were very often previously known to them—and that this can constitute a self-reinforcing pattern of self-fulfilling prophecies in which individuals not enmeshed in certain avenues of community life and not having much routine experience with the police will see no reason to contact an individual community officer and will be more likely to have contact, if at all, with patrol and response units, and in turn the community officer will have little opportunity or basis for developing a more ‘fleshed out,’ personal, and positive image of those individuals. The argument here is not specifically about homogeneity or diversity within neighborhoods and communities, but rather about the factors that allow for a neighborhood to be effectively constructed this way by police: the police as an organization and as individuals have little direct control over the makeup of their community, but they have significantly more control over how they interact with and relate to the groups and individuals who make up that community, particularly in the case of establishing partnerships.

7.3 Community Partnerships

“The first thing to understand is that the public peace—the sidewalk and street peace—of cities is not kept primarily by the police, necessary as police are. It is kept primarily by an intricate, almost unconscious, network of voluntary control and standards among the people themselves, and enforced by the people themselves.”

– Jane Jacobs (1961: 32)

The relative (social) distance between police and public has been a significant locus of much of policing theorizing and reform, with most 20^th century reform attempts—specifically in the US and UK—attempting to segregate the police from the community as often as possible to anesthetize the organization and individual officers from corrupting influences; this centralization of police organization was implemented under the broader frame of professionalism and an industrial or bureaucratic model (cf. Vollmer 1971, Walker 1993, Sklansky 2011) but also indirectly established many parallels with the earlier Continental model of police represented through national gendarmies and with visible influences even on the Anglo-American-based German police reconstituted following the Second World War. (Linnan 1984, Liang 1992, see also Lindenberger 2000 for a more general overview of the theoretical and historical development of police in East Germany) This professional model was intended to “offer… not only a way of isolating the police from potential sources of corruption (the overriding concern of 20^th century reformers) but also a way of emphasizing that the police have, or should have, special skills and knowledge that can be written down, taught and continually improved (a more common concern of reformers today.)” (Sklansky 2011: 7) The ideals of the professional model, however, have increasingly been criticized for assuming that the ‘expert knowledge’ of the police will be enough to gain approval and avoid criticism of their strategic planning as well as individual case-by-case decision-making, and attempts to involve the community have risked stumbling over this point. Sparrow (2016) notes that:

Some departments attempt to engage the community as “eyes and ears”; that is, to provide information to the police in support of their traditional crime-fighting role. The one-sided nature of this deal is what eventually renders it unsustainable. Communities will not participate for long unless they know their own concerns are being taken seriously and incorporated into policing priorities. A more mature community policing model must be a two-sided deal: police and public working together not only to achieve results, but also to set the agenda. The advantages to the community must be obvious and tangible. (105)

A major focus of community policing has been on establishing partnerships with existing community groups (of various types) for the purposes of 1) harmonizing the purported value systems that govern local and everyday police work with those of the community, broadly, and 2) engaging the community itself—at least symbolically—in its own policing. These groups are relevant both, as implied, as a proxy for the more complex and harder to delineate complexities of everyday community or neighborhood life and due to their access to resources, networks, individuals, and very often their more concrete or overt moral scheme—particularly in the case of community social organizations with defined purposes such as aiding the homeless, combating drunk driving, or neighborhood watches. (cf. Gusfield 1989)

Criticism of community policing, both its practice and its theory, have often emphasized the perceived incompatibility between the basic tenets and values of policing—those which have essentially weathered decades of reform—and the variety of cultural perspectives, standards of conduct, and moral values within specific communities. (Manning 1988, 2001) Community policing, despite rosy interpretations presenting it as a return to a better age of policing, implies a compromise or selection between differing, likely conflicting, standards. Thatcher (2001) writes that:

To tell officers “enforce the law, but don’t enforce it too strictly” may make perfect sense to most officers. But it could also amount to a mixed message of the sort that organizations try to avoid – a dysfunctional directive of “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” that can lead to paralysis and bad decision making. (771)

Thatcher assumes value conflict at a minimum between police organizations and communities (cf. Lovig and Skogan 1995, Harcourt 2001, Manning 2001) if not between individual officers and local residents. The involvement of alternative value systems in the guise of community partnerships is intended to provide guidance at two levels: determining which problems should be emphasized, and determining ways to handle situations effectively. These approaches have invoked a ‘social norms’ approach, in which, rather than emphasizing criminal enforcement (i.e. inducing a ‘fear of being caught’ in potential criminals or strengthening the cultural norms that support police power and authority) attempts are made to redefine the social meaning of crime, to make law-abiding or at least desirable behavior essentially coterminous with local social norms. (cf. Waldeck 1999, Harcourt 2001) Community partnerships, ideally, provide legitimacy to these efforts and provide a starting point for ‘ideal’ values, avoiding both the appearance and the difficulties of the hegemonic imposition of outside standards, a way to frame the desired (lawful) behaviors as already desired within the community. (cf. Bourdieu 1991) These attempts in practice have additionally revealed, apart from tensions between police expectations and demands and those of the community, rifts within segments of communities and the fact that police tend to partner with groups most similar to the institution of policing itself: traditional, conservative, male-dominated groups which are less threatening to the status quo, as well as those with already defined problems. Winship and Berrier (1999) examined police-community partnerships in Boston and found many suspect invocations of ‘community values’ attributed to churches in particular, which led to a police mandate to “focus on the truly bad youth” but “in a fair and just way.” (67, cited in Thatcher 2001) The invocation of the moral order from a community church provided a cloak of legitimacy—the police here were on the side of good—but essentially allowed police to target the behaviors, groups, and individuals they had previously targeted, and mentions of justice and fairness allowed the police to frame their behavior as just and fair provided they used the provided vocabularies and rhetoric—e.g. criminal enforcement is ‘helping to turn lives around’ rather than punishing.

Community partnerships, therefore, affect the visible nature of policing values (and their synchronicity with community values) in three general ways:

• 1) Priorities and the defining of problems

• 2) Involvement of or deference to outside actors/agencies

• 3) Symbolic association

Letting police priorities be in some part—at least dramaturgically—driven by the concerns of community groups arguably has many potential positives, including the identification of previously unknown or overlooked problems, higher satisfaction in the local police organization among the community, less need to rely on either ‘arbitrary’ uses of discretion or aggressive enforcement / zero-tolerance to present an effective image of order and safety, and the better potential for a ‘social norms’ approach to be effective. (Pütter 2006, cf. Schreiber 2011 who presents a much more skeptical view of police-community cooperation) It has long been argued that policing institutional priorities, particularly defined through statistics and generated data, is often, at a minimum, out of sync with community values. (Young 1991, Kelling and Coles 1996) Recent changes and innovations in policing have specifically focused on changing how police identify problems as serious, treatable, and likely to escalate or continue if ignored, including such efforts as hot-spot policing, COMPSTAT, and various data driven approaches. (Manning 2003, Sparrow 2016, Egbert and Krasmann 2019) A major concern, however, remains identifying those problems which are shared by the community, essentially serving as a weak proxy for community values as the solutions, outcomes, and—most importantly—formalized documentation of those outcomes preferred or required by the police may not mesh as well with local norms. The defining of the problems can be broadly moral or heuristic, as in the example of Boston, which can result in “the exploitation of existing rivalries and animosities within the population” (Liang 1992: 72), or targeted at specific pre-identified problems, essentially granting legitimacy to the definitions of problems put forward by other groups of “moral entrepreneurs” (Becker 1963), whether by viewing drunk driving as an failure of self-control, presenting drug users as victims rather than offenders, or seeing the homeless as individuals making a choice which is disruptive to local business. (Gusfield 2000, Best 2017 cf. Kelling and Coles 1996) Accepting the phenomenology of problems suggested by community groups establishes a form of symbolic connection in that it involves those groups in the work of the police as it is conducted, and may even affect the way in which police work is structured and carried out, though these connections remain at a deeper symbolic level.

Actively involving groups in police work—even if that activity is only ‘police work’ in the sense that it deals with a problem given legitimacy through a partnership or cooperation between police and moral entrepreneurs—demonstrates a level of trust and inclusiveness, incorporating additional individuals and groups, presumably with recognizable values and priorities, into the broader life-world of policing. It also reduces the social distance between officers and citizens implicit in the institutional view, depending on specific affiliations. (cf. Stebbins 2016) At the most simplistic level, this was identified in the expressed solidarity in which police officers consistently waved not only to other officers (whether they knew them or not) but also to ambulances, fire trucks, and other public safety personnel. Most notably, involving other groups in the practice of police work can lead to a more overt recognition of the fact that not all problems considered serious or relevant by the police are best handled with the measures available to (or exclusive to) the police. (cf. Bittner 1974) As discussed, a shared recognition of a problem between police perspectives and community beliefs may not correspond to the shared understanding of the best way to solve that problem, and institutional pressures or inertia may lead to police preferring administrative solutions invoking the criminal law over the opposition of elements of communities which prefer less interventionist or punitive methods. (Christie 2004, see also Pütter 2006) Incorporating citizens into problem-solving at various levels, ranging from simply identifying issues to actively cooperating with the police in resolving situations, can both firmly delineate the differences between the abilities, powers, and reflexes of the police and those of the outside agencies and groups with different resources, interests and goals as well as potentially dissolving or weakening the boundaries between the two. While the active engagement of citizen groups in crime prevention has been controversial and generally downplayed by the police (particularly in the US in the aftermath of the killing of Trayvon Martin) but neighborhood watches and the privatization of policing continue to play significant roles in both actively involving others in the resolution of ‘disruptive’ incidents as well as in the police learning to effectively exploit the existence of those roles while firmly maintaining their own position at the top of the criminal enforcement hierarchy.

One significant example from Brandenburg demonstrates the active engagement of community groups in a way that was considered (in the analysis but overtly by the involved officers as well) both practical and symbolic. On one occasion—not the first, apparently—a wild boar was reported on the main street of a town in the area, posing a risk to anyone in the area and requiring the police to block off the area around it. An officer told me that the service weapons carried by police were not powerful enough to kill the boar and were more likely to simply make it more aggressive and unpredictable. Rather than obtaining better or specialized weapons, the police contacted the local hunter’s association (Jagdverband) and a hunter, a private citizen serving as a volunteer, essentially, was dispatched. The hunter shot the boar and took the carcass, at which point the police could clear the scene and allow traffic to continue. Involving the hunter’s association was presented to me as standard operating procedure in these types of incidents and in many cases involving wildlife at all, with the explanation that they had both better equipment for specifically dealing with taking down animals and more knowledge of how to deal with animals and how they might react. These explanations were framed so as to not undercut the expertise of the police in terms of applying force and effectively using weapons; at the same time—and slightly more informally—it was emphasized that the officers themselves are less interested in weapons or their use, while the hunters would both ‘enjoy’ the opportunity and the fact that they are being called in to take over for the police. What for the police would be considered a risky, unpredictable and potentially stressful situation in which things could easily go wrong was considered—or at least dramatized—as, if not routine, completely manageable by the hunter’s association. The police, by involving the hunters at all, could minimize or avoid the threat to their expert status by virtue of the fact that it was the expert decision of responding officers to contact and engage the hunters at all. Statements and descriptions made by Revierpolizei officers at other times, in contrast, emphasized the need to maintain a good relationship and open communications with the hunter’s association and hunters in particular. The local region is particularly popular for hunting and, as a result, firearms ownership is high compared to Germany overall: this is not seen as necessarily leading to a risk of violence or more risk to police officers specifically, but the stated reasoning of officers always mentioned the fact that weapon owners needed to be registered with the local shooting club (Schützenverein) and are usually also involved with the hunter’s association. By involving the hunters as a ‘partner’ the police can essentially—symbolically—delegate control over certain aspects and risks of gun ownership to those groups, without the police being seen immediately as a threat, and with a greater likelihood that these groups will report concerns, problems, or ‘suspicious behavior’ to the police earlier. Involving these groups is directly practical—in their immediate contributions to resolving problems—broadly instrumental—by maintaining positive relations and communication channels and allowing for easier cooperation in a variety of situations—and symbolically meaningful.

Involving community groups, however, often led to a much more informal handling of the problem—one that is also necessarily more difficult to document. This was often related to the use of connections through specific individuals rather than more ‘formal’ organizational partnerships: often this might involve the same person, but the nature of the relation and the presentation of the problem would vary, reflecting the dramaturgical presentation of police authority. This was related to local knowledge and sometimes practicalities of situations. For example, in one village within Officer Schmidt’s beat, the wife of the Ortsvorsteher worked locally for a prominent community service organization, AWO (Arbeiterwohlfahrt e. V.), and “if you have certain problems you can go to her,” while her husband could handle other types of problems, making their house a useful place to visit informally after working hours. This also corresponded to the often stated but less often reflected explored idea that many problems are only criminal in their outcomes but the ‘root causes’ of them run deeper. (cf. Braga 2015) While root cause arguments often emphasize deeper structural problems or “social breakdown” (Sasson 1995) this form of community engagement often saw the ideal intervention at an intermediate level relating to social relations and the potential for many problems to be dealt with informally through communication (generally not from the institutional perspective of the police.) An individual who has been involved in a ‘disturbance’ while drunk may not be seen as needing referral to a social agency immediately, but the officer may consider the best strategy to be talking to friends or family, the local bar owner, or others thought to be already involved in the broader situation: the fact that individuals often had “dual roles” often mean problems could be addressed informally but with the hint (or even threat) of more formal intervention if those involved didn’t see progress being made.

The symbolic association of police and community groups is a significant function in outwardly constructing an image of the community and indicating the type of ‘order’ which is being enforced. This aspect of community partnerships has more often been explored in critiques of community policing than put forward by its advocates. (cf. Harcourt 2001) Police often worked with other ‘referral agencies’ in dealing with specific cases, such as child protective services / the youth welfare office (Jugendamt); however, this cooperation was primarily more practical as a way to divert cases from a more problematic processing within the justice system and contact between these types of officer and the police (apart from the Ordnungsamt) was for the most part limited to handling individual already ongoing cases. Community partnerships in contrast were maintained both in the handling of cases and in discovering and identifying new issues. Symbolic association incorporates the first two elements of cooperation—in that it suggests both a sharing of priorities and combining efforts to demonstrate shared values—but takes a step further in presenting certain groups, individuals, movements, orientations, etc. as representative of community values. In doing so, this (indirectly or directly) promotes the idea of a singular, consensual community with more-or-less shared values, potentially at the expense of excluded adversarial positions: it is for this reason that partnerships often focus on “valence issues” (Nelson 1984, Gusfield 1989) where even if oppositional views exist they are less likely to be organized or formally and symbolically expressed in public. Crime prevention groups—such as Weißer Ring, focused on both crime prevention and victims’ rights—often work with police by design as their implicit worldview and set of priorities generally conforms to that of the police institution: at the same time, and despite a significant amount of literature related to crime prevention in the main police station, Revierpolizei officers only rarely mentioned or were seen to interact with these groups (and it is possible that coordination and contact with these organizations was primarily handled by the comparatively smaller crime prevention unit.) Symbolic associations were often found in more abstract contexts with less mission-driven partners which could more realistically be presented as “community life,” such as in setting up a police information booth at a classic car show or the local officer attending and being formally introduced at a village festival organized by volunteer firefighters.

Symbolic representations can play a significant role in indicating both to the community (through organizations or structured groups as well as individuals) and police officers (in ways that can guide their use of discretion) what is to be valued or kept ‘sacred.’⁶ (cf. Manning 2012) Behr (1993) describes how police in Thuringia, following reunification, were often instructed to pay special attention to banks and ensure their security, reflecting the way money, in a newly capitalist society, symbolically represented a new “Eucharist.” (78, cf. Glaeser 2000, Hayward 2004) Overt symbolism of this type was not seen in the present study, possibly reflecting the relative stability of the ‘new German states’ almost three decades, rather than one year, after (re)unification, or else different attitudes and priorities. This is not to say that banks or other representations of economy played no role: often they were pointed out, and stories of past bank robberies were recounted as evidence for the need to pay attention to the location. But Revierpolizei officers rarely included banks as specific areas that needed to be visited and were not observed to have routine contact with employees or managers in the way they did in many other locations. Similarly to Behr’s experience, stories of bank robberies which occurred not long after unification were often repeated as a way to suggest the new risks and dangers that came from “the West,” as well as framed in a way to present extreme or deadly violence as rare, primarily an outside problem, and not something highly valued by police officers.

The idea of partnerships and community support was highly valued by officers, at least narratively. Some officers, however, were concerned about declining participation in community groups and events, with one country officer stating, “in the city it still works, but in village fewer people are going along every year.” He indicated the generally older age of the volunteer firefighters and suggested that the problem is not only a lack of younger people but a lack of appeal for most community groups for younger people. The most prominent groups, at least in terms of police relevance, in his district included the shooting club (Schützenverein), a sailing club, and the aforementioned fire department: the officer described the core municipality in his beat as “one of the quietest in the county.” Without contacts in the community, he saw little to do in terms of police work in the more rural areas in particular, “drive through, look left, look right, that’s all.” In this case particularly the role of more informal infrastructural settings, i.e. cafes and bars where ‘regulars’ assembled, was more prominent, where although “you can ignore most of what they say” it was possible to get a feel for what rumors and concerns were in circulation and then weigh this against the more official business of meetings with the municipal director. Weekly meetings were held in a cafe with primarily government agencies, often including forest rangers (Förster), and included both an array of general events and calendar-coordination as well as the presentation and discussion of potential problems from a more official or expert perspective. However, observations with this officer also included informal visits to doctors, a nursing home, several workshops and garages, hotels, as well as private residences. This discrepancy was among the most indicative of the challenges of establishing communication or understanding between the Revierpolizei and the community at the organization level, as the organizations that are the best organized—in terms of membership, communicative power and continuity—are often oriented around specific interests and less diverse (specifically in terms of age, gender, and financial status) than the community itself. The ‘compromise’ solution in effect here—and identifiable in most jurisdictions—seems to effect a happy medium, with officers engaging both with organized groups and more informal groupings to get a ‘broader’ view of what is going on, but this again highlights the significant discretion of the officer in deciding which perspectives, opinions, concerns, and suggestions to take seriously or prioritize over others. This officer was critical (at least, more vocally than many) of some specific individuals in local government, but also stressed that his work was “not about politics,” and that “everyone can still get along.” (Notably, it was this same officer who essentially wrote off the community of artists within his municipality as “not from here.”)

Infrastructural locations play a significant role in transmitting the content of community—community is both acted out in various locations (public spaces such as town halls or at public events as well as private spaces that fulfill a general social role) and gives priority and salience to those locations. Socially defined spaces can serve as “boundary objects” (Barlösius 2019: 30) where multiple social worlds overlap, such as a café where gossip is shared and where different categories of clientele might interact even if indirectly, such as by making small talk with the owner. This was particularly relevant for the Revierpolizei, as the need to establish a more-or-less singular image of ‘our community’ required overcoming the social boundaries within that community.⁷ The more informal groups that frequented informal ‘village centers’ often could serve as a conduit for the officers to reach (or receive information from) a much large portion of the population, and the utilizing of these resources in turn served as symbol of informal, personal, or community-oriented policing in which individuals saw their own various types of social capital (social standing, relations, knowledge) being valued.

Local knowledge once again played a highly significant role here, as community groups could not be simply treated as independent entities, but rather as both representing specific interests and comprised of private individuals with their own complex web of relations. The last example in particular was a case where the careful balancing of various interests was hinted out though not often made explicit—the officer expanded on a great deal of local history related to locations, groups, and settings, and demonstrated an awareness of how complicated local networks and community politics could be. As an example, a local restaurant and tavern, which had been host to a group of community regulars and a useful spot for gossip, had closed and not yet been replaced, which had left a noticeable ‘void’ within that corner of the beat and left a great reliance on either engaging with more ‘formal’ actors or actively seeking out known individuals. This was described as part of a larger trend of decline, however, with community engagement—both through formal organizations and also through simply spending time in public places and ‘village infrastructure’—declining as many villages were reduced to only a dozen houses that were occupied year-round and with little expectation of the economic situation improving.

The inclusion of community partnerships in police work in Falkenmark was a more robust and tangible affair than has often been presented in the literature, but was at the same time clearly connected to the nature (and homogeneity) of the region as is rather than necessarily a conscious strategy throughout multiple levels of police planning. Much of it was practical not just in terms of capabilities and resources (i.e. utilizing hunters or forestry officers in cases related to wildlife) but in terms of priorities. Crime in almost every narrative context took a backseat to more general concepts of ‘public safety’ which involved a broader range of expert and lay organizations: notably emergency management agencies (Katastrophenschutz) were a major cooperation partner who often worked alongside the police. Flooding was a seasonal problem in many areas, and during flood season this was one of the most significant concerns of the police throughout the county. The police had a more cooperative and often situational role here, with the primary uses of the police involving more general crowd and traffic control functions and also pure manpower for tasks such as placing sandbags, but also including search and rescue. Many situations which involved the police—such as missing persons or injuries—involved other agencies at either formal levels or more informally: the case of a missing person and suspected suicide involved essentially a canvassing of friends and relatives by a Revierpolizei officer but also coordination with the marine police and various local agencies including the fire department. These types of cases tended not so much to demonstrate community values but rather to incorporate already assumed, unchallenged, and unlikely to be challenged values. (The suspected suicide case, for example, was believed by all involved to be ‘drug related’ but the handling of the case otherwise did not reflect this or any public moral judgement, nor was the question of what relation the police as “law enforcement” had to this case which was based solely on assumptions and no concrete evidence that anyone had been hurt.) The symbolic association of the police was widespread but most visible—in a large, public, ‘spectacular’ sense—in cases suggesting public safety and risk management or else in events already presumed to be reflective of broader communities, such as the classic car shows, municipally-organized events such as the Christmas Market or various parades, and sports events. The most important everyday associations, however, tended to be more discretionary and based on the routines of individual community officers and how they established networks: the practices of officers to establish and utilize situational and personal authority reflected their understanding and construction of which community or communities they were attempting to maintain order in and based on which standards.

7.4 Liminality and the Spirit of Control

“A really good detective never gets married.”

– Raymond Chandler, Casual Notes on the Mystery Novel (1949)

As has been discussed throughout this work, police officers need to be many different things to many different people—occasionally taking on or making concessions to multiple social roles simultaneously. The concept of liminality—based on the Latin limen, meaning ‘threshold’—was popularized by Victor Turner (1967, 1969) though it has a longer history within anthropology, primarily connected to the study of rites of passage, both individually and communally, and the symbolism and ritual behavior associated with them. Liminality in its most direct, constrained sense refers to the transition period within a ritualized rite of passage: the point(s) at which the person-being-transformed has shed the most crucial aspects associated with the identity being given up, but has not yet gained the aspects of the new identity; they are “neither one thing nor another.” (Turner 1967: 96) In a deeper sense it has come to be applied to roles and/or statuses that are essentially permanently in-between fixed states: liminality has been used to describe the professional status of organizations such as campus police in the United States, who are often at the same both legitimate police organizations and viewed and acted towards in contrast to “real police” (Wada et al. 2010), and management consultants, who need to simultaneously represent various parties and interests and both utilize the knowledge systems of the ‘adopting’ organization and emphasize their own unique outsider systems. (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003) Liminality has been invoked as an element within dramaturgy. (Gusfield 2000) While the original uses of the term by Turner emphasized the fixed institutional background of the ritual and the need for a shared community understanding of both the ascribed roles and the lack of ascription for the liminal roles, more recent uses of the term have applied it to less structured situations and interactions. (Ibarra and Obodaru 2016) Rather than requiring a necessary and linearly-constructed transition, liminal roles are seen in the lack of defining structures or where two or more institutional frameworks overlap creating pressures to applying conflicting identities or accept mutually exclusive narratives which can only be accomplished by establishing a ‘permanent outsider’ role and managing to still find an insider space for that role.

The liminal roles described by Turner were presented as lacking in structural foundation—literally the product of a gap between formal structures—and establishing both a blurred personal identity and a cultural void; this was often represented by treating the individual as symbolically dead, considering them tainted and interaction with them taboo, and limiting any connection with them to formalized rituals. (Turner 1969) In less structured settings, interactions with liminal roles have been presented as either defined by “uncertainty, confusion, and disorientation” (Ibarra and Obodaru 2016: 50) or else involving an irreconcilable clash between competing frames. The voluntary nature of liminal roles has been emphasized within dramaturgical perspectives: it is not that individuals freely choose liminal roles, but rather that liminal roles are taken up and acted out, presented through (often multi-voiced) narratives and often result from resisting outside contextualization or categorization. (Jones 2013) Experiences of liminality can differ based on whether socialization is being undergone collectively, e.g. through a training academy or cohort, or individually, as well as sequentially, following a fixed and known schedule of training and indoctrination, or randomly, where lessons are learned when problems arrive or serendipitously. (cf. Van Maanen and Schein 1979) While the concept of ‘socialized liminal roles’ might appear contradictory, the relevance here lies in how the practices used to maintain liminality and selectively invoke fixed roles are learned and culturally transmitted. In terms of police socialization, all four elements could arguably play a role: police are trained within cohorts, but with a presumed and extended period of field training and mentorship; formal training is sequential, but the ‘important’ lessons for officers tend to be those learned informally through war stories and on the job experience which have no set schedule. (cf. Van Maanen 1973, Manning 1977, Fielding 1988, Conti 2009, Sauerbaum 2009) These factors influence the extent to which a possible liminal role could be considered institutionalized: as still taking place between structures but with a clearer understanding of which structures and frameworks it is that are being transitioned between or which serve as ‘poles’ between which the liminal role can maneuver. In this regard, the extent to which the police role could be considered liminal would depend on the extent to which police officers are acting with consideration towards a fixed professional, institutional role, and to what extent their audience is considered to be the community and society in general rather than institutional insiders, i.e. other police. (cf. Christe-Zeyse 2006, Kreissl 2008) The presumption that the singular policing role is liminal, that is, lacking a fixed identity, is not tenable, but rather the idea presented here is that a multitude of situated (street-level) policing roles with various configurations of contrast to or dependence on an idealized cultural and institutional role (which can rarely be fully carried out) invoke aspects of liminality as a mechanism for defending the legitimacy of situational roles without taking up the obligations or limitations of the core institutional role.

The liminality of policing roles is important to the model of authority construction in policing interaction that has been presented in previous chapters: police interactions are driven by and guided by the specter of institutional legitimacy and the powers and responsibilities deriving from the same source. The defining of what is a police encounter can be multi-subjective, in the sense that individuals may react to the presence of a police officer in certain ways and respond in a way that appeals to authority more than generic or everyday social norms (cf. Spencer 1970), but it is the police officer who can formally communicate that an encounter is taking place and invoke control (through spatial ordering, the ascription of roles, etc.) Liminality comes into play in situations where formal indication of a ‘police encounter’ has not happened (yet.) Just as the use of civil attention or “pretending not to see” by police officers is plausibly both a tacit acceptance of the behavior (not) being seen as well as a warning not to make that behavior more visible or overt, the lack of a formalized definition of the situation can never remove the possibility or belief that the situation can be re-categorized at a moment’s notice with the corresponding social roles being shuffled in the process. Among the more extreme examples would be the case of a police officer eating lunch in a restaurant in the middle of a shift: the officer is likely not indicating or establishing a strong institutional authority, and while the separation between “police” and “community” suggested by the practice of “keeping one’s guard up” may be reduced, it would be unimaginable for an armed gunman to enter and successfully rob the restaurant without the officer intervening. Following Blumer (1966), a police officer cannot eat lunch: a person who is a police officer can. Eating lunch suggests a stepping outside of the institutional police role, but not one so far as to suggest the removal of all the trappings of the profession.⁸

Fyfe (1980), referring to the use of off-duty weapons by US police officers, writes that:

American police are citizens and police officers. Considerable effort has been expended to eliminate distinctions between them and the communities they serve. Some distinctions, however, are both desirable and necessary and thus are not subject to these efforts. It is desirable and necessary that on-duty police fulfill the role of active intervener in threatening situations. It is also necessary, therefore, that they be distinguishable from most citizens by being armed during that time. (80)

Though not making the same argument, Fyfe touches on this duality of policing: officers are intended to be functional members of society, but at the same time apart from society and able to intervene in situations deemed threatening—unstated here is the important consideration that it is the police themselves, as an organization as well as individuals, who most concretely determine which situations are threatening. This already hints at the liminal nature of police officers as private citizens, at the most extreme suggesting the right to invoke policing powers or apply force, even deadly force, while off-duty (as in the US), but even if one assumes that the policing worldview is unique or significantly different from that of non-policing “standard” life-worlds. This second point admittedly could apply to any profession, hobby, or identity which offers a divergent perspective on social behavior—it first takes on special significance when one considers how, when and where private lives and personal relationships intersect with formalized policing roles.

7.4.1 The Police Officer’s Two Bodies

Personal authority refers to the understandings of the role of an individual in an encounter which are guided by understandings of the individual—the inclusion of ‘authority’ is intended to emphasize that some understanding of policing legitimacy is still included here and that the status of the individual as a police officer is still highly relevant, but that personal relations are still allowing individual or intersubjective norms to drive the interaction, rather than a deference to formal authority. At the same time, personal authority is primarily invoked in situations in which this police status is in some way relevant—in cases ranging from obvious crime activity to basic questions about procedure or personal advice about how to handle a potentially dangerous (legally or physically) situation. The acknowledgement or invocation of policing status reasserts the existence and possibility of an institutional role, but personal authority can be maintained with practices which subvert, minimize, or avoid this role as well as in cases where personal relations far outweigh institutional considerations, such as a police officer lecturing his son about underage drinking. More commonly observed cases involved less familiar but still acquainted individuals who the officer might encounter both on- and off-duty: neighbors, former classmates, cousins or extended family, former partners, etc. These relationships were often not close enough as to remove all appearances of police authority, but were also close enough as to essentially require an established form of communication governed by person norms rather than institutionalized authority: in most cases a simple wave or friendly greeting sufficed, but in more in-depth cases this involved an entire subversion of a ‘normal’ policing vocabulary, a translation of speech outside of its institutional bounds.⁹

The liminality of policing here essentially referred to a recasting of the role of police, establishing—at least attempting to establish—a new default that eschewed the formal institutional role. Police officers in rural areas and who police those areas are, by some standards, never off duty; yet this is not the same as being permanently ‘on call,’ but rather their job is deeply symbolic and can never fully not be. Whether this is manifested in the officer being called “sheriff” by a waitress (in or out of uniform) or by officers attending community events on duty but, apart from trappings of the office, outwardly appearing to share the same experience as any other local resident, these officers maintain a role that is characterized both by not being identical to that which it implies but also by its ability to invoke that role at a moment’s notice.¹⁰

The different analytic levels of policing typically are presented as individual, organization and institutional. (Bittner 1965, cf. Meyer and Rowan 1977) The symbolic nature and framing function of the institution has been widely discussed in the literature and has been a crucial part of the current analysis. Organizational studies of the police (especially following Wilson [1968]) have often been more technical, looking for ‘best practices’ and using meso-level organization-oriented methods or else considering the organization to be the summation of individual efforts. (Reiss 1992, Crank 2003) Yet the individual—the police officer—typically has been subsumed within these other schemas, even within a large amount of ethnographic work (cf. Remington 1965, Van Maanen 1977, Skolnick 1985, Mastrofski et al. 1998 cf. Campeau 2019): this is likely to a large extent explainable to the extent that a) institutional and organizational pressures shape police behavior, b) socio-psychological assumptions guide the direction of data collection as well as analysis (e.g. officers who “talk like cops” who flaunt their status as police officers are more interesting both in an everyday sense and analytically), and c) research involving police officers is primarily concerned with the immediate correlates and appearances of ‘police work’ in the setting in which is performed and the near precedent and antecedents, with less emphasis on or desire to explore a potentially unrelated biography ‘life world.’ Police ethnography and research on officers as individuals has, justifiably, focused on “working personalities,” attitudes, and situational practices rather than life-courses, career trajectories, and everyday lives. More auto-ethnographic works such as that of Arthur Niederhoffer (1969) and especially Peter Moskos (2008b) have provided more reflective explorations of the interplay of an individual with a role and setting in the spirit of Whyte’s (1943) Street-corner Society. This also speaks to the urban bias in policing literature (Klofas 2000) as the concept of a police officer who essentially only exists while on duty is more sustainable when officers can—and are encouraged by the organization—to firmly (and geographically) separate their work from their private lives. (Banton 1964, Rumbaut and Bittner 1979 cf. Allen and Parker 2013, see also Hughes 1951) The present study highlighted the phenomenon more typically described—but less often theoretically adapted—in studies of rural or remote policing (Young 1993, Huey and Ricciardelli 2015)—as well as often being depicted in popular culture (Bielejewski 2016)—in which police officers exist on the same footing as private individuals within their areas of responsibility and lack clear delineated borders between the private individual (as a community member, family member, friend, etc.) and the varying roles of a police officer. Officers exist both as institutional constructs—the institutional role—as well as ‘fleshed out’ individuals who take up and dramatize roles guided and constrained by a variety of institutions and settings, and managing this performance (or hiding it from public view) has been a key part of urban -and thereby ‘normal’—police work for at least a century. (Silver 1967, Walker 1993 cf. Rawlings 1995) These ‘two bodies’ are relevant to all forms of policing, and have been implied in work on police culture, recruitment, and training (Fielding 1988, 1994, Chan 2004, Hunold 2015, cf. Goldsmith 1990) but are most visible in those cases where private lives regularly impact police work and police work regularly overlaps with private life—individuals do not simply bring their past experiences into police work but rather their experience becomes police work. The fact that police officers are simply human beings performing a role and yet fixed within a role that fundamentally transforms all interactions within that role and many if not most outside of it is what has given the police an “interstitial” social position. (Wilson 2000: 2)

Officers in Falkenmark—particularly and often intentionally in the Revierpolizei—often cannot avoid liminality in taking on a police role simply due to the overlap of community and policing life-worlds: officers will encounter the same people and visit the same locations on- and off-duty. The knowledge they gained from non-policing experiences and contexts often carried over into police decision-making or narrative and interactional framing. (cf. Allen and Parker 2013) For Revierpolizei officers this was taken a step farther, with police work very often consciously adapting external everyday frames to gain a more proper ‘community’ understanding which could become actionable and hermeneutically valuable in future situations. Even cases where police adapted ‘pure’ institutional roles were often guided by factors and contingencies suggestive of a consideration of a deeper community context. For example, the case of the attack on Officer Karsten reported in Chapter Four was both narratively preceded and recounted with an emphasis on the resident’s ‘outsider’ status, the fact that he was known for recurring conflicts with local authorities, and neighbors’ presumed distrust of him: this re-contextualized the unfolding scene as neighbors looked on—the neighbors presumably saw the man as the problem and instigator of the encounter, rather than seeing the police and government agents as potential antagonists, though this reading is primarily based on the accounts of the police—and suggested that, if he had been given the chance, Officer Karsten likely would have maintained institutional posturing and enforced a more ‘security conscious’ and conflict-oriented type of order (Turk’s [1966] cultural norms.) Situations where police felt the need to visibly project an institutional role were rare (almost every clear example has been presented,) indicating both that officers experienced most encounters fluidly and dynamically, adapting their behavior to the development of the interaction and also that the few situations where Revierpolizei officers attempted to maintain the image of this authority were guided from the outside by a broader reading of the situation than is outwardly offered by the scene itself—that is, officers knew, as community members as well as police, when to be community members and when to be police.

7.5 Ascribing Motives and Creating Actors

The everyday work of the Revierpolizei as observed, then, often done passively or without obvious intent, is to establish a constellation of situationally-specific roles, be they formal pre-categorized roles or unique individual characterizations in constant flux. The dual levels of the community policing mandate require officers to interpret and manage both individual temporal encounters and to interpret and (selectively) actualize community realities through processes of giving legitimization to norms, values, and different forms of social and cultural capital. Once again, the role of the officer is not far removed from that of a social scientist or ethnographer entering a new setting and gradually adapting and entering a liminal state in which things are both strange and familiar.

Plucked from its native ground, i.e., the world of common sense, the concept of rational organization, and the schematic determinations that are subsumed under it, are devoid of information on how its term relate to facts. Without knowing the structure of this relationship of reference, the meaning of the concept and its terms cannot be determined… (Bittner 1965: 247)

Institutional frames alone cannot effectively determine how to make decisions that will be universally held up as acceptable or successful outside of the institution—despite this realization in various considerations of police work and bureaucracy in general, this has done little to challenge or alter institutional landscapes, yet the role of the police officer in the community has been found—demonstrably in the present case—to require the management and juxtapositioning of multiple frames. The institutional categories of ‘suspects,’ ‘offenders,’ ‘victims,’ etc. often mean little once removed from their immediate situational contexts or from larger frames of justice, law, and punishment: no community could consist solely of these roles. Sub-culturally defined frames derived from institutional constraints likewise become strained once taken into everyday ‘living’ contexts: police in practice may be able to effectively construct those they encounter as “know nothings,” “assholes,” “subhumans,” “thugs” and the like, (cf. Skolnick 1985, Van Maanen 1988) but, unless officers are to be hopelessly relegated to interact solely in policing circles, with a distinct policing culture that permeates all aspects of life, other categories need to be able to seep in and define, dynamically and developmentally, the meaning of what an individual does and is within a context. (cf. Goffman 1974, Chan 2004)

The motives police gave to individuals was often framed against local knowledge, though this varied; individuals could be placed against an understanding of the social space or against direct knowledge of that individual (and more often some combination along a great deal of room for heuristic estimations.) The general negative prognosis of ‘structural conditions’ led to a great many narratives not necessarily downplaying the seriousness of actions but suggesting some possibility of understanding the actor outside of a criminal / legal framework. At the same time, this reflected a basic sense of ‘lowered expectations’ in many narrative framings. Officer Becker, while lamenting the lack of activities and opportunities for teenagers outside of sports, suggested that this was one of the cultural factors driving a general exodus and that “we’re losing all the good ones.” Less engaged interactions—just passing by—were more likely than prolonged interactions to rhetorically involve “idiots” or “Asoziale,” where an individual could be judged based on a single observed action. Police interactions still involved the use of stock role and stereotypes to provide meaning to what was going on, but for the most part these roles were taken from a wider range, adaptable, and not limited to a police institutional vocabulary.

7.5.1 Communities of Actors and the Community as Actor

“Crime brings together upright consciences and concentrates them. We have only to notice what happens, particularly in a small town, when some moral scandal has just been committed. They stop each other on the street, they visit each other, they seek to come together to talk of the event and to wax indignant in common. From all the similar impressions which are exchanged, for all the temper that gets itself expressed, there emerges a unique temper … which is everybody’s without being anybody’s in particular. That is the public temper.”

– Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895:102, cited in Erikson 1966: 4)

Cohen (1985) writes that:

[I]t became fashionable during the 1960s for Western sociologists to talk about the ‘eclipse’ or ‘end’ of community, arguing that the spread of the mass media, the growth of centralized state power and the seemingly inexorable tendency to urbanization had eradicated meaningful distinctions within societies except those marked by economic status and, in particular, by relations to the capital market. In other words, community had given way to class. Later, others were to argue that class itself had been superseded, and that the salient categories were those of gender, race, and whether or not one was employed… By contrast, it is empirically undeniable that the 1970s and 1980s have seen in the Western world a massive upsurge in sub-national militancies founded on ethnic and local communities. The aggressive assertion of locality and ethnicity against the homogenizing logic of the national and international political economies has marked the renaissance of community. This is not surprising: it is this logic which attacks the old structural bases of community boundaries. Communities therefore respond by rebuilding their boundaries on symbolic foundations. (76–77)

This ‘eclipse’ of community, though apparently uncritically accepted by many scholars, reflected instead the adaptation of new forms and sources of shared visible values, primarily (though not only) related to changes in communication and mass media. (Tilly 1973, Hayward 2004) The perceived divide between rural and urban, between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, was likely overstated in terms of organization and disorder in the attempt to develop social theories that could explain both apparently stability and reconcile it with sharp and drastic social change. Likely the romantic view of a fading past played a role as well. Even Robert Park, though no opponent of ‘the city’ or the ‘modernity’ it represented, set it apart from more stable, ordered, village life:

In a great city, where the population is unstable, where parents and children are employed out of the house and often in distant parts of the city, where thousands of people live side by side for years without so much as a bowing acquaintance, these intimate relationships of the primary group are weakened and the moral order which rested upon them is gradually dissolved. (1952: 33, cited in Tilly 1973)

Tilly (1973) remains skeptical of the city and ‘community’ as binaries, suggesting instead that a) if anything, the ‘ideal’ versions of rural and urban are opposite poles in a spectrum and that b) a focus on territorial communities has led many (scholars and otherwise) to view a “richness of social life” within non-urban settings while overlooking the social life through various segments (kinship, neighborhood, clubs and social organizations, work etc.) that permeates urban life. (cf. Whyte 1943, Andersson 2014) The idealized images and conceptualizations of ‘community’ presumes that community values are more consistent and better maintained than urban neighbors, big cities, or (post) modern ‘global villages.’¹¹

Does this mean that a strengthening of the community (or at least the idea of community) as a source of social and cultural capital indicates a general weakening of institutional values? Not necessarily, but De Lint (1999) posits that “a hollowing out of a moral order defined by the nation-state will weaken the traditional institutional bases of police authority.” (128) Policing has always relied on community support at some level, and even during the heyday of professionalist reform and the strict separation of a ‘pure’ police from a corrupting community, there was a need to construct the image of police and perform it for carefully cultivated audience (in that historical case typically of ‘allied agencies,’ technocrats, politicians, and societal elites.) Kelling and Coles (1996) state succinctly that “police departments, like other professional agencies, shield their use of discretion for a variety of reasons.” (170) Chief among these reasons is the fact that discretion has almost always conflicted with the necessary idealism of an institutional model and set itself in opposition to a community model. This is not to posit a conflict-oriented, dominating institutional perspective against a peaceful, consensus-oriented community: the present study emphasizes the singular nature of the stated community precisely because this is the image which is actively constructed and represented at the expense of constructions of communities, overlapping societies, subcultures, etc. The establishment of a singular community—whether broadly or narrowly constructed—provides an idealized legitimacy and establishes stakeholders and a public which the police can serve, rather than allowing for narratives establishing the police as power-players, moral entrepreneurs, or even a cartel. (cf. Strauss 1982b) Christie (1977), for example, states that “local courts out of tune with local values are not local courts;” (10) the same would certainly apply to a police department, raising the question of how these values and practices are presented and viewed as in tune or out of tune. This is particularly relevant in Germany where police are organized, identified, and labeled at the state level, though they often operate locally, and much more needs to be done simply to create a cultural or cognitive association between the localness of a community and the local police. This is a type of higher-level image work, sustained by the lower level performance of roles and the presentation of symbols to create shared meaning or reject the reality of others. These routines and rituals of inclusion and exclusion are certainly inherent to police work, and adapting an ethos of ‘community concern’ in policing is primarily a recognition of this fact but also an opening to the vulnerability of appearances: a police force simply concerned with ‘law and order’ is primarily held to its own standards and honest as long as it is consistent; one which claims to represent the community fails that community twice when it makes decisions that can be effectively represented as violating the values of that community. The easiest way to fail this latter test, often seen in the adaption of ‘zero tolerance’ policies under the guise of community policing, is to take up the rhetoric of one community perspective while still enforcing a type of order largely determined outside of the local community itself. (Harcourt 2001) This is often a question of asking, if the police are there to protect their communities, what or who are they protecting it from? While either of these two answers could be considered ‘convenient,’ concerning, or acceptable in varying contexts, often police, as an organization and institutionalized culture, will see the real problems as either ‘outsiders’ or ‘the community itself.’ A great deal of the historic and ethnographic literature—up to the present day—has essentially portrayed (primarily urban) police as being at war with their own communities, or with the parts of the communities they deem illegitimate or undesirable, and using the law as a tool to enforce a symbolic order. (Silver 1967, Westly 1970, Niederhoffer 1973, Manning 1977, Uchida 1993, Marks 2004, Peterson 2008, Fassin 2013, see also Anderson 1999) Though not necessarily more encouraging, the rhetorical presentation of outside, even symbolic, threats may represent a more unified construction of a community with which the police (organizationally and individually) identify with, and this type of presentation is arguably more sustainable and (consequently) more common in homogenous and/or rural settings. (cf. Banton 1964, Young 1993) The abstract fear of crime is considered to be rising in Germany—though reported fear of crime is generally higher in ‘mid-sized’ cities and lowest in rural areas, it is also significantly higher in the East than the West, despite no consistent and significant differences in reported crime that could explain this. (Birkel et al. 2019) This makes it particularly notable when police perform image work attempting to downplay (or at least not highlight) the potential for criminality and attempt to emphasize more ‘service-oriented’ functions over the less approachable but (contextually) rhetorically stronger, less assailable, images of the crime fighter. Realistically, though, the images of the differing police functions—law enforcement, order maintenance, peacekeeping—are all sustainable to some degree (if presented in believable and narratively useful ways to accepting audiences) regardless of their connection to actual police work, and emphasizing one image does not mean entirely rejecting the others; police can emphasize service while still maintaining their authoritative and decisive nature as first responders against violent crime, yet this will require a type of consistent in presentation and a consistent set of symbols and representations and an effective juxtapositioning of the police against knowns and unknowns, abstract and concrete, insiders and outsiders.

The greatest depiction of this in Falkenmark, as a prominent example, was the discrepancy between the harsh language the police used to discuss hypothetical or distant (media) cases compared to the mediating—in descriptive language and in interactional process—that was common to most local cases. Abstract and distant criminals “deserve what they get,” while in our community “we don’t want to hurt anybody,” and even bad decisions and bad actors are due some form of sympathy. Of course, not all problems were—or are—divided into internal or external, and simply being a resident of a municipality was not always sufficient to make one a member of the community in the manner intended here: the most overt and obvious presentations of institutional authority and ‘professional’ policing where reserved for those who, without necessarily being considered dangerous, unpredictable, chaotic, or undesired, simply could not be fit into the communicative frames that governed ‘community life.’

Though useful as a metaphor, the binary of exclusion is not applicable to all aspects of community policing, and the officers of the Revierpolizei were not consistently engaged in establishing a singular consensus-oriented community. The ‘realistic’ attitudes expressed by officers admitted that some areas and groups would be open to not only the presence but also cooperation with the police, but might attempt to establish more conceptual ‘problems’ than they could actually assist with, while others would treat the visible and overt presence of the police as a potential provocation in its own right. Officers emphasized the need to establish known and (to some degree) trusted contacts particularly in more ‘problematic’ cultural and geographic areas—two officers discussing a particular incident in what they termed the “red light district” of one city explained the necessity of ‘rationing’ visits to not be overly disruptive; one officer interjected “we have our ‘spies’ there,” and they both explained that if the people they know trust them in return, problems and information will reach them, but if they get ‘too close’ they might jeopardize that trust. This type of boundary work was primarily narrative and broadly selective rather than reflective of individual encounters; it could be presumed that this would transfer down to the interpretation of various interactional practices similarly (if not identically) to how the shift from an institutional guided frame to a situational frame can transfer a punishable insult against an officer into a harmless and conversation-prompting joke. Those considered from the outset to be outsiders may have less leeway within the interaction and be expected to adapt to the rules and rituals of the interactional frame whether they are intimately aware of them or not, whereas insiders are allowed some level of ‘behind the scenes’ access—though it may not be much—in order to guide the interaction to a mutually satisfactory conclusion that subsequently corresponds to bureaucratic demands and narrative constraints.

The type of situationally-driven exclusion or inclusion was less visibly related to the exclusionary police practices often associated with the decay of the welfare state and the rise of neo-liberalism in Western society. At a narrative level, police were willing to adapt more ‘classical’ structural arguments as moderating effects, if not quite techniques of neutralization. (cf. Maruna and Copes 2005) The institutional demands on police were less strict and more avoidable than those often associated with, for example, stop-and-frisk or gang enforcement in New York and, though not necessarily of great significant, it is worth mentioning that most officers had been trained in (and all had bene born in) an ostensibly socialist society with a differing view of crime and deviance; most local residents had also been born under that system. But questions of attitudes or ideology are here secondary to those of practices and action. The exclusionary practices observed were primarily of omission, of reserving situational, negotiating interaction for those who can be ascribed roles as part of the community and where the current situation not only can be narratively framed with a past and future but where it must be. The community is constructed through partnerships and symbolic associations but especially through those encounters where it does not need to be invoked in order to be mutually understood as a governing factor. This is not unique to Falkenmark, as the community can be variously constructed to determine what is acceptable or normal in a specific time and place, but it was the visible inclusivity that made the cases of exclusion stand out, and the fact that an unstated mantra of “first, do not harm” seemed to rule encounters by default suggested the variability of frames, demands and goals which governed encounters.

7.6 Keeping the Community Alive

The Revierpolizei officers in Falkenmark live in a world of both change and stability. Their job is both to react to things happening and to proactively engage with the world. They universally see the situation of their community and the region in general as bleak, but at the same time see the value in emphasizing the positives and strengthening the things that hold their community together. The idea of policing they use—the lived world, rather than a specific institutional ideal—is both old and new, incorporating aspects of policing mythology and nostalgia (Crank 1994, Kelling and Coles 1996, see also Glaeser 2000) and yet in line with the tenets of ‘modern’ policing orthodoxy: community-orientation and problem-solving.

Klofas (2000) describes how police reform in the US has often been more ideological and idealized than linked to changes in practices or even theories of practice. He cites the 1967 President’s Crime Commission report, at the height of “Great Society” rhetoric, which advocated a move away from approaching policing and crime generally as a “contest between the officer and the criminal” (Klofas 2000: 234) and instead a focus on broader social problems. (see also Walker 1992) Although this report was seen as a turning point in American policing, particularly in establishing and encouraging academic involvement in structuring and implementing policing reforms, Klofas notes that the report’s “concern with objective, definable conditions of communities does not seem to have the same place in discussions of contemporary policing. Instead, community policing discussions have often invoked idealized versions of self-regulating communities.” (235) The idealized, progressive ideas which eventually resulted in community policing and various modern trends in democratic policing (Wilson and Kelling 1982, Manning 2001, 2012, cf. Wood 2016) not have not entirely disappeared from discussions of policing, but have rarely been implemented into actual police work with any broad consensus of success—the earlier optimistic discourses of solving social problems have been replaced with a more nuanced approach which sees this problems as less a ‘things-to-do’ list and more as mutual embeddedness and representative of power dynamics even in the identification of problems. (Gusfield 1989, Best 2017, cf. Giddens 1991) At the same time, the various fields, disciplines, and specializations that deal with those types of problems regularly linked to crime, deviance, order, and policing—including “troubled persons industries” (Gusfield 1989)—have carved out their own realms without necessarily impacting or even being impacted by the work of the police; for example, contemporary accounts tend to emphasize a coming ‘crisis’ in policing due to frequent encounters with mentally disturbed persons which are not seen as ‘real police work,’ less often reflecting on the fact that this is almost certainly related to the increased (or at least altered) power of the label ‘mentally ill’ and the function of this label as a traveling object. (Harbusch 2019) Exactly this type of work has long been a key component of policing and formal social control, evidenced both by Erving Goffman and specifically by Bittner’s (1967b) first study of the police dealing with mentally disturbed individuals. It is not the nature of police situations has changed, but rather that those situations have become applicable to a new range of outside or overlapping institutional vocabularies which reinforce and highlight the inability of the police institution—as currently constructed—to effectively deal with ‘root causes’ in earlier progressive conceptions. Despite decades of criticism of the “crime fighter orientation” in the academic literature as well as within policing itself, this perspective has remained entrenched not necessarily just in attitudes but in the nature of how policing is conducted, how policing defines situations, and how institutional goals are conceptualized and realized. Even in Germany, which has effectively resisted many of the more worrying trends of American or British policing, the “warrior mentality” is well established (Behr 2000, 2006, 2017) and the bureaucratic structures of policing essentially mirror those of the US and UK. The case of Falkenmark presents both an old and new problem—the types of social problems identified there are not particularly ‘modern,’ ‘flashy,’ or unique, but simply that of a non-ideal economic position and demographic change, and yet new for reflecting the slow realization that policing must be more flexible than a singular ideal model intended for inner-city crime reduction. (Young 1993, Klofas 2000) In this case, the question of “what police do” is not simply one of naïve interest, but is essentially a search for (counter) examples to the long-cited cycles of institutional ennui, 20- year-memories, and buzzword technocracy which have led policing, as an institutional, into a state of both perpetual reform but also locked it into a limited worldview with a fixed set of problems and goals. (cf. Sklansky 2011, Sparrow 2016) The Revierpolizei in Falkenmark were actively involved in the community, contextually reactive and proactive, yet at the same time demonstrated little of the “datafication” (Egbert and Krasmann 2019: 59) that is increasingly driving the organization and practice of policing, with officers acting on ‘common sense’ and ‘local knowledge’ rather than predictive models or database analysis.

A key aspect of policing has been the delineation of areas of responsibility: the defining and ownership of problems. Unlike the more specialized and ‘scientifically-guided’ approaches of large urban departments, rural police can rarely effectively limit their interventions to crime or even situations that easily lend themselves to formal definition. They engage with the communities they know, both as they already exist and as they are hoped to exist. Wilson (1968) described ‘service-oriented’ departments which “treat every citizen complaint as requiring a police response [and] do not rely on the criminal code to define police issues.” (Liederbach and Travis 2008: 451) Officers in these departments acted more informally—establishing a form of situational authority—and saw their job as closer to protecting an insider community: policing for a community rather than policing against a community. ‘Watchman style’ departments, by contrast, rarely intervened at all, but performed a clearer ‘peacekeeping’ function, defining problems with the use of discretion, rather than following strict legal standards or policies—presumably based on internal, policing standards (though it is unclear to which extent these should be considered institutional or culture) rather than adapting or mirroring community standards. Wilson’s study has been highly influential in policing research, though the alternating use of his categorization as descriptive or proscriptive often misses a larger point: the competing functions of policing (in this case, law enforcement, service, and peacekeeping) are not simply differing orientations or goals but speak to different views of how the police institution can define its own realm, and whether the police can operate as a primarily bureaucratically-driven organization with its own goals in a setting which puts police organizations in conflict with various other stakeholders; at the same time, adapting a community orientation and rejection the ‘expert’ powers of police to fully define concepts of ‘order’ or ‘peace’ is not only unrealistic in almost any conceivable configuration but also raises further questions of how the police can effectively and technically evaluate, adapt, and respond to community-defined problems and also still maintain a unique skillset (especially relevant if one is to assume that the capacity to use force is increasingly unpalatable as a basic foundation of how police work is defined and structured under a philosophy of ‘community policing.’) Simply stating that police should ‘solve problems’ is not enough to explain how that process should be done (cf. Goldstein 1990): this observation is not novel, but the implied solutions themselves raise further questions; police (and especially researchers) can identify patterns of how police can and should structure their work to best deal with various categories of problems—which arguably is simply a return to earlier conceptions of policing but with a variable vocabulary, e.g. “risk policing” rather than “crime prevention” (cf. Ericson and Haggerty 1997)—or else truly adapt a program of ad hoc or situational—discretion-based—approaches. The latter has occasionally been suggested within the broader framework of community-oriented policing, and is likely the best defense of the criticism that community policing has spent precious little time talking about actual communities as opposed to talking about police within those communities; the best way for police to maintain order in a community (rather than enforcing or importing order) may be a subtle approach combining both image work and a highly discretionary approach to social intervention, but this style of non-standardized policing is almost certainly one which is bound to face criticism and issues of transparency and fairness. The fact may be that community policing speaks of a “self-regulating community” not so much as an abandonment of the idea of ‘community’ but rather because this is the ideal in which policing can balance at least some of these critical issues and adapt a community orientation without sacrificing a professional image that can inspire trust or connotate fairness. The case at hand, while not necessarily a ‘self-regulating community,’ is arguably a similar case in which a police organization—by defining and presenting itself situationally and in the visage of particular and known individuals—can avoid relying on a crime-fighter image or law enforcement orientation and effectively present the image of shared community values.

The goal of the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark often appeared to be to simply maintain a form of solidarity, not necessarily even as a way to directly impact the community—while many problems could be solved, these were still often attributed as either symptoms of underlying social/structural problems or as normal or routine behaviors that will likely happen again—but rather as a way to ‘keep the community alive’ in terms of perceptions. With the recognition that most problems could be (best) dealt with privately, informally, or internally, it was seen that the best way to promote the ideas of order and safety broadly promoted by the police institution was to allow for stronger—often informal—networks connecting residents. Acts of solidarity ranged from small-scale symbolism, such as the stereotypical ‘waving to other police cars’ being extended to other service providers (firefighters, ambulances) but also to a greater and more individualized swath of the community. In contrast to more general models of bureaucratic organizations, the police—at least in a view from the street—were less focused on expanding the realm of defined and definable problems than on image work and maintaining relationships. In this context, when Officer Reiner, as station chief, says “there’s not much happening today, it’s better that way,” this is not simply a police officer looking forward to a more relaxed working day (though it is very much that!) but it is also an expression of the idea that the goal of the police is not to find problems regardless of the situation but rather to be responsive (ideally to community concerns.) There seemed to be agreement with Gusfield’s (1989) statement that “all human problems are not public ones.” (431) The art was in knowing how to allow for human problems to exist while still maintaining a community order.

7.7 Moving Images / Moving Targets: Ethnography and Community Policing

In the end, at the end, this is not a study of a community but of the people who perform a specific job within a specific community. Herbert Blumer set out a “cardinal principle of symbolism interactionism… that any empirically oriented scheme of human society, however derived, must respect the fact that in the first and last instances human society consists of people engaging in action.” (1969: 7) It is difficult to present an image of the Revierpolizei that can speak for itself and also show the human qualities of the people who take up that role; ethnographies of police often start with exciting and dramatic scenes of action which can set the stage for the subsequent analysis of policing interactions, perspectives and culture. The most exciting and dramatic stories and experiences collected from the Revierpolizei in Falkenmark have been recounted and described already, but were most notable for not only being a break from the normality of routine work but for also being presented and talked about that way: drama and excitement was for the most part a risk rather than a reward. A more accurate scene to reflect the realities of this form of community policing would appear almost disjointed: police officers wouldn’t talk like the audience expects police officers to talk, references would be made to a variety of people and events that play not obvious role in the immediate situation, and the scene would end without having a clear immediate resolution. In comparison to most scenes documented in urban police ethnographies, it would also be rather boring. Yet the idea that the most exciting, dangerous, and unpredictable moments of policing are rarely experienced, and that this disparity is a constant source of frustration for many police officers, is cliché in the literature. The key difference here is that the most ‘boring’ and everyday parts of policing were often not that indistinguishable from what officers valued the most about their jobs. The ability to act like a police officer (an almost universally recognizable genre of performance) and the capacity to take control of situations were two elements that officers were generally willing to forego or to even delegate to others; the need to see the world through the problem-seeking lenses of the police was often secondary to a less structured, less definable perspective. Officers engaged in their work, and spoke about their world, in terms that reflected both their dedication to the institutional but also to their membership within a community, expressing both the general hopes and (more pointed) fears of an unstated solidarity.

This work began, rather than with a scene from the Revierpolizei themselves, with a brief description of a Hollywood Western. This was not intended to draw parallels to the work and life of big screen frontier lawmen and rural German community-oriented police officers, nor even to the universality of policing concepts and vocabulary, but rather to speak to the importance of the concept of police as a symbol in itself: as detached as the officers were from the stock images and ideal types of the policing institution at times, they could also never stop being police, and as much effort as they expended to be known personally, as people, they knew they were fighting an uphill battle against simply being seen as “the police.” Their work was not to ‘reshape society’ to conform to bureaucratically defined standards of order or decorum, nor to even reshape society’s image and approach to the police: their work was much more individual and varied from situation to situation. Presumably, a great deal of police work in other contexts is similar, and Falkenmark simply provides a more visible example of the police liminality, role-distancing and image work as a way to directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, maintain a broad but interpretable concept of community.

The view from the life-worlds explored was one which—while not necessarily emphasizing harmony—was not fixated on disharmony or conflict. The officers saw a general peace which needed occasional shoring up, but the larger looming problems in society were outside the scope of their work. Their world was not stationary, and change was inevitable; their work was not fighting the tides of the future, but it may have been holding down the fort for the time being and maintaining an order and cohesion until new meanings, vocabularies, ideologies, forms, or anything tangible and retrospectively essential emerges. This glimpse into the world and practices of these officers is an attempt to apply an ordering frame onto a state of affairs considered ‘routine’ but decades, if not longer, in the making and by now already outdated. Many of the officers presented here have already retired, many more will within the next decade. The police have struggled to find enough recruits to perform the basic tasks—patrol remaining, as predicted, the backbone of policing despite the skepticism of academics and reformers—and experienced, community-minded officers able to devote three years simply to ‘learn the ropes’ are not necessarily readily available. For better or worse, the last generation of officers to have grown-up with a specific “East German” image of policing communities is on its way out. At the same time, the communities they have worked in for decades are changing; continuing demographic and economic decline seems inevitable, while right-wing and xenophobic sentiment is not only rising in Germany overall but especially in the “new German states” is increasingly driving and threatening to dominate politics. The specific combination of community acceptance and a more ‘hands off’ approach which seems to have allowed for, if not led to, the image of the Revierpolizei presented here may not survive the transition to a new generation of officers with their own images and ideations of police and police work and the forms of consensus which rhetorically and symbolically guide that work may not be as manageable with ‘outsiders’ become increasingly less symbolic and more frequently tangible, approachable, and targetable individuals living within common national borders. Policing and politics have never been separable: the long history of attempts to do so have led to the modern polarization of police and community which in turn led to the concept of “community-oriented policing” itself seem like a revolution. Yet the politics that govern the practice of policing fundamentally affect how society is constructed, what holds us together and what keeps us as strangers, suspects, and victims. Not just institutional and organizational structures but the basic ideas and constructions of human nature are what separate a policed community from a police state. Not just a desire to improve the quality of human life, but a reserved optimism towards the concept of community can transform the imposition of a punitive order into a constitutive social role based less on division and more on understanding.