“How could human behavior be described? Surely only be showing the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. Not what one man is doing now, but the whole hurly-burly is the background against which we see an action, and it determines our judgement, our concepts, and our reactions.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology vol. 2 § 629)

The field research that formed the basis of this study was, as is usually the case, the result of various serendipitous processes, decisions by myself and others that cannot be rationally explained either in the moment or in hindsight, and ended rather unceremoniously based on sudden, subtle shifts in the political winds. These are all elements that are not only common to the point of cliché in fieldwork, but are in themselves central elements of the analysis. Gaining access to a research site and establishing the means to even begin collecting data are not simply hurdles to conducting research, as more traditionalist models might indicate, but are themselves the first real glimpses of a new world. Managing gatekeeping is not simply a “make or break” first step, but it is the first test of an ethnographer’s ability to interpret social processes, power dynamics, and latent hierarchies on the fly.

The inexplicable decision on my part which was necessary to facilitate this research was a relatively spontaneous decision to move to Germany in 2008—at first as an academic exchange in political science but leading to a second relatively spontaneous decision to abandon my plans to study policing in New Jersey in order to stay in German, learn the language and culture, and eventually involve myself in the still rather fledgling field of social science-oriented German criminology. A positivist student of linguistics or a similar field might assume X amount of hours (let’s call it the hackneyed “10,000”) to master a language and culture; an interactionist would counter that the only way to fully master a language and culture would be to have unchallengeable authority to determine what is right and wrong (after all, ‘native speakers don’t make mistakes.’) The gaps in my knowledge were—and remain—infinite, as “authorities” (whether police or simply natives to German culture and language) can take ad hoc actions and undertake unique or non-standard speech actions justified post hoc by unfamiliar logics. This serves as a reminder, of course, that the purpose of sociological inquiry is not so much to seek out universal and unwavering systems of rules but rather to examine how actions are taken and how the concepts of rules (as justifications, as precipitating causes, etc.) overlaps with what is actually done. There are ways that things are done—which are commonly seen in the use of phrases similar to “no one does that!”—but, the trick of being a member of a society or community or a social club is knowing when the rules apply, when they don’t, and when they sort of do. Essentially two groups of people, with countless exceptions, are legitimately allowed to enter through “no entry” doors: those who are fully authorized and aware that the sign is not intended for them; and those who are lost, confused, and/or hopeless and likely unable to even comprehend the sign. Ethnographers can find themselves alternatingly in either group, but a tendency to fall into the later (or at least to be seen that way) can certainly be an advantage: violating rules, even or especially due to ignorance, is one of the quickest way to learn how those rules are thought of by others, how it is expected that these rules will be communicated, and to gauge the extent to which one is being aided, accepted, tolerated, etc. within the immediate setting. (see Garfinkel 1967 on ‘breaching experiments’)

Adapting to a new, though far from unfamiliar, culture and its accompanying grammar and vocabulary, in the end proved to be at least as beneficial as problematic. If the goal of the ethnographer is to make the unfamiliar into the familiar, I was already well into this process, but with an inadvertently well-trained eye for things unfamiliar to me (which happened to be most things.) ‘German-isms’ ranging from familiar phrases and idioms to public figures and celebrities to the use of German-specific brand names to indicate specific products flowed into conversations with casual and everyday use, essentially challenging me to either a) interrupt the flow to ask a question, likely increasing my “clueless foreigner” meter, b) trying to guess the meaning from context, with mixed results, or c) making a mental or written note of the person/place/thing/phrase/generic unknown element and remembering to either look it up later or to ask someone about it later on. An unsystematic mixture of a, b, and c was ultimately implemented, with every attempt made to fill the gaps in my knowledge prior to putting too much weight on the use of terms and examples which I have conspicuously misunderstood. (A significant number of the names I did not understand turned out to be either state government officials or “Schlager” singers.)

The difficulties here were worth powering through this uncertainty, as the admixture of concepts and topics—switching from pop culture commentary to politics to a story about a “police known” local man’s drug overdose to a complaint about the ongoing renovations of a kitchen—was among the best presentations of a policing habitus presented to me almost as a stage play, and something that could have easily been written off as “mostly non-police talk” and left out of the fieldnotes entirely. The use of these symbols, representations, etc. and their juxtapositions could have already shown something (if nothing else, the rather banal observation that police, like people in general, don’t really like to only talk about work even while at work), but my perfectly excusable unfamiliarity (and therefore presumed lack of prejudice) created an opening for these things to be explained to be in a helpfully normative way.

My uncertain and difficult to succinctly explain status proved to be advantageous for this and other reasons, as I have described in a German-language text. (Bielejewski 2016b) A simple example: upon my first official visit to the police headquarters, I was taken to a meeting with various men and (if I remember correctly) one woman. I was introduced to everyone there, but these words and titles were unsurprisingly in German and had little obvious practical meaning to me, there were several terms and titles and ranks and locations thrown at me very quickly, and, because this was my first meeting with the actual ‘location managers’ who would need to support my research and arrange my field visits, I was more concerned with participating in the interaction and presenting myself as a competent and mostly harmless sociologist, rather than with actively documenting the proceedings. As a result, my only real take-aways from this meeting with stuck with me long after were a not-for-public-consumption presentation of crime and other police relating problems (I was an insider!) and a gnawing terror that, apart from the chief and the officer in charge of press and media who I had already met, no one seemed particularly friendly, and if anything more annoyed with my presence. After the meeting ended (because another meeting, not-for-researcher-consumption, was beginning) I was spontaneously offered a tour by one of the officers present—I believe from the Kriminalpolizei, the detectives. The tone immediately changed, as we were able to joke (many of the jokes which I have referred to as being repeated many times were first encountered in these 20 minutes) and I was given a brief but “definitive” history of East Germany, Brandenburg, Falkenmark, the Berlin Wall and (re)unification, mostly predicated on the assumption that these topics were brand new to me. The topic of East-West differences seemed to be somewhat sensitive, at least from my perspective going in, and this seemed to be a way for officers to ensure, or prevent, my “hot take” from the research revolving around social decline or presenting a thoroughly negative portrayal of the region. I was further given a tour of the station and shown various offices, and given a brief explanation of various units (along with the internal police stereotypes of the individuals who choose, or are forced, to work there.)

More notable is what happened next: I encountered another officer, I believe it was Officer Karsten of the Revierpolizei but my fieldnotes here are sparse and non-specific (fixed pseudonyms were only developed later on), and essentially the same procedure was repeated. I was given a similar tour, but with a new hierarchy of roles, new stereotypes of policing aspirations, new jokes (if along the same vein), and new explanations of German history and the essence of “Ossi” culture. This was essentially an ethnographer’s dream: as expected, I had found it difficult to adequately explain my research or my goals, as I was open to anything situationally “interesting,” had no specific problems I hoped to solve, and did not want to restrict my view in any way either to only seeing what was shown to me or to being limited by my own specific interests. I imagine I was seen, especially early on, as more of a journalist than a ‘scientist,’ and the various respondents assumed they were giving me the final product for me to textually replicate the realities of policing. Yet this data was even more useful in showing the “multiple realities” (Schutz 1962) of policing. I began to worry, however, by the third time this scene repeated, and later on once it became clear that these ‘basic explanations’ of aspects of German society would become commonplace, and attempted to politely make it clear that I had, in fact, already been living in Germany for several years so as not to be deceptive. This did not seem to make any difference, and most officers seemed proud of their opportunity to explain to the American how things worked, and I was grateful for this.

This leads to a common issue with explaining, presenting, and ultimately conducting ethnographic research: what is the point? A usual understanding of research follows the classical “scientific model” (of middle school science fair fame) presuming that a scientist will have identified a specific problem and developed a hypothesis explaining this problem once and for all even prior to arriving at the site to collect data. Qualitative research in the social sciences does not always work this way, of course, and interpretive research even less so. My starting point was specifically that I knew nothing, much less what problems might exist or how they should be solved with verifiable certainty. Once this point becomes clear, officers and those involved in the research tended to be relived, once they realized that their opinions were being valued more than as simple data points to confirm my own expectations, and that I was not only relying on them to explain their work (and more) but also that I would return to them to follow up. Of course, I also made it clear that I was also not a journalist and was not simply documenting their statements but was attempting to interpret everything I experienced.

This is almost certainly reflected in the text, or at least it was clear to me while making decisions about how detailed (as well as how authoritative or uncertain) to present background information about things that might be familiar to some readers but not others. This applied particularly to aspects of German society or German policing which are likely to be obvious enough to not merit further comment to a reader living in Germany but too laden with meaning and implications to gloss over or oversimplify; for example, the unique role of the Ordnungsämter in Germany in dealing with some minor problems and local ordinances but also getting involved in many public problems or altercations means that the burden put on police is, at a minimum, differently distributed than might otherwise be the case. The need to first fully understand these concepts and then to explain them in a way that makes them contextually understandable within the analysis without attempting to present a definitive all-encompassing account of them (if nothing else to avoid unduly boring a read familiar with these things…) allowed at least some opportunity to once again “make the familiar strange,” and to view this unique ‘local factors’ (such as the fact that German Officers are almost exclusively referred to as simply “Herr” or “Frau” rather than “Officer,” “Detective,” or “Sergeant”) as specific social constructions that have established themselves as traditions yet might still be in flux or even being ‘re-negotiated’ at the backstage levels of German society (as is the case with the Ordungsamt specifically.) Overall, I continued to learn new highly relevant information, stereotypes, and assumptions about and surrounding the police continuously prior to, throughout, and well after the field research period.

In the end, in some ways the finished product is as much an ethnography of my own interpretation and experience of German society, focusing on another taken-for-granted aspect that is rarely, though not never, openly questioned: the role of the police in society understood broadly. The times when I was able to ask ‘regular’ (non-expert) Germans questions about rules, social orders, institutions, and so on and received an answer along the lines of, “hmm I’ve never thought about that,” I considered that a success. This made my stated goals more laborious, if not actually more difficult (and probably aided in them quite a bit) as I essentially needed to simultaneously approach, anthropologically, the ‘common sense’ and unspectacular everyday knowledge or shared assumptions surrounding all aspects of social and daily life that might in some way impact police work while also gaining an intimidate familiarity with the insider perspectives of police—and not just any police, but a very specific type of police, while also learning to appreciate and estimate their own ‘border maintenance’ between their internal identities and ‘regular cops.’ As Robert Blanco once sang: ein bisschen Spaß muss sein!

Familiarity becomes an issue in ethnography but is also essential to it. It is, simply put, impractical to arrive at a location, even by invitation, and then demand or ask politely to be able to routinely observe the members of that community at work over the period of a year or more. The fieldwork needs to begin, rapport needs to be developed, and research interests need to be narrowed down to some extent (for example, the decision to focus specifically on the Revierpolizei only developed several months into the fieldwork, and after that point most suggestions to accompany other units were turned down if it meant one less opportunity to accompany Revierpolizei officers.) Then once the nature of the research and some idea of my goals and working habits and who I am generally have been better established, more long-term planning can begin. Deadlines in ethnography, as in most work relying on the development of grounded theory, tend to be based more on practical factors (field access, real life etc.) as much as theoretical saturation: at some point, the ethnographer’s presence in the field is simply no longer tolerated, or has become so established that nothing new is really seen not because there is nothing to be seen, but because it becomes too difficult to observe and document without pre-filtering and seeing like a “local.”

The next major risk was then how the data will ultimately be used. Popular culture and the dominance of the natural sciences have framed science as a “takeaway” activity in which proven and unassailable (short of replication) findings can be trimmed down to one sentence. Navigating an explanatory line between the previous statement and “there are no real findings” is tricky business, as the study itself risks becoming a political football, and, of course even (or “unsurprisingly”) within a state institution, research is seen as an investment which is expected to pay off. As I have described, a major concern by various officers (and some administrators) was that the findings would show that the Revierpolizei are either inefficient according to traditional metrics or are operating at less than maximum capacity, meaning that officers could be given additional duties (specifically the dreaded prisoner transport.) The study was occurring at a period of local downsizing, in which it was expected that several retiring officers would not be replaced at all, and a serious question was essentially whether policing responsibilities could effectively be calculated simply based on population (e.g. one officer per 5,000 citizens) or whether, and how, other factors such as geography, distance, infrastructure, and demographics need to play a role, with (at least according to the officers and administrators I spoke with) budgetary concerns taking priority.

The field research period ultimately ended due to objections from a senior administrator. His concerns were entirely legitimate within a policing habitus and in line with much of what I have written, and entirely at odds with the nature of sociological investigation. He stated, more or less, that demonstrating the range of police behavior and decision-making would remind the public that police can make mistakes and can’t effectively treat everyone equally, essentially making a version of the “how the sausage is made” argument. (cf. Newburn 2022) This is the central tenet of my research here and elsewhere, though: if we cannot talk about how policing is done, and how we think it should be done, then the way we claim our society is organized and the actual society we inhabit are as different as a dream and reality.

In the end, I don’t think seeing “how the sausage is made” in this case could be considered the worst thing that could happen to the police I’m discussing here. Publicly available narratives of police have been in flux for decades (although realistically, throughout the entire history of policing) and in the years since the fieldwork ending it has become increasingly plausible to describe policing—and here I am speaking primarily as an American but with one eye toward Germany—as a powder keg irresponsibly close to an open flame. Social media has become, for legitimate and laudable reasons, a trendy topic in policing research and arguable should become even more so, particularly as the images of policing made available, and the speed with which they are disseminated, has been so thoroughly impacted, but at the same time public opinion in terms of police in general do not seem to have been affected as thoroughly as one might expect. Social media and ‘modern’ technology played such a minor role in the fieldwork that it is entirely plausible that, as many officers stated, essentially nothing had changed in the past two decades. Even in a personal sense—shifting into auto-ethnography—the forms of communication and information gathering available to me changed during the course of the research and afterwards. As the most obvious example, I was still using a ‘dumb’ phone during most of the field work—one notable memory that stands out is needing to wait around in my guesthouse room for an email telling me it was okay to visit the police station, because if I left the room I would have no email access. The situations I described earlier with being unfamiliar with many references and phrases may have played out differently had I been able to promptly look up these topics myself, but this—hopefully obviously—seems to be a significant threat to the ethnographic spirit.

In general, the police I encountered tended to avoid the “scientific” explanations of effectiveness and how to properly conduct police work that seem to be the (unattainable?) goal towards which policing is moving. They saw police work as primarily about communication and—for lack of a better term—networking. Communication was furthermore not a specialized skill or something which could be learned through listed rules but rather was more of a gut-feeling, common-sense concept based around respecting people when they deserve it and allowing room for outside perspectives. In short, I can—as I’m sure you can—see both upsides and downsides here, which I hope to have illuminated somewhat in the previous chapters. As I’ve stated previously, this work was intended to describe a specific form of organizing society (that is, policing) in a specific time and place, and by design these findings are not intended to be ‘generalizable’ to all, or even really to any, other police organizations. The ways I have learned to approach and look at these police, however, might be relevant not in only looking at others but might also provide some insight into the nature of policing itself and how we think and talk about it.

Despite my protests that this investigation was only about one unit in one German county, it is certainly clear that a great deal of my thinking, evidence, examples, and otherwise came from outside. This is not a contradiction but intentional and unavoidable: the way we think about the things we take for granted is affected and impacted but the other things we already know and take for granted. Our views and understandings of central, basic things like “policing” or “society” cannot simply change, as they are embedded alongside and within other concepts, and attempting to view the police in Germany in Falkenmark as a purely new unknown entity would be simply impossible. As I have argued, this is the nature of symbolism and the point of the police, to be identifiable and clear even in ‘passive’ communication. This is also a core element of the ethnographic spirit which I was fortunately able to embrace, hopefully for the better: everything is connected.