Fieldwork

Abstract

The recent demographic transformation of Irish society poses novel and significant challenges for the Irish police force as its officers engage with a multicultural, multi-ethnic and multiracial public for the first time. The immediate aim of the research on which this book is based was to gather and analyse information on the daily street-level practices of those officers now coming into daily contact with ethnic minorities and on how these officers are trying to adapt to such diversity. To achieve this goal it was also necessary to examine the language used in official Garda Síochána publications, policies, and initiatives aimed at adapting to a new unfamiliar public made up of a growing proportion of ethnic minorities. These data provided an organisational, and somewhat more structural, backdrop for the main data set, which comprised of ethnographic observations and interviews focusing on the many ways in which Irish police officers conceive of, talk about, and interact with ethnic minority communities. Like Loftus (2008), I ‘acknowledge the need to reflect the nuances within police culture (see Foster 2003), but am concerned primarily to emphasize the dominant narratives that arose in police responses’ (Loftus 2008, 757).