Bethan Loftus

Police occupational culture: classic themes, altered times

Understandings of police culture rely heavily on ethnographies conducted several decades ago. In these classic accounts, authors have identified recurring themes within police dispositions and practices over time and space. There have, however, been important developments within policing contexts, some of which could be expected to transform the cultural ethos that has long underpinned the police identity. This article draws upon ethnographic research conducted in an English police force to explore how much of the classic characteristics of police culture have survived the period of transition. It shows that the underlying world view of officers displays remarkable continuity with older patterns, and argues that police culture endures because the basic pressures associated with the police role have not been removed. In light of this apparent durability of cultural themes, the article calls into question the increasingly accepted view that orthodox conceptions of police culture no longer make any sense.

Police culture in a changing world

PART I - SITUATING POLICE CULTURE 1. Replaying the Classics 2. The New Social Field of Policing PART II - POLICE CULTURE IN MOTION 3. Dominant Culture Interrupted 4. Enduring Themes, Altered Times 5. Policing Diverse Publics 6. The Continuing Significance of Class PART III - CONCLUSION 7. Police Culture in Transition?

Border regimes and the sociology of policing

Throughout the world, resources are being shifted towards border enforcement. Along with the concerted political and financial investment afforded by states into defending territories, the apparatus of border policing comprises of numerous state agencies and an ever-expanding range of private actors and commercial bodies. Yet an examination of the culture and practices of those responsible for the routine preservation of border priorities has garnered surprisingly little attention within the sociology of policing. In this research note, I foreground an agenda intended to extend current research and reflection on the everyday policing and surveillance of borders. My starting point is that the policing of borders is undergoing significant changes but without the accompanying scrutiny by policing scholars. Drawing on examples from the USA and Europe, my overarching claim is that as policing and security governance on the border becomes more innovative and pluralistic, policing scholars need to engage in sustained ethnographic fieldwork to track how security frameworks are realised at the local level and acted out against national environments. In so doing, policing scholarship can lead the way in developing a more holistic understanding of border practices with a view to redressing the social injustice experienced by those at the receiving end of contemporary border regimes.

Doing ‘dirty work’: Stigma and esteem in the private security industry

This article draws upon two different ethnographic studies – one based in Sweden, the other in the United Kingdom – to explore how private security officers working in a stigmatized industry construct and repair their self-esteem. Whereas the concept of ‘dirty work’ (Hughes, 1951) has been applied to public police officers, an examination of private security officers as dirty workers remains undeveloped. Along with describing instances of taint designation and management, we find that the occupational culture of security officers enhances self-esteem by infusing security work with a sense of purpose. As members of a tainted occupation, security officers employ a range of strategies to deflect scorn and reframe their work as important and necessary.

POLICING THE 'IRRELEVANT': CLASS, DIVERSITY AND CONTEMPORARY POLICE CULTURE

Using ethnographic material derived from an in-depth study of contemporary police culture, this chapter explores a contradiction which emerged between the police’s organisational emphasis on diversity and axes of class. While efforts aimed at changing police culture both within and beyond the organisation focused on notions of equity, discrimination and diversity, it was predominantly poor and low-status white males who occupied a central position in the police’s practical workload, and in their occupational consciousness. Taking class contempt as a relatively unexamined aspect of police culture, this chapter raises questions about the place of class in current ‘policing diversity’ debates. The incremental slide away from [class] is marked as more than an economic retreat, it is also a retreat from regarding the white poor as ‘people like us’ – the white moral majority population. (Haylett, 2001, p. 358) Police Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Volume 8, 181–204 Copyright r 2007 by Elsevier Ltd. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 1521-6136/doi:10.1016/S1521-6136(07)08007-4

Policing and the Surveillance of the Marginal: Everyday Contexts of Social Control

While the surveillance practices of the private security industry have become a central preoccupation of scholarship, the surveillance power of the state has been greatly enhanced through multiple procedures of information gathering to support practices of control and management. In this article, we draw upon two different research projects to examine the surveillance work of the police and other public sector groups working in partnership, as well as the activities of police officers operating covertly. In so doing, we expose the often unintended, but nevertheless invasive and comprehensive power of state agencies to gather details of individuals in the residual working class, within mundane and innocuous policing practices. Our central argument is that these developments have occurred alongside a displacement of social policy through crime control, and represent both an acceleration and intensification of existing state approaches to the surveillance of the problematic individual. This extensive project of targeted surveillance, we contend, also calls into question current claims that the state is moving towards a system of managing deviant populations.

Covert Surveillance and the Invisibilities of Policing

This article draws upon research from the first ethnographic field study of covert policing conducted in the United Kingdom, and seeks to shed light on how covert officers carry out their surveillance work. In particular, it demonstrates how officers attempt to blend into their surroundings and render their work invisible in order to intrude into the daily lives of those people considered suspect. In so doing, we highlight some hitherto unnoticed aspects – or ‘invisibilities’ – of policing, and show that the surveillance strategies used by law enforcement are increasingly embedded in the most mundane aspects of social life. In contrast to the processes of mass surveillance that are typically the focus of surveillance scholars, the article serves as a reminder that the surveillance powers of the State are vastly intensified when individual members of the public are regarded as suspects by the police.

Watching the watchers: conducting ethnographic research on covert police investigation in the United Kingdom

It has long been claimed that the police are the most visible symbol of the criminal justice system (Bittner, 1974). There is, however, a significant strand of policing – covert investigation that relies routinely on methods of deception – that resists public revelation (Ross, 2008). The growing importance of covert police investigation has profound implications for the relationship between citizen and the state in a democratic society, but it is relatively unexplored by police researchers. In this article, we describe the methodology of the first ethnographic study of how the introduction of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (2000) – a piece of ‘enabling’ legislation that regulates the conditions under which law enforcement agencies can intervene in the privacy of individuals – has effected the conduct of covert police investigation in the United Kingdom. We describe our ethnographic experience in the ‘secret world’ of covert policing, which is familiar in many respects to ethnographers of uniformed officers, but which also differed significantly. We contend that the organizing principle of surveillance – the imperative to maintain the secrecy of an operation – had a marked impact on our ethnographic experience, which eroded significantly our status as non-participant observers and altered out reflexive experience by activating the ‘usefulness’ of our gender.