Pages: 114

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 10

This chapter looks briefly at the early police ethnographies and how this impressive assemblage of work reframed the way academia understood police and policing. The chapter identifies and tracks the ‘gap’ between early policing ethnographers and the resurgence of such work in the last two decades. It considers the importance of ethnography and why it matters. The chapter notes the topical, disciplinary, and geographical expansion of ethnography studies in the past two decades and considers the rejuvenation of this method in police studies.

Pages: 21

This chapter focuses on what here is referred to as the ‘classic era’ of police ethnography. A great many of the foundational works in the field of police studies, a field that emerged from the 1960s onward, were based on ethnographic fieldwork. Their authors used the classic methods of participant observation to investigate the everyday realities of policework and to delve behind the official ideological representations of such activity. Much of what is now known about policing - the limits of formal social control, the craft and culture of policing, and its largely discretionary nature - emerged from these studies. Despite the huge and subject-defining impact that ethnography had in this early period, such in-depth and focused fieldwork gradually became less fashionable and fell out of favour as the century progressed. More recently, however, such work has seen something of a renaissance, one involving a wider range of scholars and a broader geographical focus of investigation than was true of the original Anglo-America-dominated studies.

Pages: 19

In this chapter we start from the idea that ethnography, as it has been used in the social sciences, has three complementary meanings: it involves a particular set of methods, it comes with a certain sensibility toward the field, and it entails a certain written product. We discuss these three meanings as aspects of ethnography in the light of the history, development, and controversies in the ethnographic study of the police as well as more contemporary manifestations. In order to do so, we assessed well-known texts from before 2000 and conducted a study of works (all in English) from 2000 to 2020. In our description of the development of fieldwork, sensibility, and writing in ethnographies of the police, we touch upon a range of issues such as gender, multi-sitedness, street-level decisions, and the concept of police culture, among others.

Pages: 18

Once ethnography travelled beyond the boundaries of its home discipline of social and cultural anthropology, total immersion became less intensive and definitions of ethnography became ever more expansive so that it now covers at-a-distance fieldwork, an ethnographic sensibility, and stories that must meet aesthetic criteria of evaluation. We describe eight varieties of ethnography: hit-and-run, historical, focus groups, autoethnography, visual, applied, performance, and digital. We argue that, although each variety may not involve immersive observation, all are still ethnography because they share an ethnographic sensibility, which is about recovering the meaning of everyday life - about sitting where the other person is sitting. Every version of ethnography we discuss is ‘real’ ethnography, because it deploys this ethnographic sensibility.

Pages: 17

The central theme of the chapter is the similarities between ethnography and policework. Several similarities are highlighted. The core similarity concerns ethnographic fieldwork and police investigation, casting the latter inclusively so that it includes not only the work of the detective but police practice more generally. Similarities between the two fields emerge along the way, including matters of competence and craft, knowledge, and experience. Acknowledging that policing seems poised on the brink of substantial change in Western societies, not least to meet the changing expectations of the public, the chapter also directs its analysis to where we may find ourselves in a near future where contemporary efforts to bring about ‘evidence-based policing’ have matured.

Pages: 18

One of the core contributions of police ethnography has been to uncover how informal norms shape police practice, directing officers’ attention to some aspects of police work and away from others. This chapter argues that ethnographic fieldwork is also shaped by unarticulated values and conventions which focus our attention on particular aspects of police work, leaving others unexplored. Drawing on ‘confessional tales’ from early police ethnographies to the present, this chapter argues that ethnographers’ stories are powerful cultural products which illuminate a dominant understanding of ‘real’ fieldwork with the police. The stories that are told, and those that are not, illuminate what has come to be seen as the appropriate focus of our attention and how we should think about what we see. It explores three common themes in ethnographers’ tales: stories of coercive power, stories of emotion, and stories of action. In each of these, it examines how our preoccupations may limit the scope of ethnographic inquiry and divert ethnographic attention from important aspects of police practice.

Pages: 9

This chapter will discuss the premises upon which different research methods and modes of analysis popular in contemporary criminology are based. Particular attention is given to the premises on which participatory methods of research, including ethnography, are based. As a means of contrast, Evidence Based Policing (EBP), and in particular the model of EBP adopted by the Cambridge Centre for Evidence-Based Policing, is considered. Comparisons between EBP and ethnographic studies of policing are explored, theoretically and in relation to policy and practice change within police constabularies in England and Wales. It is argued that there is insufficient attention paid to philosophical anthropology in this approach to police research and that a refocus on the observation of human action, which is creative, attributes meaning to phenomena and is conceptualised best as negotiated in interaction with others, is central within policing research.

Pages: 184

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 17

This chapter reflects on the ethics of producing knowledge about policed populations on the basis of experiences of two ethnographers working as part of a mixed-methods research project on hot spots policing in a mid-sized US city. Through participant observation, interviews, and focus-groups, we catalogued discursive articulations of the ‘feelings of home’ in policed communities, as correlated to crime maps generated by the local police department. This presented us with challenges related to locating an ethnographic ‘site’ within a statistically defined problem space. Any mode of accessing human beings through mechanisms of state surveillance is ethically fraught, particularly in a field of asymmetric and potentially violent relationships. Representing a population defined by the targeting mechanisms of police attention as the ‘ethnos’ of an ethnography raises a tangle of issues. How can a researcher ethically represent the experience of people who purposefully make themselves invisible to state surveillance? Our struggle with this question led us to develop a critique of visual epistemology, grounded in our ethnographic consideration of the intersection between knowledge and ethics. Within the relationship between police surveillance (the watchers) and the experiences of those it seeks to surveil (the watched), we identified a poetics of temperature, whereby the ‘heat’ generated by policing and exposure to interpersonal and structural violence is counteracted by attempts to ‘stay cool’ or ‘chill out’. This cooling metaphor provided us with a way to articulate the community-building processes that generate collective sentiments of peace and security against the excessive ‘heat’ that often functions to erode bonds of social solidarity. On this conceptual basis, we developed an epistemological stance aligned with bottom-up processes of communication rather than top-down processes of observation, which allowed us to render intelligible the life-world of a quasi-fugitive space by giving it an audience rather than exposing it to surveillance. This, we argue, is an ethical mode of access. This chapter describes our methods and our findings; offers a critical contribution to policing studies; and reflects on what all this might suggest for the larger project of political ethnography.

Pages: 13

In Police Work and Identity: a South African Ethnography, I described my police subjects as ‘accidental officers’ and myself as an ‘accidental academic’. Although I had spent my late childhood wanting to become a police officer, and most of the officers I shadowed had hoped to become doctors, engineers, or entrepreneurs, centuries of racialised power and politics in South Africa meant that our roles were reversed. The book was based on an ethnography that sought to answer the question, ‘Who do South African police officers think they are and how does it shape their work?’ But in carrying out the research, I was forced to ask the same question of myself. The answer did not sit comfortably with me, a discomfort which was amplified by calls for tertiary education to be decolonised. In this chapter, I probe the ethics and obligations of police ethnographic scholarship and ask: Who our ethnographies are for? Drawing on ideas emanating from anthropologists and decolonial scholars, I ask whether we should do more to partner with and elicit judgements on our work from those we study. I recognise that while I tell myself I research and write for others, in some sense I predominantly do the work for myself. I use the philosophy of Michael Sandel to challenge myself and other police ethnographers to embrace the unchosen moral ties and burdens that bind us to our police subjects and to work in ways that are as just for them as they are for ourselves.

Pages: 19

Suspicion is endemic to police ethnography. As research has demonstrated, the police repeatedly probe into the ethnographer’s intent and purposes. Is the ethnographer observing police work to ‘simply’ carry out research? Or is the ethnographer actually there to help develop the profession or, worse, to deviously disclose police secrets? Yet, doing police ethnography not only involves the ethnographer being questioned by the police; it also frequently involves being asked similarly interrogating questions by academic peers. Amplified by present-day critiques of police misconduct, colleagues ask about the police ethnographer’s commitment. Has the ethnographer, for example, ‘gone native’ and thereby lost the ability to shine a needed critical light? Bearing such question(ing)s in mind, this chapter introduces the methodological concept of ‘the collaborator’. Using the ambiguous/antagonymic meaning of the word, the chapter considers how police ethnography often involves navigating contested waters with both police and peers questioning the ethnographer’s allegiances, thereby wrestling with continuous queries about whether the ethnographer is in fact collaborating with or against the police. In doing this, the chapter adds to existing methodological debates about the ethics and loyalties of (police) ethnography, pointing to how the question of suspicion and side-taking extend from the offices of the police to the hallways of academia. Drawing on the author’s own experiences of studying transnational policing practices across Europe, the chapter concludes by offering five recommendations as to how the police ethnographer may continue to produce quality ethnography while, for better or worse, being cast as a collaborator.

Pages: 18

Several obstacles and challenges interfere with the process of conducting research with police agencies, particularly since these agencies are traditionally closed to the public. This chapter draws on the experience and development of a project on police perceptions of legitimacy and authority in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. It introduces the Brazilian context, reflecting on the fieldwork with civil and military police organizations. Such research requires negotiating issues relating to trust and access to deeply hierarchical institutions and navigating questions of secrecy and silence inside state institutions, which can complicate research outputs. Once we gained access, our immersion in the field for conducting a mixed method research project transformed into an accidental ethnography of policing. Our reflection on field notes provides insights into a wider range of practices and perceptions that would otherwise remain obscured through our initially proposed methods, including surveys and interviews. The approach of analysing researchers’ observations in the field indicates that a range of social inequalities and vulnerabilities affecting both researchers and those being researched are revealed through immersion. This analysis sheds light on broader questions pertaining to the social and cultural context within which the police operate in Brazil.

Pages: 15

Access to a site, whether a group, organization, or a neighborhood, is a fundamental problem for fieldworkers. It typically involves continuous negotiation over time. Negotiating access to powerful and secretive organizations is often thwarted or truncated. This chapter describes the problems of seeking access to An Garda Síochána, the police of the Republic of Ireland. The focus of the research was the consequences of the Patten Report (1999) for social change in the Garda. Until recently, few studies had been done of the organization. Interviews and historical materials were gathered from 2008 to 2013, but no direct observations of practices were gathered. The content of the interviews was consistent with the several reports of tribunals and commissions that noted the resistance of the Garda to change.

Pages: 17

Police researchers have highlighted the importance of gaining a measure of trust and acceptance from the police officers they study. Reflexive ‘tales from the field’ have stressed the need to consider whether one’s own personal characteristics may shape the research relationship and impact on the quality of data collected. Little attention, however, has been paid to the implications for trust and acceptance of the way in which police officers conceptualise their own role. In the case study discussed later in this chapter, significant attempts were made by some police officers to avoid being observed for the purpose of the research. One explanation for this was that the researcher’s biography - a young, black, male, university student - may have heightened the usual concerns about allowing outsiders to study police behaviour. The problem with this explanation - made clear throughout the ethnographic process - was that different groups of police officers responded differently to the project. Some were obstructive and uncooperative, while others enthusiastically generated opportunities for the observation of routine police activity, throughout the fieldwork. There was no evidence to suggest that those who were receptive to the research held less-problematic views about the researcher’s personal characteristics. It seemed instead that the more comfortable police officers were with their particular policing role, the more willing they were to being researched. This leads to the conclusion that reflexive accounts of police-ethnographer field relations should attend to how police officers conceptualise their intuitional role.

Pages: 15

Perhaps with only the exception of Simon Holdaway, covert research of the police has not been achievable for academic researchers. However, researchers of the policed can find themselves in a position where they are observing officers who may not be the primary target of the research, who may not be aware they are under academic scrutiny and have not provided any form of informed consent. The nature of police work is defined by interactions between officers and agents of other organisations, and those who are the targets of police attention: suspects, victims, and other members of the public. It has never been sufficient in the academic field of policing to focus exclusively on the officers themselves and researching the policed is an important but often overlooked feature. In contrast to many ‘low visibility’ aspects of police work, public order policing is highly visible to outsiders and attracts significant scrutiny of all actors. We argue that by choosing to focus primarily on the policed rather than the police, interactions between police and members of the public become observable even where researchers have not negotiated direct access to the police themselves. This chapter draws upon the experiences of the authors in their research among crowds of political protesters and ‘risk’ football supporters to draw out some of the ethical and practical problems and benefits associated with researching those who are regularly and sometimes controversially policed.

Pages: 17

The purpose of this chapter is to critically explore the creative and positively disruptive role that deception can play in police ethnography. Despite covert and undercover research being a controversial and emotive outcast long associated with cavalier deception and ethical transgression, it is a radical tradition that is submerged and continually maligned. Using deception can be an imaginative insider way to explore secretive subcultures, clandestine organizations, and illicit activities, which can typically have closed or very limited access by standard methods. Rather than being unethical, much covert research uses types of situated ethics to ground their approach. Recognizing and appreciating deception in action can potentially diversify and enhance the police ethnography canon.

Pages: 18

This chapter chronicles the expectations, experiences, and outcomes of an early career ethnographer trying to complete their PhD thesis on armed policing in two police organisations in England. The chapter highlights the lack of reporting on the access process in police ethnographies and shows how gaining access can be difficult and time-consuming, particularly as an ‘outside’ academic. The chapter provides the following recommendations to facilitate the process of gaining access. First, plan your research thoroughly, considering both your topic and style of ethnography. Second, approach a wide range of stakeholders in advance of your fieldwork, remember that you are ultimately responsible for creating and taking the opportunities that ensure your project’s success, and you will inevitably need to overcome challenges and false starts. Finally, once you have gained access, be alert to opportunities to leverage and extend that access to enhance a richer understanding of your topic.

Pages: 16

Gaining access to a particular research site and population is a key part of ethnographic fieldwork; yet, it is often unexplored or presented as a logistical, practical matter. In this chapter, I reflect on my own access trajectory to an independent police oversight body in Nairobi, Kenya, and show that access should not be equated to permission. Rather, access acts as a trajectory that is continuously negotiated throughout the research process. By exploring my own experiences, I show that research on policing, especially when including formal institutions, generally requires some measure of formal permission. In my case, this was not granted; yet, this does not entail the cessation of one’s research. Rather, it entails the use of different and often more creative avenues to understand a particular phenomenon. Combined, this chapter calls for more elaborate reflections on access to field sites and populations: by centralising our access trajectories within our analysis, we gain further insight into our research subjects, that is policing.

Pages: 17

This chapter draws on ethnographic fieldwork done over a year and conducted within the municipal police in the outskirts of Mexico City - following previous studies that used a similar method - in order to focus on specific methodological implications posed by carrying out participant observations therein. The chapter discusses how access to the police was obtained, briefly reflecting on how that mirrors the way access to power in general operates in Mexico. Thereafter, the chapter illustrates how the politically orchestrated nature of that access defined the achievement of trust within the municipal police. It discusses how access to the municipal police places the researcher close to the violence they want to control or the challenges they seek to overcome. Building on these notions, the chapter discusses how consent and anonymity were ensured in the context of the power dynamics that offered access to this study. Finally, the chapter describes the process of leaving the field while highlighting how that signified an abrupt end to the rapport that had been developed with key informants for months.

Pages: 179

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 18

This chapter charts how prime recruits during police training role-play scenarios should not only expect hostile encounters with motorists on the road, but also how they should see and stage their responses to civilians in anticipation of the immediacy of imagined threats. This chapter turns toward this specific genre of police training and testing known as the ‘Vehicle Stop’ or the ‘Traffic Stop’, the simulated encounter between a Responding Officer on patrol and a Motorist on a public road, to illustrate how police vision in practice reveals the racial optics of state violence that are improvised and performed in the academy. I describe my experience as a participant-observer of these staged stops while conducting ethnographic observations of interactions between recruits and training officers at a regional police academy in Southern California and argue that an ethnographic attunement to these unfolding scenes reveals how a racialized police vision is curated and enforced in staged encounters of asymmetrical threat.

Pages: 16

In this chapter, we argue that ethnography can play a more active role in transforming policing to better serve the current and future needs of communities by focusing on positive experiences as an explicit change process perspective. We explore the utility of appreciative inquiry (AI) in ethnographic policing scholarship, specifically drawing on ethnographic data on Vietnam. AI is an innovative approach to discovering and fostering innovations in organisational development. It is a strength-based approach to social research which aims to elicit values, facts and feelings from participants through an emphasis on real and positive experiences with a view to building and co-creating a better future. ‘Future-forming’ approaches, such as AI, enable both ethnographers and police officers to become ‘agents of social change’. We contend that applying AI in ethnographies on policing that it can help ‘unstick’ difficult policy areas encourages a contest of ideas to enhance capacity for change, and facilitates change in relatively stable organisational environments.

Pages: 18

This chapter makes the case for a critical ethnography of policing. Situating this approach within the renewal of police ethnography in the last two decades, the chapter suggests that there are alternative, critical approaches to police research that have been undervalued and can help us understand both how policing is done and how it might be done differently. Drawing upon work from within and outside police studies, the chapter seeks to explain what is critical about critical ethnography and why this approach is beneficial to the collective effort to understand policing. In doing so, it makes a renewed case for the study of policing from the outside demonstrating the continued importance of ethnographic research on rather than with police. In an era of productive partnership working between researchers and police institutions, the chapter suggests that there is an under-appreciated role for research on policing conducted not just from the outside but from ‘the other side’. With reference to a case study of research on the policing of protest, the chapter considers the benefits and challenges associated with this approach to research and suggests that we can learn a great deal by studying those who are subject to policing. Advocating the study of the policed, the chapter suggests that critical ethnography enables us to view policing from a different perspective, a process which is vital to our ability to uncover and understand problems in policing and ultimately to inform change. As public debates about what, and who, policing is for have become louder in recent years, this type of research is of increased importance.

Pages: 20

This chapter examines policing as a social institution, and ethnography as a methodology for understanding this institution, through the lens of a reconsideration of extraction as a social process. It engages critiques by anthropologists and other ethnographers that an ‘extractive imperative’ constitutes a globalized logic of social relations deriving from colonial racial capitalism and is always already a unidirectional and ubiquitously harmful process. It further problematizes assumptions that police are ‘violence workers’ whose raison d’être is to enforce this pervasive extractive relational logic, rendering them reviled institutional agents that must be abolished in order to realize social justice in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork with police in northern India and citing cases of police being figured as simultaneously subjects and objects of extraction, this chapter suggests that police are more aptly conceived as ‘security laborers’ who also may be allies in some progressive social movements. It concludes with a provocation to conceive both policing and ethnography as social fields in which mutualistic co-extraction may occur in ways that have the potential to create new relational forms and possibilities for positive transformation on local or even global scales.

Pages: 18

This chapter provides a methodological reflection on police ethnography in exceptional circumstances. More specifically, it considers what police ethnographers can do to pursue their craft when fundamental aspects of doing ethnographic research are no longer feasible or severely restricted. The COVID-19 pandemic is used as a case study, because it has given rise to a range of legal and ethical issues that have impacted on the capacity of ethnographers to immerse themselves in the field to study police work through direct observation and in-person interactions. By focusing on methods that enable ethnographers to explore the inner world of policing while physically distant, the chapter discusses the potential benefits and practicalities of embracing unconventional and innovative approaches to ethnographic research. Particular attention is given to visual images, digital technology and utilising the police as observers through cameras and diaries. It is argued that police ethnographers should integrate such methods into their toolkits in order to enhance their adaptability and broaden their horizons in terms of data sources and avenues of inquiry.

Pages: 15

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an analysis of autoethnography as a policing research method. I open with an introduction to autoethnography as a research method, distinguishing between analytic and evocative autoethnography. I then discuss the variety of ways in which serving and former police officers have published studies and stories based on their experience, which includes autobiographies, novels, and analytic autoethnographies. After summarising and contextualising my 5 years as a city police officer, I explore the relationship between that service and the findings of my own analytic autoethnography, measuring my study against the established standards of the fieldwork model of research. Finally, I consider whether other research methods could have produced the same results and defend analytic autoethnography against the accusation of redundancy. My conclusion is that analytic autoethnography is a valuable method for social scientists to deploy in policing research and, as such, a new horizon for police ethnography.

Pages: 18

The Internet is an omnipresent medium that intersects our everyday lives. Since the late 1990s, technologies that allow users to access information and to communicate over the World Wide Web have become widespread. At the same time, criminals and criminal communities have exploited these new avenues of virtual socio-cultural forms to find innovative ways to commit crime. These developments represent multiple and expanding opportunities for interdisciplinary research, and one such research frontier within the social sciences is virtual ethnography. This chapter explores the application of the ethnographic method to the study of virtual communities and interaction, and the potential benefits this method brings to policing research. Its focus is on the method of lurking (covert non-participant observation), and how researchers have adopted this method for collecting and exploring virtual crime, criminal and deviant groups, as well as the policing responses to cybercrime. The chapter also explores some of the key ethical challenges and limitations that virtual ethnography and lurking pose for Internet researchers.

Pages: 16

The chapter suggests the potential of appreciative ethnography for criminological research. It is illustrated from a study of hate-crime policing. The appreciative ethnography found police officers’ practice, engagement and relations with victims to be shaped and informed by the principle of empathy. An appreciative approach therefore revealed hate-crime detectives’ culturally competent practice. Through such immersive and reflective criminological research, we show how the ethnographer can access the occupational worlds of those oft-maligned and pathologised men and women who are clustered together as part of the police force with colleagues who are corrupt, racist and brutal. Appreciative ethnography enables us to move away from condemnatory approaches to achieve an appreciation of what officers feel they do well.

Pages: 21

Covert investigation is a staple feature of late modern policing, posing both challenges and opportunities for ethnographic study. In this chapter, we reflect on our research with officers engaged in covert surveillance to explore the rewards and dilemmas involved in entering this extreme policing environment. We demonstrate how, as ethnographers, we shared with covert officers a similar set of aims and demands as we attempted to build a picture of individuals we, respectively, observed. Central to our experience was a mutual sense of precariousness and a shared set of challenges associated with balancing discrete ethical and legal decisions and restrictions with an overarching commitment to a particular goal. As such, we argue that the craft of covert policing can be viewed as a limited form of ethnography. While those involved in covert policing do not consciously aim to develop an ethnographic stance, their work nevertheless draws on many of the key features and commitments of the method.

Pages: 17

This chapter explores the role of emotions and emotional experiences during ethnographic fieldwork conducted on policing and police work. Criminological scholarship on policing seldom investigates the place and prominence of emotions, neither for the ethnographer nor the participants, during observations and interviews. Advice on fieldwork generally foregrounds principles of objectivity, impartiality, and neutrality. In this chapter, I suggest that we need to pay attention to our emotions when we write about, reflect, and subjectively introspect upon our fieldwork and in our analysis. I draw upon my ethnographic experiences of conducting fieldwork on policing in Pakistan and confess some of the key emotional challenges encountered. I also draw upon the experiences and insights relayed by other scholars who have conducted similar research in Pakistan and comparable environments.

Pages: 176

No chapter abstract available.

Pages: 12

This chapter introduces a conceptual framework through which we can understand the city as a medium of future policing. Employing the city as a lens for illuminating how the police perceive of and seek to preempt and counter diffuse and hybrid threats associated with crime and terrorism, we direct attention towards how officers’ affective orientations such as fear, anxiety and desire inform practices of policing. At the core of our framework is the argument that police work in the city implies an emotional response to the uncertainty and unpredictability of the urban environment that is aimed increasingly at responding to threats that have not yet materialized. To capture how affective orientations inform police work, it is necessary to move beyond the understanding of police work as expressions of a centrally governed bureaucratic institution, adopting instead an ethnographic focus on the micro-dynamics and everyday practices of policing. An ethnographic approach, we propose, allows access to the context-specific ways in which the police engage in preemptive practices of policing the future, and in turn, opportunities for unfolding how urban transformations will shape the future of policing.

Pages: 21

In this chapter, we analyze the shadowy dimensions of security and policing as a constitutive part of social life, the state, and the economy, a ghostly presence that deserves to be the focus of ethnographic research. We use ethnographic fragments from a broader research project to draw complexities of security assemblages in cities in the state of São Paulo. We navigate through violent practices, ambiguous biographies, opportunities, and threats manipulated by concrete and experienced shadow men in the precarious lives of those employed in outsourced security companies. This chapter discusses the ways in which security is manufactured on a daily basis in urban Brazil. Accordingly, we have given thought to how methodological courage is needed to deal with the risks in such an ethnographic endeavour, and for ethnographers who engage deeply and intimately in this kind of fieldwork with the aim of producing non-normative ethnographies. In order to give a clearer sense of the implications of doing fieldwork in the grey zones of security, we propose the concept of pendular ethnography, a reflexive approach committed to following the shadows of security without being subject to them.

Pages: 16

Ethnographies of policing have overwhelmingly focused on the work of traditional security actors, namely the public police, in local communities. By comparison, ethnographic research on the poly-centric and multi-scalar networks of power that govern and provide security around the world remains a rarity despite increased theoretical interest in nodal governance, plural policing, transnational policing, and international police-building. In this regard, ethnographic research on policing appears to be disconnected from important theoretical developments in the field. At the same time, researchers who study these complex webs of security governance qualitatively typically rely on key stakeholder interviews and documentary sources rather than ethnographic methods. Accordingly, this chapter considers the methodological possibilities, benefits, and challenges of studying policing assemblages using multi-sited ethnographies. The primary benefit of multi-sited ethnography is that it allows researchers to situate themselves in different security nodes in order to examine the development, translation, and implementation of security policies and practices within and across different fields of power. This provides researchers with a strategy for developing first-hand, empirical insight into how and why policing mentalities, technologies, resources, and institutions are structured by their position in a wider field, and in turn structure the field.

Pages: 13

How police officers employ categories based on culture, ethnicity and race has become the crucial and most discussed issue of policing in the last decades. Ethnographic police research has pointed out discriminatory practices based on such categorisations (Epp et al. 2014; Fassin 2013) but also questioned the relationship between these categorisations and practices (Waddington 1999b). Currently emerging ethnographic approaches allow researchers to generate new questions: as theories on racial profiling have been developed mainly in the United States, how do we grasp the very specific historical trajectories and policing rationalities concerning culture and ethnicity in such different countries as, for instance, France, Germany or South Africa? How are discriminatory speech and practices linked when it comes to policing? And what categories of difference do we, as police ethnographers, employ to label police officers and citizens? These three questions shape this chapter, showing how ethnographic approaches and heightened reflexivity allow us to complicate the issue of race, culture and ethnicity in contemporary policing.

Pages: 13

The significance of stories in policing and in policing research has been widely remarked upon. They are said to function as tropes and precedents or as therapy, and they are told and retold in countless canteen conversations and research interviews. They are seen as an integral part of ‘police culture’, conveying knowledge about what works from officer to officer, from old hand to recruit, shaping police behaviours and actions. In this chapter, we develop a different approach to narratives that draws upon 6 years of ethnographic research with officers in three police forces. We recognise the fragments of stories to be found in an officer’s local knowledge, in briefings and intelligence and in the interpretation of the actions of others, projecting forwards into potential future scenarios and represented subsequently in an authoritative account. These interlocking stories are integrated to form plausibility structures that become themselves a story passed on as intelligence. The chapter explores the value and implications of such an approach to the analysis of ethnographic data and to the understanding of policing.

Pages: 26

This chapter explores and argues for the use of a specific set of theoretical approaches combined with certain methodological tools for carrying out research into police officers’ subculture and the wider field of policing phenomena. The reciprocal relationship between theory and methodology is understood here as being fundamental to guaranteeing the validity, accuracy and effectiveness of researching issues surrounding policing - especially ethnographic fieldwork aiming to provide a sociological insight into the world police officers’ inhabit. Discussed are a number of thinkers’ understandings of human agency and social causality alongside how such processes as sensemaking play a defining role in the construction of police officers’ shared reality. This chapter should be of significant interest to police researchers who are keenly aware that understanding officers’ shared reality, and how this reflects and impacts on everyone’s shared reality, yields rich data which provides original contributions to the wider and inter-disciplinary knowledge base on policing. The chapter draws on relevant examples of police researchers’ contributions to the area that have grown out of, and are rooted in, the wider endeavour of trying to better understand the relationship between police officers’ use of language, knowledge, practices and power relations within the late-modern nation-state. This chapter ultimately outlines how the combination of these approaches and tools can perhaps provide the most fruitful and fit-for-purpose paradigm for researching any and all social phenomena surrounding policing.

Pages: 14

This chapter considers how the ideas and perspectives of Foucauldian governmentality studies can be translated to the specific field of ethnographic policing research. We outline three aspects in which governmentality studies might aid in extending the scope of research on policing, by 1) extending the focus beyond a preoccupation with police culture, 2) extending the focus on policing as reaching beyond law enforcement and 3) extending the critical potential in policing research. We are not the first to point out that policing research could be extended in these directions, but it is our argument that the insights of governmentality studies can be particularly helpful for doing this. Finally, we consider some challenges in combining the analytical insights of governmentality studies with the methods of ethnographic policing research.

Pages: 14

Ethnographies of police work traditionally rely on methods such as field observation, recorded in fieldnotes, and interviews. This chapter introduces a linguistic ethnographic approach, which offers a valuable contribution to the study of policing. Conceptualised early on as a tool to ‘tie ethnography down’ and ‘open linguistics up’ (Rampton et al. 2004), linguistic ethnography combines an epistemological stance of ethnography with detailed linguistic analysis. It is often seen as an umbrella term uniting work concerned with researching language in social life. This chapter offers an overview of linguistic approaches to policing in general before discussing interactions in the context of community policing. It does so by looking at an analysis of a spontaneous interaction between a Police Community Support Officer (PCSO) and a member of the public. Drawing on Goffman’s dramaturgical model and using Sarangi’s (2010) distinction between discourse roles and activity roles as a theoretical framework, the analysis shows how a question-and-answer format as well as the strategic use of pronouns provide an interpretative tool for the discussion of constantly shifting roles in a community policing context.

Pages: 16

Taking as a starting point the controversial reception of an ethnography of black lives in the United States and using Michelangelo Antonioni’s famous film Blow Up as a source of inspiration, this article proposes a reflection on the ethnographic exposure by distinguishing three dimensions, which stem from the Latin etymology of the verb exponere: to unveil and display; to report and recount; to lay open and render vulnerable. Each of these dimensions - uncovering truths, representing worlds and taking risk - are discussed and developed on the basis of an ethnography of policing in France. From this perspective, ethnography is generative of a social critique which appears to be especially necessary, as it is increasingly under academic and political pressure.

Pages: 16

In addition to being multi-sided, much work carried out by police ethnographers is also multi-temporal in nature, since relations that developed in the field often continue and change long after fieldwork. Such relations are increasingly complicated by the mediatization of police ethnography, which may leave both the ethnographer and field relations caught up in cross-publics and media conflict. In this chapter, I reflect on the ‘public afterlife’ of my own ethnographic work with the Dutch police. These reflections are based on three cases that will, first, help us understand how and why police leadership tried to ‘quarantine’ and localize the main problem that was addressed in the mediatized ethnography: ethnic profiling. Second, they allow for a sociolinguistic analysis of such ‘scaling down’ as a matter of words, not deeds, that is as representational work to improve police legitimacy and public acceptance. Third, they help us to think about public ethnographers as boundary figures who expose and broker (in this case militarized) police concepts, which gain new meanings in contexts beyond the world of policing.

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While police ethnography has grown in popularity within the academy, ethnography itself is still not a widely practiced research technique. Moreover, the ethnographic method and ethnographers are almost completely absent from policy debate, news and opinion, public discussion, and even fictional popular culture about policing and law enforcement. Such omissions seem especially egregious and destructive in the United States, where entire policing crises rise and fade without an ethnographer’s voice being heard. Here I argue that ethnographic conclusions and spokespeople should be part of the discussion on policing issues because ethnography produces useful insights vital to policing debates among policymakers, journalists, and the public. Ethnographic data have an authenticity that speaks to actionable solutions.