Understanding Police Culture

John P. Crank

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317521433
• Édition: 2
• Sujet: Diritto
• Sous-sujet: Diritto penale

Police culture has been widely criticized as a source of resistance to change and reform, and is often misunderstood. This book seeks to capture the heart of police culture—including its tragedies and celebrations—and to understand its powerful themes of morality, solidarity, and common sense, by systematically integrating a broad literature on police culture into middle-range theory, and developing original perspectives about many aspects of police work.

Part I Understanding Police Culture

Prologue

DOI: 10.4324/9781315721255-1

“Its a Cop Thing. You Wouldn’t Understand.”

The quote above, displayed in large black letters, was on the front of a T-shirt worn by a heavily muscled off-duty police officer. I watched him as he casually walked to the back of the convenience store, a smile on his face. It was late June in Las Vegas, and the summer winds were already hot. Reaching into a cooler, he grabbed a quart of Gatorade.

A thick coat of sweat covered my brow. My thoughts rumbled over the implied question—What is a cop thing?

Chapter 1 Culture and Knowledge

DOI: 10.4324/9781315721255-2

Culture is an extraordinarily broad topic. At its heart, the study of culture is the study of what it means to be human. Culture enables a great many of those things that mark us as quintessentially human. Our capacity for moral and ethical development, the way we describe and act out fundamental institutions of marriage, church, government, and economy, the labeling of others as friend or foe, our ability to act in ways that display justice and fair play, our identity as citizens, all of these are expressions of culture.

This book is about police culture. It breaks from public presentations of police culture as a hostile influence in efforts to instill organizational reform. Consider a news story from CNN (2000) that reported the following response to a Board of Inquiry report on corruption in the Los Angeles Police Department:

The culture of the Los Angeles Police Department is to blame for its corruption scandal, a study commissioned by the police officer’s union found. ...”The Board of Inquiry report fails to recognize that the central problem in the Los Angeles Police Department is the culture,” said the report’s author . . . “There will not be meaningful reform in the Los Angeles Police Department until the culture is changed.”

The perception that a police “culture” is a source of hidden, unpleasant police characteristics is not only a media construction. It is also widely present in academic literature. Police culture has been described in terms such as a “culture of violence,”“suspicion,” machismo,” racial prejudice,”“distrust,” and “siege mentality” (Shanahan, 2002). As Chan (1996) has noted, culture is an umbrella term for a range of negative values and practices among the police. Waddington (1999:293) noted the limitations of this view of culture:

Its (the term “culture”) ‘convenience’ lies in its condemnatory potential: the police are to blame for the injustices perpetuated in the name of the criminal justice system.

The purpose of much of this research, Waddington (1999) reminds us, was not to understand what police do or think, but to change them. It is about reform. Citing Reiner (1985:85), Waddington noted that the impulse for change “was a civil libertarian concern for the extent and sources of police deviation from due process of law.” The literature on police culture, Waddington concluded, ends up telling us what is wrong with police culture from the perspective of the observer of the culture. It does not tell us anything about culture from the perspective of its participants. Consequently, and consequentially, we learn a great deal about the perspective of the observer, not the observed. The interaction of the observer and observed is a central and unsolvable dilemma in all research on culture, and particularly haunts narratives on police culture popular in both the popular and academic media.

Literature on police culture is rarely embedded in any sort of definition or notion of culture. Police culture emerges uniquely from the organizational setting, yet the broader notion of culture is unaddressed or taken for granted. What is needed is a definition of culture that provides a bridge to literature on culture generally, and from which descriptions of police culture make sense.

Central to ideas of culture is the recognition that culture is neither bad nor good, but rather is a central organizing principle of social life. Human culture brings out a central feature of our humanity—our capacity to find meaning in our lives. So it is for the police as well. It is culture that makes police like the rest of us, not different from us.

This chapter and Chapter 2 are framing chapters. I will review central issues on culture and on police culture, providing contexts or “frames” for thinking about these issues. Framing is not intended to provide answers, but aims at providing a basis for conversation on culture. I review current research both in and out of the fields of policing and criminal justice to develop ways of thinking about each of the issues framed in this chapter. The chapters are somewhat theoretical, and are intended to review the notion of culture generally and to think about current research on police culture.

I address the following frames. Chapter 1 asks, What is culture and what constitutes cultural knowledge? Chapter 2 asks, What should be the focus of cultural studies? Examined are institutional perspectives, interactionist standpoints that focus on emergent properties of local cultures, and theories that argue for multiple cultures within the organization.Chapter 3 presents thematic analysis as a way to sketch out the interplay of many elements of police culture. This book identifies 20 themes that, considered together, provide a sensibility to think about what it means to participate in the culture of the police.

The second purpose, and the substance of Part II, is the elaboration of themes of police culture. The central purpose of Part II of this book is to show how culture is a powerful and multifaceted dynamic that infuses police work with meaning. Through the presentation of the cultural themes in Part II, I hope to show how police work is meaningful to its participants. Some of the themes may appear to be negative, and others positive. However, negative and positive views of cultural themes are ethical judgments, and the reader is reminded that such judgments are reflective of their own cultural predispositions, not those of police officers. Cultural knowledge is acquired through recognition and understanding of differences, not through exclusionary ethics that label some cultural characteristics wrong and others right.

What Is Culture?

A working definition. In this section, I will lay out a working definition of culture. This will be followed by a discussion of many aspects of culture encompassed by this definition. This discussion is somewhat theoretical, and I hope the reader will bear with me while I present it. The aspects of culture discussed here provide the theoretical frame for police cultural themes developed in Part II of this book.

Below I present a working definition of culture, adapted from Hall and Neitz, (1993:4-5), and Sackmann (1993) with a “behavioral element” added and tool and social elements of culture distinguished:

Culture is collective sense-making. Sense-making has ideational, behavioral, material, social structural, and emergent elements, as follows:

(1) ideas, knowledge (correct, wrong, or unverifiable belief) and recipes for doing things, (2) behaviors, signs, and rituals, (3) humanly fabricated tools including media, (4) social and organizational structures, and (5) the products of social action, including conflicts, that may emerge in concrete interpersonal and inter- social encounters and that may be drawn upon in the further construction of the first four elements of collective sense-making.

This definition is useful for several reasons.

1. It recognizes that ways of thinking about issues are an element of police cultural study. This is the ideational component of culture, that is, the part of culture related to thinking about problems and organizing information to create coherence in occupational life. This element is described by Manning (1989:360) in terms of the organization’s history, its traditions, and “what is taken for granted by its members, things that are invisible but powerful constraints . . .”
   This element of culture also includes ethical prescriptions. For example, the practice of public order maintenance is fundamentally different from law enforcement—it requires a normative judgment by officers as to what constitutes local order (Wilson, 1968). This judgment is often linked to secondary judgments about the likelihood of conviction and attitude of the complainant (Black, 1980). In making such judgments, officers are tied to local community dynamics and shared notions of public order. In this example, a powerful ideational component—notions of public order—tie officers to communities and provide a basis for enforcement/non-enforcement decisions.
2. It recognizes that culture has a behavioral component. This part of culture is recognized in Manning’s (1989:360) definition of culture as “accepted practices, rules, and principles of conduct that are situationally applied.” Van Maanen (1973), for example, discussed the practices associated with pre-service training. A boot-camp training environment, with emphases on group punishments for minor infractions and stress training contributed to a perception by recruits that they could only trust each other, not superior officers. A training practice, in this example, resulted in a distrust of superior officers that infused professional work long after training was completed.
   Behaviors are not causal or consequential to ideas, but exist in a reciprocal and occasionally independent relationship to them. A person acts in a certain way because it is a culturally appropriate way to act, and a person thinks about that action in particular ways because that way of thinking is also appropriate. Culture is in this sense a conglomeration of thought and behavior. A handshake is a behavior, and it carries with it a certain way of thinking; that we express introduction and friendliness through a handshake.
   Manning noted that “culture links seeing, doing, and believing.” These elements are not necessarily linked harmoniously. Behavioral components should be recognized and analytically distinguished, because each might have fundamentally different implications for the study of police culture. Waddington (1999), for example, suggested that police attitudes about their work are frequently at odds with their actual behaviors. Attitudes, carried by what he called “canteen culture”—how police talk about their work—are often expressed as overtly racist sentiments, and research into police attitudes concluded that police were racist. On the other hand, studies of police occupational behavior rarely revealed racism.
   Waddington concluded that canteen culture exists, in part, to justify police beliefs about the world in the face of social and legal constraints over their actual behavior. A further implication of Waddington’s research is that research conducted only on attitudes (attitudinal surveys) or of occupational behaviors (ride-alongs with police officers that assess police-citizen encounters ) would be limited and carried enormous potential to be misleading.
3. It recognizes that culture has a material component, in which culture is expressed as tool-making and information-processing structures. According to this element of culture, sense-making emerges in response to “brute facts” about the world. In turn, the tools may take on a social vitality of their own, independent of their practical tool-making properties. Guns are an example of this element of culture. Guns have a “brute fact” practicality—they may enable a person to protect him or herself against another dangerous human or to put food on the table. However, they have accumulated cultural value and are dense with cultural meaning. In many quarters in American political life guns are infused with values of patriotism and protection against a threatening central government.
   Print media also has this quality. The print media and the machinery that enable it are daily fare for many people for gaining information about the world around them. As many have observed, the print media has a profound effect on the social dynamics it talks about. The phrase “the medium is the message” popularized by Marshall McLuhan in the 1970s is another way of saying that material and social culture are highly interpenetrated. In the same way, cops shows, though highly edited and polished versions of observed police activity, provide public notions of what police work is like. The public is exposed to the “huff and puff of the chase” even though observers of the police have repeatedly commented that most police work has little to do with such activity and is generally routine.
4. It recognizes that culture has a social structural component. This means that it is expressed in physical and organizational “things” (see Fine & Kleinman, 1979:7). It encompasses the physical structure of a police department, the physical geography of beat boundaries, and organizational features of the police such as operational strategies and goals, training practices, and patterns of occupational differentiation. As Hall and Neitz (1993:11) observed, “structure” does not always exist independently of ‘culture.’ Indeed, insofar as culture delimits a patterned basis for a group’s structure, we may speak of those patterns as ‘cultural structures’.” Police occupational practices like random preventive patrol are examples of such cultural structures, as are police uniforms. This element is in recognition of Chan’s (1997) critique of existing theories of police culture to recognize the importance of the social structural setting in which the police carry out their work.
5. It recognizes that there is an emergent component of culture. Four aspects of the emergent component are important here.
   First, products of social action—that is, the behavior that flows from the decisions we make about things—can give rise to new ideational and physical components of culture. The arrest practices of a department are a product of social action, that can have a substantial impact on the lives of those arrested. Released felons in turn may seek revenge on police officers, broadening the way officers perceive, train for, and tell stories about “officer safety.” This element is consistent with Chan’s (1997) admonition that police are not passive recipients of culture but are actively involved in its creation.
   Second, “emergence” recognizes that culture construction is a creative activity. Culture is highly duplicative—there are many kinds of blue jeans, for example—and people are constantly selecting among existing cultural elements, recombining them in stylistic ways (Willis, 1993). This view is consistent with a symbolic interactionist view of culture which emphasizes “the importance of face-toface interaction in the generation and activation of cultural elements” (Fine & Kleinman, 1979:8). Muir’s (1978) discussion of officers’ styles, for example, revealed artistic adaptation to common police dilemmas associated with the use of force.
   Third, emergence is also a product of new relations among social groups. Civil service, a late 1880s federal program, was incorporated into police organizations at the beginning of the twentieth century. It has had a pervasive influence on police personnel systems, locking in local personnel and sharply limiting the ability of managers to develop innovative practices by hiring creative or knowledgeable people into the middle or senior ranks (Guyot, 1986). In the 1970s the increasing interpenetration of academics, police, and federal grants organizations led to a revolution in police research, and has fundamentally changed the way police do their business (Crank & Langworthy, 1993).
   Fourth, the emergence of cultural elements may be a product of conflict with other groups. Participation in the life of a particular group—the finding of one’s identity and meaning—is often tied to the separation or rejection of identity with other groups. Douglas (1986:1) reminds us that “Writing about cooperation and solidarity means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust.” Widely recognized in political science is the formation of ethnic identity as a consequence of cultural contacts (see, e.g., Eller, 1999). The idea that conflict is central to the formation of cultural identity is in sharp contrast to traditional notions of cultural isolation and solidarity. This definition rejects the notion that culture emerges in stable social circumstances. The historical existence of a truly isolated and solidary community, a doubtful precept, simply is irrelevant to today’s highly interactive and mobile world. This element recognizes that culture is an ongoing, contemporary, emergent process and that conflict is one if its integral elements.

Culture and the Nature of Knowledge

Culture is an idea of extraordinary breadth. In its origins, culture was conceived broadly, that there are bounded, isolated, and stable social entities called cultures, and these cultures provide the measure of a whole way of life of a people. Redfield (1939), for example, described culture as people who shared common understandings and who produce and consume their own goods. Kluckhohn (in Geertz, 1973:4-5) provided 11 definitions for culture, including “the total way of life of a people,”“a way of thinking, feeling, and believing,” and “a set of techniques for adjusting both to the external environment and to other men.” Culture occupied such a large intellectual space in the early days of anthropology that it has been described as the “root metaphor” of the field (Geertz, 1973).

The study of culture emerged in ethnographies of “primitive”or nonWestern societies (Hall & Neitz, 1993). Early conceptions of culture, carried out by ethnographic observers of indigenous peoples in far-away places such as Africa, developed a conception of ...