NCJ Number
201835
Date Published
2004
Length
26 pages
Annotation
This article analyzes the interaction between police culture and the effort to implement community policing.
Abstract
Traditional police culture is broadly characterized as combining a high us-them boundary between sworn officers and all others, including civilian workers; and strongly reinforced rules governing behavior rooted in official form and informal norms and sanctions. The seven police subcultures are remnants of the traditional culture, paramilitary, opportunistic, administrative, civilian, and expert community-oriented policing. The current transitional period in urban policing has left police departments a legacy of fragmented organizational cultures, with a variety of approaches to police work pulling in contradictory directions. An ethnographic re-examination of police subcultures is needed because most of the current knowledge has been built on ethnographic work two or three decades old. The apparent resurgence of excessive police force demands deeper understanding of the dynamics leading to officer abuse. It seems likely that coming years will witness attempts to reconsolidate a more unified culture of policing because fragmented organizational cultures find it difficult to pursue their goals effectively. What culture will ultimately prevail depends significantly on conditions set by others: political leaders, leadership of local departments, the renewal of federal funding, and the demands of diverse urban democratic constituencies. Only policing insiders can construct a new cultural core to give direction and meaning to the work of policing. It will be the interplay between the cultural agency of police leaders and the structural conditions set by political and legal dynamics that will determine the future course of urban policing. 1 figure, 61 citations