Abstract
Using examples of incidents that UK Police Forces deal with on a day-to-day basis, we explore the macrocognition of incident response. Central to our analysis is the idea that information relating to an incident is translated from negotiated to structured and actionable meaning, in terms of the Community of Practice of the personnel involved in incident response. Through participant observation of, and interviews with, police personnel, we explore the manner in which these different types of meaning shift over the course of incident. In this way, macrocognition relates to gathering, framing, and sharing information through the collaborative sensemaking practices of those involved. This involves two cycles of macrocognition, which we see as ‘informal’ (driven by information gathering as the Community of Practice negotiates and actions meaning) and ‘formal’ (driven by the need to assign resources to the response and the need to record incident details). The examples illustrate that these cycles are often intertwined, as are the different forms of meaning, in situation-specific ways that provide adaptive response to the demands of the incident.
Highlights
We consider Police incident response as a form of macrocognition (Klein et al, 2003)
The processes {detecting problems, managing risk, managing uncertainty, coordinating} are central to incident response. These are the primary processes involved in this activity
We began this paper with the proposal that sensemaking, as collaborative activity, is performed within a given community of practice, operating with the constraints of its institutional frames
Summary
We consider Police incident response as a form of macrocognition (Klein et al, 2003). From the point of view of ‘pragmatic sensemaking’, a Community of Practice shares information partly through common jargon (and associated experience and ‘world view’) and partly through shared communication technologies and practices An irony of this (for the type of incident response considered in this paper) is that ‘outsiders’ (i.e., people who are not part of the Community of Practice) are the very focus of its activity. Of particular interest are the institutional frames that are designed to aid the management and recording of incidents, such as the electronic forms that allow call handlers to enter information into incident logs These electronic forms are a repository of prior experience of the organization; they reflect the primary types of incident to which responses are required and the primary types of information that need to be recorded in order to produce consistent, structured accounts of the incident and the response. From the perspective of macrocognition, this patchwork of ‘rules’ will influence the space in which information is interpreted, and the ways in which different ‘framing’ of the same information can vary
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