Police Culture: Themes and Concepts. By Tom Cockcroft (London: Routledge, 2013, 168pp. 25.99 pb)

Abstract

You would be forgiven for thinking that the final drop of ink had dried on academic writings about police culture. Textbooks summarize its key features as if they are secure. The theoretical basis of studies of police culture remains largely unquestioned. For many, ‘police culture’ has entered criminological discourse as a central, taken-for-granted category. Many criminologists interested in the police, however, take the opposite view. In their language, culture is an effect, not a cause. Being more concerned with whether this or that intervention has worked, they neglect consideration of how police culture acts as a lens through which law and policy are refracted. The ‘random controlled trial’ has become the single standard of trustworthy research. Culture might be a relatively unimportant variable, but that is all. In his accessible book, Tom Cockcroft presents six chapters in which he strongly questions these perspectives. He interrogates the clarity with which criminologists have used the concept of police culture; whether significant changes in the culture have been given sufficient or any research attention; how wider social change may have an impact, not on a monolithic form, but on plural police cultures; and, importantly, the need for ethnographic research further to explore the concept. An implicit argument about the importance of research focusing upon sociological as much as social problems runs a thread through the text. This is surely a very welcome, refreshing approach.