Abstract
Most comprehensive discussions of the police acknowledge the inability of legal and bureaucratic regulations to determine officer behavior. Attention is turned instead toward the informal norms developed within the police subculture. These discussions, however, tend to overstress the chasm between the formal and informal. They also provide inadequate tools for understanding differentiation, conflict, and change within police departments. I address these shortcomings here by mobilizing a particular conceptualization of the term “normative order”—as a set of rules and practices oriented around a central value. Six such orders are crucial to policing: law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality. I illustrate the importance of each by drawing upon ethnographic observations of the Los Angeles Police Department, and explain how my conceputalization offers a comprehensive yet flexible means to understand the social world of policing.
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