The Police War Story and the Narrative of Inequality

Abstract

This article attempts to demonstrate, through an examination of the police `war story', that narrative has at its core a fundamental inequality between narrator and audience. In collecting police narratives, through interviews with 125 Chicago police officers, I became aware that even the most seemingly direct police narrative is filtered through the narrator's sense of the chasm of experience that lies between narrator and audience, whether the audience is a fellow police officer or member of the public. This article focuses on the two audiences police address: that of police officers and `civilians', and also looks at the `excluded audience' of criminals and intimates. Police tell stories to both real and imagined audiences, in both spoken and published form, putting the police narrative in a pivotal position for demonstrating what happens to narrative along Ong's oralityliteracy shift and the way the narrator's perception of audience shapes narrative itself.