Everyday Policing Research Articles

An evaluation of Barnardo’s trauma-informed policing training

This paper presents an evaluation of Trauma-Informed (TI) training for police officers in the West Midlands Police from November 2022 to February 2023. The West Midlands Violence Reduction Partnership has commissioned and delivered bespoke TI training since 2020, which aimed to deepen the understanding of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and trauma within the Police and, in turn, to create meaningful changes in everyday policing practice. Pre- and post-training surveys were conducted with 230 frontline officers and new recruits, as well as semi-structured interviews with 14 police officers and sergeants. Statistically significant improvements were found across all seven factors measured by the Trauma Aware Policing Attitudinal Survey (TAPAS). These findings indicate the efficacy of the training in improving police officers’ knowledge, responses, behaviours, self-efficacy, reactions to work, and personal and system-wide support for trauma-informed care. The qualitative results indicate a positive influence of the TI training on police practice overall. However, the quantitative data have limitations in drawing conclusions regarding long-term knowledge retention and the integration of trauma-informed practices, as well as the lack of robustness of the TAPAS tool. This highlights the necessity for further efforts to assess TI attitudes and providing TI training to police officers and senior management, promoting ongoing professional development and the wider implementation of trauma-informed approaches.

Reducing police response times: Optimization and simulation of everyday police patrol

AbstractPolice forces around the world are adapting to optimize their current practices through intelligence‐led and evidence‐based policing. This trend towards increasingly data‐driven policing also affects daily police routines. Police patrol is a complex routing problem because of the combination of reactive and proactive tasks. Moreover, a trade‐off exists between these two patrol tasks. In this article, a police patrol algorithm that combines both policing strategies into one strategy and is applicable to everyday policing, is developed. To this end, a discrete event simulation model is built that compares a p‐median redeployment strategy with several benchmark strategies, that is, p‐median deployment, hotspot (re)deployment, and random redeployment. This p‐median redeployment strategy considers the continuous alternation of idle and non‐idle vehicles. The mean response time was lowest for the p‐median deployment strategy, but the redeployment strategy results in better coverage of the area and low mean response times.

Intimacy, comradeship and everyday police violence: the rape of Sophie M. in German South West Africa in 1910

AbstractThis article asks whether and how gendered violence was part of the quotidian activity of state building in German South West Africa. Investigating the intimate space of a police compound, it gives a micro-historical account of how interracial sexual relations unfolded there, and how policemen’s private, intimate affairs were subject to close scrutiny by the colonial state. Rape – as distinctively masculine violence – posed a notably delicate problem to the legitimacy of the colonial state. The white masculine prerogative needed to be affirmed as the raison d’être of the colonial regime, but disorderly, unprofessional violence had to be controlled for the same reason. The case examined in this article was a rare moment in which an African woman attempted to take part in the discussion over the meaning of sex and violence. Ultimately, her articulation of what intimate, physical interactions meant to her was ignored. Instead, policemen articulated what masculine honour and comradeship meant to them. These discussions over what individual ‘honourable’ (including violent) behaviour implied were also always negotiations over the nature of colonial power and its programme.

Permissive Space and Policing Practices in Mathare and Kaptembwo, Kenya

ABSTRACT In this article, I analyse how different policing actors project their power and sovereignty in two informal settlements in Kenya: Mathare and Kaptembwo. Using the idea of permissive space, I unpack how power, relationships, and sovereignty issues are negotiated through everyday policing practices and repetitive public performances. I interrogate how the police, community policing bodies, boda boda (motorcycle taxi) riders, men and women, and young people interacted in different spaces of impunity as they exercised sovereignty. I show how they draw on historical claims to power negotiated over time that entitled them with authority over particular issues, such as carrying out street violence on suspected criminals. As a result, I establish how legitimacy and sovereignty are negotiated, contested, constructed, and reconstructed. We can only understand these dynamics if one looks at how actors negotiate their relationships with the state and each other.

Advancing police professionalism on the front lines with experiments and experience

Abstract We juxtapose two different visions for police reform, one based on programs and scientific experiments, the other on street-level practices and experience. Our purpose is to consider a closer marriage between them. To this end, we have outlined a training model based on the police craft, and designed to help patrol officers reflect mindfully on the numerous and varied situational factors that characterize mundane but perplexing encounters with the public. This model is inspired by the Aristotelian concept of perception or discernment. Its focus is not on outcomes but on decision-making processes that lead to choosing well in the kind of complex and uncertain environment of everyday police work.

The Costs of Grooming: Bodily Scrutiny and White-collar Masculinities in Japan

This article explores the everyday policing processes surrounding men’s bodily grooming and white-collar masculinities in Japan. Amidst increasing scrutiny of men’s bodies, research has highlighted how men understand their grooming in relation to masculinities privileged by class, race, and sexuality. Less is understood, however, about men’s experiences of everyday policing processes surrounding grooming. Japanese white-collar cultures where good grooming stands for professionalism provide fruitful contexts to address these gaps. Interviews with 33 socially privileged white-collar men in Tokyo demonstrate how participants understand grooming vis-à-vis masculine ideals of professional competency. Participants are particularly conscious of scrutiny from superiors, colleagues, and subordinates. While past scholarship has often overlooked the vulnerability of privileged men’s positions, for white-collar men in Japan, being subject to often cruel policing processes threatens their place on gendered hierarchies. Thus, I argue that even for privileged men, policing of their grooming presents real costs to their hegemonic status.

Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi

Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi

Implementation issues with hot spot policing

Although the science behind hot spot policing is robust and grounded in theory, implementation issues prevent it from becoming commonplace in everyday policing. The mounting evidence suggests that “hot spot policing” (Sherman and Weisburd 1995) is rarely applied in police routines. The paper critically discusses three common problems with the implementation of this approach into policy: officers' motivation, organisational resistance, and technological failures. Two competing solutions are proposed to these endemic issues: instituting specialised hot spot policing units or outsourcing the job of ‘cooling down’ hot spots to alternative non-police entities, partially or wholly.

Resilience policing and disaster management during Australia's Black Summer bushfire crisis

Policing landscapes are being transformed by disaster risks associated with climate change. ‘Resilience policing’ is described as an emergent model of security governance that builds upon established state-based community policing traditions to support the management of these complex risks and hazards. The assumption is that established policing capabilities might be harnessed to enhance disaster resilience. Empirical research on resilience policing is lacking however, and it is unclear whether this model is truly innovative, or simply a progression of established community policing models. This article explores these questions by considering how local police contributed to disaster management activities in a remote rural community which was directly impacted by Australia's catastrophic Black Summer bushfires in 2019–20. Our qualitative, empirical case study illustrates how institutionalized learnings, organizational and systemic reforms, and everyday policing activities enhanced the absorptive and adaptive capabilities of police as emergency responders, emergency management networks, and local residents. Our analysis indicates that a resilience policing model, anchored in existing community engagement and partnership-working methods, may hold promise as a means of enhancing the adaptative capacity of police and improving alignment between policing and emergency management networks. Less optimistically, it reveals potential obstacles to adapting this template for use in complex policing environments, sustaining institutional focus and adaptive capabilities amidst poly-crises, and aligning policing roles and mandates with transformative climate adaptation agendas.

Zoha Waseem, Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi

Zoha Waseem, <i>Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi</i>

The Vigilant Citizen: Everyday Policing and Insecurity in MiamiBy ThijsJeursen, New York: NYU Press, 2023, pp. 208.

Journal for the Anthropology of North AmericaEarly View BOOK REVIEW The Vigilant Citizen: Everyday Policing and Insecurity in MiamiBy Thijs Jeursen, New York: NYU Press, 2023, pp. 208. Megan Raschig, Corresponding Author Megan Raschig [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-5198 Correspondence Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Megan Raschig, Corresponding Author Megan Raschig [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0002-2299-5198 Correspondence Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 30 May 2023 https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12175Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL No abstract is available for this article. REFERENCES Beliso-de Jesús, Aisha. 2019. “The Jungle Academy: Molding White Supremacy in American Police Recruits.” American Anthropologist 122 (1): 143– 56. Burton, Orisanmi. 2015. “To Protect and Serve Whiteness.” North American Dialogue 18 (2): 38– 50. Feliciano-Santos, Sherina. 2021. “Of Cops and ‘Karens’: Language and the Bureaucratic Arm of Policing.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 31 (2): 261– 66. Rios, Jodi. 2020. Black Lives and Spatial Matter: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

The Violence of Everyday Police Disrespect: Experiences of Encounters with the Police in Canada’s Capital

ABSTRACT Scholarship on police violence tends to either center the historical role of the institution in protecting an unequal social order or the individual use of force. To broaden our understanding and unpack how violence manifests in everyday interactions, we examined 251 accounts of police encounters in Ottawa, Canada. Finding that disrespect was disturbingly common, we developed a typology that highlights the spectrum of police disrespect as it manifests through: a) denial of bodily autonomy, b) demeaning verbal interactions, and c) disdain. We argue that everyday police disrespect may appear banal compared to the use of physical force, but that it is a significant part of a continuum of dehumanization that creates an atmosphere that renders police violence possible.

Segregation and “Out-of-Placeness”: The Direct Effect of Neighborhood Racial Composition on Police Stops

Differential police conduct may be attributed both to residential racial segregation and more general discriminatory attitudes and policies. We draw upon ethnographic and other studies of everyday policing to propose that police, in the context of racially segregated neighborhoods, intensively surveil individuals who are “out of place” in terms of their race and the local geographical context in which they are found. We then use statistical evidence from the New York City Police Department to compare stops in different neighborhoods. We find that the NYPD indeed carries out “stops” that differentially target African Americans and Hispanics present in predominantly white precincts, with the degree of surveillance increasing as precincts become more white, and as stops become more generic and less about specific, identifiable crimes.

Removing Local Nuisances, Arresting Masterless Strangers, and Granting ‘Nights on Request’

This article proposes a comparative study of everyday police controls of vagrants in two Belgian cities – a port city and a capital city – at the end of the nineteenth century, a period that was characterized by heightened mobility and social fear about the so-called ‘masterless poor’. The first section of the article looks at the annual arrest and prosecution rates for vagrancy in Antwerp and Brussels between 1880 and 1910, as well as at the daily instructions from the city authorities and police chiefs to their policemen on how to deal with vagrants and unwanted newcomers. Next, drawing on a selection of archival records of the central police divisions of Antwerp and Brussels from the 1880s, we examine if and how police controls focused on mobile groups when they dealt with vagrancy, and whether they answered the preoccupations of local authorities. In line with the findings of other scholars, we demonstrate that the notion of vagrancy was so elastic that, in both cities, many different groups were arrested and prosecuted for this offence. Next to foreign and internal migrants, the Antwerp and Brussels police also apprehended local people, born in the city or in the surrounding province, who were not necessarily mobile and often known to them. To explain this, we argue that, in practice, the policing of vagrancy was not only shaped by top-down repression, but also by bottom-up uses of the police by vulnerable individuals in need of shelter.

Book Review: Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi by Zoha Waseem

Book Review: <i>Insecure Guardians: Enforcement, Encounters and Everyday Policing in Postcolonial Karachi</i> by Zoha Waseem

Governing Police Discretion Through a Craft Learning Model

In this article, we build on some of our previous empirical research to develop the value, logic and nature of the craft learning model, as an alternative to the dominant, administrative rulemaking paradigm for governing patrol officer discretion. We do this by conceptualizing the craft model in relation to Egon Bittner’s observations on two distinct mechanisms of police organization and control: legality and workmanship. Second, we illustrate the largely overlooked potential of body-worn cameras for learning about and advancing craft knowledge and skills. And third, we address three challenges to what we propose and consider how these might be mitigated or overcome: (1) resistance from the police culture; (2) the limited role of first-line supervisors; and (3) the current lack of community participation in guiding street-level decision-making. Our overarching purpose is to encourage advocates of police reform to explore new models that account for the complex technical and normative dimensions of everyday policing and facilitate more reasoned, transparent and principled decision-making on the front lines.

Legal practices and tribal exceptionalism in Western India

The Bhil and Girassia tribal regions of Udaipur district in the state of Rajasthan in Western India have been historically associated with ideas of wildness and primitivity that have relegated them to zones of exception. This article examines how everyday legal practices reflect and reproduce tribal exceptionalism. In particular, the article examines cases that are registered under sections 323 and 341 of the Indian Penal Code. The combination of 323 and 341 is locally known as petty violence. The manner in which high caste legal practitioners, including police officers, government doctors, lawyers, magistrates, and court clerks, inscribe documents in a legal file pertaining to crimes of 323 and 341, such as the First Information Report, injury report, map of crime, and list of witnesses, is mediated by a complex infrastructure of caste ideology that assumes that Bhils are wild, lack mental skills, and are only capable of petty violence. Legal practitioners believe that tribal life is incommensurable with the specific forms of selfhood, modes of interaction, and publicity that comprise legal personhood and that tribals are more effectively governed by their own customary laws. The article reveals how through these everyday police and court practices, legal practitioners legitimize and establish the state by creating spheres of tribal exceptionalism.

The showability of policing: How police officers’ use of videos in organizational contexts reproduces police culture

While much scholarly literature on police ‘canteen’ culture focuses on police storytelling, there is little research on the effects of camera phone technologies on police behaviours, particularly in organizational settings. This article introduces the concept of showability to examine how police officers use videos in their everyday police life, and how this relates to police culture. Based on an ethnographic study of the Dutch police, it illustrates that officers show, share, and discuss videos of various policing acts such as arrests, car chases, and use-of-force events, and do this in various locations such as office spaces, squad cars, and on the streets. First and foremost, officers show videos to entertain and to educate themselves and their fellow officers. Second, showing videos is a new occupational practice that, like in telling stories, reinforces and refutes aspects of police culture, for instance, a masculine ethos. The article contributes to criminological scholarship on the era of ‘new visibility’ by demonstrating that showability is a form of inward visibility wherein officers generate a visual world that fits their professional vision. It also contributes to a sociological understanding of the ‘everydayness’ of police culture. I claim that showability is a key feature of policing practices, which is relevant in light of increasing pressures on the police to account for their work.

‘It depends’: Officer insights on the potential for body-worn cameras to change police and citizen behaviour

Abstract This study mined officers’ perspectives on whether body-worn cameras (BWCs) could change the behaviour of citizens and police. Officers reinforced themes from prior studies on the professionalizing effect of BWCs, the potential for passivity, and the concern with ‘second-guessing’. Officers also stressed the theme of ‘it depends’, where behaviour change is contingent on the citizen, the situation, and the officer. Findings resonated with the concept of police encounters as two-way social interactions and related insights from regulation scholarship on ‘motivational posturing’. Results underscore the need for more observational studies (including ethnographies and systematic social observations) that identify the variety of encounters and settings where BWC activation might alter behavioural norms and encounter dynamics. Relatedly, BWC footage could be mined to inform reviews of everyday police work that identify the unique ways in which BWC activation could be leveraged to change behaviour in a variety of situations with different posturing dynamics. Policymakers should emphasize the complexity of the implementation environments surrounding the uptake of BWCs and other technology, with a view to encouraging research that measures the many dimensions of officers’ perceptions. Understanding the place and role of BWCs within the contexts of officers’ holistic experiences should help policymakers understand both the limits and potential of cameras to change everyday policing.

“Cover Your Ass”: Individual Accountability, Visual Documentation, and Everyday Policing in Miami

AbstractIn the context of police violence and the proliferation of cameras, a growing body of anthropological scholarship has sought to understand the role of photography and its relationship to everyday policing. While scholarly attention has been given to how cameras can intensify a racialized visuality of crime and justify violent policing practices, this article discusses how police officers themselves understand and use cameras in their daily work. Police officers can act as if they have a high level of impunity and a broad sense of righteousness, yet still feel that their work is surrounded by procedural and bureaucratic uncertainties. Based on extensive research with police departments in Miami, Florida, I discuss how police officers document their professionalism and integrity. When making sense of and navigating their societal role and the scrutiny that comes with it, US police officers use cameras to record themselves to capture visual and legal‐looking actions of what they understand is exemplary of good policing. In the eyes and hands of police officers, cameras are used to document state violence and racialized policing as individual performances, highlighting officer accountability and misconduct while obscuring institutional responsibility.