Everyday Policing Research Articles

Exploring a Craft Learning Model for Reviewing Patrol Officer Decision-Making in Encounters with the Public

Since the 1960s, police departments have turned to rules and procedures to help control how patrol officers, as legal decision-makers, exercise their discretionary authority. The logic of the administrative rulemaking model depends on the development and enforcement of bureaucratic rules and regulations. The public outcry over high-profile incidents of police abuses of authority has renewed interest in this approach. This article conceptualizes a complementarycraft learning modelto supplement rulemaking. This model harnesses patrol officers’ knowledge and skills, learned through experience, to the development of criteria for assessing and guiding how they use their discretion in less dramatic encounters with the public. Using in-depth interviews with thirty-eight patrol officers reacting to a video clip of a fairly routine and low-key neighbor dispute, we derive seven evaluative standards (accountability, lawfulness, problem diagnosis, repair of harm, economy, fairness, and safety and order). We then explore how these standards could be used by first-line supervisors to structure reviews of patrol officer decision-making through a process of reflection-in-action. Our purpose is to imagine a reform strategy that tries to account for the complex technical and normative dimensions of everyday police work to facilitate more deliberate, transparent, and principled decisions.

POLICIJSKE NAUKE U REPUBLICI SRBIJI – STANJE I CILJEVI

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the basic determinants of police sciences and explore the possibility of their equal treatment with other sciences, based on the analysis of previous research and results in terms of establishing and developing police sciences as well as research and educational police practices. In addition, this paper should contribute to the integration of the knowledge developed so far in our country into the corpus of police sciences and their more efficient application in police education and everyday police work. The establishment of police sciences is imposed as a necessary precondition, as a special scientific field in the existing classification of scientific fields.

“You Wanna Come to the ‘Urban’ Night Tomorrow... It’s the Wrong Night Tonight”

Drawing from a yearlong ethnography alongside police officers, door staff, and venue managers, this article explores my research participants’ conceptions, and governance of, “urban nights” in “Greenshire, UK.” My research participants used the term “urban nights” to refer to nighttime events where traditionally Black music is played, such as drill, grime, and R & B. In doing this, I reveal how institutional racism is embedded within policing cultures and everyday policing practices used to govern nightlife. In exploring how nightlife is governed in a white provincial context in Southern England, I uncover how the public and private police work together to produce nightlife as an “acceptably white space.” The article outlines the impact this has on the governance of “urban nights” and the management, access, and experiences of Black nighttime participants.

Domestic Peacekeeping Practices in the Tamale Metropolis

This article contributes to understanding local security practices in urban Africa by examining links between international peacekeeping and local policing in Tamale, the capital of Ghana’s Northern Region. It uses the concept of assemblage to suggest that while experiences, skills and lessons gained from consistent engagement in United Nations peacekeeping may be detected in local policing in Tamale, their effects on everyday policing are in practice limited. This is due to the central role of traditional authorities in local security and general political interference in police matters. Local policing in Tamale is an assemblage of formal (police and military) and informal (chiefs and community leaders) security arrangements, with the latter, especially, dictating how crimes should be dealt with. This makes it next to impossible for the police to do their job without interference. The article examines how non-state or traditional actors shape policing and security provision in Tamale, and what space is available for police officers to use the skills they believe they have learned in peacekeeping missions. The paper shows through empirical analysis how local policing is shaped more by kinship and politics than international principles of human rights and democracy.

Eating pizza in prison

ABSTRACTPolice work is obviously a question of pursuing subjects. In postslave societies, one figure dominates; police are always after the young Black man. Meanwhile, another distinctive subject of policing exists. In São Paulo, Brazil, police detectives are also worried about the failing White father. He represents a crucial kind of problem: he weakens whiteness by subjecting White children to the indignities that Black children face. His punishment is not incarceration, however. Instead, his punishment is a question of civility and reparation, of being “pedagogical.” Attention to police officers’ decision‐making about these two subjects of everyday policing shows how the long‐standing fallacy of the idealized White family is produced by extracting from the Black family. It reveals the logic of differentiated punishment—civil and reparative punishment for White men, life in prison or death for Black men and boys—as a mechanism in the constant remediation of whiteness as property and accumulation. [whiteness, policing, punishment, men, family, child support, race, São Paulo, Brazil]

The railway panopticon: State formation, carceral power, and everyday policing in the late-nineteenth-century train station

Historical scholarship on the formation of the state in the United States has focused on the national and state governments and has searched for state power in courtrooms, barracks, and legislative chambers. This article reveals the growth of municipal state power in an unlikely place: the large urban train station, a crucial transportation chokepoint. Using nineteenth-century St. Louis as my primary example, I focus on how both police and non-state actors took advantage of an emergent place of constricted mobility. Rather than imprison people to punish criminality, subalterns caught in the railway panopticon were disciplined according to then-prevailing gender and racial norms. I argue that the intersection of networks there created a place where local police and their allies could surveil, check, and potentially stop more people than in any other place in the urban landscape. This article refocuses the history of state building on a more prosaic location than the halls of government and traces the history of police as enforcers of the racial norms and patriarchal order. Central railway stations became, unintentionally, key sites of state formation and carceral power. This research reveals the spatial heterogeneity of the state's strength, provides a genealogy for contemporary racially inequitable policing, and creates a framework to investigate other places where state and non-state actors can exercise particular power over everyday people.

Everyday Police Work Abroad: A Story of Experience, Continuity and Change in Multilateral Missions

ABSTRACT Nowadays, police officers are regularly deployed as members of multilateral peace operations. This article examines how these experts implement their mandates and how we can understand their activities. For this, we draw on a set of 90 semi-structured interviews with European police experts who have experience in multilateral policing. We find that, to navigate their work abroad, European police officers primarily rely on their own domestic policing experience, their experience from previous deployments and the experience of colleagues they meet in the mission. The extent to which they can rely on their own experience is shaped by how much discretion they find at their disposal. We identify two conditions limiting their discretion: the preferences, policies and histories of host states, and institutional lock-in effects within missions that reduce officers’ room to manoeuvre over time. While we also find that officers do not normally draw on international guidance documents in their everyday work, missions can nevertheless be regarded as sites where more localized transnational policing practices emerge. These mission-specific transnational practices are formed, over time, by successive cohorts of police officers from different countries.

Police interactions in post-colonial India: how particularistic accountability, legitimacy and tolerated illegality condition everyday policing in Delhi and Kerala

PurposeThe paper aims to relocate discussions on police stops and police interactions from the Anglophone world to the particularistic context of the post-colonial state of India. The paper further frames the everyday policing practices in a theoretical dialog between questions of legitimacy, accountability and tolerated illegalities. For that purpose, the author contextualizes the discussion in the post-colonial state of India, in the jurisdictions of two police stations (PSs), in the National Capital Territory of Delhi and the State of Kerala.Design/methodology/approachThe author conducted ethnographic studies in one station each in Kerala and Delhi, India, from February to July 2019 and July 2019 to January 2020, respectively. The study mapped everyday power relations as the relations manifested within the site and jurisdiction of the PSs.FindingsThrough the research, the author found that to fully understand everyday practices of policing, especially police interactions and police stops, one must contextualize the police force within the administrative power-sharing relations, police force's accountability structures, legal procedures and class dynamics, which mark the terrain in which personnel function. In that terrain, the author found that the dialog between particularistic legitimacy, accountability and tolerated illegalities offered an important framework to interpret the everyday policing practices.Originality/valueThrough the paper, the author seeks to expand the analysis of ethnographic descriptions of policing by contextualizing them in the political economy of the state. In doing so, the author aims to provide a framework through which police interactions in post-colonial India could be understood

Criminal Law & Migration Control: Recent History & Future Possibilities

Abstract Immigration enforcement in the United States has undergone a revolutionary transformation over the past three decades. Once episodic, border-focused, and generally confined to the efforts of a relatively small federal agency, immigration enforcement is now exceedingly well-funded and integrated deeply into the everyday policing of the interior United States. Not only are federal immigration agents more numerous and ubiquitous in the interior, but immigration enforcement has been integrated into the policing practices of state and local officials who once saw their purview as largely distinct from that of federal immigration enforcement agents. This essay briefly explains these developments, from shortly before the passage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 through the present day, and assesses their consequences. It includes a brief discussion of the ways states and localities have responded to federal enforcement trends, whether through amplification or constraint.

Move-on powers and practices of social exclusion: an examination of governance

ABSTRACT This paper extends Valverde’s call to examine spatiotemporal governance and jurisdiction in the exercise of formal and informal control through an analysis of the everyday policing of public spaces in Victoria, Australia. Move-on powers were introduced via legislation in 2009, following calls for greater police powers to combat antisocial behaviour and violence, predominantly in the Melbourne CBD. While initially presented as a response to issues surrounding Melbourne’s nightlife, the use of these powers has expanded to include moving on rough sleepers and others. As we establish in this paper, such powers are also being exercised, with or without legal authority, by a broad range of actors, resulting in a flattening of the legal hierarchy of move-on powers. Our analysis also highlights the everydayness of being moved on for individuals and populations who are consistently targeted, bringing to the fore the often-hidden nature of practices of exclusion. We argue that the examination of policing practices in relation to move-on powers must also include the expansive and increasingly informal nature of policing public space, which we refer to, collectively, as move-on practices.

The Rise of the Robots: Technocapitalism and the Policing of Race

This article critically engages with the emergence of police robots in the United States, arguing that their inevitable foray into everyday policing will fuel existing issues of racial discrimination. Building on Luis Suarez-Villa’s (2009) conceptualization of technocapitalism, I situate police robots within a framework of social domination that thrives not only on its connections to corporatism and militarism, but also on technocapitalist conditions that invariably exacerbate the oppressive dynamics of racist and discriminatory policing. Although police robots will make police work safer for officers (Sharkey 2008), I contend that they will be used by the police as weaponized machines of racial discrimination.

Citizen‐Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya

ABSTRACTThis article privileges the grounded geographies of the war on terror, focusing on those who grapple with its everyday policing powers. Informed by ethnographic research in the cities of Nairobi and Mombasa, I explore how Kenyan Muslim activists experience and make sense of the networked assemblages of police power that transform urban spaces into “gray zones” that fall within the ambiguous spectrum between war and peace. As US‐trained Kenyan police employ military tactics of tracking and targeting potential terror suspects in quotidian urban spaces, they rely on “pop‐up” interventions such as abductions, house raids, and makeshift checkpoints—flexible maneuvers designed to match the amorphousness of the so‐called enemy. I introduce the term citizen‐suspect to shed light on actually existing citizenship in the urban gray zone. Citizen‐suspects contend not simply with the fear and paranoia that come with subjection to surveillance and suspicion but with the knowledge that is needed to navigate the shape‐shifting geographies of transnational policing.

Do everyday proactive policing activities reduce vehicle crashes? Examining a commonly held law enforcement belief using a novel method

Traffic accidents present a significant challenge to public safety and are a top priority for many law enforcement agencies in the United States. Empirical studies suggest that police agencies commonly engage in traffic enforcement activities to be proactive, spending much of their downtime patrolling areas with heightened risks for vehicle crashes. Despite the ongoing focus on traffic enforcement in daily police work, the impact of these efforts on traffic accidents remains unclear. The current study uses a Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) framework to examine everyday police proactive work and its impact on vehicle crashes at “hot spots” of collisions in a large suburban jurisdiction. Findings indicate that routine patrol levels and activities produce short-term reductions in crashes at the most serious crash hot spots but have less impact elsewhere. To generate a more sustained and optimal effect on traffic safety, everyday police proactivity needs to be more carefully calibrated in terms of its targeting, dosage, and types of activities.

Street Authority and the Politics of Everyday Policing

Abstract Through the ethnographic lens of so-called gangs and anti-gangs, this doctoral thesis investigates the politics of everyday policing in the conflict-affected city of Goma (Democratic Republic of Congo) and the distinct style of street authority it produces. The gangs and anti-gangs focused upon in this doctoral study are marginalised youths from Goma’s popular neighbourhoods, who see it as their mission to protect the cities’ inhabitants from the everyday “crime” and violence committed by maibobo (street children) and other gangs. To understand how gangs and anti-gangs carve out a political space for themselves within Goma’s broader policing environment, and impose themselves as street authorities, I draw from three main theoretical concepts: liminality, performance and the political imagination. The doctoral thesis is situated in bodies of literature around urban violence and (in)security, conflict studies, vigilantism and civilian policing groups, governance, and the exercise of public authority. Methodologically, besides the main method of ethnography, this PhD relies also on visual methodologies – in particular a collaborative filmmaking methodology that was developed during the course of the research.

Understanding emotion as a strategy in policing

This article reviews neuroscience and cognitive psychology literature to understand how trauma and emotion impact policing and why some strategies are counterproductive by threatening police legitimacy. This review further illuminates the pernicious effect of stress in the policing environment, in both officer and citizen. Therefore, the article makes the point that the current focus on tactical training and the ‘warrior ethos’ diminishes community policing values, destroys trust, undermines respect and discourages cooperation while fostering resentment and hostility thus making everyday policing more hazardous. It argues that community policing strategies offer the only path for successful consensus policing in a democracy.

Measuring the Impacts of Everyday Police Proactive Activities: Tackling the Endogeneity Problem

To examine how the practice of daily proactivity affects and responds to changes in crime at micro geographic and temporal scales. Police calls for service and automated vehicle location data from a large suburban jurisdiction were used to create comprehensive measures of police proactivity. Panel data and the generalized method of moments framework were applied to tease out the endogenous relationships between crime and police proactivity and understand the unique impact of proactive patrol and crime upon one another. Daily police proactivity in this locality was highly stable at micro places, although police did intensify their activities very briefly in response to recent changes in crime. In turn, increases in proactive patrol generated immediate increases in crime reporting, followed by fleeting residual deterrent effects that were weaker and less robust. The patterns remained relatively consistent when varying the units of analysis or focusing on hot spots with different profiles of proactivity, but the deterrent effects appeared more sensitive to model specification. Of all measures of proactivity, patrols of medium length and non-traffic enforcement activities were associated with stronger evidence of crime reduction effects. Short-term adjustments in hot spot patrols appear to produce both reporting effects and temporary residual deterrent effects as measured through calls for service and police vehicle location data. Police could potentially enhance and prolong their deterrence by adopting more deliberate strategies with their daily proactive behaviors, including making their proactive activities more targeted and sustained.

Imagining the anti-gang: the state, the father and Jean-Claude Van Damme

Empirically focusing on the so-called anti-gang, a civilian policing group in the city of Goma (DRC), this article examines the nexus between the workings of the imagination and the politics of everyday policing. Four forms of political imaginations through which the anti-gang imagine themselves as everyday policing actors are identified: political imaginations around the state, citizenship, the father, and martial arts and action movies. The article makes two main arguments. First, political imaginations are not merely fantasies. Instead, the anti-gang harness them to do political work and impose themselves as street authorities. In doing so, they in turn contribute to giving form to these political imaginations, by making them tangible and experienced as real in everyday urban life. Second, the article asserts that the political imaginations that shape and are shaped by anti-gang practices show that they do not so much propose a new political order. Instead, they seek to be included in it, escape marginalisation and become politically significant.

Colonial policing and urban space in the notorious Commune Rouge of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo

AbstractZooming in on the urban history of the Kenya neighbourhood in Lubumbashi, this article deals with the relation between urban space, colonial policing and African unrest. Colonial policy-makers feared the populous neighbourhood and its African masses, and deployed urban planning to materialize an ambiguous agenda of ‘welfare colonialism’ and discipline. The implementation of these planning projects was incomplete, and a spatial analysis of subsequent African local unrest, everyday colonial policing and military schemes sheds additional light on how colonial forces and Africans utilized urban space as a resource for protest and control. As such, the article aims to contribute to the academic debate on colonial policing, in which spatiality has been lacking.

Criminal Futures: Predictive Policing and Everyday Police Work

This book explores how predictive policing transforms police work. Police departments around the world have started to use data-driven applications to produce crime forecasts and intervene into the future through targeted prevention measures. Based on three years of field research in Germany and Switzerland, this book provides a theoretically sophisticated and empirically detailed account of how the police produce and act upon criminal futures as part of their everyday work practices. The authors argue that predictive policing must not be analyzed as an isolated technological artifact, but as part of a larger sociotechnical system that is embedded in organizational structures and occupational cultures. The book highlights how, for crime prediction software to come to matter and play a role in more efficient and targeted police work, several translation processes are needed to align human and nonhuman actors across different divisions of police work. Police work is a key function for the production and maintenance of public order, but it can also discriminate, exclude, and violate civil liberties and human rights. When criminal futures come into being in the form of algorithmically produced risk estimates, this can have wide-ranging consequences. Building on empirical findings, the book presents a number of practical recommendations for the prudent use of algorithmic analysis tools in police work that will speak to the protection of civil liberties and human rights as much as they will speak to the professional needs of police organizations. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, and cultural studies as well as to police practitioners and civil liberties advocates, in addition to all those who are interested in how to implement reasonable forms of data-driven policing.

Cross-cultural encounters in everyday urban policing

ABSTRACT This paper is focusing on the way in which securitization is performed, experienced and felt in everyday embodied encounters. It explores encounters between citizens and urban authorities – here represented by police officers holding different positions in relation to the public. The context of the research is public spaces marked as a potential threat to the security of the city. That can be streets, squares or neighborhoods represented as ‘ghettoes’ in the public debate. The research object is encounters with the authorities (in which majority and minority agents can take different positions) and the experiences, emotions and power relations lived out in these encounters. The methods are interviews with both police officers and citizens focusing on their experiences of cross-cultural encounters. To achieve a deeper understanding of the meaning horizons circumscribing the encounters, we interpret them through the lens of theories of embodied encounters, emotions and different modes of violence and power relations.