Sociology Of Policing Research Articles

Exploring Terrorism Prevention: An Organizational Perspective on Police Investigations

Abstract The article analyzes the investigations conducted by the Berlin police into the subsequent perpetrator of the vehicle-ramming attack at a Berlin Christmas market on December 19, 2016. We explore why the police closed these investigations prematurely and thereby focus on an attempt to prevent lone actor terrorism. The analysis shows that the police closed its investigations owing to organizational dynamics driven by an increasing need to justify further resource investments in the face of absent conclusive evidence and scarce resources in relation to the organizational case ecology. We propose hypotheses for future research and formulate three contributions to existing research on the sociology of police, terrorism prevention, and lone actor research.

“Aiming to repel unjust aggression”: a sociology of police accounts and investigations into police lethality cases in Minas Gerais

Resumo Entre 2012 e 2021, 1.146 pessoas morreram em decorrência de intervenções policiais em Minas Gerais. Em quase todos esses casos, a narrativa oficial dos boletins de ocorrência foi de que essas mortes se deram em situações de “confronto”, nas quais os policiais, atuado no “estrito cumprimento do dever legal”, usaram “moderadamente dos meios de força necessários” para “repelir injusta agressão”. Já há no Brasil farta literatura demonstrando que a mobilização dessa gramática, já nos registros iniciais, é a primeira etapa de uma cadeia de procedimentos que, ao final, quase sempre resultará na aplicação jurídica da “excludente de ilicitude” à letalidade policial. Dialogando com essa produção, este artigo apresenta os principais resultados de um estudo de caso sobre o processamento investigativo da letalidade policial militar em Minas Gerais. A partir de abordagem etnometodológica, buscou-se compreender como um complexo sistema de representações, discursos e cognições compartilhadas entre policiais sustenta a construção de accounts sobre os casos de letalidade, dando a eles a forma jurídica da “legítima defesa”. Em termos metodológicos, o estudo se vale da análise de 3.605 B.O. sobre mortes e ferimentos decorrentes de intervenções policiais registradas no estado entre 2013 e 2018, bem como de 25 entrevistas com atores-chave das forças policiais e do Ministério Público. A pesquisa revela que, no campo discursivo, a Polícia Militar de Minas Gerais tem adotado estratégias institucionais para padronizar as narrativas inseridas nos registros de letalidade (boletins de ocorrência e inquéritos policiais militares), já acionando, nesses documentos, a gramática necessária à fundamentação da excludente de ilicitude na etapa judicial. Em termos procedimentais, a corporação tem não apenas assumido a investigação de seus próprios casos letalidade, mas também interditado tentativas de apurações externas feitas pela Polícia Civil. Já na esfera política/institucional, a Polícia Militar tem sistematicamente ignorado determinações do Ministério Público, esgarçando possibilidades de controle externo de sua atividade.

‘Assisted’ facial recognition and the reinvention of suspicion and discretion in digital policing

Abstract Automated facial recognition (AFR) has emerged as one of the most controversial policing innovations of recent years. Drawing on empirical data collected during the United Kingdom’s two major police trials of AFR deployments—and building on insights from the sociology of policing, surveillance studies and science and technology studies—this article advances several arguments. Tracing a lineage from early sociologies of policing that accented the importance of police discretion and suspicion formation, the analysis illuminates how technological capability is conditioned by police discretion, but police discretion itself is also contingent on affordances brought by the operational and technical environment. These, in turn, frame and ‘legitimate’ subjects of a reinvented and digitally mediated ‘bureaucratic suspicion’.

Robert Reiner: a pioneer in policing scholarship

This article charts the career of Robert Reiner, the pioneering British police researcher and prolific writer on mass media, popular culture, political economy, law and order, crime and justice. It surveys his life and work focusing on his contribution to the sociology of policing. The article examines Reiner’s empirical and theoretical studies of policing and the ways in which his work has shaped the discipline. The Politics of the Police, published nearly 30 years ago and now in its fourth edition, is the finest, most authoritative and comprehensive account of British policing in the post-war period and remains the standard work in the field. The article explores the historical, sociological, cultural and social-legal facets of Reiner’s work that have decisively shaped our thinking about policing, how it should be defined, understood and studied. The legacy of Reiner’s work is a tradition of policing scholarship that embraces a fully social and democratic sensibility of what the police are for in order to show how policing can best be performed.

PCCs, neo-liberal hegemony and democratic policing

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the recent introduction of directly elected police and crime commissioners (PCCs) in England and Wales, and to consider to what extent this new innovation should be considered as a positive contribution to the achievement of democratic policing. Design/methodology/approach – The paper draws on a range of key sources of academic literature on police accountability and the sociology of policing, as well as considering the content of government pronouncements and legislation. Findings – The central argument of the paper is that the introduction of PCCs needs to be examined within the context of the hegemony of neo-liberal logic in public services reform. It is argued that some enduring myths of policing, including the myth that the police impartially uphold an impartial law, lend themselves to the depoliticisation of policing which is necessary in order to facilitate neo-liberal colonisation of the service, which is inimical to democratic policing. Originality/value – The paper builds upon and contests some of the early critiques of the introduction of PCCs which have emerged and proposes a new direction for the development of critique in this area. It will be of interest to policing scholars as well as anyone concerned about the relationship between democracy and policing under current conditions of deep public service cuts and the colonisation of service provision by neo-liberal values.

Border regimes and the sociology of policing

Throughout the world, resources are being shifted towards border enforcement. Along with the concerted political and financial investment afforded by states into defending territories, the apparatus of border policing comprises of numerous state agencies and an ever-expanding range of private actors and commercial bodies. Yet an examination of the culture and practices of those responsible for the routine preservation of border priorities has garnered surprisingly little attention within the sociology of policing. In this research note, I foreground an agenda intended to extend current research and reflection on the everyday policing and surveillance of borders. My starting point is that the policing of borders is undergoing significant changes but without the accompanying scrutiny by policing scholars. Drawing on examples from the USA and Europe, my overarching claim is that as policing and security governance on the border becomes more innovative and pluralistic, policing scholars need to engage in sustained ethnographic fieldwork to track how security frameworks are realised at the local level and acted out against national environments. In so doing, policing scholarship can lead the way in developing a more holistic understanding of border practices with a view to redressing the social injustice experienced by those at the receiving end of contemporary border regimes.

Where is Policing Studies?: A Review of Democratic Policing in a Changing World. By Peter K. Manning (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2010, xvii + 306pp. $95.00 hb, $28.95 pb) * The Policing Web. By Jean-Paul Brodeur (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, xiii + 404pp. $45 hb) * Lengthening the Arms of the Law: Enhancing Police Resources in the Twenty-First Century.

Over the last decade or so, there has been a dizzying expansion in the number of institutes, posts, publications, conferences, courses and academic and quasi-academic journals devoted to research and teaching in policing. Against this backdrop, it is clearly preposterous to think that one can fully address the question ‘where is policing studies?’ in a single essay concerned with but three of the field's latest outputs. Indeed, this once small sub-field of sociology and criminology has grown at such a rate that if one set oneself the task of reading only the books and articles published on policing each year, one would struggle to keep up. The publication of these three texts nonetheless provides an opportunity to consider the current condition and prospects of policing research—to examine where it has been, where it currently stands and where it might fruitfully now travel. One reason for thinking this is that their authors include some of the founding—and subsequently most influential—figures in the sociology of policing (e.g. Brodeur 1983; Manning 1977; Shearing and Stenning 1981). Another is that these books are themselves works of synthesis, diagnosis and prognosis, and they each have interesting—and sometimes pointed—things to say about the history and state of policing studies, the challenges that presently lay before it and the agendas its practitioners should now pursue. It is with these matters in mind that I consider, in turn, the contribution of each.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Transnational Crime and Transnational Policing

Doing the business: entrepreneurship, the working class, and detectives in the East End of London

Doing the Business looks at the culture of London's East End and its relationship with the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police. The cultures of both the East End and the CID are examined in terms of their relationship with the market place and the emergent strategies of negotiation, trading, and, most importantly, entrepreneurship. The author breaks new ground in several crucial areas. He asks how well traditional notions of working class culture fit the East End, and argues convincingly that they do not. His model of an entrepreneurial working class culture (a shadow economy) is a departure from the routine 'them and us' picture of class relationships in Britain. He links the working class ethos peculiar to the East End with the occupational culture of detectives in an illuminating analysis of the working identity of plain clothes policing. There is also much of interest and originality in his theories of crime and delinquency, and in his documentation of the history of detective work in London. This is a highly original and at times controversial piece of work that contributes not only to our knowledge of culture and sub-culture, but also to the sociology of policing, and the study of class relations and organizations.