Explore And Illustrate What Is Meant By Police Culture



Explore and illustrate what is meant by police culture

Like any occupation, police officers share informal knowledge, values and attitudes that inform their working practices, especially the exercise of discretion. The principal elements of the police culture found among the lower ranks in many jurisdictions include conservative authoritarian attitudes; prejudice on the basis of gender, race and sexuality; peer group defensive solidarity; masculinity; suspicion and cynicism; and resistance to reform (especially that motivated by liberal values). This informal culture is now widely recognized as a malign influence that needs to be removed in order to improve policing.

The cultural dimension of policing was the focus of many pioneering texts on policing (e.g. Westley 1953; Skolnick 1966; Wilson 1968b; Reiss 1971; Cain 1973; Manning 1977; Bittner 1990) that revealed the murky world in which policing was not done 'according to the book' but through the invisible exercise of discretion. Formal procedures designed to protect suspects were found to be routinely subverted to ensure conviction, and cynicism about the criminal justice system to extend to tolerating misconduct and protecting wrongdoers behind a 'blue curtain' of solidarity. Later research confirmed the tenacity and near-universality of this culture (Holdaway 1979; Punch 1979; Smith and Gray 1983; Fielding 1988; Brewer 1990a; Brogden and Shearing 1993; Chan 2003a). The concept has become such a conceptual commonplace that it is increasingly invoked to explain a wide range of police misconduct, from sexism in the work-place to brutality towards suspects.

Skolnick (1966) located the imperatives that produced police culture in two structural contingencies of police experience: authority and danger. For instance, the police must be alert to threats to their physical safety and to come to regard African-Americans as 'symbolic assailants'. Expanding on this, Holdaway (1983) pointed to the obligation that police officers feel to come to firm conclusions in fluid and confused circumstances, which encourages prejudicial stereotyping. Kleinig (1996) identifies the anomic nature of policing, in which officers are duty bound routinely to transgress normal standards of conduct by intruding into privacy, deceiving those suspected of crime (see also Manning 1977) and using force (possibly lethal). This functional nature of police culture has been highlighted by how officers during the IRA (Irish Republican Army) insurgency in Northern Ireland avoided the stress arising from the threat of violence (Brewer 1990b) and by how humour is used to insulate them from such potentially distressing experiences as dealing with corpses (Young 1995).

The source of this culture lies with the informal influence of peers, especially during the officer's early experience of patrol. Typically, the 'rookie' is advised to forget everything taught during training and to learn how policing is really done on the street. The loyalty of rookies to their peer group is often tested by exposing them to minor misconduct and by enticing them into committing minor infractions (such as 'easing' in 'tea-holes'; Cain 1973), before inducting them into more serious and systematic wrongdoing. Peers are also a source of excuses that neutralize moral ...