Encounters with Policing

This book examines how encounters and interactions are crucial in shaping how policing is experienced by people. These dynamics are changing in the digital age where many encounters with policing are being conducted through computer, online, and AI-assisted systems rather than face-to-face.

Encounters with Policing revisits and reinvigorates the ways in which social interactions with, and within, police and policing matter. Contributing to how people see themselves and others, symbolising social status and hierarchy, and representing the configuration of social orders, encounters with policing take many different forms. Where the mode and distribution of encounters has always evolved, the digital age of communications has accelerated this process, resulting in less face-to-face social interaction and more of it that is mediated, parasocial, and representational. This has potentially far-reaching consequences for social solidarity and for feelings of connection to, or disconnection from, policing and authority. The book makes a distinctive theoretical contribution to the study of policing by foregrounding Erving Goffman and Randall Collins' iterations of interaction ritual theory, affirming its value in delineating the dynamics, ingredients, and outcomes of encounters, but also extending it to better accommodate the peculiar character of police encounters as well as the changing modes of social interaction. Encounters with Policing will be of interest to all policing scholars, but especially those examining the role of policing in relation to order, exclusion, and marginalisation. It also marks a timely return to the study of the cultural, symbolic, and mediated power of policing, and is a vital resource for those concerned about the risks to social solidarities inherent in an increasingly technologically mediated world. In its sustained examination of the particularities of policing encounters, it also provides a potent 'case' for scholars of social interaction.