Police Culture in a Changing World

This book offers an ethnographical investigation of contemporary police culture based on extensive field work across a range of ranks and units in the UK's police force. Through direct observation of operational policing and interviews, the author assesses the impact of three decades of social, economic and political change on police culture.

Police Culture in a Changing World represents the return of police research to its original ethnographic form for the first time in decades. The book offers an in-depth investigation of contemporary police dispositions and practices based on extensive field work involving more than 600 hours of direct observation of operational policing across urban and rural terrains, and interviews with over 60 officers from a range of ranks and units in one English police force. The author provides a revised account of police culture in the new millennium, identifying various aspects of that culture which have hitherto gone unnoticed. With new understandings of how greater social diversity within and beyond policing organizations are shaping traditional relations, the book explores the impact of prevailing management practices on the way officers think about and perform their jobs, and the form police culture takes under conditions of late modernity. Finally, there is a theoretical discussion of police culture, tracking the new social, economic, and political field of British Policing, which sets out the main findings of the fieldwork. Theoretically and empirically informed, Police Culture in a Changing World is a landmark work on contemporary policing culture. Its timely character also has relevance with respect to highly salient issues in the current political climate regarding operational policing.