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450707 title page 9/9/03 3:07 PM Page 1

Florida Atlantic University

Understanding Police Culture, Second Edition

First published 2004 by Anderson Publishing

Published 2015 by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 1998, 2004

Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or

utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
infor mation storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.

Notices
No responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to
persons or property as a matter of products liability, negligence or otherwise,
or from any use of operation of any methods, products, instructions or ideas
contained in the material herein.

Practitioners and researchers must always rely on their own experience and
knowledge in evaluating and using any information, methods, compounds, or
experiments described herein. In using such information or methods they should
be mindful of their own safety and the safety of others, including parties for
whom they have a professional responsibility.
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and
are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Crank, John P.
Understanding police culture / John P. Crank. -- 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-1-58360-545-5 (pbk)

Cover design by Tin Box Studio, Inc. EDITOR Janice Gail Eccleston
ACQUISITIONS EDITOR Michael C. Braswell
450707 preface 9/11/03 1:25 PM Page iii

Preface

This book stems from my long-term interest in the behavior of the

police and my curiosity about people, what makes us what we are, and
what it means to be human. Understanding the behavior of the police, I
believe, requires an approach that locates them as participants in a cre-
ative cultural process, a process that is alternately celebratory and tragic,
self-fulfilling in its values, densely moral, and profoundly meaningful. Yet,
if it is their culture that uniquely marks them, and I think it is, it is also
their culture that makes them so like the rest of us. Culture marks
humans: we seem compelled to commit our energies to the creation and
sustenance of culture. The capacity of the police to reproduce culture is
a mark of their humanity, their similarity to us, not their difference. Crit-
ics of police culture, who hold that the so-called “police subculture” is the
primary impediment to change and reform and must be expunged, are
unwittingly advocating that we strip cops of their humanity.
I have been troubled by the tendency of existing literature to over-
simplify the police. Police are typically described in either unquestion-
ingly supportive platitudes, or in sharply negative critiques. The pen-
chant to judge cops in simplistic terms of good and evil obscures our
ability to understand cops as actors on a human stage, complex individu-
als who struggle daily to determine where good and evil lie. In this book,
I have looked for meaning not only from what I have read and observed
about the police, but from my personal reflections and understandings
about what it means to be human. The book, though aimed at develop-
ing middle-range theory, is written in the spirit of discovery and self-
reflection.
If there is a predisposing bias in my writing (and of course there are
many), it is my two years of solicited experience as a grunt in the U.S.
army, an experience that has left me with a profound understanding of
rank structure, sympathy for the sad sack on the bottom of the chain-of-
command, and a flat-out distrust of superior officers. This experience
also left me with a visceral appreciation for the unpredictability of life, a

iii
450707 preface 9/11/03 1:25 PM Page iv

iv Understanding Police Culture

perception that I think helps me comprehend a great deal of what the

police are about. Ten years of post-military experience as a hard-drinking
construction worker, living frequently on the edge of the law and often
outside respectability, left me with an instinctive edginess in the presence
of the police that I still carry today into my criminal justice classrooms. If
this seems to set me too far apart from the police to write about them,
consider the following observation:

People don’t like cops. People don’t like us. I get a reaction when I see
a cop—and I’m a cop. I’ll be driving down the street in a police car. I
look up, and there’s a squad car in my rear view mirror. I think, what
does this asshole want? What’s he doing following me? (Fletcher,
1990:1)

Today, as a veteran of university affairs, I have developed particular

skills appropriate for survival in the dog-eat-dog world of academic poli-
tics. I understand bureaucracy, and am good at it, though I care for it no
more than when I was decades younger. I have also learned how bureau-
cracies—of necessity—focus on issues irrelevant to the work of the
employees for whom they exist. If 20 years ago my distrust of bureaucra-
cy was instinctual and unfocused, today it is reasonable and lucid. Read-
ers of this book will find meager the charitable offerings toward police
bureaucracies, not because I hold animosity to the police, but because I
know bureaucracy too well.
The second edition varies from the first primarily in Part I. I have
watched research and writing continue to spread on police culture, and
much of it is quite interesting. Yet little of it begins with a notion of cul-
ture that drives a conception of culture among the police. This edition
accordingly primarily differs from the first by putting forth a notion of
police culture grounded in a notion of culture generally. It is hoped that
this integrative step will spur others to think about the interdisciplinary
potential available on the theory and methods of cultural analysis from
the fields of anthropology, sociology, and political science. In view of
what appear to be increasing militaristic tendencies among the police, I
have also added a new theme, called militarism.
I have received a great deal of assistance and support from many peo-
ple. Dr. Betsy McNulty read an early draft, and gave the manuscript a
powerful kick in the you-know-what, forcing me to re-think the concept
of the book itself. The book is much improved for the sharp critique. Her
loss is a painful reminder of the brevity of life. Dr. Victor Kappeler pro-
vided a detailed review for which the book has benefitted greatly. And I
have always been able to faithfully count on Dr. Robert Langworthy to cri-
tique my work and get to the point, a skill too often lacking in the ner-
vous lairs of academe. To the many fine scholars I cite in the book (and I
hope they don’t hide their faces for it) thank you for letting me peer
through your vision.
450707 preface 9/11/03 1:25 PM Page v

Preface v

Special thanks are given to two. To Patti, mi corazón amante y com-

pañera, from whom I’ve learned that still waters run deep. To my mother,
who died while this manuscript was being written, thank you for the gift.

John P. Crank
Page Intentionally Left Blank
450707 toc 9/11/03 1:26 PM Page vii

Table of Contents

Preface iii

Introduction 1

Part I
Understanding Police Culture 9

Prologue 11

Chapter 1
Culture and Knowledge 13

Chapter 2
Issues in the Study of Police Culture 29

Chapter 3
Culture and Cultural Themes 53

Chapter 4
Articulating Police Culture and Its Environments:
Patterns of Line-Officer Interactions 63

Part II
Themes of Police Culture

Section I: Coercive Territorial Control 77

Chapter 5
The Moral Transformation of Territory 81
Theme: Dominion

Chapter 6
Force Is Righteous 97
Theme: Force

vii
450707 toc 9/11/03 1:26 PM Page viii

viii Understanding Police Culture

Chapter 7
Crime Is War, Metaphor 113
Theme: Militarization

Chapter 8
Stopping Power 127
Theme: Guns

Section II: Themes of the Unknown 141

Chapter 9
The Twilight World 143
Theme: Suspicion

Chapter 10
Danger Through the Lens of Culture 155
Theme: Danger and Its Anticipation

Chapter 11
Anything Can Happen on the Street 163
Theme: Unpredictability and Situational Uncertainty

Chapter 12
No Animal Out There Is Going to Beat Me 173
Theme: Turbulence and Edge Control

Chapter 13
Seductions of the Edge 185
Theme: Seduction

Section III: Cultural Themes of Solidarity 197

Chapter 14
Angels and Assholes: The Construction of Police Morality 201
Theme: Police Morality

Chapter 15
Common Sense and the Ironic Deconstruction of the Obvious 213
Theme: Common Sense

Chapter 16
No Place for Sissies 229
Theme: Masculinity

Chapter 17
Mask of a Thousand Faces 237
Theme: Solidarity
450707 toc 9/11/03 1:26 PM Page ix

Table of Contents ix

Chapter 18
America’s Great Guilty Crime Secret 255
Theme: Racism

Section IV: Loosely Coupling Cultural Themes 269

Chapter 19
On Becoming Invisible 273
Theme: Outsiders

Chapter 20
Individualism and the Paradox of Personal Accountability 279
Theme: Individualism

Chapter 21
The Truth Game 289
Theme: Deception

Chapter 22
Cop Deterrence and the Soft Legal System 305
Theme: Deterrence

Chapter 23
The Petty Injustice and Everlasting Grudges 311
Theme: Bullshit

Section V: Death and Police Culture 329

Chapter 24
Thinking About Ritual 331

Chapter 25
The Culture Eater 339
Theme: Death

Chapter 26
Good-bye in a Sea of Blue 353
Theme: Police Funerals

Postscript 365
References 367
Index 385
Page Intentionally Left Blank
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 1

7 Introduction

The past 30 years have witnessed an explosion of interest into the

habits and customs of American municipal police. There have been a
number of thoughtful investigations into police culture, and the quality of
this work has been consistently creative. Connoisseurs of police culture
are versed in concepts like Skolnick’s symbolic assailant, Manning’s
impossible mandate, Niederhoffer’s cynicism, Wilson’s craftsmen, Reuss-
Ianni’s two cultures of policing, and Van Maanen’s kinsman and “asshole.”
Yet this work has remained largely unintegrated. The field of police stud-
ies is generally bereft of efforts to creatively organize cultural works into
more general syntheses of the police.
The current lack of integration of police culture research is not an
altogether troubling circumstance. Scholars, students, and interested
readers must read original works, and are consequently exposed to the
full force and potency of authentic thought. Summaries tend to provide
easy overviews of literature, sterilized of troubling inconsistencies and
complex ideas that mark real-world processes. In this book, I try to retain
the intellectual vigor of original writers by casting their ideas—as much
as possible—in their original intent, with full conceptual baggage
appended, for all the mess and confusion the baggage sometimes entails.
What I seek to accomplish in this book is to bring together and to cre-
atively organize the thoughts of others that have written on police cul-
ture. Observers of the police, I believe, have been looking at a phenom-
enon that is culturally similar across police departments, despite the
geographical diversity of police agencies. The current work is motivated
by the notion that culture tends to reproduce itself in similar ways in dif-
ferent organizations, and hence that writings on police culture can be sys-
tematically organized.

1
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 2

2 Understanding Police Culture

The present effort is a work of creative integration, not of mind-numb-

ing summarization. As such, I bring my own ideas to bear on existing
research. Police work, like writing, is a craft, and excellence at either is
not science but artistry. I seek moods and perspectives, slants and twists,
different ways of thinking about what has already been thought about. I
link themes and associate ideas in order to provide a roughly systematic
way of thinking about culture that celebrates research that has gone
before. It is a Mertonian effort to build middle-range theory, creatively
organizing and presenting in a cohesive way existing literature on the
topic of police culture.

Police Work Through the Lens of Culture

In this book I try to lay out the celebratory and exciting aspects of
police work without becoming blindingly high-minded. At the same time,
the darker aspects of police work are seen in context, like shadows that
mix and blend, rather than the brooding darkness that infuses much aca-
demic fare. The product, I believe, is cultural.
Central to the ideas presented here is that the behavior of the police
only makes sense when viewed through the lens of culture. But what is
the lens of culture? My idea is one of metaphorical reduction—from the
blinder, to the eye, to the mind. Let me explain.
Sometimes culture is presented as a set of blinders, such as worn by
a horse so that it will not be distracted. The work of the police, accord-
ing to this metaphor, presents them with a jaded image of life and con-
tributes to a contempt for the public. If officers could be involved in
other aspects of work, it is thought, police culture would lose its grip on
officers. Culture, according to this notion, is a set of fixed prescriptions
for behavior that permit no variance from culturally prescribed rules.
Culture-as-blinders is also the essence of reformer logic in the age of
community policing. Consider walking patrol, a common tactic advocat-
ed by contemporary police reformers. By changing what officers see, for
example, by having officers do walking patrol and mix with citizens that
actually like them, it is hoped that officers will change their attitudes
toward citizens. However, I believe that this idea of culture change is lim-
ited. Police do not have ideological or cognitive “blinders” that force them
to look at the world from a particular point of view. This “horse and blind-
er” analogy does not capture the way in which powerful human emotions
are harnessed to cultural values, to enable behaviors and ways of thinking
as well as to constrain them. Put another way, as a cognitive process, cul-
ture is not simply limiting, but also creative and adaptive.
Nor is culture, to regress the analogy one step, the eyes that see. The
eyes are a mechanical device that organize and frame our vision, and we
manipulate them so that we can look at particular themes. Eyes don’t
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 3

Introduction 3

think, they process information. Pursuing this analogy, we think that if

police have better information or intelligence, or if they have more
sophisticated record-keeping, they can do their work better. On the
reformer side, it is thought that if police acquire more education, partic-
ularly about minority and ethnic groups, they will be more sensitive to
the plight of urban minorities.
Culture-as-eyes, however, is too mechanical an image of police work.
It fails to capture the values that mobilize police work. Cultures are more
than information processors for some rational (or irrational) mind. Cul-
tures are dense in values and beliefs, rituals, habits, full of historical pre-
scriptions and common sense that guide action. Culture processes infor-
mation, but in value-laden ways and in moral predispositions that are
self-affirming.
The regression, I believe, must be complete. Culture is the mind that
thinks, that takes in information from the world around it and acts on that
information in predispositive, though not wholly predictable, ways. Cul-
ture is how we act out our moral and social identities—it carries the val-
ues we bring to bear on what we see, our behaviors, and is present in the
categories through which we organize the world seen and imagined. It is
in the implicit assumptions we make, and it is in the hidden edges and
implicit meanings of the metaphors we use and take for granted. Culture
is carried within us, not a thing set apart and reified from social action.
Culture made plain is our common sense about things, what every fool
sees (as Geertz so cogently observed), our traditions cast as knowledge,
our metaphors taken as the thing in itself. It is a self-affirming blend of
our traditions—the world past—and the world of today that we see
around us and on which we act. We share our thoughts, therefore culture
exists. We act out shared thoughts in self-fulfilling behaviors, and culture
is confirmed.
Culture covers a lot of intellectual and emotional territory. Police
organizational structures, policies, behaviors, arrest patterns, corruption,
education, training practices, attitudes toward suspects and citizens,
forms of patrol, and all other areas of police work—the whole ball of
wax—are witnessed and practiced through the lens of culture. All areas
of police work have meaning of some kind to cops, and as every reformer
and chief who has sought to change any organization knows, these mean-
ings tend to bind together in sentiments and values impossible to analyt-
ically separate and individually change.
Carried in the minds of street cops who work together, culture
enables a wide variety of police activities to link together in ways that are,
though not systematic, sensible enough to give meanings to different
kinds of situations in which cops find themselves. Organizational tradi-
tions are customary ways of doing things, and they take on common-
sense value that cannot be changed easily or frivolously. This is why many
insiders say that efforts to change the police, whether the change con-
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 4

4 Understanding Police Culture

cerns traditional ideas of patrol, getting officers to talk about corrupt fel-
low officers, even changing the type of weapons they carry, must first
win the hearts and the minds of its officers. Until advocates of police
change recognize the importance of culture, they will continue to be as
surprised as they have been for the past 100 years at the profound limi-
tations of reform efforts to yield real and enduring changes (Crank, 1997).

General Plan of the Book

The book is organized into two parts. Part I reviews theory of police
culture and describes the conceptual underpinnings of the book. Part I has
been extensively rewritten and expanded for this book so that I can address
a central concern in the widening body of literature on police culture. Con-
cepts of police culture are rarely informed by a concept of culture. Writ-
ings on police culture tend to take the notion of culture as a given, whose
meaning is already known, and all that remains is to identify the unique
dimensions of police culture. Because of this, the concept of culture in
police studies is poorly developed and has become little more than a gloss
for reformist critiques of police practices.
Part I has three interrelated purposes. Chapter 1 lays out a definition
of culture that is consistent with literature on culture generally. It empha-
sizes central issues in culture analysis, such as the role of conflict, agency
versus structure, the diverse elements that constitute culture, and the
issue of standpoint, which is the relationship between the observer and
the observed. Chapter 2 reviews different perspectives on police culture.
Three frames are assessed: institutional perspectives, interactionist per-
spectives that locate culture more or less coterminously with local agen-
cies, and a group of contemporary views of police culture that consider
the presence of multiple cultures within individual organizations. Recent
works carried out by Chan (1996; 1997; 2001), Paoline (2001) and Pao-
line, Myers, and Worden (2000) have invigorated important debates about
culture and the police. Both argue for the presence of multiple cultures
and the works of both are considered. Chapter 3 develops the perspec-
tive used in this paper—culture is assessed in terms of themes, identifi-
able in the context of daily police work, which are areas of cultural activ-
ity that unite elements of predisposition, action, and social structure.
What, then, is daily police work? Police culture is made possible
because police officers interact with other groups in routine, observable,
identifiable ways. These groups, citizens and street people, the courts,
police administration, and the media are principal drivers of police cul-
ture. The work of the police is embedded in these groups—what I have
called elsewhere their “institutional environment” (Crank & Langworthy,
1992) and police culture is in large part a reciprocal understanding of
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 5

Introduction 5

police reactions to and influences on these groups. Whether they are

criminals, the administration, or citizens, these groups interact with line-
officers in concrete encounters, providing the cultural foundations for
the social identity of the police. Part I concludes with a discussion of the
various groups with which police officers routinely interact, and how
they contribute to the formation and sustenance of culture.
Part II of the book presents the themes that characterize police cul-
ture. It is divided into five sections. The first section is called coercive ter-
ritorial control. Simply put, this is the idea that the police view much of
their work in terms of the use of coercion to control, individually or en
masse, a particular assigned territory, metaphorically described as the
“beat” or more romantically, “the street.” Coercion, one of the themes, is
not only the simple use of physical violence, but the employment of
threats, lies, cajolery, and arrest to control or to direct the behavior of
individuals with whom they come into contact during their work. Coer-
cive territorial control is not a single theme, but a concatenation of inter-
related themes emerging in the everyday process of police work. Togeth-
er, these themes provide insight into elements of police culture thought
to be foundational by many observers of the police.
As a form of police knowledge, coercive territorial control is a con-
geries of stories, common-sense anecdotes, metaphors, and training
strategies that provide police with a practical store of common-sense
knowledge for problem-solving on the beat. It forms elements central to
what Swidler (1986) called a cultural tool kit: a set of skills that officers
use to control their territories. Ways of using command voice in routine
encounters, abrading a citizen’s personal space, a sense of authority and
righteousness regarding one’s beat, all are aspects of the tool kit that offi-
cers carry into their daily work routines.
The second section focuses on themes of the unknown. I use the word
“unknown” as a noun, even though it is more correctly used an adjective.
For cops, the unknown is a palpable, real presence: Police activity rou-
tinely puts officers in circumstances that are unpredictable and that are
sometimes beyond their control. The unknown is at the center of much
police work: routine activity involves dealing with crimes, maintaining the
public order, coordinating the flow of traffic, and other encounters where
citizen interests often lie in withholding or not admitting information.
Events unfold in unpredictable ways: trivial encounters may take on
humorous overtones, or unexpectedly escalate into uncontrollable danger.
A paradox is thus at the center of police culture: ideas of common sense
emerge around what’s not known rather than what is known.
Officers develop a wide variety of strategies, gambits, and common
lore for dealing with the unknown. The unknown becomes the basis for
shared knowledge, a way of thinking integral to police culture. Four
themes—(1) suspicion, (2) danger and its anticipation, (3) unpredictabil-
ity and situational uncertainty, and (4) interaction turbulence and edge
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 6

6 Understanding Police Culture

control, each reveal different facets of the way the unpredictable ele-
ments of their work shape cop culture.
The third section of the book looks at solidarity themes. These
themes separate the police from other groups and provide them with a
sense of occupational uniqueness. The central characteristic of these
themes is the emotional bonding and intense loyalty associated with soli-
darity. The sense of morality officers carry into police-citizen encounters,
their unusual sense of common sense, a practical, work-driven sense of
hostility toward particular ethnic groups, the excitement of their work,
and their solitary individualism—reinforced by the shift in the modern
era to one-person patrol cars—all are themes that invigorate a strong
sense of solidarity among officers.
In this section I draw from the work of Coser (1956) to describe the
way in which relations with other groups reinforce solidarity within cop
culture. In his writings on the functions of social conflict, Coser argued
that solidarity emerges from external-group conflict. Extending this idea to
the police, I contend that a great deal of police solidarity emerges from the
conflicts with other groups with whom they regularly interact. Every threat
to the cop culture or to officers individually serves to strengthen culture
and bind officers closer together. Contemporary and past reform efforts are
received as threats to officers’ authority to do their work, reinforcing rather
than diminishing the influence of police culture over line officers.
The fourth section focuses on loosely coupling themes. Loose cou-
pling is a term taken from institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan, 1977) to
describe organizations whose goals and objectives are not closely linked
to the daily activity of organizational members. Loose coupling permits
managers to deal with influential people and groups, while lower-level
personnel focus on the crime control business of the organization. Police
administrators, for example, may put into place what are, in principle,
harsh internal review mechanisms to placate community groups fearful of
police abuse of authority. Street officers, in response, develop informal
ways to nullify the effects of internal review when abuse takes place dur-
ing routine police encounters (Christopher, 1991). Loose coupling thus
allows police to do their work unhampered by external inspection.
Put another way, loose coupling themes serve to de-couple line activ-
ity from organizational goals and policies when they are perceived by offi-
cers to obstruct or undermine the ability of the police to do their work.1
Like the solidarity themes stemming from out-group conflict, loose cou-
pling themes are characterized by their strength in the face of resis-
tance—the more the organizational administration seeks to control line
behavior, or the greater the effort of a community to impose outside con-
trol over the behavior of individual officers, the more important these
themes become to organizational members. Thus, themes in both the sol-
idarity and loose coupling sections of this book strengthen and protect
culture in times of adversity—indeed, adversity is the stimulus that gives
450707 introduction 9/11/03 1:27 PM Page 7

Introduction 7

rise and sustenance to these themes. It is through these cultural devices

that reform efforts engender police cultural backlashes that ultimately
deflect or nullify sought changes.
The final section focuses on death in the police culture. Of all aspects
of police culture, none has such a profound impact, nor is as little under-
stood, as the death of a police officer. This section provides an explo-
ration of this emotionally moving topic.
I approach death and funerals not simply as cultural themes, though
they are both heavily imbued with the most powerful themes of police
culture, but in terms of powerful police rituals. The anthropological lit-
erature, particularly Clifford Geertz (1973, 1983) and Victor Turner (1969,
1974) has much to offer on thoughts about ritual activity. This body of lit-
erature allows us to reclaim a feature that has been lost in most writings
on police culture—the way in which culture channels the emotions of its
members, and what it means when an officer is killed.
Chapter 25, titled “The Culture Eater,” looks at the impact of death on
police culture. Death repudiates many of the myths that sustain culture.
Important tenets of police culture—that officers are safe when their train-
ing is finished and their focus is true, that they can develop knowledge
about the unknown, control the unpredictable, rule the dangerous coun-
try of human relations, that their common sense will protect them—are
utterly defeated when an officer is killed. The final chapter looks at how
funerals, steeped in symbolic imagery and departmental tradition, pull
together a department after an officer has been killed. Building on its
own symbols and drawing from other institutions, funerals reawaken the
significance of what it means to be a cop.
One theme is not separately discussed in the book. When I have my
academic pointy-hat on, I call it a meta-theme. This theme is that the
police have become what we the people want them to be. They enact
our desire to be protected against life’s unfairness. Their actions pro-
foundly reflect our expectations. Their morality mirrors our own, as
Black (1973) wisely noted, and their behavior, alternatively professional
and brutish, flows from our solicitations.
This meta-theme is a drumbeat, a constant presence in all of the
diverse themes laid out in this book. In some of the themes, the drumbeat
is as loud as a thunderclap. In others you will have to listen very carefully
to hear it. Yet it is always present. You should listen very closely.

John P. Crank
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Understanding Part I
Police Culture

9
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450707 ch1 9/12/03 1:42 PM Page 11

Prologue

“Its a Cop Thing.

You Wouldn’t Understand.”

The quote above, displayed in large black letters, was on the front of
a T-shirt worn by a heavily muscled off-duty police officer. I watched him
as he casually walked to the back of the convenience store, a smile on his
face. It was late June in Las Vegas, and the summer winds were already
hot. Reaching into a cooler, he grabbed a quart of Gatorade.
A thick coat of sweat covered my brow. My thoughts rumbled over
the implied question—What is a cop thing?

John P. Crank

11
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450707 ch1 9/12/03 1:42 PM Page 13

1 Culture and
Knowledge

Culture is an extraordinarily broad topic. At its heart, the study of cul-

ture is the study of what it means to be human. Culture enables a great
many of those things that mark us as quintessentially human. Our capac-
ity for moral and ethical development, the way we describe and act out
fundamental institutions of marriage, church, government, and economy,
the labeling of others as friend or foe, our ability to act in ways that dis-
play justice and fair play, our identity as citizens, all of these are expres-
sions of culture.
This book is about police culture. It breaks from public presentations
of police culture as a hostile influence in efforts to instill organizational
reform. Consider a news story from CNN (2000) that reported the fol-
lowing response to a Board of Inquiry report on corruption in the Los
Angeles Police Department:

The culture of the Los Angeles Police Department is to blame for its cor-
ruption scandal, a study commissioned by the police officer’s union
found. . . . ”The Board of Inquiry report fails to recognize that the cen-
tral problem in the Los Angeles Police Department is the culture,” said
the report’s author . . . “There will not be meaningful reform in the Los
Angeles Police Department until the culture is changed.”

The perception that a police “culture” is a source of hidden, unpleas-

ant police characteristics is not only a media construction. It is also wide-
ly present in academic literature. Police culture has been described in
terms such as a “culture of violence,”“suspicion,” machismo,” racial preju-
dice,” “distrust,” and “siege mentality” (Shanahan, 2002). As Chan (1996)

13
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14 Understanding Police Culture

has noted, culture is an umbrella term for a range of negative values and
practices among the police. Waddington (1999:293) noted the limitations
of this view of culture:

Its (the term “culture”) ‘convenience’ lies in its condemnatory potential:

the police are to blame for the injustices perpetuated in the name of the
criminal justice system.

The purpose of much of this research, Waddington (1999) reminds

us, was not to understand what police do or think, but to change them.
It is about reform. Citing Reiner (1985:85), Waddington noted that the
impulse for change “was a civil libertarian concern for the extent and
sources of police deviation from due process of law.” The literature on
police culture, Waddington concluded, ends up telling us what is wrong
with police culture from the perspective of the observer of the culture.
It does not tell us anything about culture from the perspective of its par-
ticipants. Consequently, and consequentially, we learn a great deal about
the perspective of the observer, not the observed. The interaction of the
observer and observed is a central and unsolvable dilemma in all research
on culture, and particularly haunts narratives on police culture popular in
both the popular and academic media.
Literature on police culture is rarely embedded in any sort of defini-
tion or notion of culture. Police culture emerges uniquely from the orga-
nizational setting, yet the broader notion of culture is unaddressed or
taken for granted. What is needed is a definition of culture that provides
a bridge to literature on culture generally, and from which descriptions of
police culture make sense.
Central to ideas of culture is the recognition that culture is neither
bad nor good, but rather is a central organizing principle of social life.
Human culture brings out a central feature of our humanity—our capaci-
ty to find meaning in our lives. So it is for the police as well. It is culture
that makes police like the rest of us, not different from us.
This chapter and Chapter 2 are framing chapters. I will review central
issues on culture and on police culture, providing contexts or “frames” for
thinking about these issues. Framing is not intended to provide answers,
but aims at providing a basis for conversation on culture. I review current
research both in and out of the fields of policing and criminal justice to
develop ways of thinking about each of the issues framed in this chapter.
The chapters are somewhat theoretical, and are intended to review the
notion of culture generally and to think about current research on police
culture.
I address the following frames. Chapter 1 asks, What is culture and
what constitutes cultural knowledge? Chapter 2 asks, What should be the
focus of cultural studies? Examined are institutional perspectives, inter-
actionist standpoints that focus on emergent properties of local cultures,
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Culture and Knowledge 15

and theories that argue for multiple cultures within the organization.
Chapter 3 presents thematic analysis as a way to sketch out the interplay
of many elements of police culture. This book identifies 20 themes that,
considered together, provide a sensibility to think about what it means to
participate in the culture of the police.
The second purpose, and the substance of Part II, is the elaboration
of themes of police culture. The central purpose of Part II of this book is
to show how culture is a powerful and multifaceted dynamic that infuses
police work with meaning. Through the presentation of the cultural
themes in Part II, I hope to show how police work is meaningful to its
participants. Some of the themes may appear to be negative, and others
positive. However, negative and positive views of cultural themes are eth-
ical judgments, and the reader is reminded that such judgments are reflec-
tive of their own cultural predispositions, not those of police officers.
Cultural knowledge is acquired through recognition and understanding of
differences, not through exclusionary ethics that label some cultural char-
acteristics wrong and others right.

What Is Culture?
A working definition. In this section, I will lay out a working defi-
nition of culture. This will be followed by a discussion of many aspects of
culture encompassed by this definition. This discussion is somewhat the-
oretical, and I hope the reader will bear with me while I present it. The
aspects of culture discussed here provide the theoretical frame for police
cultural themes developed in Part II of this book.
Below I present a working definition of culture, adapted from Hall
and Neitz, (1993:4-5), and Sackmann (1993) with a “behavioral element”
added and tool and social elements of culture distinguished:

Culture is collective sense-making. Sense-making has ideational, behav-

ioral, material, social structural, and emergent elements, as follows:

(1) ideas, knowledge (correct, wrong, or unverifiable belief)

and recipes for doing things, (2) behaviors, signs, and rituals,
(3) humanly fabricated tools including media, (4) social and
organizational structures, and (5) the products of social action,
including conflicts, that may emerge in concrete interpersonal
and inter- social encounters and that may be drawn upon in the
further construction of the first four elements of collective
sense-making.
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16 Understanding Police Culture

This definition is useful for several reasons.

1. It recognizes that ways of thinking about issues are an element of

police cultural study. This is the ideational component of culture,
that is, the part of culture related to thinking about problems and
organizing information to create coherence in occupational life. This
element is described by Manning (1989:360) in terms of the organi-
zation’s history, its traditions, and “what is taken for granted by its
members, things that are invisible but powerful constraints . . .”
This element of culture also includes ethical prescriptions. For
example, the practice of public order maintenance is fundamentally
different from law enforcement—it requires a normative judgment
by officers as to what constitutes local order (Wilson, 1968). This
judgment is often linked to secondary judgments about the likeli-
hood of conviction and attitude of the complainant (Black, 1980). In
making such judgments, officers are tied to local community dynam-
ics and shared notions of public order. In this example, a powerful
ideational component—notions of public order—tie officers to
communities and provide a basis for enforcement/non-enforcement
decisions.

2. It recognizes that culture has a behavioral component. This part of

culture is recognized in Manning’s (1989:360) definition of culture
as “accepted practices, rules, and principles of conduct that are sit-
uationally applied.” Van Maanen (1973), for example, discussed the
practices associated with pre-service training. A boot-camp training
environment, with emphases on group punishments for minor
infractions and stress training contributed to a perception by
recruits that they could only trust each other, not superior officers.
A training practice, in this example, resulted in a distrust of superi-
or officers that infused professional work long after training was
completed.
Behaviors are not causal or consequential to ideas, but exist in
a reciprocal and occasionally independent relationship to them. A
person acts in a certain way because it is a culturally appropriate
way to act, and a person thinks about that action in particular ways
because that way of thinking is also appropriate. Culture is in this
sense a conglomeration of thought and behavior. A handshake is a
behavior, and it carries with it a certain way of thinking; that we
express introduction and friendliness through a handshake.
Manning noted that “culture links seeing, doing, and believing.”
These elements are not necessarily linked harmoniously. Behavioral
components should be recognized and analytically distinguished,
because each might have fundamentally different implications for
the study of police culture. Waddington (1999), for example, sug-
gested that police attitudes about their work are frequently at odds
with their actual behaviors. Attitudes, carried by what he called
“canteen culture”—how police talk about their work—are often
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Culture and Knowledge 17

expressed as overtly racist sentiments, and research into police atti-

tudes concluded that police were racist. On the other hand, studies
of police occupational behavior rarely revealed racism.
Waddington concluded that canteen culture exists, in part, to
justify police beliefs about the world in the face of social and legal
constraints over their actual behavior. A further implication of
Waddington’s research is that research conducted only on attitudes
(attitudinal surveys) or of occupational behaviors (ride-alongs with
police officers that assess police-citizen encounters ) would be lim-
ited and carried enormous potential to be misleading.

3. It recognizes that culture has a material component, in which cul-

ture is expressed as tool-making and information-processing struc-
tures. According to this element of culture, sense-making emerges
in response to “brute facts” about the world. In turn, the tools may
take on a social vitality of their own, independent of their practical
tool-making properties. Guns are an example of this element of cul-
ture. Guns have a “brute fact” practicality—they may enable a per-
son to protect him or herself against another dangerous human or
to put food on the table. However, they have accumulated cultural
value and are dense with cultural meaning. In many quarters in
American political life guns are infused with values of patriotism and
protection against a threatening central government.
Print media also has this quality. The print media and the
machinery that enable it are daily fare for many people for gaining
information about the world around them. As many have observed,
the print media has a profound effect on the social dynamics it talks
about. The phrase “the medium is the message” popularized by Mar-
shall McLuhan in the 1970s is another way of saying that material
and social culture are highly interpenetrated. In the same way, cops
shows, though highly edited and polished versions of observed
police activity, provide public notions of what police work is like.
The public is exposed to the “huff and puff of the chase” even
though observers of the police have repeatedly commented that
most police work has little to do with such activity and is generally
routine.

4. It recognizes that culture has a social structural component. This

means that it is expressed in physical and organizational “things”
(see Fine & Kleinman, 1979:7). It encompasses the physical struc-
ture of a police department, the physical geography of beat bound-
aries, and organizational features of the police such as operational
strategies and goals, training practices, and patterns of occupation-
al differentiation. As Hall and Neitz (1993:11) observed, “structure”
does not always exist independently of ‘culture.’ Indeed, insofar as
culture delimits a patterned basis for a group’s structure, we may
speak of those patterns as ‘cultural structures’.” Police occupational
practices like random preventive patrol are examples of such cul-
tural structures, as are police uniforms. This element is in recogni-
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18 Understanding Police Culture

tion of Chan’s (1997) critique of existing theories of police culture

to recognize the importance of the social structural setting in which
the police carry out their work.

5. It recognizes that there is an emergent component of culture. Four

aspects of the emergent component are important here.
First, products of social action—that is, the behavior that flows
from the decisions we make about things—can give rise to new
ideational and physical components of culture. The arrest practices
of a department are a product of social action, that can have a sub-
stantial impact on the lives of those arrested. Released felons in turn
may seek revenge on police officers, broadening the way officers
perceive, train for, and tell stories about “officer safety.” This element
is consistent with Chan’s (1997) admonition that police are not pas-
sive recipients of culture but are actively involved in its creation.
Second, “emergence” recognizes that culture construction is a
creative activity. Culture is highly duplicative—there are many kinds
of blue jeans, for example—and people are constantly selecting
among existing cultural elements, recombining them in stylistic
ways (Willis, 1993). This view is consistent with a symbolic interac-
tionist view of culture which emphasizes “the importance of face-to-
face interaction in the generation and activation of cultural ele-
ments” (Fine & Kleinman, 1979:8). Muir’s (1978) discussion of
officers’ styles, for example, revealed artistic adaptation to common
police dilemmas associated with the use of force.
Third, emergence is also a product of new relations among
social groups. Civil service, a late 1880s federal program, was incor-
porated into police organizations at the beginning of the twentieth
century. It has had a pervasive influence on police personnel sys-
tems, locking in local personnel and sharply limiting the ability of
managers to develop innovative practices by hiring creative or
knowledgeable people into the middle or senior ranks (Guyot,
1986). In the 1970s the increasing interpenetration of academics,
police, and federal grants organizations led to a revolution in police
research, and has fundamentally changed the way police do their
business (Crank & Langworthy, 1993).
Fourth, the emergence of cultural elements may be a product of
conflict with other groups. Participation in the life of a particular
group—the finding of one’s identity and meaning—is often tied to
the separation or rejection of identity with other groups. Douglas
(1986:1) reminds us that “Writing about cooperation and solidarity
means writing at the same time about rejection and mistrust.” Wide-
ly recognized in political science is the formation of ethnic identity
as a consequence of cultural contacts (see, e.g., Eller, 1999). The
idea that conflict is central to the formation of cultural identity is in
sharp contrast to traditional notions of cultural isolation and soli-
darity. This definition rejects the notion that culture emerges in sta-
ble social circumstances. The historical existence of a truly isolated
and solidary community, a doubtful precept, simply is irrelevant to
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Culture and Knowledge 19

today’s highly interactive and mobile world. This element recog-

nizes that culture is an ongoing, contemporary, emergent process
and that conflict is one if its integral elements.

Culture and the Nature of Knowledge

Culture is an idea of extraordinary breadth. In its origins, culture was
conceived broadly, that there are bounded, isolated, and stable social enti-
ties called cultures, and these cultures provide the measure of a whole
way of life of a people. Redfield (1939), for example, described culture as
people who shared common understandings and who produce and con-
sume their own goods. Kluckhohn (in Geertz, 1973:4-5) provided 11 def-
initions for culture, including “the total way of life of a people,”“a way of
thinking, feeling, and believing,” and “a set of techniques for adjusting
both to the external environment and to other men.” Culture occupied
such a large intellectual space in the early days of anthropology that it has
been described as the “root metaphor” of the field (Geertz, 1973).
The study of culture emerged in ethnographies of “primitive”or non-
Western societies (Hall & Neitz, 1993). Early conceptions of culture, car-
ried out by ethnographic observers of indigenous peoples in far-away
places such as Africa, developed a conception of culture as a bounded way
of ethnic or tribal life. Cultural theory in turn contrasted such “folk” or “tra-
ditional” cultures with modern or Western societies (Levi-Strauss, 1966).
Many of the founding ideas of culture have been reconsidered. The
notion that human cultures should be thought of as isolated and
autonomous social entities has been largely abandoned in the current age.
Appadurai (1988) suggested that the idea of culture may have been a
product of the way colonialists encountered African villages. Culture
emerged as synonymous for the local villages they encountered—villages
were taken for cultures—and the notion that local villagers were unique-
ly characterized by tradition or local autonomy only extended to their
lack of previous contact with Europeans.
Wolfe (1982) noted that many non-European cultures studied by
anthropologists were not isolated, but were involved in complex interre-
lations with other (non-European) groups. Cultural identity, he suggested,
might emerge from the efforts of groups to construct identity that set
them apart from other groups with whom they interacted. Identity, in a
word, emerged around differences, not similarities. Similar process of
ethnic identity formation have been noted by Eller (1999) in his research
on international ethnic conflict, suggesting that the formation of cultural
identity in response to contact with other groups is a contemporary
process quite active in the world today.
Early observers of culture were concerned with “going native,”
becoming so involved in local cultures that the observer or ethnographer
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20 Understanding Police Culture

began to take on the trappings of local identity and lost their independent
viewpoint. However, the independence of the “Western” viewpoint has
itself been sharply challenged in recent years. These challenges have two
elements. On the one hand, many observers contend that there are par-
ticular aspects of the Western worldview that carry predisposing biases—
for example, that British patterns of colonialization in Africa placed
boundaries over autonomous and local groupings of people. On the other
hand is the notion that there is no such thing as an independent view-
point. The notion that somehow we can stand outside culture and study
it from a noncultural standpoint is today considered by many to be a par-
ticular kind of viewpoint associated with “enlightenment” ideas of objec-
tive social science.

Cultural Observation: A Thought Experiment

I am going to carry out a thought experiment to illuminate three
issues central to cultural studies: cultural autonomy, observer objectivity,
and the location of culture. Imagine that a young ethnographer is walk-
ing through a deep forest in some unknown country and suddenly she
comes upon a village. She finds that people are dressed in unusual ways,
and some have odd make-up on their faces. Sometimes they dance. They
talk. They behave in ways that seem to be communicatory, but she has no
idea what is being communicated. They act as if they have never seen a
person like her before. Her interest is piqued. She wants to know about
them, what they are saying and thinking, why they do and act as they do.
Why, she could write a dissertation about this group! Our young ethnog-
rapher might think that, because they seem to find her pale skin strange,
they are an isolated or autonomous group. Relatedly, she might suspect
that their identity as members of the village—their “cultural” identity, is
what is called local or traditional, produced by their lack of contact with
civilization. She moves in and lives with the villagers for one year. Over
time, she records their patterns of collective sense-making. She witness-
es interactions with other groups. She observes their use of material cul-
ture, their social hierarchies, the significance of some of their facial mark-
ings and their rituals. She develops rudimentary language skills. At the
end of the year she writes a narrative of the encounter.
Cultural autonomy. First consider the issue of cultural autonomy.
This is the idea that a group is a stable and independent social entity, as
she learned about them, she noted inter-village behavior. It might have
involved trade, religion, warfare, family contacts, or even slavery. The
inter-village behavior might be seen as shaped by the different cultures of
the villages. That is, the intergroup behavior is, to a degree, an outcome of
the cultures of the different groups. However, today, ethnographers are
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Culture and Knowledge 21

considering how intergroup behavior can serve as a cause of cultural iden-

tity. Villager identity might not have emerged because of their separation
from “civilization,” but have resulted from being embedded in civilization.
Importantly, it might be that some aspects of culture, what Eller
(1999) called “ethnic identity,” helped them protect their group identity.
Seen this way, local or so-called “traditional” culture may not be a precur-
sor of modern mass society—it may be a consequence of it. This is impor-
tant for the consideration of culture in the United States today. Perhaps
we should think about group cultures, not in terms of their emergence
from some traditional ethnic “cultures,” but in terms of their interactions
and conflicts with other groups in mass society. Local culture, in this
sense, is produced by modern society.
By the same notion, we can see that her interest is forged in the cru-
cible of difference. She is interested in precisely those things about them
that violate her sense of cultural propriety. It might be structures, such as
the way they construct their dwellings, or it might be their manner of
face painting. Her professional identity is framed in terms of her differ-
ence from them. Indeed, her villagers may be wearing face paint and act-
ing in an odd way precisely because she is there. It might be their way of
dressing up to respectfully greet an uninvited guest.
Objectivity and observer dependency. This leads to the second
issue, framed by a question: Can an observer be objective? Our anthro-
pologist concluded her year by writing a narrative that described the vil-
lagers, their patterns of interaction, family life, structures, customs, sym-
bols, rituals, and other notions associated with their cultural identity. Her
narrative—and a central concern in all efforts to witness and describe cul-
ture generally—is that it occurred within her way of ordering the uni-
verse. This is quite important, because a reader can never be sure
whether she is reading the actual account of a group as it understands
itself, or an account of the ethnographer interacting with the group. That
is, the content of the narrative is “observer dependent.”
To explore the notion of observer dependence, we need to begin
with another idea—institutional facts. Institutional facts are statements
about human relationships: As Searle (1998) noted, “Humans . . . talk
together, own property, get married, form governments, and so on.” Insti-
tutional facts are always observer dependent. This means that, without
someone to consider them, they would simply cease to exist. They are
not like rocks, that would go on and on until their molecular structure
decays at the end of time no matter who watched them. If humans ceased
to exist tomorrow, institutional facts such as property, marriage, or justice
would also vanish.
Institutional facts, Searle (1998) noted, can be recognized because
they are always in a functional form, such that “this behavior (two people
in a church in front of minister) functions for that purpose (marriage), or
this colored material (flag) functions as (country).” Stated differently, the
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22 Understanding Police Culture

functions assigned to behaviors create institutional facts. These functions

can be variously called meanings, values, or messages, and they are how
we assign social identity to institutional facts.
An example will help clarify the idea of institutional facts. In policing,
we might say that this behavior (driving around in marked police vehi-
cles) serves the function (random preventive patrol). Hence, we have an
institutional fact called random preventive patrol. In turn, we can say that
this institutional fact (random preventive patrol) serves the function (deter-
rence). Hence, the behavior of driving around police vehicles described
above has an extended meaning. First, it means random preventive patrol,
and second, it means deterring potential criminals. In this way, institu-
tional facts can be used to create another institutional fact. This is the “iter-
ative function” of institutional facts, and enables humans to build quite
complex normative and ethical systems from quite simple building blocks.
It is the observer-dependent element of institutional facts that makes
them tricky to deal with for observers of human culture. The functions—
that is, the meanings we assign to behaviors—are located wholly in the
view of the observer. So when I see behavior occurring, the meanings I
give the behavior are wholly dependent on my point of view, or my
standpoint in the popular vernacular.
Searle reminds us that the most fundamental institutional fact is lan-
guage.1 Searle suggests that language constitutes the world of institution-
al facts. When we witness anything associated with an institutional fact,
we are not simply using language to describe. We use language to create
meanings for what they see. Language does not “represent” the outside
world. In the area of institutional facts, it creates the outside world.
For example, I cannot think about a flag if I have no word for flag. It
would have no meaning. And if I saw someone burning a flag, my atten-
tion would likely be drawn to the brute fact of fire. If the fire were close
I would probably run from it. That it was a flag that was burning would
have no meaning to me without a vocabulary to make it meaningful.
However, once I have a vocabulary that contains the word “flag” I can
assign a function to it such as “patriotic.” Additionally, I can call flag-burn-
ing “unpatriotic” or an “exercise in free speech.” In this example, language
creates the possibility for my way of thinking about the flag. I have locat-
ed it in the realm of institutional fact, it has meaning, and it can mobilize
my sentiments. Language does not mediate between me and the institu-
tional fact, it creates the institutional fact I observe. This means that,
when our ethnographer is observing the culture in which she is interest-
ed, she is not simply “recording” activity. Her cultural predispositions are
creating the meanings that she observes. The “culture” exists because she
is witnessing it.
Let me explain this in another way that is sometimes uncomfortable
for readers. When I view the flag-burning as an “exercise in free speech,”
I have assigned value or function to the flag-burning. And that value exists
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Culture and Knowledge 23

because I have a language that can provide it. Language precedes and
constitutes value. That is, value is relative to language.
Many people do not like to think of their values as relative. They like
to think of their set of values as something more important than the
words they use, perhaps even timeless. Many people locate their values
in moral tradition or religious scripture. When I state values are relative,
that does not mean that they are relative to infinity. They are relative to
the cultural history of the human population, which is broad but certain-
ly not infinite. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) note that our conceptual sys-
tems tend to be widespread across languages and cultures. Humans share
similar neural systems, derived from neural adaptive processes attuned to
and, to a large extent, embodied by the social and physical environments
in which we find ourselves (though highly malleable to historical contin-
gency). This limits the capacity for pure, uncontrolled relativity in human
adaptive processes. Wilson (1993) has similarly noted that some moral
and ethical traditions seem to have a remarkable tendency to repeat them-
selves cross-culturally. Nevertheless, our values are located within a cul-
tural framework—they are a standpoint—and they find their meaning
from cultural prescriptions, not timeless truths.
The upshot of this is that when our young ethnographer begins her
investigation of the village, the way in which she finds meanings in their
behaviors is wholly constituted by her language. Her social cosmology—
the whole ball of fluid social wax—is pre-structured by her language. The
meanings or functions she witnesses—the institutional facts—are mean-
ings created by her culture. It is important to understand this—there is
not something more fundamental than the language and its way of assign-
ing function, meaning, and value. She cannot wholly comprehend their
cultural standpoint until, within her mind, their language organizes her
thoughts before her native language does. This is the central point of
observer-dependency. There is no exterior, value-neutral, or independent
point of view that we can take to comprehend the meanings of another
culture. It does not work that way. Some underlying neural-adaptive sim-
ilarities enable the capacity for learning, but cultural knowledge is not
immediately unavailable or pregiven.
When she finishes with her ethnography, she writes a narrative
account of her experience. The narrative authenticates the culture. This
means that there is no culture without a written description of their activ-
ity as a culture. Culture is itself a word for the amalgam of behaviors, a
product of Western social science. Culture is, in a word, an institutional
fact. Characteristics of the culture exist because she has written them
down. We see in this that, regarding institutional facts, the social identity
of the observer and the observed are completely entangled.
A narrative is simply a story of “events germane to the inquiry” (Hall,
1999). The narrative account is a document that provides running dia-
logue of what she saw, the principal features of the social and physical
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24 Understanding Police Culture

environments, the people in it, what it all meant from their point of view,
and perhaps broader implications of the findings. Put simply, a narrative
is a written story of the ethnography. But the narrative will not fully cap-
ture the “difference” between the ethnographer’s world and the world
studied. It is an entity in itself, a standpoint whose meanings engage the
reader with the ethnographer’s meanings about the world.2
The location of culture. Our ethnographer has developed an image
of the culture that she is observing. She writes it up, and presents it as a
prospectus for a doctoral dissertation. She meets with her committee to
defend the proposal. One of the professors, a stale old bone, asks her “So
you saw interaction between your group and other groups. Well, where
did it all come from? How did they know how to act? Did the culture
spring up from the group itself, or from other groups? Can you point to
something and say, This is the source of culture?”
It is a good question. She realizes it is a trapping question. She mulls
over it for a minute. Then, pulling out her wallet, takes out her driver’s
license, puts her finger on her photograph, and says “Here’s culture.”
She was pointing to herself. The culture was in her. That is source
enough. The lesson was that culture is in our heads. There is no culture
separate from the humans who carry it. It is not something different, not
some great thing that exists outside us. When we are dealing with culture
we are dealing with humans. So it must be in our heads. There is no other
place to find it.
Recognizing that culture is in our heads helps put into focus the
abstract argument that humans are not “cultural dopes.” Culture is not
something imposed, it is something that we carry with us and that helps
us interpret our social setting, including its social structural and material
elements. We interpret and act. To talk of culture is to always talk about
humans acting and finding meaning in their actions, interpretations, and
creations.
Chan (1977) recognizes the centrality of human action in the pro-
duction of culture in her (1977) description of police practice. Figure 1.1
is reproduced from her discussion of culture.

Structural Conditions

Police Actors

Cultural Police
Knowledge Practice

Figure 1.1
An interactive model of the production of police practice. From Chan (1997:74) Polic-
ing in a Multicultural Society.
450707 ch1 9/12/03 1:42 PM Page 25

Culture and Knowledge 25

The model above locates police actors as “active participants in the

construction and reproduction of cultural knowledge and institutional
practice” (Chan, 1997:73). In it, Chan rejects the notion that broad struc-
tural conditions lead to cultural knowledge that humans learn and act
upon. Instead, structural conditions, cultural knowledge, and practice are
all mediated through individuals. The central feature of this model is that
individuals are in the center and culture exists through their expression
of it. That they are aware of their conscious role in the creation of their
social environment is noted by Barker:

Police officers are consciously aware of their role as active participants

in the creation and interpretation of this social world. They are aware of
the perceived necessity for adherence to their construction of reality in
order to perform their job. They believe that the ordering of reality is
essential for social survival and also for literal survival. Adherence to the
police version of the world confers actual, literal, survival in the perfor-
mance of a job that has extraordinary risks and deals with high levels of
uncertainty and danger (Barker, 1999:21).

Culture and police culture. This thought-experiment and discus-

sion has several implications for the study of police culture.

Culture and observer-dependency. There is no such thing as police

culture in the objective “out there” (see DiCristina, 1995). It does not
exist independently of the observer. When academicians write about
police culture, their values and predispositions are completely inter-
twined with the standpoints of the membership of whatever police
group they are studying. In writing about police culture, academicians
authenticate it. The values of the observer are not separable from the
object of the research, and are fully in place from the moment the
researcher uses the word “culture” to describe a group of police officers.
In a real sense, the researcher is always investigating her interaction with
the people being studied. It is not and never can be objective.

Language. Language is critical to understanding the life of any group.

By the study of language we “engage the text,” that is, we learn about
what is different and what is similar about the people studied. Conse-
quently, students of police culture should recognize the preeminent role
played by language. Van Maanen (1978) recognized the centrality of lan-
guage in his article called “The Asshole,” in which he explored the mean-
ings the word “asshole” carried for police officers.

Culture, intergroup interactions, and conflict. To speak of police

culture is not to suggest that the police sub-populations of interest are
somehow autonomous, by which I mean that members’ identities are
determined only by their “traditional” group affiliation or that they are
independent of the influence of other groups. Cultural identity may be
stimulated by the interaction with other groups. Cultures are not
450707 ch1 9/12/03 1:42 PM Page 26

26 Understanding Police Culture

“homogenous, static, and closed” to borrow a phrase from Fine and

Kleinman (1979).3 Recognizing this, patterns of interaction and are inte-
gral to the formation of police culture.
Cultural identity is closely tied to conflict. This notion carries a
rejection of the idea of static and closed societies. When we deal with
culture, we are dealing with notions of solidarity and identity. Central to
this book is the thesis, developed by Coser (1968), that conflict is cen-
tral to the formation of group identity, group boundaries, and group sol-
idarity. Consequently, the specification of culture requires that we rec-
ognize groups with which the group of interest is in conflict.
Conflicts range from resentment to violence. Among the police, we
see such conflicts with regard to the courts, with management, and with
criminals and troublemakers. Each of these groups has particular impli-
cations for police culture. The conflicts between the police and these
groups are the basis for the formation of a great deal of cultural identity.

Culture is in our heads. This element reminds us that the study of cul-
ture is always the study of people. When we talk about understanding
organizational culture, we are talking about, in some fashion, under-
standing the people in it.
The recognition that culture is in our heads bears on the debate on
the socialization/predisposition argument concerning sources of police
“personality.” Socialization proponents argue that police are heavily
influenced by police departments in their first few years of service. In
his classic article on police socialization, Van Maanen (1973) argues that
the early socialization process is characterized by four periods: pre-
entry, admittance, encounter, and metamorphosis. These periods col-
lectively last about four years. They represent that period during which
a recruit is most vulnerable to organizational influences.
Predisposition proponents argue that a recruit’s views are largely in
place by the time they are hired. Crank and Caldero (1999) contend that
a recruits views are largely in place upon hiring. Subsequent changes in
their outlook are minor and largely unaffected by organizational experi-
ences. Because departments screen recruits for particular moral types,
efforts to change organizations by hiring more minorities and women
does not result in significant change in the organizational culture.
The idea that culture is in our heads means that, when someone is
hired, they bring with them a complete complement of cultural behav-
iors, values, and predispositions. The organization may have a socializa-
tion effect, but its effect will be, like our ethnographer interpreting the
village culture she witnessed and participated in, interpreted through
recruits’ already fully-in-place worldview.
Culture reproduces itself. Managers in the police organization tend
to hire people like themselves, who see the world like they do. The
organization consequently has little effect: its members, through the
organizational experiences, reproduce their already existing cultural
worldview. For socialization to have a large experience, it would have to
be contrary to the way recruits previously looked at the world. Yet the
screening process is designed to assure the opposite effect—that
recruits are fit for police work.
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Culture and Knowledge 27

Understanding: Engaging the text on its own terms. Understanding

emerges from the ability to understand the culture in its own terms. The
ability of our ethnographer to engage and learn from the villagers, to
“share a conversation with them” as it is sometimes put, is tied to her
experience and knowledge. In Gadamer’s terminology, our ethnographer
sought to “engage the text on its own terms.” In this case the culture is the
text. This way of thinking recognizes that police cultures are products of
time and place, and understanding them requires an effort to understand
the interior and externalized meanings carried by the police themselves.
It also requires the reader to put herself in the place of the writer—that is,
to try to capture the meanings as the writer experienced them.
In our thought experiment, as our ethnographer spent more time in
the village, she learned more about the people, she expanded her sense
of cultural understanding, that is, her knowledge of the human stock of
institutional facts. She became both more worldly and more wise in the
ways of humans.4 She may have developed insights to help her better
understand her own people. Her sense of language may have expanded,
either by the addition of their language, or by her ability to broaden the
use of her language to understand the people she studied.
This suggests that researchers interested in the culture of the police
should engage the police on their own terms. This is accomplished
through participation and the study of elements of their written, spo-
ken, symbolic, social, and physical culture. The study of the police, like
the study of any group a researcher wants to label a “culture,” will be per-
sonally broadening to the extent that the researcher views her task as
“engaging the text in its own terms.”
The capacity to learn from studies of police culture are tied to our
ability to engage them on their own terms. As did our young ethnogra-
pher, we will never be “objectively” studying the police culture, as it
were, but subjectively studying our interactions with the police. Kraska
(1996) incorporated this insight into his narrative inquiry into police
militarization practices among a small number of off-duty officers. When
we study police culture, to a surprising degree we are studying our-
selves.

Endnotes
1
“I believe that language is the fundamental institution in the sense that other institutions
such as money, government, private property, marriage, and games, require language, or
at least language-like forms of symbolism, in a way that language does not require the
other institutions for its existence” (Searle, 1998:153).
2
A text has its life in language as well, and so engages the reader in an interpretive
process. The task of interpretation is to find “the right language to understand the text”
(Johnson, 2000).
450707 ch1 9/12/03 1:43 PM Page 28

28 Understanding Police Culture

3
Cited in Hall and Neitz, 1993:231. Fine and Kleinman were describing the concept of
subculture; however the idea is apt for understanding culture as well.
4
This does not mean that she became either more trustful and kind, or distrustful, or cyn-
ical. The development of cultural knowledge here is not meant to be interpreted as a
“hand-holding” experience, but a harsh, sometimes gut-wrenching cultural shock that
tends to accompany sharp expansions of practical knowledge. In terms of being human,
it simply means that she became “more.”
450707 ch2 9/11/03 1:29 PM Page 29

2 Issues in the Study

of Police Culture

How do we frame a “police culture?” By frame, I mean identify the

source of the values, social structures, and other elements that make up
some organizational “culture.” There are three frames commonly used in
literature on police culture. The first frame is interactionist, and locates
culture and cultural emergence in the face to face interactions of officers
in local settings. The idea that the police are a “local culture” suggests that
the outlooks and predispositions of police officers emerge from their work
setting and occupational environment. The second frame looks at police
organizations in terms of subcultures, that is, whose values and cultural
predispositions are imported from outside, and uses an institutional per-
spective to identify common subcultural elements. According to the insti-
tutional perspective I look at broad institutional or national patterns and
their effects on local structures and the values carried by local actors. The
third frame draws from a variety of contemporary writings to argue that
multiple cultures co-exist in police organizations. This literature defies
easy categorization and individual authors will be considered.

Limitations On a Common Distinction

Between “Culture” and “Subculture”
The terms “culture” and “subculture” are commonly used inter-
changeably to describe particular police subgroups and the way they do
and think about their work. However, the choice of terms we make car-
ries important implication for how we think about police work and the

29
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30 Understanding Police Culture

values and ethics police have. Most generally, culture can be described as
“the occupational beliefs and values that are shared by officers across the
country” (Roberg, Crank & Kuykendall, 2000:265). Subculture, on the
other hand, is the “values imported from the broader society in which
officers live” (Roberg, Crank & Kuykendall, 2000:265).
This distinction between culture and subculture above is practical for
reform-minded professionals, because it permits us to both view how val-
ues are adopted from broader society (police as a subculture) and how
police recruits are socialized into a prevailing way of thinking about
police work (hence culture). If problems are cultural, they can be
addressed by changing the organization or its formal and informal social-
ization processes. If problems are subcultural, they can be addressed by
changing recruitment practices.
This way of distinguishing between of culture and subculture, how-
ever, is limited. First, it does not recognize complexity in the relationship
between culture and subculture. Municipal police departments across
the United States, for example, are characterized by similar patterns of
rank-structure, occupational differentiation, and patrol practices (Crank
& Langworthy, 1991), suggesting that all subgroups in these organizations
can be described by a similar material culture. Similarly, research on the
police as a culture, particularly research focusing on cultural themes or
attitudes often fail to notice subtle patterns of subcultural differentiation
(see Fine & Kleinman, 1979:7). Christensen and Crank (2001), for exam-
ple, noted that police tended to display a general pattern of themes simi-
lar to those proposed in this book. However, on close inspection, subtle
differences were noted. They concluded that:

An outsider visiting police organizations in two jurisdictions may

encounter the same theme concepts . . . However, our research also sug-
gests that the conclusion of equivalence is too facile and overlooks
nuanced but important differences in the way officers think about their
work (Christensen & Crank, 2001:94).

In other words, the presence of similar police “themes” may hide

important differences in local meanings appending to those themes.
Second, when we examine only ideational components—values,
beliefs, and ethics—associated with municipal police organizations, we
might observe that some elements seem to be present in all departments,
suggesting the presence of a general “culture” of policing, while others
appear to be local, suggesting subcultural variation. For example, it has
been suggested that a conservative, order-oriented attitude is widely
shared among police officers. However, attitudes toward minority hiring
practices may vary substantially among different groups within a police
department. In other words, depending on which elements we look at,
ideational elements can be both cultural and subcultural at the same time.
450707 ch2 9/11/03 1:29 PM Page 31

Issues in the Study of Police Culture 31

Third, all of this is complicated by the predispositions of the observers.

One observer might look at a pattern of similarity or divergence in some
practice, value, or organizational element, and conclude that they are
quite similar, while another might conclude that they, in fact, reveal star-
tling differences! Recall that there is no objective way to study culture
and that researchers are, to a degree, always studying themselves in inter-
action with the “culture” studied. For example, one observer might look
at police shift work and conclude that police are amazingly similar every-
where—they tend to have three shifts; these shifts are aligned around late
morning to early afternoon, early afternoon to evening, and evening
through to morning again. Variations on this theme are typically minor
and adaptive to local dynamics. Another observer might look at the same
shifts and note incredible diversity: Shifts are not all on the same hour,
some places do a split shift, some do an overlapping shift, a few depart-
ments run on 12-hour shifts. Indeed, the second observer states, each
shift tells us something different about each department and how it has
adapted to its public constituencies. In other words, the presence of com-
mon cultural elements is in the eye of the beholder as much as it is a prod-
uct of the organization itself.
Fourth, to identify a subculture begs the question: What is the larger
culture of which the police are a subculture? Should we define culture
geographically, using nation-states or political units as boundaries? Some
themes seem to have international scope (Waddington, 1999). Perhaps
language is the key to common cultural identity: language was presented
as the key to common understanding. This suggests that culture, in the
broadest sense, is made up of people who share a common language. Can
we then say that the languages that share Latin as a root share some cul-
tural elements? Can the French and Spanish be thought of as subcultures
of their Latin progenitors?
At this point, the reader might want to throw up her hands and ask,
Is culture simply a mass gadgetry of colorful wheels, gewgaws, cams,
rolling pins and levers, bells, quacks, buzzers and whistles, all running in
different directions at the same time, all powered by some unknown
source, all producing a great deal of motion and excitement, but resulting
in very little clarity?
The image of culture carried by this author is that culture exists in
varying degrees at all levels (it IS a gewgaw of rumbling and squeaking
parts!) and flows in all directions—from individual to society and back
again. We are embedded in culture—as Geertz (1973:5) put it in an oft-
cited quote, “Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspend-
ed in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those
webs . . .” We think about national issues. We share mass thoughts about
the morning’s coffee while we call up the New York Times on the Inter-
net. We wonder who is going to be at war and what the editorials will say.
We set about cleaning the house before guests arrive—tonight is bridge
450707 ch2 9/11/03 1:29 PM Page 32

32 Understanding Police Culture

night. All of these things reveal our embeddedness in social construc-

tions, from housework behavior to polity concerns over the adroitness or
stupidity of congressional leaders. They operate within each of the cul-
tural frames—they respond to institutional concerns, they actively create
an ongoing cultural life together, and they interact on various levels with
different friends who may embed them in different cultural milieus.
Their lives are embedded in each of the cultural frames simultane-
ously. Yet the frames are not separate from them—culture is carried in
people, and their creativity, aesthetic interests, or misunderstandings can
create new cultural knowledge. Their participation in the different
frames reveals the complexity of cultural life in mass society. Each of
these frames is discussed below.

The Police as Local Culture

According to the interactionist perspective, culture emerges locally in
concrete social interactions and radiates out to other groups in patterns
determined by the social interactions of the groups members with other
groups. We do not simply and blindly take culture as it is handed down
to us. Interactionists focus on emergent properties of culture.
Humans are constantly engaged in a process of interacting with other
people, and the meanings these interactions hold for us emerge in a prac-
tical, common-sense way from these interactions. According to this idea,
we create meaning daily as an ongoing process of acting and reacting to
other people and events in simple everyday life. Meaning emerges in the
form of common sense, or what works as individuals together seek to
solve routine problems (Geertz, 1973). These meanings tend to provide
a sensibility out of which future action is conditioned.
Observers of culture have developed a diverse and colorful terminol-
ogy to describe the interactive process: as shared typifications (Berger &
Luckmann, 1966), as common-sense knowledge (Geertz, 1973), as figu-
rative action (Shearing & Ericson, 1991), as documentary interpretation
(Garfinkle, 1967), as a tool-kit (Swidler, 1986), and as a humanistic coef-
ficient (Znaniecki, 1936). These descriptions share a common theme.
Culture is a body of knowledge that emerges through the shared applica-
tion of practical skills to concrete problems encountered in daily routines
and the normal course of activities. This body of knowledge contains
both information, values, and behaviors that tend to interact in ways that
are self-confirming, reproducing culture through confirmation.
Knowledge about how to act and how to think about work derives
directly from real-world experiences shared by its members. Viewed
through the lens of culture, the content of day-to-day activity becomes
meaningful, collects value, and is understood in a vocabulary of common
450707 ch2 9/11/03 1:29 PM Page 33

Issues in the Study of Police Culture 33

sense (Shearing & Ericson, 1991; Geertz, 1973). The constructed world
is an everyday one, and cultural vocabularies that describe it are prag-
matic (Willis, 1990).
Problem-solving is not a solitary exercise, but occurs in the sharing of
problems concretely experienced (Berger & Luckmann, 1966). Many
problems are similar, and come to be recognized, discussed, and shared
as a common type of problem; to use the language of phenomenology,
they are a typification. These pragmatic typifications or areas of similarly
perceived experience are the building blocks of culture. When added
together they become a store of “common knowledge” about how things
work (Wuthnow et al., 1984:47).
Skolnick, for example, discusses the “symbolic assailant,” a person
whose clothes and mannerisms suggest that the person will cause trouble
and is a likely candidate for a stop and frisk. Training officers teach
recruits what to look for in terms of potential danger, and officers tell
each other stories about things they have seen that mark individuals as
dangerous—a type of tattoo, piece of clothing marking a gang member,
or the like. Thus, typifications indicating the potential for trouble and
danger arise from the concrete doing of police work, are shared by cops
(and hence the phrase “shared typification”) and become a part of the
lore of a local police culture.
In time such typifications are regarded as common knowledge that
carries common-sense value. Put sensibly, common knowledge is part of
a cultural tool-kit for carrying out everyday activities (Swidler, 1986:275).
This tool-kit is described by, she observes, “action and values” . . . “orga-
nized to take advantage of cultural competences.” Common knowledge,
with its roots in shared everyday experience, is a way of thinking about
the world, of organizing information into typifications that enable an
actor to do their work with the competency to know how events will
unfold. In the case of police culture, culturally shared meanings represent
how cops think about their working environment, and with the passage
of time they indicate how cops think about their lives.
Consider the following example of problem-solving and the way it
reproduces culture. A house in a small rural community is widely
believed to be a source of drugs, and many residents are upset. They meet
with the recently assigned local county sheriff’s deputy, and together they
develop an informal organization to consider how to deal with the prob-
lem. One day a person who is carrying a package approaches the house
that, to a citizen watching the house, looks as if it might contain drugs.
Two citizens confront him, and the deputy quickly arrives. A fight breaks
out among the citizens, the deputy, and the residents of the house. The
residents are ultimately arrested. The incident becomes part of the local
lore of the sheriff’s department and the community as well. The fight
eventually attains the status of institutional fact: a “function” or a “value”
is given the fight, it is “doing something about bad guys.”
450707 ch2 9/11/03 1:29 PM Page 34

34 Understanding Police Culture

Are there other cultural interpretations of the same incident? There

are many. For example, a citizen might wonder why the deputy and some
of her friends are physically assaulting a person at their home. Or they
might think that drugs are personal behavior and question the right of the
government to intervene in citizens’ lives on such a moral basis. Or they
might think that, if the drugs are dangerous, only family members of the
person to whom they are a danger have the right to intervene. Or they
might think that only local residents have the right to intervene, that it is
none of the government’s business. A family member of the person that
the deputy fought with might believe that there is no higher purpose than
to protect members of the family, and that her responsibility is to kill the
attacking police officer. An ethnographer might think that the entire
spectacle is ritual behavior whose purpose is the confirmation of power
of community leaders and the degradation of peripheral group members.
With changing times, the police begin to adopt elements of commu-
nity policing. The fight receives a new institutional fact designation: it is
seen as an example of (a function of) community policing in action, some-
times called “aggressive order maintenance.” And rural police propagate
the idea that they have always been doing community policing. What we
have in this example is an institutional fact emerging within a setting
already dense with institutional facts (such as deputy, merchandise, rob-
bery, house, and the like), then being redesignated with changing cir-
cumstances in the occupational setting.
An element of the incident was that it was somewhat unpredictable.
The deputy might have been killed. Or the deputy might not have decid-
ed to fight, but instead to bring in more sheriff’s deputies. Stated differ-
ently, the deputy and the community members, informed by a variety of
institutional facts, made decisions about how to act. The circumstances
and outcome of the incident in turn became added to local cultural lore.
Unpredictability, in its many forms, are a central ingredient in police cul-
ture (Manning, 1997).
This incident also has implications for studies of local police cultures.
Because a particular culture is always undergoing change, any study of it
will of necessity be incomplete. It can never be wholly understood,
because there is not this “finished” or complete entity to understand. Cul-
tural understanding, for both its participants and its observers, is a con-
tinual process of interpretation, never complete, always changing and
adapting to new historical circumstances.
The incident reaffirms and reproduces culture. Drugs are still bad,
bad guys deal with drugs and police justifiably treat them roughly. All this
must be done to protect the community. In this way, the cultural disposi-
tions and behaviors that justified the original encounter lead to further
acts that confirm the views. Culture is reproduced in a concrete setting.
Central tenets of culture are established—in this real-world example, cul-
ture is a self-fulfilling circle.
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