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E-book Holding down the Fort : Policing Communities and Community-Oriented Policing in Rural Germany

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Penilaian

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Policing is one of those defining concepts of modernity about which much haswritten—to the point where it is difficult to imagine that there is much left to besaid—that is, at the same time, decisively modern. The modern conceptualizationof police referring to a fixed and commonly identifiable role, occupation andorganization, rather than simply a practice performed by the state through itsvarious arms and agents, is not yet 200 years old. Egon Bittner wrote that, “themost remarkable fact about the timing of the foundation of the modern policeis that it is sequentially the last of the basic building blocks in the structureof modern executive government.” (1970: 15) The taken-for-granted structuresof modern society and democratic governments not only count among them thevarious structures and practices of policing but to a large degree are held togetherand reinforced through them. Far from the simple practice of formal social controlof public security, the police have become engraved as a symbol of society—forbetterorworse.The police today, and in most places, are just as much a “Rorschach in uni-form” (Niederhoffer 1967: 1) as they were in the US in the 1960 s. Publicattitudes and opinions often seem to be divided between hostility to the continuedexistence of police and universal support for every action of every officer. Thegrowing field of police studies often seems to be similarly divided into positivis-tic and technocratic attempts to improve the efficiency of the “war on crime” andthose who look at the past seventy years of police reforms, theoretical and tech-nological developments, failures, and varying relationship to their communitiesand the very concept of ‘democratic government’ and seem ready to throw theirhands up and declare the entire project a failure. Part of the reason for this is thatthe taken-for-granted nature of the concept of policing is rarely challenged: evento criticize the police in a specific case or mediatized scandal could interpreted asa call for improving training, hiring practices, internal disciplinary practices, or upervision, as a direct and personal criticism of police administration or polit-ical leadership, as a critique of specific practices or the use of specialized unitswhich display less concern for civil or human rights or the concerns of the cit-izenry, as an attack on the very nature and structure of the police as a stateinstitution, or as a more symbolic, expressive, exasperated rhetorical utterance.Despite myriad conflicts and disparities between them, the various dimensions ofthe policing concept are often treated singularly: the individual uniformed offi-cer, often even out of uniform, is treated as a part of the whole organization,indistinguishable from that organization, and at the same time as a representativeof the entire broader cultural idea andinstitutionof policing. The work done bypolice is likewise considered ‘police work’ whether discussing the work they aretheoretically considered to be doing within the strict confines of the bureaucracy(in this case, the production of measurable outcomes primarily in terms of crimeand arrests), the practicalities of encounters and actions taken in pursuit of insti-tutional demands (patrolling the streets, responding to calls, talking to individualsand declaring them suspects, making arrests), the work they inevitably find them-selves doing that doesn’t easily lend itself to bureaucratic measurement (advisingresidents, giving warnings, solving minor disputes, ‘checking up’ on people andplaces) and the entire realm of action that takes place from the moment a shiftbegins until it ends. If policing refers to an institutional organization—in whichthe actions taken by the agents of that organization only roughly correspond tothe bureaucratic guidelines, hierarchies, mission statements, and statistics pre-sented to the public and outside agencies—and police work refers to the actionstaken by an member of that organization, then how should we view police worksituated within a social space, municipality, community, or society?

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

307.1243 BIE h

Penerbit

Germany : Springer Nature., 2023

Deskripsi Fisik

421 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9783658397739

Klasifikasi

307.1243

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Community Sociology in Germany

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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