Getting legless, falling down pissy‐arsed drunk: Policing men's leisure

Abstract

This paper shows how the culture of drinking in police society can be analogously related to the ways in which certain aspects of men's leisure is handled by these same policemen. A practical mastery in policing requires an early ability to handle the business of drinking, and has long historic precedents to structure how this is understood. Incorporating rules of hierarchy, gender and cognition of the correct time, place and ways to drink, the system also encompasses time‐honoured disciplinary practices to control excesses in this activity. Using an anthropological ‘thick description’ of the processes, the author—an insider in police society for over three decades—argues that a macho working‐class culture has structured police drinking styles, and that these—like other aspects of police culture—are often hidden from scrutiny, separated off from the outside gaze. It is suggested that it is only when these slip into the public domain and become an embarrassment that they are then controlled.

The strength of these inside/outside binaries is also shown to be linked to dualistic concepts of ‘public’ and ‘private’ classification, and these in turn influence how men's leisure time drinking (and other drug taking) is policed. As drink offences are not ‘recordable crimes’ in police terms they have less status than official ‘crime’ matters, and the underclass of society—who the police have long been tasked to control in respect of this aspect of their culture—can thus be dealt with in arbitrary, gender‐specific and variable ways that reflect the fact that men are expected to ‘get legless’. Indeed the way the police command and control men's leisure‐time activities, mirrors their own drinking styles, and also depends on following long‐established rules of practice, the specificities of the occasion, and some damage limitation in the event of excess.