Constructing tales of the field: uncovering the culture of fieldwork in police ethnography

ABSTRACT

One of the core contributions of the strong tradition of police ethnography is the emergence of a powerful critique of police culture. Through this work, researchers have explored the informal norms that structure police practices and the implications both for the experiences of policing and for central questions of social justice. Yet while research has demonstrated the power of occupational cultures in shaping what professionals consider important and thus what they do, there has been little attention paid to the culture that underpins the work through which police ethnography is produced. This paper explores how ethnographers construct accounts of fieldwork with the police and interrogates the patterned understandings that structure the way researchers think about and do police ethnography. Returning to unpublished fieldnotes generated as part of a major study of policing in the aftermath of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, it interrogates their connections with published fieldwork ‘confessionals’ to uncover the unarticulated conventions of what has come to constitute authoritative fieldwork. It suggests that accounts of ethnographic fieldwork reproduce a narrative of research in which researchers attempt to conform to the dominant norms of the setting; which emphasises tales of physicality, endurance, risk and action; and in which raw, undirected emotion is excised. This suggests a central irony in police ethnography: the dynamics of police culture it so powerfully criticises are reflected in the construction of the ethnographic process.

KEYWORDS:

• Ethnography
• police culture
• fieldwork
• methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A note about the scope of this paper. Given the interests of this special issue, I have focused this discussion on police ethnography, although it is likely that much of what I have to say here extends to other areas of criminological fieldwork. The paper is concerned with the work of fieldwork rather than the final ethnographic product, even though these are, of course, closely connected (e.g. Rock 2001). Further, I am attempting to explore how ethnographers construct the practice of fieldwork rather than a discipline more broadly, though it is likely these too are connected given the centrality of fieldwork to the anthropology (e.g. Gupta and Fergusson 1997). It is also important to note that the concern of this paper is with how researchers represent fieldwork rather than what they actually do. Indeed, I argue that there is much of the fieldwork practice that is omitted from these accounts. However, it is through these tales of the field that it is possible to see an orientation towards what is considered ‘authoritative’, trustworthy fieldwork.

2 There is an inevitable paradox in this paper: through attempting to critically analyse the construction of my previous work, I am following the convention of the confessional tale: as such, this paper is of course no less a construction intended to convey my own methodological authority than the work I am exploring.

3 Rowe (2007) for example describes how he prepared for ethnographic police research by reading the works of others, and determining that tales of police deviance were going to be important.

4 My experience in the research was undoubtedly structured by other aspects of my biography including my ethnicity, sexuality, and able-bodiedness. However, as these matched the dominant characteristics of the officers within the service they did not cause the moments of disjunction which are the focus of this paper.

5 A ‘major incident’ is the term used by emergency services in the UK to define ‘an event or situation requiring the implementation of special arrangements by one or more of the emergency services’, which may require multiple services, large numbers of people or media attention. See e.g. LESLP 2015.

6 There are of course exceptions: for example, Marks (2004) account of her fieldwork described above is so powerful in part because of the vividness in the way she conveys her fear: she describes being ‘petrified’, her heart racing and her stomach dropping and states ‘I thought I would die of fright’ (p. 879); similarly Diphoorn (2012, p. 212) describes being so terrified ‘my heart started beating excessively, my mouth became dry, and I nervously scratched my face and head’.