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Abstract
This article seeks to understand the form, content and broader implications of police academy ethics training. We begin by detailing the mechanisms borrowed from (near) total/greedy institutions that are key elements in the academy training structure. These are noted in an ethnographic account that points out the importance of obedience to authority, and the resultant shame and honour, which function as the core of police socialization. We conclude by explicating the theoretical foundation of the police function and then move on to question how ethics training supports, or resists, this structure. Findings suggest that, even at its best, ethics training is likely to serve in restraining the professional vision of incoming police officers. Despite what can only be assumed to be the best of intentions, a traditional model of police as law enforcers is (re)generated within a recruit cohort while more progressive notions of the police role (i.e., working toward neighbourhood efficacy) are ignored. With this, truly ethical behaviour is structurally inhibited by theatrical efforts at maintaining the collective fiction of the police mandate.
Notes
Norman Conti is at the Graduate Center for Social and Public Policy at Duquesne University. James J. Nolan III is in the Division of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University.
Harris's specific term was “depersonalization”.
It is worth noting that better funded law enforcement organizations such as the State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) maintain training facilities that include barracks where cadets reside during their training.
Rockport is a pseudonym for an American city with a population of 500,000 people and a police force of 2,000 officers.
The class of seventy recruits was divided into four subgroups in order to facilitate small group training in specific areas such as self-defence, weapons or first aid. These types of classes were in contrast to large, largely boring, lectures presented on “General Police Orders” (GPOs).
Marx (Citation1988: 21) notes that one of the key functions of the police uniform is “a moral separation of the police from criminals and a visual separation from the police and everyone else”. Here the uniform is designed to compel the citizenry to come to the aid of an officer when needed and compel the officer to actively pursue order rather than his or her own vices. This is achieved via the public scrutiny that the uniform inherently attracts.
The Deputy Chief, when he was the Lieutenant in charge of the academy, had once dismissed a recruit from training on the day of graduation for refusing to present her identification card to the institutional guard at the entrance to Police Headquarters. She had felt that her full police uniform was all of the identification that she needed. The commander disagreed and saw this as a disobedience that disqualified her for service.
This fits neatly with Goffman's description of the avuncular role that the staff takes in relation to inmates.
The Deputy Chief insists that he “never flipped over any table”. He claims that part of the story is a total embellishment and it does seem a bit far-fetched. Still, whether it actually happened or not, it was real in the minds of the recruits and added to their understanding of the Deputy Chief as well as police culture in general.
A recruit who had worked for the Rockport Metropolitan Housing Authority Police explained that when he and many of his fellow officers were all laid off at the same time this same ploy was used on them prior to being informed of their dismissal.
For this reason, all of the specifics have been excluded, despite the fact that the officers involved acted with great honour. The story's inclusion would only serve as an example of a high moment in police conduct and an illustration of the extreme difficulties entailed in police careers.