Everyday policing: toward a greater analytical appreciation of the ordinary in police research

ABSTRACT

Since its modern conception, police research has shown an interest in everyday life. This has to do with how this (sub)discipline, more than other areas of criminological thought, has been founded on ethnographic methods. Since Westley’s study in the 1950s, scholars have agreed on the importance of not simply studying policing through proxies, but also observing and studying the workaday reality of police practice. This paper is written as an appreciation of this scholarly disposition. However, while applauding fellow police researchers’ ethnographic engagement, the paper argues that we could do with an even greater appreciation of everyday life not only in methodological but in analytical terms. Using an ethnographic study of the Danish Police, the paper thus stresses the often-unnoticed advantage of paying better analytical attention to the many ordinary and even banal aspects of police work. In doing so, the paper follows and extends Fassin’s (2015, 2017) recent contention that the many ordinary activities of the police may not have benefitted from the scholarly scrutiny they deserve. Indeed, as demonstrated through telling empirical examples, even the most everyday issues frequently have a bearing on the most essential and evocative aspects of policing.

KEYWORDS:

• Policing
• ethnography
• everyday life
• transnational crime
• detective work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 TFP is a special investigations unit and part of the Copenhagen Police district. As the name suggests, the detectives who work here are involved in policing a large number of organized property crimes related to pickpocketing (incl. skimming, credit card thefts and other tricks and scams) in and around Copenhagen. The other detective unit which I was allowed to follow was Task Force Burglary (TFB) located north of Copenhagen, investigating organized forms of burglary and other large-scale property crimes committed throughout the Danish island of Zealand. Besides investigating organized forms of property crime, what empirically unites the two units is the fact that many of their suspects are foreign nationals – or, as the police themselves call them, ‘travelling’ or ‘transnational criminals’.

2 All names used throughout this article are pseudonyms.

3 Recently, however, and after ending my field study, the Danish Police have introduced a computer program [POLINTEL] able to communicate with and search multiple registers and databases. Where this has definitely made the detectives’ job easier, they still report that they feel overwhelmed, undertrained and unable to use the available technologies.

4 A much better and bigger overview can be found in Manning’s (2014) essay ‘Police Ethnographies’

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by H2020 European Research Council [Grant Number #725194].