Street-level bureaucrats under COVID-19: Police officers’ responses in constrained settings

Abstract

The COVID-19 poses unprecedented challenges for Street Level Bureaucrats (SLB). Whereas there are discussions about the pandemic impacts on health care workers, less is known about how it affects police officer’s responses. Drawing upon an inductive qualitative research that follows the ethnographic sensibility inspired approach on a major Brazilian police force, we argue that conflicts concerning political, occupational culture, and material dimensions can negatively affect police officers’ responses in financially and institutionally constrained settings. By unveiling how the identified conflicts can jeopardize the efforts to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and suggesting that the usual discretion of street-level bureaucrats can be both a blessing and a curse, our work informs existing SLB literature and sheds light on practical issues that police officers in constrained settings face when dealing with the pandemic.

Keywords:

• COVID-19
• occupational culture
• police officers
• political conflict
• street-level bureaucrats