The culture of policing

Abstract

The original ethnographic literature on police developed in legal studies, after an attempt in the 1950s by the American Bar Foundation to document the practical operations of the criminal justice system discovered that it had to take discretion seriously (Ohlin and Remington 1993). This insight eventually led to our present conception of police work as a kind of improvisational performance aimed at maintaining the meaningful order of the community (i.e. “community policing,” cf. Manning 1997, Bittner 1990, Wakefield 2009). Now, a half century later, a growing number of anthropologists conducting ethnographic studies of contemporary culture in its myriad forms are discovering that they have to take policing seriously. In this paper, I juxtapose the classical “cultural turn” in police studies with the emergent “policing turn” in anthropology to argue that the stuff of culture and the phenomena of policing are, in fact, mutually implicated; both can be better understood through taking a more explicit stance on the nature of this interconnection. I illustrate the benefits of this approach by reference to my own work explaining contemporary Taiwanese political culture through the island’s history of modern policing, as narrated in terms of anthropological concern with the jural dimension of intimate politics, the dynamics of state involution, and the performative forces of symbolic legitimation.