Rethinking the place of crime in police patrol: a re-reading of classic police ethnographies

Both in the policing literature and criminology more broadly, it is a taken-for-granted fact—an entrenched ‘truism’—that patrol policing has little to do with crime. This ‘truth’ is a product of fieldwork on the public police begun in the early-1950s. These works, thus, are of immense importance to...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ranasinghe, Prashan (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
Published: 2017
In: The British journal of criminology
Year: 2017, Volume: 57, Issue: 4, Pages: 867-884
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
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Keywords:
Police patrol
Crime work
Police ethnographies
Production of knowledge
Polizei
Ethnographie
Polizeikultur
Description
Summary:Both in the policing literature and criminology more broadly, it is a taken-for-granted fact—an entrenched ‘truism’—that patrol policing has little to do with crime. This ‘truth’ is a product of fieldwork on the public police begun in the early-1950s. These works, thus, are of immense importance to criminology. In this paper, I undertake a re-reading of several classic police ethnographies and argue that there is a disjuncture between what is claimed and revealed. These texts show that the patrol police appear to deal with a significant amount of what I call crime work, the minimization and marginalization of which I seek to make sense of.
ISSN:1464-3529
DOI:10.1093/bjc/azw028