Police culture
The term police culture encompasses the standards of values and behavioral patterns that characterize police officers in the exercise of their profession.
The police as an institution is part of the public administration . Their tasks and authorizations are laid down in laws, for example the Police Act and the Code of Criminal Procedure . However, the way in which police officers apply the basic rules in each individual case cannot be organized administratively. Rather, concrete action is influenced by patterns that have been socialized in the institution. On the other hand, the influence of the individual police officer on his behavior should not be underestimated. A distinction can be made between professional police culture (cop culture) and behavior in a leisure environment (canteen culture).
Informal value systems are not specific to police organizations. However, it is misleading to speak of a central "culture" in this regard - rather, there are many different and culturally plural values within the institution that only shape such a police culture as a whole. Understood in this way, several police subcultures can be assumed.
The first detailed investigations into police culture were carried out in the USA in the 1990s . Their subject matter was in particular police operations with a discriminatory, harassing or inappropriately violent background.
Studies of this kind aim to identify the factors that determine how police officers think they do their job well in practice. It was shown that in the field of tension between dealing with social realities (e.g. "law of the street"), the demands of the police manager and the expectations of one's own colleagues, behavior patterns arise that are influenced by masculinity rituals (superiority, respect) and group processes ( Secrecy, adaptation) are determined.
The system of shared values and action patterns, which has often emerged over generations, is passed on in professional practice regardless of the official content of vocational training. Anyone who wants to be permanently integrated as a police officer has to adapt to the internal rules of the organizational culture ( conformity ). However, recent research shows that the process of adaptation does not take place stereotypically and that the assumption of a firmly established police culture must be differentiated in favor of an inhomogeneous variety of police environments.
In addition, police culture is articulated as a publicly communicated understanding of roles beyond the statutory provisions in models, self-image and principles. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the federal government, the federal states and also the individual police authorities set their own internal and external priorities. The development processes and the effect of this normative police culture on the behavior of the police officers and the perception of the police in public are the subject of ongoing scientific studies.
literature
- Rafael Behr : Cop Culture. The everyday life of the monopoly of violence. Masculinity, behavior patterns and culture in the police . 2nd edition, VS-Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-531-15917-1 .
- Rafael Behr: Police culture. Routines - rituals - reflections. Building blocks for a theory of police practice . VS Verlag, Wiesbaden 2006, ISBN 978-3-531-14584-6 .
Web links
- Book review: "Fair Cop. Learning the Art of Policing" (PDF file; 100 kB)
- Role and self-image - Police NRW: "We about us"
- Police in North Rhine-Westphalia (PDF file; 1.28 MB)
- http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/article/view/445
- "The Viennese population and their police", diploma thesis v. Simone Plack (2008) University of Vienna, Faculty of Social Sciences
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Newburn, Tim .: Criminology. Routledge, 2017, pp. 656 (English).
- ↑ Janet Chan: Changing Police Culture: Policing in a multicultural society . Cambridge University Press, 1997, ISBN 978-0-521-56420-5 .
- ↑ cf. Behr, 2000.
- ↑ Reiner, R .: The Politics of the Police . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000 (English).