ABSTRACT
This article focuses on these organizational tensions as they affect and are expressing police "record work". By this concept I intend to emphasize two interrelated processes relevant to police record keeping: First, record work highlights the processes affecting how patrol officers produce a variety of work-and organization-relevant records. particularly central here are the ways in which the projected organizational uses and longer-term "careers" of records shape their forms and content. Second, record work references the ways in which police officers interpret and infer the meaning, import, and "accuracy" of the various sorts of records they rely upon in carrying out their routine activities. As many officers note, "The record can tell you some things but not others". Describing the process whereby local background knowledge is brought to bear to determine what particular records can "tell you" comprises a second component of record work.
