ABSTRACT
The purpose of this section is to lay out the boundaries and audiences of police culture. If police culture is to be understood in terms of grounded aesthetics, then it is necessary to explain the “grounding,” that is, the daily situations they encounter and the audiences with whom they interact. Two preliminary observations will be stated and discussed below. First, local police cultures are embedded in and bounded by the departmental organization. Consequently, it is first necessary to discuss how the organization of the police provides the conditions in which line-officers become a cultural-carrying group. Second, the themes studied here arise from observable, every-day interactions officers have with other people. Whether they are criminals, the administration, or citizens, these other people interact with line-officers in recurring, concrete contexts from which the cultural identity of the police emerges. I will also discuss the common, everyday ways in which the police interact with these various groups.
