ABSTRACT
The study of policing would appear to be a field where threats to personal physical
safety are inevitable. However, rarely are the field experiences of researchers studying
the police discussed in terms of how the encounters with danger positively inform the
research. In this chapter physical danger and risk are examined as a composite aspect
of understanding police work and police identities. It argues that ‘where the action is’
is often where the insight lies. Therefore, as researchers we should not perceive the
experience of danger in the field as an obstacle to understanding the worlds of
participants but as an opportunity to examine how risk enters their lives. For many
members of society physical risk is an everyday part of their lives or occupations,
therefore trying to exclude the possibility of researcher-risk is not possible if one is
taking an ethnographic approach. In the case of my observation of police work, gender
identities were found to be important to how the police understood and worked with
risk and danger. It was only through experiencing danger with police officers that I was
able to theorise about the role of threat to the shaping of identities.
