ABSTRACT
In Police Work and Identity: a South African Ethnography, I described my police subjects as ‘accidental officers’ and myself as an ‘accidental academic’. Although I had spent my late childhood wanting to become a police officer, and most of the officers I shadowed had hoped to become doctors, engineers, or entrepreneurs, centuries of racialised power and politics in South Africa meant that our roles were reversed. The book was based on an ethnography that sought to answer the question, ‘Who do South African police officers think they are and how does it shape their work?’ But in carrying out the research, I was forced to ask the same question of myself. The answer did not sit comfortably with me, a discomfort which was amplified by calls for tertiary education to be decolonised. In this chapter, I probe the ethics and obligations of police ethnographic scholarship and ask: Who our ethnographies are for? Drawing on ideas emanating from anthropologists and decolonial scholars, I ask whether we should do more to partner with and elicit judgements on our work from those we study. I recognise that while I tell myself I research and write for others, in some sense I predominantly do the work for myself. I use the philosophy of Michael Sandel to challenge myself and other police ethnographers to embrace the unchosen moral ties and burdens that bind us to our police subjects and to work in ways that are as just for them as they are for ourselves.
