ABSTRACT
In addition to being multi-sided, much work carried out by police ethnographers is also multi-temporal in nature, since relations that developed in the field often continue and change long after fieldwork. Such relations are increasingly complicated by the mediatization of police ethnography, which may leave both the ethnographer and field relations caught up in cross-publics and media conflict. In this chapter, I reflect on the ‘public afterlife’ of my own ethnographic work with the Dutch police. These reflections are based on three cases that will, first, help us understand how and why police leadership tried to ‘quarantine’ and localize the main problem that was addressed in the mediatized ethnography: ethnic profiling. Second, they allow for a sociolinguistic analysis of such ‘scaling down’ as a matter of words, not deeds, that is as representational work to improve police legitimacy and public acceptance. Third, they help us to think about public ethnographers as boundary figures who expose and broker (in this case militarized) police concepts, which gain new meanings in contexts beyond the world of policing.
