ABSTRACT
The intention of this book has been to provide an informed overview of the themes and concepts of police culture. The term’s popularity belies the fact that it can tend to obscure as much as it explains, and behind a rather plain façade can be found multiple layers of understanding which themselves reflect academic, political and institutional tensions. Moreover, recent works have suggested that police culture has an increasingly limited relevance to our understanding of police work in a world where both policing and its social environment continue to change. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century much of the research into police culture, and the concepts that have subsequently emerged from it, portray policing and its cultures as distinct and hermetic packages operating in a vacuum far removed from the shifting landscapes of everyday life. This should not be construed as a criticism. The social worlds described by the likes of Skolnick (1994), Westley (1953), Holdaway (1983) and Cain (1973) were fundamentally more stable than later eras, which have become defined by fragmentation as much as by consensus. At the same time, whilst some earlier works, such as that of Niederhoffer (1969), described cultural tensions between working- and middle-class police officers, it is generally correct to assume that police officers today represent a significantly more diverse group in terms of a range of social characteristics than was previously the case. It is now no longer possible, if it ever was, to portray the cultural orientation of the police as synonymous with that of white, working-class males.
