ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on delinquency and delinquents taken from police and probation files are examined to reveal how official statistics are assembled. It argues that conventional sociological explanations rely upon tacit assumptions about how the governments and law-enforcement agencies of particular communities work and that these assumptions are too often unexamined. The chapter argues that conventional sociological explanations do not take sufficient account of the encoding operations necessarily employed by both those persons who assemble official statistics and by the researcher. The case load assigned to the probation officer and the organization of the staff along professional-supervisory lines, with less hierarchy than the police, tends to force the probation department into a kind of social work organizational structure. The obverse is true of City B where even nonranking detectives are politically active and seek and obtain some measure of community power independent of their police position.
