ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes how the police management is working on diversity issues and how this is perceived by the police officers. The empirical material consists partly of observations of a diversity training session and partly of interviews with both LGB police officers and police officers whose sexual orientation is unknown to the author. The chapter shows how diversity work tends to be decoupled from the police's operational work and engaged with in a way that reproduces the belief that it does not count as “real police work”. The police officers view the management's work on diversity as impression management, designed to satisfy external stakeholders (government or the media) rather than to seriously integrate issues of diversity into the police's operational work. In the analysis, the author acknowledges the officers' view and discusses problems related to decoupling diversity work from operational work, but also argues that initiatives characterized by impression management can have an internal impact by providing formalized support and input into the police organization's long-term identity work. The latter is about how initiatives can create expectations that affect the development of new organizational norms and start discussions that in informal ways can be recoupled; that is, they can find their way into the “real” police work.
