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36 Criminology 343 (1998)
Police Subculture Reconsidered

handle is hein.journals/crim36 and id is 353 raw text is: POLICE SUBCULTURE RECONSIDERED STEVE HERBERT Indiana University Most comprehensive discussions of the police acknowledge the inability of legal and bureaucratic regulations to determine officer behavior. Attention is turned instead toward the informal norms developed within the police subculture. These discussions, however, tend to overstress the chasm between the formal and informal. They also provide inadequate tools for understanding differentiation, conflict, and change within police departments. I address these shortcomings here by mobilizing a particular conceptualization of the term normative order--as a set of rules and practices oriented around a central value. Six such orders are crucial to policing: law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality. I illustrate the importance of each by drawing upon ethnographic observations of the Los Angeles Police Department, and explain how my conceputalization offers a compre- hensive yet flexible means to understand the social world of policing. Most comprehensive discussions of the police include some mention of subculture. The police are typically viewed as a distinct subgroup with a particular ethos that strongly influences their daily practices. Several authors emphasize the prevailing sense of rupture that officers believe exists between them and the general public, a we/they mentality that courses through the police's social world (Kappeler et al., 1994; Niederhof- fer, 1967; Skolnick, 1966; Westley, 1970). Some authors stress the inability of formal laws and regulations to adequately control police behavior, and they argue that less formal customs are determinative of police action (Bittner, 1967; Brown, 1981; Reiner, 1992; Reuss-Ianni, 1983; Rubinstein, 1973). In sum, the police are typically described as a social group, differ- entiated from the general public, whose behavior is more significantly structured by informal norms than by formal rules. There is some consistency in these discussions about those factors most central to police subculture. As mentioned, police officers are described as seeing themselves as distinct from the general population. This, it is argued, frequently breeds mistrust and suspicion of the public (Banton, 1964; Cain, 1973; Graef, 1989; Westley, 1970). This is manifest, in part, in the tendency of officers to cover up each other's mistakes, to develop a united front against outside interest in their potential misdeeds (Chevigny, 1995; Shearing, 1981; Westley, 1970). The police world is further charac- terized as extremely masculine (Fielding, 1994; Reiner, 1992), so much so that women's acceptance into the group is resisted (Heidensohn, 1992). CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 36 NUMBER 2 1998

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