Rural police officers try to construct the identity of rural policing by telling stories. In their stories they explain how rural policing works and what its strength is. According to these stories, relations between police and citizens are different from what is usual in the cities. Rural police officers are more used to solving problems by ‘talking’ and not by ‘escalation’. Rural officers work on a broad range of problems, including all kinds of service tasks. Two factors are often mentioned why the rural police have a different (and ‘better’) way of working. The long patrol distances make that it takes a long time before assistance will arrive, so initially officers have to deal with problems on their own. The social density of rural communities makes that police officers have different positions compared with city officers. As a result rural officers are more focused on peace keeping than on rule enforcement.

This paper analyzes the phenomenon of the use of police force and gender moralities in training and professional practices of police women. The central question is how physical and lethal force produces contradictions between making progress careers and agreeing with expressions of femininity that inhibit, a priori, such skills. This paper is the result of an ethnographic fieldwork displayed over five years in different police Argentinian institutions. The fieldwork includes interviews and participant observation in training facilities and workplaces (police stations, patrols and special operations) of Argentina’s Federal Police, Argentine National Gendarmerie, Buenos Aires Provincial Police and Argentine Naval Prefecture. Ethnographic descriptions discuss the idea of homogeneity of police culture and contribute to think about flexibility, permeability and diversity in the police profession. This article presents arguments and empirical data which lead to conceive police as a space of tensions regarding the conceptions of gender. On the one hand, police officers (males and females) reaffirm some hegemonic ideas of gender; on the other hand, in their speeches they break the traditional notion that femininity systematically implies weakness. In this sense, the display of physical force is incorporated by women in the course of their police careers and exercised in contexts of police actions, but reinterpreted when justifying their actions against judicial agents.

The idea of police culture is almost as old as the field of police studies itself, and has been traced to the coincidence of concerns about violent and discriminatory police conduct with shifts in intellectual fashion, including a turn towards ethnography. This article considers some criticisms of the idea of police culture before engaging with a recent narrative turn in analysis. Drawing on fieldnotes from an ongoing ethnographic study of police in England it explores the use of a narrative approach to fieldnotes. The article concludes that extending the narrative approach to police work in this way shows significant potential for developing our understanding of why police behave as they do. Ethnography alone can provide the kinds of unique insights into overlapping and interconnected narratives that help to situate and order the particularities of police work in relation to the broader social and political context.

In this paper, it will be argued that proactive policing and patrol actions are creative, timed, executed but concealed policing activities. Proactivity appears as an arranged, organised and meaningful cultural artefact. It involves rituals performed in an enacted or staged environment in which images of a dangerous environment, crime, suspiciousness of the population and an organisational context of an unstable ‘fire brigade’ patrol department serve as a background to engage in practices that define, even reconstruct, the environment as such. Hence, this paper elaborates on how patrol officers ‘cope’ with mundane reactive policing in an unpredictable organisational context by enacting dramatized crime-fighting roles. In order to explain and frame the proactive patrol activities that appeared, a cultural sociological framework is suggested which questions a stress-coping model to explain how culture and action develop and which allows us to understand these activities from a subjective point of view. This article thereby focusses on meaning-making, agency and contexts of street-level policing and folklore.

This contribution deals with the police interaction that comes about through contact with the population in public places. We propose to focus this contribution on the interaction methods that make it possible to explore the characteristics of the patrol and district police officers. First we will report on the interactional practices ‘specific’ to one or another of these professional groups. We will then highlight the ones which, on the contrary, seem similar. Supported by the detailed description of encounters between police officers and the population and an analysis inspired by the sociology of Goffman (1973, 1974, 1991), our results highlight the concrete proceedings of the interactions, a dimension rarely investigated in police sociology. And although our results intend to expand knowledge on the practices of police in contact with the public, this interactional ‘entryway’ allows us to analyse autonomy as a police resource that is susceptible to supporting recognition of the population’s legitimate engagement during interactions with the police.

This article reflects on the personal, epistemological and methodological dilemmas of conducting (auto)ethnographic fieldwork within the police organisation. The argument is that positionality and ascribed identities complicate existing dilemmas of using participant observation within the police context, such as maintaining a researcher’s role, acceptance, building trust and coping with ostracism. The article also deals with the tension of being a member of the organisation and a researcher at the same time, as well as the pains, but also the gains, of doing auto-ethnographic fieldwork within the police organisation as a frequently racialized (male) member of an ethnic minority.

While undertaking qualitative research, researchers often experience issues with an emotional or ethical charge. This backstage reality of the research process is not often discussed in public. In this article, we argue that (ethical) research inheres an important learning process. Research errors – in this article ‘dilemmas’ – should be revealed to the academic world rather than swept under the carpet. Researchers should be encouraged to describe and reflect on these dilemmas as it helps them to become more aware of what they are doing when they are in the thick of their research. Using this (ethical) reflexivity, our article examines real ethical dilemmas encountered in the field by a junior PhD researcher. In doing so, more methodological awareness was created and the research quality was increased. We hope this ethical reflexive exercise will inspire other researchers and contribute as such to the greater body of methodological knowledge.