Drawing on her ethnographic doctoral research, the author reflects on the challenges of employing a feminist methodology when observing the police. The article will discuss the fraught process of gaining trust and sustaining fragile access by betraying the self. The feminist killjoy (Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life; Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook) is used as a lens to examine the author’s response to the political and ethical dilemmas that she encountered during fieldwork. This will lead to considering whether a “critical empathy” framework is a valuable approach to conducting police research from a feminist perspective. This discussion will offer new tools for dealing with the emotional complexities of ethnographic research. It will make a strong case for the possibilities and importance of conducting feminist research about the police.

All around the globe, police first responders are confronted with an increasing number of citizens showing concerning behaviour. These citizens are a harm to themselves or others, and to prevent further (physical) escalation from occurring, it is important that police officers quickly make sense of the situation and take follow-up actions (e.g. call for a healthcare or police intervention team). To do this, police should know what behaviour to look out for. Yet, previous research on these interactions predominantly used interview, case study and police database data which do not allow for direct observation of behaviour. In this article, bodycam-footage-based human ethology is considered as a method to overcome this issue. The dataset used for this study consisted of 14 police-citizen interactions in which citizens display concerning behaviour. From this dataset, an ethogram was created, identifying 21 types of concerning behaviours that citizens displayed. It was feasible to reliably code this behaviour on a situational level. This article sets out to inspire other academics to use human ethology in policing studies and provides a starting point for research specifically focusing on concerning citizen behaviour.

How, and in what ways, can design practice contribute to observational research on policing? This article outlines the potential for design research methods, and more specifically, “design Things”, to be used in ethnographic policing research. The article outlines some of design practices’ unique epistemic qualities, describes what design Things are and suggests they might relate to ethnographic policing research. Reflecting on doctoral research into police use of body-worn video cameras, the article discusses how design Things have successfully been used to introduce specific questions, matters of concern and elicit speculations from research participants. As well as highlighting the possibilities of this novel methodology for policing research, the challenges and ethical considerations are also considered.

Several police practices, including stop-and-search actions, involve selecting citizens for controls. These selection procedures have faced extensive criticism for being biased with respect to socio-demographic factors. However, the different methodologies adopted in prior research to assess target selection have made it difficult to evaluate the actual existence of biases, especially due to difficulties in establishing a comparable benchmark population. To circumvent these limitations, we propose using covert systematic social observations as a method to investigate and evaluate the potential bias of police’s selection procedures. Using the weapon control performed by the Dutch police in Amsterdam in 2022 as a case, we present a method to detect selection biases based on ethnic profiles of citizens that can be reliably applied and has the benefit of allowing for varying police’s selection practices. In sum, given how covert on-site observations offer a realistic picture of how the situation unfolds, we recommend this as a method to examine stop-and-search actions and other bias-prone citizen selection procedures.

Police research increasingly uses videos to study policing situations. This has several benefits: it allows researchers to capture behaviour in a reliable way, is cost-efficient and reduces or removes observer reactivity. In this article, we argue that using videos can improve our understanding of policing action and address some of the limitations of systematic social observation (SSO). We propose capturing behaviours by using a methodological tool from behavioural biology known as the ethogram method. The ethogram method offers a measurement instrument that focuses on describing rather than interpreting behaviour, by separating the measurement of behaviour from the outcome of behaviour, by involving intercoder reliability tests of the measurement instrument before applying it for analysis rather than after and by an overall ambition to compare across cases, contexts and spices. To demonstrate the value of ethograms in police research, we present examples from own work illustrating how we developed and applied ethograms to code and analyse policing behaviours. We discuss benefits and challenges of using ethograms and offer concrete insights into how research could investigate behaviours of police officers to make research more unobtrusive, efficient and reliable. These insights can push the field forward with a novel and ground-breaking approach to study policing in action that allows for comparative studies and theory development. Where biologists have species- and behaviour-specific ethograms, police researchers do not. This is a call for precisely such effort across the field.

Positionality, along with reflexivity, is a key component of ethnographic research. Traditional male-oriented police ethnographic accounts, however, rarely include a reflection on how researchers’ positionality shaped the research process. While a growing number of female police scholars reflect on gendered power dynamics and strategies for managing trust or flirtatious behaviour, the literature is inconclusive regarding the tension between maintaining field relations characterized by trust while also maintaining a measure of invisibility. In this article, I examine how my positionality impacted the course of fieldwork during a long-term ethnography of the Dutch police. I discuss how my gender and former social work profession, in particular, challenged and provided a resolution through field relations while establishing (in)formal access and gathering data on violent interactions. Moreover, I reflect on the usefulness of Shakespeare’s concept of “confessions of ignorance” and Reyes’ “ethnographic toolkit” as strategies to navigate discomfort and build rapport. The article contributes to the field of policing studies by exploring how we can transform our inevitable differences from liabilities to valuable research assets, enhancing our understanding of the complexities involved in conducting ethnographic police research.

Crime prevention is strongly promoted in many countries’ police organizations. However, lack of a clear, agreed definition of the concept could impede its effective implementation. This study addresses associated problems by exploring 15 Swedish police officers’ understanding and definitions of crime-preventive work to characterize their translation of the official definition of crime prevention into operational practice. It was found that the participants had highly heterogeneous understanding and translation of crime prevention but broadly recognized that it consisted of preventing the occurrence, continuation and/or repetition of crime. They also recognized four key types of activities: collaboration, fostering constructive community relations, increasing risks of crime detection and deterrence and cause analysis. The results highlight needs for more coherent definitions of crime prevention and associated strategies to avoid the diversity of interpretations hindering the implementation, evaluation and improvement of crime prevention efforts.

Scholars use different methods trying to understand aspects of policing and the police, among which observations such as field-based observations of police officers, systematic social observations and, since the twenty-first century, observations by means of body-worn camera footage, dashcams and even civilian footage. Each observation method comes with specific challenges. This special issue on observation methodology in police research focuses on (current) issues regarding police observational research, such as challenges that may occur when observing police officers, reflexivity, use of covert observations and more recent approaches to police observations such as the use of ethograms. The issue is a collection of six different articles, all of which discuss some pertinent aspects of observational police research. With this special issue, we wish to initiate further discussions on police observational methodology and innovative approaches in this regard. We want to stimulate reflections on these topics and enhance our understanding of police observational methods. We also wish to help police researchers in designing their observational research project and encourage them to set up such projects. After all, observational research on policing is still one of the most important methods to get a grip on different aspects of real-life police work and decision-making.