Abstract

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.