Police Occupational Culture : New Debates and Directions

Police occupational culture has been a great source of academic interest since research into policing began in earnest in the 1960s. 'Police culture' has become a lens through which a number of aspects of police have been studied including the use of discretion, police corruption, institutional racism and sexism, and also police reform. These studies have tended to be done in topical isolation from each other and have focused rather narrowly on Anglo-American state policing forms. This book aims at a contemporary look at police culture by questioning established silos in topics, presenting new ways of thinking about police culture and what forms police culture is likely to take in the future. The chapters in this book are both explanatory and normative and deal with a range of new topics in police cultural studies including the impact of tertiary education opportunities on police culture, police unions as counter-cultural groupings, the coming together of private and public policing cultures, and the impact of new identity groupings on police organizational culture. This book will be of considerable interest to students and researchers in police and policing studies, crime and criminal justice and to police practitioners themselves.