Overview

Police Culture in a Changing World represents the return of police research to its original ethnographic form for the first time in decades. The book offers an in-depth investigation of contemporary police dispositions and practices based on extensive field work involving more than 600 hours of direct observation of operational policing across urban and rural terrains, and interviews with over 60 officers from a range of ranks and units in one English police force. The author provides a revised account of police culture in the new millennium, identifying various aspects of that culture which have hitherto gone unnoticed. With new understandings of how greater social diversity within and beyond policing organizations are shaping traditional relations, the book explores the impact of prevailing management practices on the way officers think about and perform their jobs, and the form police culture takes under conditions of late modernity. Finally, there is a theoretical discussion of police culture, tracking the new social, economic, and political field of British Policing, which sets out the main findings of the fieldwork. Theoretically and empirically informed, Police Culture in a Changing World is a landmark work on contemporary policing culture. Its timely character also has relevance with respect to highly salient issues in the current political climate regarding operational policing.

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9780199653539

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<br> Bethan Loftus' research makes a major contribution to the analysis of contemporary policing, and of the impact of the extensive reform initiatives of the last quarter of a century. It does this by replicating the classic studies of police culture conducted from the early 1960s to the early 1980s, which constituted the core foundations of the understanding of policing. This book would thus fill a hole in the analysis of policing that has long required plugging. It does this in an outstanding way that matches the very best of the classic studies. <br>--Professor Robert Reiner, Professor of Criminology, London School of Economics<p><br>

Author Information

Bethan Loftus is a fellow at the Centre for Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Manchester. Previously, she was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Centre for Criminology, Oxford, specialising in policing and police cultures and policing social divisions. She was awarded a Ph.D at the Centre for Criminological Research, Keele University in 2007 for her thesis 'Police Culture in a Diverse Society: A Provincial Police Force in Transition?' She holds an MA in Comparative Criminology and Criminal Justice and first class honours degree in criminology and criminal justice, both from the University of Wales.

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