Police Work and Identity: A South African Ethnography

ISBN-13: 9781138233294 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 248 str.

Andrew Faull

Opis

This is a book about the men and women who police contemporary South Africa. Drawing on rich, original ethnographical data, it considers how officers make sense of their jobs and how they find meaning in their duties. It demonstrates how the dynamics that lead to breakdowns in everyday policing, public order policing and high policing in transitional and neo-liberalising regimes such as South Africa, have their origins in the day to day experiences and ambitions of the average police officer.
By focusing on police officers, this book positions the individual in primacy over the organisation. It acknowledges but downplays the importance of police culture in determining officers' attitudes and behaviour, and reminds readers that most officers' lives are entangled in, and shaped by a range of social, political and cultural forces. It is out of these entanglements that particular forms of order are produced. In an era where 'evidence' and 'what works' reigns supreme, and where 'cop culture' is deemed a primary socializing force, this book emphasises how officers' personal histories, ambitions, and vulnerabilities remain central to understanding how policing unfolds on the street.

Spis treści

1. Police work, personal identity, and context,  2. Police practice and the good shift,  3. The good shift as fiction,  4. More than police work: precarity, policing, and personal identity,  5. Ambition, shame, violence, and respect,  6. Individualism, transgression, coercion, and hope,  7. Accidental occupations in the post-colony

O autorze

Andrew Faull is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Safety Governance and Criminology, University of Cape Town, Editor of South African Crime Quarterly, and author of Behind the Badge: the untold stories of South Africa’s police service members. He was previously a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) and a police reservist (volunteer) in the South African Police Service.