Abstract
Police ethnography is a field of interdisciplinary inquiry populated by scholars from a range of social scientific disciplines. Work in this area is united by the commitment to ethnographic inquiry—an approach which has traditionally been taken as offering an inside, up close view on the practice of policing as it takes place in daily life. This chapter charts the author’s circuitous route into police ethnography. In so doing, it shows how such an unconventional approach allowed the author to adopt a unique perspective on police and policing and revealed blind spots in the wider ethnography of police which have yet to be fully remedied.
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Notes
- 1.
Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is important to mention that there is a distinct urban bias in police ethnography as well.
- 2.
“It remains extremely difficult for students who do their dissertation fieldwork entirely within the United States to get jobs at top departments” (Gupta & Ferguson, 1997, p. 14).
- 3.
Reiner (2000) has argued that a key virtue of ethnography as a means of studying police is its ability to study what police actually do, rather than simply what they say they do. Since my objective was never to study police behavior per se, I was forced to simply take the police at their word—in the same way that I took everyone else I interviewed at their word. In the case of police, however, I could corroborate certain statements by checking it against court documents and others who experienced the same events being described in the interview. More importantly, perhaps, I treated what I was told as “official discourse”: an example of what police thought I, as an outsider, should be told or wanted to hear.
- 4.
Reiner and Newburn (2007) note the increasing focus on policing rather than just police in recent police research.
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Garriott, W. (2018). Becoming a Police Ethnographer. In: Rice, S., Maltz, M. (eds) Doing Ethnography in Criminology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96316-7_15
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