Transforming The Robocops

The structure, uniform, equipment, and training of the South African Police Service have changed since apartheid, says Marks (sociology, U. of KwaZulu-Natal); the force proclaims a community-oriented service ethic, hires more women and black personnel in high positions, and is rarely rather than often excessively violent during demonstrations and protests. Still, she asks how much the police have changed, and whether it is really to change them, or indeed to change the police anywhere.

This fascinating new title offers an ethnographical investigation of contemporary police culture based on extensive field work across a range of ranks and units in the UK's police force. By drawing on over 600 hours of direct observation of operational policing in urban and rural areas and interviews with over 60 officers, the author assesses what impact three decades of social, economic and political change have had on police culture. She offers new understandings of the policing of ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and the ways in which reform initiatives are accommodated and resisted within the police. The author also explores the attempts of one force to effect cultural change both to improve the working conditions of staff and to deliver a more effective and equitable service to all groups in society. Beginning with a review of the literature on police culture from 30 years ago, the author goes on to outline the new social, economic and political field of contemporary British policing. Taking this as a starting point, the remaining chapters present the main findings of the empirical research in what is a a truly comprehensive analysis of present day policing culture.

Knowledge about policing has been produced and disseminated unevenly so that our understanding comes from a skewed emphasis on the Anglo-American experience. Drawing on an original and comprehensive study of policing in Vietnam and engaging a Southern Criminological framework, this book explores police cultures and practices in a postcolonial, post-Confucian, transitioning economy. Identifying both similarities and differences in policing and police culture in Vietnam with those found in the dominant literature from the Global North, Policing in a Changing Vietnam challenges assumptions that police are (purportedly) apolitical, averse to tertiary education and defer to legalistic approaches to policing and law enforcement. It highlights that the variations identified in policing in Vietnam must be understood, not as deviations from Anglo-American normality, but as significant separate practices and traditions of policing from which the Global North may have something to learn. Contributing to ongoing debates on police culture and socialisation, this book explores the assumptions about relationships between the police, political systems, broad societal cultures, legal frameworks, organisations, communities and gender. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, policing, gender studies, sociology, politics, law and all those who are interested in understanding the experiences and views of the Vietnamese police.

Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa is a vivid and ambitious survey of the complex politics of security, crime and social control in South Africa. Nearly three decades after the formal end of apartheid, policing in South Africa continues to be defined by brutality, incompetence and corruption. Featuring unapologetic critiques of elite power and the stifling politics of fear, while informed by global discussions on police abolition, Shoot to Kill: Police and Power in South Africa calls for a society based on democracy and justice. Author Christopher McMichael speaks to the realities of our world increasingly defined by militarised injustice and outlines ways we can escape from this rusty cage.

Moving past theoretical critiques of human rights, this book considers how we might translate situational analyses of torture into effective strategies for preventing it.

Focusing on the South African city of Durban, Security in the Bubble looks at spatialized security practices, engaging with strategies and dilemmas of urban security governance in cities around the world. While apartheid was spatial governance at its most brutal, postapartheid South African cities have tried to reinvent space, using it as a “positive” technique of governance. Christine Hentschel traces the contours of two emerging urban regimes of governing security in contemporary Durban: handsome space and instant space. Handsome space is about aesthetic and affective communication as means to making places safe. Instant space, on the other hand, addresses the crime-related personal “navigation” systems employed by urban residents whenever they circulate through the city. While handsome space embraces the powers of attraction, instant space operates through the powers of fleeing. In both regimes, security is conceived not as a public good but as a situational experience that can. No longer reducible to the after-pains of racial apartheid, this city’s fragmentation is now better conceptualized, according to Hentschel, as a heterogeneous ensemble of bubbles of imagined safety.

This book demonstrates the unique contribution police ethnographies make to our understanding of policing cultures and practices in a variety of international settings. It features contemporary examples of police ethnographies that demonstrate the continuing value of ethnographic work to our understanding of policing. The first section of the book focuses on the police and Anglo-American policing. The second section is international in scope and seeks to enrich our understandings of policing ‘beyond’ the police. Chapters explore police interactions during a stop and search and at a carnival. They peer behind the scenes at the control room and at the use of intelligence. We listen in to the experiences of new recruits and the stories told in canteens. They also take us into the world of private security agencies, to Kenya and to Vietnam. The book explores the position of ethnographers asking: whether we do too much with rather than on the police; and whether our work reveals more about us as academics than them as officers. Together, they are revealing of a changing policing landscape. Ethnography and the Evocative World of Policing demonstrates the unique value of ethnographic work in the fields of policing studies and criminology. It will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of policing, criminology, sociology, law, and research methods.The chapters in this book were originally published in two special issues of Policing and Society.

Through ethnographic research in South Africa, this book explores the lived experiences of police navigating danger and death.