Understanding police culture / John P. Crank.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction -- PART I: UNDERSTANDING POLICE CULTURE: Prologue -- Culture and knowledge -- Issues in the study of police culture -- Culture and cultural themes -- Articulating police culture and its environments: patterns of line-officer interactions -- PART II: THEMES OF POLICE CULTURE: SECTION I: COERCIVE TERRITORIAL CONTROL: The moral transformation of territory (Theme: Domination) -- Force is righteous (Theme: Force) -- Crime is war, metaphor (Theme: Militarization) -- Stopping power (Theme: Guns) -- SECTION II: THEMES OF THE UNKNOWN: The twilight world (Theme: Suspicion) -- Danger through the lens of culture (Theme: Danger and its anticipation) -- Anything can happen on the street (Theme: Unpredictability and situational uncertainty) -- No animal out there is going to beat me (Theme: Turbulence and edge control) -- Seductions of the edge (Theme: Seduction) -- SECTION III: CULTURAL THEMES OF SOLIDARITY: Angels and assholes: the construction of police morality (Theme: Police morality) -- Common sense and the ironic deconstruction of the obvious (Theme: Common sense) -- No place for sissies (Theme: Masculinity) -- Mask of a thousand faces (Theme: Solidarity) -- America's great guilty crime secret (Theme: Racism) -- SECTION IV: LOOSELY COUPLING CULTURAL THEMES: On becoming invisible (Theme: Outsiders) -- Individualism and the paradox of personal accountability (Theme: Individualism) -- The truth game (Theme: Deception) -- Cop deterrence and the soft legal system (Theme: Deterence) -- The petty injustice and the everlasting grudges (Theme: Bullshit) -- SECTION V: DEATH AND POLICE CULTURE: Thinking about ritual -- The culture eater (Theme: Death) -- Good-bye in a sea of blue (Theme: Police funerals) -- Postscript.

Print version record.

Police culture has been widely criticized as a source of resistance to change and reform, and is often misunderstood. This book seeks to capture the heart of police culture-including its tragedies and celebrations-and to understand its powerful themes of morality, solidarity, and common sense, by systematically integrating a broad literature on police culture into middle-range theory, and developing original perspectives about many aspects of police work.

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