Bethan Loftus

What is covert policing? How do covert surveillance officers use their time? What are their perceptions of the work, its status, rewards and challenges? How are operations planned, authorised, carried out and reviewed? How do officers understand and negotiate the dilemmas involved in carrying out the peculiar demands of their job? Does the existing authorisation regime strike an appropriate balance between the need for police accountability and the protection of civil liberties on the one hand, and operational efficiency and the demands of security on the other?This book provides answers to these questions and more, and presents the first truly ethnographic account of the inner-world of covert policing. This book sheds new light on a largely hidden and poorly understood form of investigation and offers a major contrubution to research on police culture and police practice.

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.

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.