CLSC | Socio-Legal Studies Workshop: Mike Rowe - "Understanding Police Conduct: On Cultural and Institutional Explanations"

Mike Rowe, Senior Lecturer in Public Sector Management of Management School at University of Liverpool, will present "Understanding Police Conduct: On Cultural and Institutional Explanations".

Abstract
The concept of police culture has become, in Sklansky’s terms, cognitively burnt-in such that it is hard to speak of police conduct at the street level without reference to this culture. However, after conducting six years of ethnographic observations in three police organizations in England, it was not clear to me what ‘culture’ either explained or clarified about actual police behavior. In my book Disassembling Police Culture (Routledge 2023), I use a socio-material lens to reveal institutional factors that underpin police actions. Rather than cultural factors inculcated by a process of socialization, as commonly discussed in the literature, or individual officers exercising their own prejudices and biases, I observed that police were for the most part doing what their organizations expected of them. What happened at the street level, drawing on Lipsky’s theory of street-level bureaucracy, was in large part driven by the organizations’ policies, systems and supervisory decisions. In practical terms, policies, systems and supervisory decisions can be altered more easily than something as loosely defined as a police culture. Policing in the US is, admittedly, very different from the UK context, not least because of the ubiquity of firearms. I conclude by considering what might be relevant from the UK context for policing in the US.