Canadian Policing Research Catalogue

How police officers in England and Wales learn to construct and report 'official reality' / by Clive John Owen.

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Location

Canadian Policing Research

Resource

e-Books

Authors

Publishers

Bibliography

Includes bibliographical references (pages 300-325).

Description

1 online resource (352 pages)

Note

"September 1999".
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Warwick University, 1999.

Summary

"This research examines the way police officers learn to make sense of, and report, 'official reality'. 100 in-depth, tape recorded interviews were carried out with police officers at various stages of service including probationers, Tutor Constables, Trainers and a group of experienced officers. Full transcripts of the interviews were prepared and then subjected to a close-grained, qualitative analysis in which various themes were identified. The results were then subjected to a statistical technique known as logistic regression. The findings reveal, inter alia, that an officer's interpretation of incidents will change with experience. Probationers at first treat incidents as self-contained legal 'texts' with semiosis limited to consideration of 'points to prove'. Later they begin to take into consideration contextual factors. More experienced officers introduce experiential or `intertextual' factors into their semiosic activity so that their interpretation includes not just synchronic but diachronic elements. Various `interpretive communities' are identified linked to structural groupings within the policing institution and impacting on the way incidents are interpreted and reported.Police culture[s] is shown to largely determine what elements of an incident are seen as salient and what are ignored."--Summary.

Subject

Online Access

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