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.