Conceptualising the role of police culture in change strategies

auteurs Marleen Easton
  Dominique Van Ryckegem
tijdschrift GofS (ISSN: )
jaargang 2010
aflevering Safety, Societal Problems and Citizens' Perceptions. New Empirical Data, Theories and Analyses
onderdeel Artikelen
publicatie datum 24 februari 2010
taal English
pagina 135
samenvatting

The history of police reform in Belgium reveals that police culture has never been a real concern to our policy makers. The focus has always been on the structural reorganisation of the policing landscape (Enhus & Ponsaers, 2005). Similarly, literature about the Belgian police culture(s) is almost non-existent. Academics who tried to shed a light on the various dimensions of the former police force have never ventured to consider police culture as a research subject. Nonetheless many of them have endorsed the importance of this culture. The police departments often made limited analyses, but the findings were seldom or never published. Moreover, the culture of police departments has been effectively researched at international level. To conceptualise the role of police culture in change strategies, a review of this literature is necessary and this should take a number of elements into account. First, a study of a culture (the culture of a group of people, an organisation or a nation) is in itself beset by theoretical and ideological schisms. Second, a survey of a culture invariably means the researcher him/herself subscribes to a specific cultural trend. A grasp of these trends and their research methods is nearly indispensable in order for us to gain a full understanding of police culture and, almost important, for us to be able to interpret the findings. This contribution starts with a theoretical review of the problems encountered when studying culture in general and the trends it inspires. Secondly, we focus on police culture and describe the key findings of the available studies, while showing how they reflect certain cultural trends. Thirdly, we move away from the unidisciplinary
approach and we seek to adopt an interdisciplinary stance for each of the cultural study problems we explained in the first part of this paper. Therefore, the study of police culture is rather complex: various approaches and research methods have to be factored in. Conversely, the simplicity lies in the fact that opting for a specific approach and type of research allows this approach to be incorporated, its limitations to be recognised and the research findings to be assessed in the light of their true value.
Therefore, understanding culture through research paves the way for the incorporation of culture in change strategies, which is an important point of interest in current reforms of police systems across the world.