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The purpose of this paper is to problematise the application of hegemonic masculinity to police practice and culture.

This paper offers a viewpoint and is a discussion paper critiquing the application of hegemonic masculinity to police officers, their practice and culture.

The paper suggests that a broader conceptualisation of masculinity, offered by scholars such as Demetriou (2001), is required when considering policing and its culture, in order to more accurately reflect the activity and those involved in it.

Writings concerning police practice and culture, both in the media and academic discourse, are questionable due to the application of hegemonic masculinity. The application of hegemonic masculinity can create a biased perception of policing and police officers.

The paper helps to engender a more accurate and balanced examination of the police, their culture and practice when writing about policing institutions and encourage social institutions such as academia to address bias in their examination of policing institutions and police officers.

There has been limited consideration in regards to multiple masculinities, police practice and culture.

Narrative criminology has continued to expand as an important theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of crime and justice. However, the vast majority of narrative work focuses on the narrative development of those identified as criminal offenders, and little research has explored the narratives of those employed within the criminal justice system. This chapter examines the importance of police storytelling and the unique narratives vital to the cultural life and institution of policing. Police stories are an important part of the ‘meaning-making structure’ in policing and often convey particular power well beyond the limitations of formal organizational or agency policy. Police stories frequently influence understandings of the nature of social problems; community change and decay; and even understandings of race, class, and gender. Police narratives and stories also offer some unique methodological challenges for narrative scholars. Analysis of police stories must focus on the underlying plot details while still analysing the themes or metaphors provided by the narrative. This may require specific attention to the role the story plays in police culture, training, and development of organizational cohesion. Furthermore, narrative researchers must explore the shared narratives distinctive to the profession, while still examining unique meanings that stories convey to different departments and even specialized units. Finally, access to police organizations and individual officers can represent unique challenge for narrative researchers. By examining police narratives, we gain unique insight into the production and maintenance of police authority and culture accomplished through the storytelling process.

Many authors describe police culture as a relevant determinant of officers' health, policing behavior and reaction to change. Investigation of such relationships requires an appropriate instrument for measuring police culture.

This paper proposes a questionnaire containing 20 values that are characteristic of police culture (e.g. masculinity, loyalty, solidarity). In an online survey, 153 German police officers described their last workgroups in terms of how typical these values are. Besides conducting item and factor analyses, multiple regression models were tested to explore the effect of group characteristics on police culture.

A four-factor solution, comprising (1) conservative-male culture, (2) institutional pride culture, (3) team culture and (4) diligence culture, seems to fit the data best. Significant predictors of the police culture total score are percentage of male officers, average age of the group and service in a problematic district.

Overall, the results indicate that police culture is a measurable multidimensional construct, which substantially depends on the composition and the operational area of the workgroup. A limitation of the study is the retrospective and subjective assessment of cultural values.

The questionnaire presented in this paper depicts the culture of police workgroups in a differentiated way and is able to detect cultural variation within the police. Future research could draw on the questionnaire to investigate determinants and consequences of police culture.

The purpose of this paper is to identify whether officers who adhere to the aspects of the traditional police sub‐culture – authoritarianism, cynicism, and burnout – are more likely to use violence against their intimate partner. Intimate partner violence (IPV) is measured in terms of both physical assault and psychological violence.

A survey was created using existing scales and was given to a sample of police officers from four departments in the southern United States. Both Tobit and logistic regression were utilized to examine the effects of the traditional police sub‐culture on the two types of intimate partner violence.

The results of the analyses partially supported the link between traditional police culture and police intimate partner violence. The results showed that two aspects of the traditional police sub‐culture, burnout and authoritarianism, were significantly related to psychological IPV. There was no significant relationship between traditional police culture and physical IPV

There are a relatively small number of police officers in the convenience sample and it is not very diverse in its composition.

The results of this study indicate that those who adhere to the traditional police culture are at more risk for engaging in psychological domestic violence than those officers who do not. The research shows that traditional police sub‐culture has an effect on police intimate partner violence. This information is important in that it may provide police agencies with some direction in implementing domestic violence prevention efforts.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the organisational cultures of two different parts of the emergency service, the police and the ambulance service.

Semi-structured interviews with 45 police officers and ambulance staff sought to understand more about the relationships between these two distinctly different professions who work together closely and regularly in often very difficult situations.

Interviews with police officers and ambulance staff revealed the strong and harmonious working relationship between the two professions and an existence of both shared organisational characteristics and shared cultural characteristics. These cultural characteristics, identified as both explicit and tacit in nature provide the “glue” which not only binds each organisation together but which appears to cement a longer term, tangible link between the police and ambulance services.

This paper reveals a new dimension within cultural analyses of occupational groups by considering the shared cultural characteristics of two groups within the emergency services, police officers and ambulance staff. This potential for cultural boundary crossing is explored in detail.

To examine the extent to which cultural fragmentation among police officers results in differences in searches of suspects and their surroundings during proactive traffic stops.

Cluster and multivariate analyses are performed utilizing survey and observational data collected as part of the Project on Policing Neighborhoods (POPN).

Differences in search behavior among patrol officers are found as a result of variation in cultural alignments. That is, patrol officers that adhere to the culture (in varying degrees) from an attitudinal standpoint are more likely to engage in searches than those who most ardently resist cultural attitudes.

Although the classification scheme captured many of the core attitudes associated with police culture, it did not measure all of them. Also, the departments studied would compare to most American municipal police organizations, but would make poor comparisons to very large urban or small rural agencies, where culture might operate in different ways.

Police administrators can use this information if they wished to alter the rate at which search behavior occurs.

This study fills a research void in policing by examining whether attitudinal variation in cultural commitment results in different behavioral patterns. This work also adds to a larger body of social science research by finding an attitude‐behavior relationship.