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- Title
Dramatized Policing, Misinformed Communities.
- Authors
Lyons, William
- Abstract
The article focuses on the book "Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing," by Peter Manning. Police work is a dramatic story about the triumph of means over ends and public relations over public safety. Police work is an extended metaphor for mechanisms of social control that hasten the atrophy of community life and systematically preclude from understanding the roots of collective failure to prevent this violent spiral of decay. In "Police Work: The Social Organization of Policing" Peter Manning defends the claim that policing is "situationally justified action," where the meaning of police work, community, and disorder remain provisional and contested. Meaning remains contingent on the shifting power imbalances crossing associational networks and manifest in ongoing discursive struggles within and without police departments. A focus on crimes known to the police strengthens the capacity of police bureaucracies' to assert that which should be demonstrated: good police work. In fact, "shifting attention to problems of information, systems analysis and official statistics, obscures the absence of objectives in police work."
- Subjects
MANNING, Peter; POLICE; SOCIAL control; SOCIAL structure; COMMUNITY life
- Publication
Qualitative Sociology, 1999, Vol 22, Issue 3, p275
- ISSN
0162-0436
- Publication type
Book Review
- DOI
10.1023/A:1022966107348