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This chapter investigates the nature of police work. It reconstructs the minutiae of policing in German Southwest Africa. Most of the policeman's day was filled with a series of established, unspectacular routines. Often, policemen appropriated the tasks at hand in a way that neither contradicted nor ignored given orders, but that executed them in a manner that would add distraction or excitement, or at least a sense of self-willed action to the task. In the field, policemen proceeded according to what can best be described as a tactic of making do. Policemen frequently improvised; they mixed duty and sociability, and they deployed both formal and informal techniques. Trickery paired with bureaucratic rationalization featured prominently. As a result, an organizational culture emerged in which policemen insisted on the primacy of their own experience and established a “commonsensical” course of action. More often than not, making “short shrift,” that is, resorting to the quick solution of violence, was the outcome. Integrated into daily routines, such violent behavior acquired ritualized features.

This chapter describes the lives of four emblematic police torturers and murderers in Brazil during crucial periods in the thirty years from 1957 to 1987, explaining that each violent life represents a different generation of police work, with two among the four from the military government generation. It provides a documentary picture of some of the men who carried out atrocities in Brazil over a thirty-five-year period and explains how these violence workers manage the secrecy of their atrocities.

How does a police force in the capital city of a democracy operate at an everyday level? Ethnographic fieldwork of policing practices inside police stations and outside in the policed territories and interpreting them in the light of police manuals and laws, help develop in this chapter a background to understand the place of the police as an institution and the police personnel as performers of the state, in the self-imaginations of police personnel as well as in the imaginations of those in the margins. Looking at methods of crime investigation and categories such as ‘Bad Character’, the chapter further comments on constructions of crime and criminality. The chapter also briefly engages with the question of the positionality of the researcher and how the identity of an intersectional ‘outsider’ in the space of a police station evokes complex responses.

This chapter argues that Police in Africa bears testimony to a renaissance in empirically grounded, ethnographic long-term research on the everyday dimensions of police work, combined with a re-focussing on the state as a central figure in policing and the production of in/security, and a seriousness vis-à-vis the everydayness and banality of bureaucratic work in Africa. It reflects current debates about the state and bureaucracy in Africa as well as the ethnography and sociology of police and policing, all the while refuting African exceptionalism. It also gives an overview of the contributions to the volume.

This chapter focuses on finding and identifying cases of human trafficking. Most trafficking cases are discovered by law enforcement through a report from the victims themselves or their friends and family. Agents also find out about a case through proactive police work, usually while looking at another case. Moreover, reports can come from victim assistance organizations that have had contact with victims through their hotlines or assistance programs, but this has been difficult due to the contentious nature of the relationship between law enforcement and NGOs. In identifying a case as trafficking, agents must first apply the formal criteria of the law. However, due to the newness and vagueness of the trafficking law, these criteria would require several subjective judgments.

The chapter positions professionalism in policing and police training in the context of the contemporary police mission. It seeks to define and measure police work and the police mission by examining and assessing current policing strategies, the operation of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act in relation to suspect populations, and the role that the police play in responding to racism, hate crime, and terrorism. Adopting the idea of ruptured communities marked by division and polarization as a key challenge facing the police, it assesses how police respond to riots, organized crime and gang crime, and evaluates the practice of stop-and-search. It closes with the twin mythologies of new police governance—that new powers gained by the police lead to fewer constraints on their activities.

This chapter describes how police work shapes the health context of cities and neighborhoods, and affects the lives and behaviors of countless citizens. While there has been much concern in recent years about how some police activity has harmed health, particularly among minority communities, police have the potential to improve the health of the communities they serve. Police beat work is filled with low-intensity interactions in which officers serve as problem-solvers; these problems often involve public health. Police are first responders to opioid overdoses; they also intercede in intimate partner violence, and they engage with the homeless. As such, leveraging police involvement into better health outcomes could go a long way toward helping people solve these crises. Increasingly, large cities are developing crisis intervention teams (CITs) to improve safety and divert individuals from criminal justice involvement.

This chapter details how the gendarmes in Godiya dealt with a criminal case that they had never seen before. The case was about an investigation into the murder of two little girls in Tsaga. On their first visit to Tsaga, the gendarmes had “nothing to report”; there were no traces, no witnesses, just the two dead girls' bodies. Eventually, they caught the perpetrator and they interrogated him. Contrary to interim brigade commander Chef Tahirou's initial assumption, the perpetrator was not a Nigerian organ trafficker and the murder weapon was not a machete but an axe. Ultimately, the exceptional quality of this case pushes aspects of the gendarmes' work to the fore that were central to everything they did but would certainly get lost in the description of the trivial everydayness of their usual workdays.

This chapter assesses how existing legal frameworks are anachronistic and inadequate for governing police work in the age of big data. There is now a burgeoning body of legal scholarship analyzing the legal implications of big data policing, yet it is largely theoretical. By grounding legal debates about police use of data in empirical detail, the chapter makes the case that basic legal principles are inadequate not simply because they are anachronistic, but also because the legal debates are too narrow. There are a number of ways legal frameworks are overlooking the social side of big data. First, the way the conceptual categories that underpin legal doctrine—like individualized suspicion—are deployed and organized to make normative assessments do not reflect how decision-making plays out on the ground. Second, police are not simply scaling up data collection in the digital age; rather, different kinds of data are being produced. Despite the fact that there is a difference in kind—rather than just degree—old legal doctrine is still being laid on top of these data. Third, relying on extant legal mechanisms like the exclusionary rule involves using what is meant to be a check on state power at one point in time and space, whereas data is fundamentally social and, as such, has a life course. Fourth, unfettered big data policing creates new opportunities for information asymmetries and can threaten due process through a practice called “parallel construction.”

In this chapter the real events that inspired Cruising are described and give the novel its context. In the 1960s detective Randy Jurgensen set out to investigate a series of brutal murders within the gay leather scene. This essay explores Jurgensen’s investigation and brings us to journalist Arthur Bell’s article on a very similar series of killings, which were the impulse for Friedkin to finally direct the film.