On the Relevance of Police Organisational Culture Approaches to the Prison Context

Research into the occupational culture of prison officers has provided some important and enriching accounts of prisons, of the lives of those who live and work in them and the kinds of work that take place within them. Such accounts tend to use police occupational culture as a reference point, if not as a template for such observations. In many respects, this is understandable and a perhaps obvious choice given that prison officers and police officers both work within the criminal justice system. Similarly, the wealth of literature focussing on police occupational culture provides a foundation for understanding and exploring different occupational groups which function within the criminal justice arena. This paper, however, will explore some of the broader differences between the two occupations. The purpose of this is to assess the limits to the usefulness of police occupational culture as a means of understanding the cultural world of prison officers. This is not to understate the similarities between the two occupations and the ways in which these might contribute to similar or shared culturally driven experiences, perceptions and behaviours. What this paper will do, however, is to provide a brief overview of some of the areas of difference which might lead to different cultural reference points

Golden Ages, Red Herrings and Post-Keynesian Policing: Understanding the Role of Police Culture in the Police Professionalism Debate

This paper seeks to further our understanding of the role played by police culture in debates surrounding police professionalization. It begins with a brief overview of the ‘Golden Age’ of policing which has become the benchmark for public satisfaction against which subsequent eras of British policing are now judged. This is followed by an introduction to the concepts of police professionalism and police culture and an overview of some existing literature that highlights the cultural challenges of police ‘professionalization’. The paper then seeks to position police professionalization agendas as a direct result of social change and the emergence of post-Keynesian policing. This leads into an exploration on how professionalization agendas (in their broadest sense) can be viewed as an attempt to impose, rather than remove, control from practitioners. Finally, the paper shall develop two related themes. First, that the discretion which is synonymous with the police role makes the imposition of greater occupational control problematic and, second, that being seen to control occupational culture is increasingly viewed as a measure of effective police leadership

Police and Higher Education

Interest in the relationship between police and higher education is not a new phenomenon. However, in the UK, co-operation between police and the academy has been slow to develop, particularly when compared to the United States and Europe. Nevertheless, a number of police-university partnerships and a variety of courses from Foundation to Masters level aimed at current and aspiring police officers has mushroomed over the last decade, illustrating a recent formalisation of the police-academia relationship in the UK. Overall, the relationship between police and academia has become more routine, taking place at organisational (as opposed to interpersonal) level. The recent introduction of the Certificate of Knowledge in Policing, overseen by the newly established College of Policing, is likely to further expand and deepen the relationship between police and higher education institutions. The impact of academic police education on the professional identities of the students and the broader organisational culture of the police is a topic that has so far garnered relatively little research (e.g. Punch, 2007, Heslop, 2011). Yet, professional communities, such as higher education and policing, strongly influence identity construction through the process of socialisation. Institutions define and confirm identities via expert knowledge systems that provide ways to interpret the social world and the individual’s place in it. Indeed, an individual’s entrance to the cultural landscapes of higher education or policing can be viewed as a transformational experience, requiring a renegotiation of one’s self-identity. The perceived and actual cultural and paradigmatic differences between the police and academia implies separate social (and mental) spaces which suggest conceptual tension, uneasy compromise, and a certain degree of dissonance are a possibility for the students wishing to occupy both worlds of higher educatio

Police Culture: Histories, Orthodoxies, and New Horizons

The idea of police culture has dominated academic and practitioner debate for the past half-century. This might appear, at one level, remarkable given the degree to which wider society, police organisations and policing itself has changed over this time. That said, the enduring appeal of police culture, as a concept, might be relatively straight forward to explain. The general principle of the concept, that specific yet informal values emerge amongst police officers and that these impact on how police work ‘gets done’, allow it to be applied to a broad range of areas of policing. It is, arguably, as relevant to contemporary debates about police education and training as it was to explaining police race relations in the 1980s. Furthermore, its popularity as a concept might also be explained by the fact that, for later iterations at least, it allows for the notion of cultural change. This idea that it is possible to modify, mitigate or reduce the culture and its impact has done much to make the concept attractive to police leaders, rather than just academic audiences. In doing so, it also tells us much about the new social and managerial contexts against which (or through which) police organisations operate. Increasingly, and as the papers in this special issue illustrate, scholars continue to find that police culture provides a helpful tool with which to understand these complexities associated with 21st century policing. Of interest here, however, has to be an understanding of how the context through which knowledge about police culture is generated has evolved over the last 50 years

The Role of Police Culture in the Police Professionalisation Agenda

This paper seeks to extend our understanding of the role played by police culture in debates around police professionalisation. In particular, it will seek to position the contemporary police professionalization agenda as a direct result of the shift towards post-Keynesian policing over recent decades. In doing so, this paper will argue that this transformation has signalled a distinct form of professionalisation which, in a break with more traditional forms of occupational professionalisation, has sought to limit and control the discretion available to practitioners. This, it will be argued, is directly linked to attempts to control behaviours associated with police culture. From this foundation, the paper will present the findings of a research project investigating police officer experiences of engaging with degree level study to highlight structural and cultural challenges related to using Higher Education as a tool with which to promote police professionalisation

Two G-proteins act in series to control stimulus-secretion coupling in mast cells: use of neomycin to distinguish between G-proteins controlling polyphosphoinositide phosphodiesterase and exocytosis

Provision of GTP (or other nucleotides capable of acting as ligands for activation of G-proteins) together with Ca2+ (at micromolar concentrations) is both necessary and sufficient to stimulate exocytotic secretion from mast cells permeabilized with streptolysin-O. GTP and its analogues, through their interactions with Gp, also activate polyphosphoinositide-phosphodiesterase (PPI-pde generating inositol 1,4,5-trisphosphate and diglyceride [DG]). We have used mast cells labeled with [3H]inositol to test whether the requirement for GTP in exocytosis is an expression of Gp activity through the generation of DG and consequent activation of protein kinase C, or whether GTP is required at a later stage in the stimulus secretion sequence. Neomycin (0.3 mM) inhibits activation of PPI-pde, but maximal secretion due to optimal concentrations of guanosine 5'-O-(3-thiotriphosphate) (GTP-gamma-S) can still be evoked in its presence. When ATP is also provided the concentration requirement for GTP-gamma-S in support of exocytosis is reduced. This sparing effect of ATP is nullified when the PPI-pde reaction is inhibited by neomycin. We argue that the sparing effect of ATP occurs as a result of enhancement of DG production and through its action as a phosphoryl donor in the reactions catalyzed by protein kinase C

Knowledge Wars: Professionalisation, Organisational Justice and Competing Knowledge Paradigms in British Policing

The professionalisation agenda in British policing is being driven by the College of Policing. Whilst there are a number of definitions of professionalism (Sklansky, 2014), the basic tenets of a professional organisation are that the employees follow a code of ethics, there is a commitment to use expert knowledge and that there is an element of self-regulation. Within the professionalisation agenda for the British police there are a number of strands. These include the implementation of a police code of ethics, the development of a police education qualification framework (PEQF) and wide support of police and academic collaborations to ensure police practice becomes increasingly evidence based. This chapter focuses on the latter strand of work, evidence based policing (EBP), particularly as there has been extensive debate in both the academic and policing fields about the extent to which police officers are both supportive and understanding of this concept and the extent to which they feel involved in EBP at all stages of the process (Fleming and Wingrove, 2017). In doing so, the chapter will seek to explore some of the potential issues which arise in respect of EBP by using the theory and principles of organisational justice. This will be used to explore the changing conceptualisation of knowledge within police organisations and the link this has with the professionalisation of policing. We will attempt to do this firstly, by exploring the concept and principles of organisational justice and applying this to the context of policing, EBP and knowledge work. Secondly, we will explore what we mean by knowledge in a police context and, thirdly, we will examine the potential to apply the concept of organisational justice to current views on the constitution of knowledge and knowledge outputs in the modern policing milie