Don’t Look Down: Adding a New Dimension to Police Culture by Looking up
Geoff Cartner, Charles Sturt University
When researchers turn their attention to a modern organisation, they usually gain access to that organisation at senior management level. Studies of modern police organisations are no different. Permission to access a police organisation has to come from the top. Although the focus of studies into modern police organisations varies, most of these studies use culture as the lens to look at policing and the view through that lens is from the top down. A problem with many past studies into police organisations is that the definition of police culture used by them comes from organisational theorists. This has led to a situation where, some argue, ‘police culture’ is poorly defined and is of little analytical value. I will show in this paper that if a police organisation is studied from the bottom up, a new dimension is added to the definition of police culture. This new definition, I argue, allows the concept of police culture to be used as an analytical tool that is both explanatory and predictive of police behaviour.
