As policing has recently become a major topic of public debate, it was also a growing area of ethnographic research. This collective volume brings together an international roster of scholars who have conducted fieldwork studies of law enforcement in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods on five continents. How, they ask, can ethnography illuminate the role of the police in society? Are there important aspects of policing that are not captured through interviews and statistics? And how can the study of law enforcement shed light on the practice of ethnography? What might studying policing teach us about the epistemological and ethical challenges of participant observation? Beyond these questions of crucial interest for criminology and, more generally, the social sciences, the book provides a timely discussion of one of the most problematic institutions in contemporary society.

Content

Introduction: Ethnographying the Police - Didier Fassin

Part I: Position

• One: Accountability: Ethnographic Engagement and the Ethics of the Police (United States) - Steve Herbert
• Two: Complicity: Becoming the Police (South Africa) - Julia Hornberger
• Three: Intimacy: Personal Policing, Ethnographic Kinship, and Critical Empathy (India) - Beatrice Jauregui
• Four: Affect: The Virtual Force of Policing (Taiwan) - Jeffrey T. Martin

Part II: Observation

• Five: Predicament: Interpreting Police Violence (Mozambique) - Helene Maria Kyed
• Six: Morality: Understanding Police Training on Human Rights (Turkey) - Elif Babül
• Seven: Experience: Being Policed as a Condition of Life (Chile) - Clara Han
• Eight: Aspiration: Hoping for a Public Policing (Bolivia) - Daniel M. Goldstein

Part III: Description

• Nine: Sense and Sensibility: Crafting Tales about the Police (Thailand) - Duncan McCargo
• Ten: Detention: Police Discretion Revisited (Portugal) - Susana Durão
• Eleven Alibi: The Extralegal Force Embedded in the Law (United States) - Laurence Ralph
• Twelve Boredom: Accounting for the Ordinary in the Work of Policing (France) - Didier Fassin

Index

•  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017, 320 pages. ISBN Paper: 9780226497648. 30,00$