Contemporary Police Officers in Urban Minnesota and Wisconsin
In the challenging George Floyd context, I have undertaken a UROP project (spring 2021) that has focused on how police discovered their commitment to enforcing the law and the main values and orientations they use “on the job”; how they distinguish their “power… from raw violence by its normative qualities” (Martin 2018). To clarify, given their authoritative position, they can choose to either improve a citizen’s life or damage it. Why, from their perspectives, did they become a policeman? What are the philosophies and methods that they use? Borrowing methods from Spradley (1979), I interviewed six male, veteran or retired police officers from the Madison and Twin cities area departments. Although I discovered a range of motivations for why they joined the force, they all said that communication and empathy was their tool of choice with physical force being the last resort. For example, I interviewed Bruce, an officer for the UW-Madison department, who saw policing as the beginning of a healing process for students, mental illness sufferers, and non-student civilians that he works with on the job. Clint, a retired beat cop for the Madison police department, viewed policing as a communal occupation, even when a part of a large city department: establishing personal relationships with families, especially those in the struggling lower socioeconomic class. The remaining question I want to explore in this presentation is how normative accounts of policing fit, or do not fit, with events and circumstances “on the street.”