Participant Observation/Tales from the Field
(College of Marin)
This paper will present some of the high points from a twenty year study of policing which utilized participant observation as the primary vehicle to develop information about policing as a subcultural system. The author became a sworn reserve police officer in 1979 in order to study the subculture. A number of role changes and assignments within the police department took place over the period of research and a variety of social settings were encountered while responding to calls for service. The dramaturgical approach and the interactionist perspective offer a lot of potential for insight into the dynamics of what happens to police officers over the course of their careers. Selected examples from the research will be illustrated to highlight the relationship between the social setting and the behavioral and physical changes that officers frequently undergo as part of their immersion in the subculture of policing. During the course of the fieldwork a a significant number of violent incidents were experienced along with the normal daily activities of a small town police force. Injuries, were also part of the fieldwork…something which most researchers overlook when talking about their fieldwork experiences in other cultural settings.