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作者

Mike Rowe Michael Rowe

来源

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY,Vol.50,Issue6,P.751–774

语言

英文

关键字

作者单位

1Management School, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK;2Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK

摘要

Much media and academic representations of police work focuses on action, and moments of excitement, drama, and danger. In this article, we consider, instead, those long periods of relative inactivity that characterize routine operational policing, which we refer to as times of “nothing” (consciously using quote marks since we argue that these quiet periods are actually opportunities in which valuable work is done). We identify three types of “nothing”: nothing that is inevitable and necessary; nothing as a creative space; and nothing as the absence of demand. We argue that we need to understand these and their part in policing practice. Moreover, recognizing the importance of “nothing” in police work serves as a corrective to politicized representations of policing and can help derail aggressive, hypermasculinized policing tropes.