This Open-Access-book questions the relationship between
institutionalized images and understandings of policing - the monolithic
ideas common to most, if not all, Western law enforcement agencies - and
contextual, situative, and local interactions where the human
representatives of policing - street-level officers - come into contact
with residents. The political and theoretical association of specific
forms of "Western" policing with democratic society can be illustrated
in the case of German integration: narratives of reform and essentially
forging new democratic police agencies in the "new German states" stand
at odds with much of the experience and statements of officers who
continued to serve following (Re)Unification. Officers who present their
works primarily in terms of their local responsibilities, expectations
and more specifically to their unique and individual relationship and
connection to their communities downplay the relevance of high-level
policing policy. Based on a two-year ethnographic study of policing in a
rural county in the German state of Brandenburg, this book explores the
local nature of policing both in terms of how police officers imagine
their communities to be and with reference to broader societal
expectations and assumptions of what police, essentially, are, can
effectively do, and should effectively do.