Police Work and Identity

Andrew Faull is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Safety Governance and Criminology, University of Cape Town, Editor of South African Crime Quarterly, and author of Behind the Badge: the untold stories of South Africa’s police service members. He was previously a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) and a police reservist (volunteer) in the South African Police Service.

• 1. Police work, personal identity, and context, 2. Police practice and the good shift, 3. The good shift as fiction, 4. More than police work: precarity, policing, and personal identity, 5. Ambition, shame, violence, and respect, 6. Individualism, transgression, coercion, and hope, 7. Accidental occupations in the post-colony

"At a time when anger about police violence is voluble and global, there is a danger that the ordinary men and women who don police uniforms will be dismissed as mere villains. Andrew Faull brings a welcome dose of critical sympathy to his portraits of South African police officers. Faull is not shy to describe their violence; nor does he flinch from analysing the dark and destructive work they do. But he nonetheless keeps asking a single question with compassion and with curiosity: who do police officers think they are? The result is a work of pathos and understanding, a portrait of police officers both as agents of injustice and as authors of precarious life projects in a world they can scarcely control."Jonny Steinberg, Professor of African Studies, African Studies Centre, University of Oxford, UK"This is a very important book, contributing significantly to making sense of the complexities of the life world and the responses of the men and women of the South African Police Service. This book demonstrates that how police act is the result not simply of a workplace identity, but also as a result of their daily organisational and societal interactions. In so doing, this book steers away from stereotypes and set understandings of ‘police culture’ and ‘police deviance’ through its ethnographic and social interactionist approach which gives voice to the organisational actors it seeks to understand. My congratulations to Andrew Faull on this contribution to South African and international policing studies."Monique Marks, Research Professor and Head of the Urban Futures Centre, Durban University of Technology, South Africa"Police Work and Identity offers rich insights into the everyday workings of the South African police as well as policing elsewhere. Faull has managed to write a balanced account where our presence next to and together with the police officers from various parts of South Africa allows us to understand the world through their eyes without loosing the critical edge which is imperative in any analysis of policing."Steffen Jensen, Professor in the Department of Culture and Global Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark"In this ground-breaking book Andrew Faull brings an astute and sensitive ethnographic eye to questions of police and police-work in South Africa. Eschewing simplistic ‘cop culture’ approaches, he shows that the way policing is ‘done’ in South Africa is heavily inflected by police officers’ search for security of self and identity in a context marked by highly charged history and present-day uncertainty, inequality, and division. What goes on inside the police organization is shown to be firmly tied to the wider social, political and cultural context – and the stories people in South Africa tell about themselves and their society – thus challenging visions of timeless, context-independent police cultures."Dr Ben Bradford, Departmental Lecturer in Criminology, Centre for Criminology, University of Oxford, UK