Academic research and professional debate on policing have long sought to understand whether police officers share a distinctive way of viewing and acting within their role. The existence of what has become known as ‘police culture’ has been an enduring topic of discussion since the 1960s and continues to be widely debated today. Within the field, there is a preoccupation with the day-to-day values, belief systems, and working practices of rank-and-file officers, with
successive generations of researchers noting similar features within the occupational culture.
Increasingly, however, portrayals of a monolithic, inflexible, and negative police culture have been subject to robust critique. Yet there is sufficient evidence from research and inquiries that police services in different countries exhibit at least some of the qualities captured by the term, and as a result, a common conclusion is that changes are needed to elements of police culture(s).
Against such a background, the scope of this report is to describe and examine key research conclusions emanating from the literature on police culture, as well as the efforts implemented to encourage change on the ground. In particular, the report:
• explains the socialscience methodology of ethnography,setting out the value of
ethnography to policing research and understandings of police culture;
• supplies a definition of the central concept of ‘police culture’ and discusses what have been characterized as key features of police culture over time and in different
settings;
• identifies some standard strategies used by police services to change aspects of their culture, noting the possible reasons for the success and failures of these strategies;
and
• focuses, where possible, on attempts to influence police culture with respect to family violence, gender-based violence, and the provision of equitable policing services to racialized groups, as well as the success and failures of these initiatives.
The intricacy of the themes within the police culture debate, and discussed within this report, makes it difficult to summarize in a few sentences or words. Nevertheless, the reflections at the end of this report present the main consolidated discussion points and policy-focused demands for change emanating from previous research and thought.