‘You don’t want people knowing you’re a copper!’ A contemporary assessment of police organisational culture

Abstract

Police organisations have recently experienced a number of significant transformations, including changes to police officer demography, the adoption of community-oriented policing models and increased accountability requirements. The impacts of these changes upon the dominant police organisational cultural characteristics have been speculated upon, but have not been empirically assessed. Via the use of the cultural web methodology applied in both interviews and focus groups with N = 42 sworn police officers, this research assessed the key dimensions of contemporary police organisational culture. The results indicated the existence of five dominant police organisational culture characteristics: the police family, control, us versus them, masculinity, and subcultural differences. We also identified two dominant themes regarding the key changes to the police culture: reduction in social rituals and increased scrutiny. We discuss how these results both support previous descriptions of the core components of police organisational culture and update previous findings by identifying significant changes to police cultural norms and practices.