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46 Policing: Int'l J. 1 (2023)

handle is hein.journals/polic46 and id is 1 raw text is: Guest editorial: Reexamining the police culture Background From the early scholarly writings on policing (e.g. Skolnick, 1966; Westley, 1970), academic explorations of various dimensions of police culture have been a consistent staple in policing research (e.g. Chan, 1996, 1997; Cockcroft, 2012; Crank, 2014; Ingram et al, 2018; Loftus, 2009; Paoline, 2001, 2003; 2004; Paoline and Terrill, 2014; Reuss-Janni, 1983; Terrill et al., 2003). Police culture has traditionally been defined from an occupational perspective as a collective bond and professional world-view that arises among police officers as a result of the common strains encountered on the job (Paoline and Terrill, 2014, p. 6). Research on police culture has outlined external and internal police environments in which police officers work and explored issues such as the us vs. them attitudes; secrecy, group solidarity and the code of silence; potential danger; crime-fighter role orientation; and the legitimate right to use coercive force (e.g. Paoline and Terrill, 2014; Skolnick, 1966; Walker and Katz, 2018; Westley, 1970). Unlike the occupational view of police culture, the organizational approach assumes that police culture is not monolithic, allowing it to vary not only across police agencies and communities, but also within subunits of the same agency (e.g. Klinger, 1997; Klockars et al., 2000, 2004; Paoline and Terrill, 2014; Wilson, 1968). The conceptualization of police culture is enriched with the addition of the rank-and-file perspective, that is, the understanding that police culture could also vary across different layers of police hierarchy and that street cops, middle managers, and top administrators could develop and participate in quite different police cultures (e.g. Nlanning, 1995; Paoline and Terrill, 2014; Reuss-Ianni, 1983; Walker and Katz, 2018). Finally, the understanding of cultural norms and values could diverge across individual police officers. In response to their occupational and organizational environments, police officers could adopt a variety of policing styles (e.g. Brown, 1988; Paoline, 2001, 2003; White, 1972), resulting in individual- level nuances of cultural variations among police officers (Paoline and Terrill, 2014, p. 21). Indeed, the increased inclusion of female, minority and educated police officers over the last several decades shaped police culture (e.g. Haar, 1997; Westmarland, 2017). Since the beginning of the 21st century, several developments shook the policing to its core, particularly in the USA, and had a potential to affect the police culture severely. The widespread use of novel technologies, particularly the body-worn cameras, pushed the issues of officer safety, citizen complaints and agency accountability to the forefront (e.g. Lum et al, 2019; National Institute of Justice, 2022). Despite mixed findings of extent research about the effects of body-worn cameras (e.g. Lum et al, 2019; National Institute of Justice, 2022), a 2020 Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research public opinion poll (2020) revealed that nine out of ten surveyed adults-regardless of their race-somewhat or strongly favored that police officers be required to wear body-worn cameras during their interactions with the public. The high-profile deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd-among many others-coupled with the related Department of Justice investigations (e.g. U.S. Department of Justice, 2015, 2016, 2021a, b), which documented evidence of severe police misconduct and racially biased policing (e.g. U.S. Department of Justice, 2015, 2016), and the related federal oversight in the police departments in Ferguson, Louisville, Baltimore and Minneapolis (Vasilogambros, 2021), lead toward the Black Lives Matter protests in a number of countries, resulted in a crisis of police legitimacy (e.g. Cobbina, 2019; Kochel, 2019; Weitzer, 2015) and yielded requests for an extensive police Guest editorial 1 Policing: An Intermatinl Jnrnal Vol. 46 No. 1, 2023 pp. 1-9 © Emerald Publishing Limited 1363-951X DOI 1O.1108/PIJPSM-022023.-201