This article argues that the notion of norm images does more justice to the complexity of the police organization. The notion of ‘police culture’ is heavily criticized for its homogenizing tendencies, monolithic connotations and stereotypical and negative evaluation of police work. Norm images have an analytical value, because (1) the images are contextualized within and connected to the rule of law, (2) the images are sufficiently analytically flexible for a situational and relational interpretation of the cultural processes within the police organization, and (3) the notion theoretically presupposes the resistance strategies of social actors against the norm images. The article illustrates the theoretical value of norm images by focusing on the dominant images of the ‘trustworthy’, ‘neutral’ and ‘loyal’ police officer.

This article scrutinizes the forces that are at play during the work of police officers in the Netherlands in order to unravel how they shape and give meaning to police officers’ workaday practice. By doing so, we contribute to scholarly debates in the fields of criminology and public administration and give a new impulse to the Dutch debate on policy culture. Using insights from the literatures on police culture, policing, police morality and police styles as theoretical background, an empirical study was conducted using fifteen focus groups with a total of 83 police officers working at street-level as main method of data collection. After analyzing the transcripts through an iterative coding process, four main forces that influence police officers’ workaday practice emerged from the data, partly confirming and partly expanding existing research: 1) environment and public; 2) group culture; 3) organization and its supervisors; and 4) personal factors. However, by acquiring a deeper understanding of these forces in relation to each other and to their workaday practice, police officers’ ‘moral resilience’ will increase: it will help them to act well-considered, strengthening their ability to explain the logic of their actions.

In police practice and science, police culture is often seen as having a significant influence on the behavior of police officers. With his article Police (canteen) subculture, Waddington challenged this perspective in 1999. He argued that the expressive talk in the canteen is an area of action that is separated from the behavior on the street. This led to a discussion in the police literature about how to interpret the relation between police culture and police behavior. In this article this discussion is enriched with new empirical research. This research resulted in 22 patterns that police officers use to make sense of their environment in order to act in that environment. A distinction is made in three environments: organization (canteen), street (surveillance) and situation (encounter with citizens). The distinction in different environments for sensemaking helps to re-interpret the relation between police culture and police behavior and shows that police culture and police behavior are related in rather complex ways. Police culture influences the behavior on the streets through the cultural knowledge they share in the canteen, and which they use to make sense of concrete situations in which they have to act. At the same time, the point made by Waddington seems also true. The patterns of interaction between police officers have also a function in affirming their worldview and beliefs, regardless of their behavior on the streets. His perspective is just to one dimensional. A multidimensional view on the relation between police culture and police behavior is preferable if we want to understand the relation between police culture and police behavior.

This paper focusses on the cultural aspects of rural policing by analyzing the stories of rural police officers. It shows that some central elements can be found in these stories. The core element of these stories is the constructed contrast with the imagined urban police: the rural police are said to be better integrated in the local communities, have more personal and direct relations with citizens, and have other strategies to solve problems. Rural officers often feel that they are seen and treated as inferior police. In contrast to this image they emphasize that they are more competent and have better methods of policing than the urban police, by avoiding the use of violence and escalation. These stories are an important way to construct an identity as rural police. They become more manifest at the moments that the specific identity of the rural police is under threaten.

In the traditional understanding of police culture as well as in the criticism against the use of the concept of ‘police culture’, not much attention has been paid towards the influence of the representation of police work and crime in the media. Although since the pioneering studies in the sixties and seventies of the last century it has been made clear that police work is not limited to dealing with crime and criminal justice, the mass media for decades have presented a completely different image: one of thrill seeking and hardcore action. Police officers themselves tend to ‘sensationalize’ their work. Police culture is no longer understood as a deterministic coping mechanism, but is rooted in active and constructive participation of police officers. As a consequence we must pay attention to representation of ‘the police’ by the media and ask ourselves how identity work by police officers is influenced by the representation of crime and the police in the (new) media.