Policing Interactions

Abstract

This chapter discusses the interactional skills and strategies that police perform when engaging with members of the public cast in a variety of roles. In so doing, it seeks to work out the principal tenets of a dramaturgical analysis of Neighbourhood Policing, including how forms of ‘face work’ and the management of impressions are part of the art and craft of street policing. The authors entertain the idea of reframing the concept of police performance from its orthodox usage, referring to a set of measurement instruments applied to gauge police activity, to a more dramaturgically sensitive understanding of how and why police behave in particular ways in their interactions and encounters with citizens, that can influence the local social order.