Sequential Standoffs in Police Encounters With the Public

Abstract

Research on interactions involving police officers foregrounds the importance of their communicative practices for fostering civilians’ perceptions of police legitimacy. Building on this research, we describe a pattern of conduct that is a recurrent source of trouble in such encounters, which we call sequential standoffs. These standoffs emerge when two parties persistently pursue alternative courses of action, producing a stalemate in which neither progress in, nor exit from, either course of action appears viable. They are routinely resolved by officers (re)casting civilians’ pursuit of one course of action as constituting resistance to the officers’ proposed course of action, and thus as warranting officers’ use of coercive violence to resolve the stalemate. In some cases, however, officers resolve standoffs cooperatively using sequentially accommodative methods. We consider how these findings advance approaches to communicative dilemmas in policing, and their broader significance for scholars of social interaction, and of the interactional organization of conflicts.