ABSTRACT

United States police response to the 2014 Ferguson riots has directed scholarly and public attention towards police militarisation, renewing interest in community policing strategies as a potential strategy to decrease militarised policing. However, these concepts are vague and require further empirical examination. This article proposes a novel method of empirically studying militarisation and community policing by using police recruitment videos, which act as advertisements of departments’ self-depictions. Themes of militarisation and community-oriented policing are observed using a quantitative content analysis of videos collected from the 200 largest United States policing agencies. Community-oriented themes are found to occur across a higher percentage of the sample than militarised themes, and for longer average durations of time. However, there is some complexity present across the variables, and subsets of the videos fall into the extreme ends of the two concepts. This exploratory study acts as a foundation for examining future research questions regarding police culture and behaviour, viewer semiotics, and police administrator recruiting recommendations.

摘要

美国警方对 2014 年弗格森骚乱的反应将学术界和公众的注意力引向了警察的军事化，重新唤起了人们对社区警务战略的兴趣，将其作为减少军事化警务的潜在战略。然而，这些概念是模糊的，需要进一步的实证检验。本文提出了一种新方法，通过使用警察招聘视频作为部门自我描述的广告来实证研究军事化和社区警务。军事化和以社区为导向的警务主题是通过对从美国 200 家最大的警务机构收集的视频进行定量内容分析来观察的。与军事化主题相比，以社区为导向的主题在样本中出现的比例更高，并且平均持续时间更长。然而，变量之间存在一些复杂性，视频的子集落入了这两个概念的极端。这项探索性研究为检查有关警察文化和行为、观众符号学和警察行政人员招聘建议的未来研究问题奠定了基础。