A fighting fetish: On transnational police and their warlike presentation of self

Abstract

Transnational police readily use martial language in the stories they tell about their work. Their actual work, however, tells a different and less dramatic story. Why, then, do they insist on these warlike tales? Why is there a discrepancy between the self-representation of transnational policing and its reality? Using an ethnographic study, this article provides some answers. First, it includes an overview of three established explanations of the inclination of transnational police to represent their work in warlike terms. Next, an additional reading is presented. Building on Reiner’s discussion of “police fetishism”, this reading proposes that transnational policing actors have an idée fixe about their own professional inevitability. They blindly believe that policing must exist, but also that it has to be done combatively to truly work. In conclusion, the article contemplates what the existence of such a “fighting fetish” means in both theoretical and reform terms.

A collaborator? Ethnographic issues of police and peer suspicion

“…You know, someone who'll misinterpret or misuse what we say.' As a police ethnographer, I have had many front-row insights into the police's workaday efforts to combat issues of transnational crime in Denmark and beyondinsights which among other things have led me to discuss both the surprising triviality of such work (Sausdal, 2021a;Sausdal and Lohne, 2021), and graver issues such as police xenophobia (Sausdal, 2018c), violence (Sausdal, 2019), surveillance (Sausdal, 2018a) and warlike behavior (Sausdal, 2021a) as they relate to what Bowling and Sheptycki (2010) have termed "the globalization of policing". This chapter looks at another issue; an issue of methodology rather than theory.…”

Police Prejudice or Logics?

“…While not at all disregarding the possibility of police prejudice being part of the equation, this article ponders an additional explanation. Building on my ethnographic experiences of researching detective work (Sausdal 2018(Sausdal , 2019a(Sausdal , 2020a(Sausdal , 2020b(Sausdal , 2021a(Sausdal , 2021b(Sausdal , 2021c(Sausdal , 2021d, the article draws on Martin Innes's (2002) writings about the existence of a specifi c "mode of investigational rationality. " It does so to be able to further refl ect on why the Danish police chose not to pursue a hate crime charge.…”