Capítulo 5. A rua dos polícias. Visão itinerante

The police community on the move: hierarchy and management in the daily lives of Portuguese police officers

“…Such perceptions are individually acquired and conveyed; in other words, they are ‘private’ and not ‘institutional’. However, while from the bureaucracy perspective they may be summarised as ‘practical’ and not ‘modern’ collective and formal shared knowledge, those apparently pre‐modern action orientations are essential for local policing performances, such as, for instance, establishing different policing routes and developing variable interactive reasoning with different citizens (see Durão 2008a, 2008b, 2010). Moreover, whenever a police officer is transferred from one unit to another all contextual skills must be re‐learned, the organisational environment must again be socialised, the urban space and the relational networks produced at work must be re‐established – a process that takes up the time and energy of all participants.…”