Suspicious minds and suspicioning: constructing suspicion during policework

Abstract

PurposeThis article explores officer use of suspicion before informal police-citizen encounters as a method to further understand police officer decision-making. There is a body of research focused on officer decision-making before formal “stop and search” encounters, yet, while the more informal “stop and chat” encounters are ubiquitous, they are a comparatively under-researched part of policework.Design/methodology/approachThe research takes an ethnographic approach to explore police decision-making. It used participant observation (800 h over 93 patrol shifts) of front-line first response officers from New Zealand (n = 45) and South Australia (n = 48). Field observations were complemented with informal discussion in the field and 27 semi-structured interviews.FindingsIt reveals that officers applied three situational “tests” to assess the circumstances or actions observed before initiating an informal encounter. Officers then weighed up whether the circumstances were harmful, contrary to law, or socially acceptable to determine the necessity of initiating a police-citizen encounter. This process is conceived as suspicioning: deciding whether circumstances appear prima facie suspicious, how an officer goes about collecting more information to corroborate suspicion to ultimately inform a course of action.Originality/valueThe findings present a new perspective to understanding how and why police officers decide to initiate encounters with members of the public. Moreover, as the first ethnographic cross-national research of officers from New Zealand and South Australia, it provides a rare comparative glimpse of Antipodean policing.

The dual institutional work of Lyra's Walk: partisan violence and peace protest in Northern Ireland

“…Most were based around safety (wear high-visibility vests, drink water), but she ended with the admonishment: “Obey the police.” Peaceful encounters with the police sought to counter the disruptive violence complicit in Lyra's death. As we will show later, the relationship and interactions with Police Service Northern Ireland (PSNI) during the protest were complex (see Hendy, 2022 for the police perspective in a different context).…”

The police hunch: the Bayesian brain, active inference, and the free energy principle in action

“…The ability to survive these complex and dynamic environments rests not only upon established operating procedures and training, but also on an officer’s intuition; their inherent capacity to generate “hunches”. These hunches, often perceived as instinct or a gut feeling , have long remained contested, even gaining the moniker: “suspicioning” ( Quinton et al, 2000 ; Quinton, 2010 , 2014 ; Hendy, 2021 ). Research in this area is related to stopping and searching, where the hunch directs a conscious choice to intervene with a driver or perform an outer clothing search for contraband or weapons ( Alpert et al, 2005 ) and has often been collocated with race.…”