Suchergebnisse

This PhD study explores how the police respond to organised crime via proactive investigation as a representation of a new policing paradigm called proactive policing. Anchored in a phenomenological-hermeneutic tradition the study is based on comprehensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Danish police and examines: how do proactive investigations unfold in the police and which conditions impact this and why? The study's empirical findings are analysed and interpreted through a theoretical framework compelled by Erving Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical model for social interaction and Peter K. Manning's (2010) theoretical concept of the police métier. Throughout the thesis, a theoretical framework is built and developed concerning the police's proactive performance which is determined by a specific proactive detective métier. Moreover, the groundwork for a comprehensive embedded police research methodology is developed and proposed (Hartmann et al. 2018). The study contributes with unique empirical, methodological, and theoretical knowledge about proactive policing in general and proactive investigation specifically and how these phenomena can be studied, interpreted, and understood.

A current discussion about the role of research knowledge, particularly in Nordic police research, is concerned with research-funding collaborations being too entangled with political interests in documenting best-practices ("what works"), to maintain a trustworthy degree of critical and freely reflexive ethos. Whereas previous debaters find the solution to be one of researchers distancing themselves from their embeddedness with the police organisation they study in, we argue on the contrary that embedded, in-depth and close-up approaches are essential in producing rich enough knowledge from within the police to achieve critical and freely reflexive research-knowledge. In nuancing perspectives on the role and potential of embedded police researchers in contributing to knowledgeable policing, we suggest a framework for Embedded Police Research.