Suchergebnisse

Abstract
This paper examines new meanings that police–citizen interactions take on when officers make sense of them through the lens of body-worn cameras (BWCs). Drawing on 30 interviews with frontline police officers in a large Canadian city, we analyse the embodied character of BWCs to show how officers reframe their role and the subtleties of their approach in dealing with the public as more robotic. First, the participants believe BWCs curb their ability to build rapport with citizens, and therefore dehumanize interactions. Second, they report a need to operate more mechanically to follow protocol for case-building and use-of-force. Still, 100 per cent of participants remain in favour of BWC use—in an era of high visibility and pressure for accountability, video recording technology offers protection.

Studies of antagonistic interactions, specifically in policing, frequently view (de)escalation as a linear process without considering how officers perceive and anticipate interactional processes. We argue however that officers perceive tense encounters with civilians as characterized by a back-and-forth going of various trajectories, goals, and directions. Based on our interactionist and ethnomethodological conceptualization of interactional trajectories, we analyse 25 video interviews and 46 elicitation interviews. Our analysis focuses on officers' interpretations of "turning points," e.g., sudden shifts in their own, their colleagues', or civilians' bodily behaviour that redirect their projected trajectories and which necessitate po- lice action, sometimes violence. This article moves beyond a purely situational understanding of police-civilian encounters by incorporating officers' accounts of their experiences and bodily actions, as elicited by watching video recordings of police-civilian encounters. We argue that our conceptualization of trajectories and turnings points as well as our video-based interview method shed light on the importance of bodily action police-civilian encounters; maintaining public order is to anticipate and redirect perceived turning points that potentially disturb routinized patterns of bodily actions.

Summary This study investigates the experiences of social workers with tense and threatening situations in homeless shelters of the Salvation Army in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Clients intimidated and threatened social workers verbally, damaged property and, in some cases, physically assaulted them. The study is based on qualitative analyses of 18 interviews. Findings Social workers reported that such situations have intense emotional, bodily and mental impact. Their main concern is to manage overwhelming bodily manifestations of fear and tension to maintain work-related comportment. We demonstrate that social workers use emotion/body work in their attempts to control their own and their clients' emotions. We also found that social workers' emotion/body work is informed and supported by feeling rules that revolve around their identity as professionals. Being a professional social worker means to be in control of the situation and to regard the aggression and violence of clients from a distanced, sociologized perspective. Finally, social workers note the longer term emotional consequences of their experiences, but also of their emotion/body work, in the sense that some of them become habituated to violence. Applications The study concludes that more systematic attention should be given to the 'emotion/body' work of social workers who are exposed to tense and threatening situations, in both academic studies and current prevention policies and practices. While the former tend to offer a disembodied view of work place violence, the latter do not give sufficient attention to sharing and reflection on the emotional and bodily experiences among social workers.