Policing Space: Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department

Abstract

Policing Space examines the Los Angeles Police Department as an agency of territoriality. Based upon ethnographic fieldwork, the book explicates the variety of ways in which officers pursue strategies of social control through spatial control. Effective territorial control, the book demonstrates, is essential to effective policing. Policing Space also explains the dominant motivations behind police territoriality through use of the concept of order, which is defined as a set of rules and practices centered around a primary value. Six such orders -- law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence and morality -- shape how officers define and attempt to control space. The importance of each normative order is amply illustrated with numerous vignettes from the fieldwork. The book contributes to a wide variety of literatures, including those concerning state theory, geography and the law, and the social organization of policing.