POLICE SUBCULTURE RECONSIDERED

Most comprehensive discussions of the police acknowledge the inability of legal and bureaucratic regulations to determine officer behavior. Attention is turned instead toward the informal norms developed within the police subculture. These discussions, however, tend to overstress the chasm between the formal and informal. They also provide inadequate tools for understanding differentiation, conflict, and change within police departments. I address these shortcomings here by mobilizing a particular conceptualization of the term "normative order"—as a set of rules and practices oriented around a central value. Six such orders are crucial to policing: law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality. I illustrate the importance of each by drawing upon ethnographic observations of the Los Angeles Police Department, and explain how my conceputalization offers a comprehensive yet flexible means to understand the social world of policing.     

ON THE INITIATION AND CONTINUATION OF DELINQUENCY*

An ongoing debate among criminologists concerns the merits of studying different dimensions of offending, such as initiation, frequency, and duration. One critical point of contention is whether separate models are necessary to explain different aspects of offending. The current study uses empirical data to assess whether different models are required to explain initiation and continuation of delinquent behavior. Using the first four waves of the National Youth Survey, we focus on the predictive ability of variables central to social control, labelling, differential association, and urbanism perspectives. We find many similarities and some differences between models for initiation and continuation of delinquency. We discuss the relevance of these results for developing a more comprehensive understanding of criminal behavior.