The Normative Ordering of Police Territoriality: Making and Marking Space with the Los Angeles Police Department

Abstract The power of police officers to shape social action depends fundamentally on their capacity to control space. Without effective territorial strategies, police officers would be unable to create order in the majority of incidents they handle. This paper draws upon fieldwork in one patrol division of the Los Angeles Police Department to illustrate the significance of territoriality to police efforts at social control. The fieldwork illuminates the complex structuring influences on the processes by which officers define and seek to control the spaces they patrol. Legal and bureaucratic stipulations shape police territoriality, but so too do subcultural norms and values. I mobilize the concept of a “normative order”—defined as a set of rules and practices that are structured around a central value—as a means of capturing the mix of influences on police efforts at socio-spatial control. The discussion explains how six of those orders—the law, bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo, safety, competence, and morality—structure the territorial tactics of the LAPD.