Double-clicking on police subcultures: a case study on cybercrime

There are few areas of policing scholarship that have received sustained attention comparable to police culture. For decades, researchers have drawn on culture to interpret and explain numerous aspects of police organisational life. While many scholars acknowledge the potential for police cultures to vary, much of the police culture research adopts the police organisation as its unit of analysis and has focused on local policing rather than police organisations with national functions. This paper approaches culture in a different way; we focus on culture in the context of national police organisations and within the specific specialisation of cybercrime to illustrate how studying unique subcultures can advance our understanding of police cultures more broadly. The paper is based on a large, international study on the policing of cybercrime involving 90 interviews with members of law enforcement agencies across three Five Eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States). The paper examines cybercrime subcultures around the following themes: cyber as a crime type, the structure and dynamics of cybercrime units and appreciating cultural variations within those units. Our findings suggest that cybercrime has required police to respond differently to most other crime types, including in terms of how they source and organise varying forms of expertise, with these factors coalescing to evolve a unique subculture. We reflect on these findings in the context of existing scholarship on police culture in addition to implications for further research as well as policy and practice.