Competence and Culture in the Police

Assessments of the achievement of competence in organisations often obscure the relationship between external or formal criteria of competence and those of members. Efforts to reform police practice may founder on the lack of fit between the terms in which outsiders and members construe `competent' practice. In order to approach this matter it is initially necessary to specify the terms in which members attribute competence to practice at incidents, and to examine the formal and informal constraints and goals which influence their action. This article pursues the issue in the context of ethnographic research into policing in American and British urban settings.