Summary
This thesis reports the results of a comparative analysis of the attitudes held by police recruits about police work, before and after training. By employing an instrumental case study methodology combining quantitative and qualitative techniques, the researcher was able to demonstrate the early stages of development of traditional police values, over the course of basic police training at the Justice Institute of British Columbia. An abundance of police based literature has shown that traditional police tactics are ineffective in reducing crime and that some aspects of the traditional police culture can contribute to police misconduct. As a result, in the later part of the twentieth century community policing has become the philosophy endorsed by police experts and managers across North America. The philosophy of community policing promotes values that are in many cases diametrically opposed to those of the traditional police philosophy. While the Justice Institute of British Columbia and police training institutions across the continent teach police recruits about the community policing philosophy, this research demonstrates that recruits show a closer alignment with the values implicit in community policing before basic training, than they do after training. The researcher sees this distancing of self from the values associated with community policing not as any indictment of the police academy, but as an expression of the dominant discourse of the police culture through the curriculum of the police academy. Through an exploration of the police value system inferred by behaviours and attitudes demonstrated by police recruits, the researcher argues that community policing is resisted not because it is ineffective but because it is unattractive to police officers. Traditional police attitudes and behaviours are promoted in the police culture because they are more suited to the already masculinized nature of the job and are simply more desirable to most police officers than the behaviours emphasized under the community policing model. The researcher believes that for this reason, policing has failed to transform to a model based on the principles of community policing, and that the police culture will continue to resist these changes until the values implicit to the culture are challenged. Changing the values of the police culture must logically start at the recruit training level, but to be effective the researcher believes this change must also involve a process of introspection on behalf of all police practitioners.