Law Enforcement as a Diverse Culture

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Law Enforcementas aDiverse Culture

• Texas Commission on Law Enforcement
• Officer Standards and Education

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6.0. To understand the premise of Law Enforcement
as a culture

• Identified as a sub-culture
• The Blue Brotherhood
• Lack of trust
• Looking to each other for support
• Shared norms, values, goals, career patterns,
  life styles, occupational structures
• Created culture?

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• Culture hides more than it reveals and,
  strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most
  effectively from its own participants.
• People are blind to their own embedded cultural
  behavior
• Natural tendency to interpret behavior from your
  cultural point of view

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6.1. Explain the concept of law enforcement as a
culture

• An organization can be defined as a culture
• Key values
• Beliefs
• Actions
• Sustained by
• Selection of new members
• Members trained
• Acceptance into organizational ranks
• Assimilation

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• Ethnocentrism
• Challenge in the interpretation and enforcement
  of law
• Due to one set of laws to which all citizens must
  adhere, ones culture affects its
  interpretations, meaning, and intentions

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6.2. Define Cultural Competence in the realm of
law enforcement

• Four basic components
• Awareness of ones own cultural worldview
• Attitude about cultural differences
• Knowledge of different cultural practices and
  worldviews
• Cross cultural skills

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Tips to enhance multicultural communication

• Make positive contact
• See your non-enforcement side
• Treat society objectively and fairly
• All groups have good and bad
• Go out of your way
• Appearance and avoidance

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• Patiently educate
• Be a change agent
• Do the right thing
• Am I part of the past, present or future?

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• Scenarios

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6.3. Discuss the immergence of women in the law
enforcement culture

• New challenges in male/female relations
• Camaraderie among officers
• One of the guys
• Male dominant profession

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• Most prominent workplace issues
• Sexual harassment
• Gender discrimination
• Most of the women indicated that when they were
  exposed to offensive behavior by male officers,
  they remained quiet for fear of negative male
  backlash.

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• Gender discrimination translates to unequal
  treatment for women in the workplace.
• Shown by
• Assignments to traditional womens jobs
• Tests for promotions not job related
• Held to higher or different standard in
  performance evaluations

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• Not given equal consideration for training or
  specialty job assignments
• Pregnant women not given light duty but men
  injured off-duty given assignments instead
• This double standard has also been notably
  applied to gay and lesbian counterparts

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Role Barriers

• In the act of protectingthe protector becomes
  dominant and the protected becomes subordinate
• Added responsibility of protecting women officers
• Women officers felt patronized, tolerated
• Creates barrier in peer relations

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• Today
• Double standard less prominent due to the concept
  of community policing

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6.4. Discuss law enforcements relationship with
the community

• Communities unaware
• Defensiveness engulfs the law enforcement
  community
• Blame
• Tendency to isolate
• Their own kind

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• Use of forcepast, present?
• Debated often in community
• Protect vs. Public outcry
• Community policing
• Work hand-in-hand with community
• Help bridge gap
• Allow trust

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6.5. Identify characteristics of todays law
enforcement workforce

• Policing has undergone many changes
• Attitude
• Physical make-up of precinct
• Values
• Education and skill sets

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• Let us pool the very best of all
• that we have in common
• and enrich one another
• with our mutual differences.