Some have the view that it is group socialisation and institutional routines that generate a particular working personality and a strong occupational subculture, what is commonly termed a ‘canteen culture’. The whole process of becoming a police officer is said to be very institutionalised, as probationers start at the bottom of the structure. They are placed under guidance of experienced officers from whom they pick up the real world of practical policing – the folklore as well as the common sense discourse on crime. They develop a sense of knowing when something or someone is not ‘right’; they learn when to use conciliation and when to use full force of law; they learn how to identify and classify offenders and suspects. At the same time, police officers do have considerable autonomy. Law enforcement is a complex activity and officers have to exercise discretion in all sorts of situations. As they translate written law into law in action they are constantly making key decisions. A patrolling officer may ignore a large number of minor offences everyday (prostitutes soliciting, illegal parking etc) when action is taken it is time consuming, which inevitably means that nothing is done about other offences. But through acquiring the ‘conventional wisdom’ police officers can often recognise criminals and know where to locate them. As a consequence of this they tend to concentrate on street crime, such as robbery, burglary and assault. The individuals they target are liable to feel ‘picked on’ which leads to a sense of injustice that will affect police public relations. This all affects the official statistics as well which the positivists say are correct. But positivists don’t take into account these factors as well as factors such as racism, sexism and other prejudices.
When looking at whether the police do pick who they arrest there are two main positions that are then taken are either the consensual or conflict approach. The consensual approach suggests that police have a close relationship with the community, representing the values and interests of the majority. But there are others like scraton who has suggested that the police impose law and order that reflects the powerful groups in society, oppressing those less powerful, such as the working class or ethnic minority groups.
The structural view is that they believe that the law is biased in favour of powerful groups, ignoring corporate and white-collar crimes and targeting crimes, such as theft and burglary. They believe that the police are agents of the capitalist society and the values that they have reflect the job that they have. The consensual and conflict approaches would also agree with different methods of policing. The conflict approach would favour large numbers of patrolling police, where as the consensual approach favours community response policing.
As said before the positivist theory is based on the thought that statistics are an accurate representation of crime in society. The fact that their theory is based on statistics shows it to be weak as official statistics can only provide information of the crimes that the police actually know about. This is assumed to be accurate but not all crimes will be reported to the police, and out of those that are not all are recorded. For crime to be reported, it first has to be detected. This is not always easy as some crimes don’t even get detected such as fraud as it is hard to detect, they are also difficult to record. Victimisation studies have been carried out asking individuals if they have been victims of crime in the previous year, whether they reported the crime and if the police recorded them. These studies confirmed that crime statistics are unreliable. Not all crimes will be uncovered due to embarrassment or shame, for example crimes such as rape and domestic violence. But people may not report crime because they want to sort it out their selves or something.
Official statistics are really not an accurate reflection of crime in society but are really a representation of police activity. This shows the positivist argument to be weak as they rely too much on criminal statistics and not much else.
