Holding down the Fort

Policing is one of those defining concepts of modernity about which much has written—to the point where it is difficult to imagine that there is much left to be said—that is, at the same time, decisively modern. The modern conceptualization of police referring to a fixed and commonly identifiable role, occupation and organization, rather than simply a practice performed by the state through its various arms and agents, is not yet 200 years old. Egon Bittner wrote that, “the most remarkable fact about the timing of the foundation of the modern police is that it is sequentially the last of the basic building blocks in the structure of modern executive government.” (1970: 15) The taken-for-granted structures of modern society and democratic governments not only count among them the various structures and practices of policing but to a large degree are held together and reinforced through them. Far from the simple practice of formal social control of public security, the police have become engraved as a symbol of society—for better or worse.This work is an ethnographic analysis of a police organization presumed to challenge many of the orthodoxies of police behavior, identity, and relationship to the local community. The Revierpolizei is a community-oriented policing unit which—in the most generous reading of history—predate the contemporary fixation with the rhetoric (if not practice) of community-oriented policing. Though similar units (with different nomenclature) exist throughout Germany, the Revierpolizei within the state of Brandenburg are particularly relevant for working in regions highly defined by low population densities and a rapidly decreasing population (due in part to poor economic opportunities locally.) The Revierpolizei are in a region—and in a country—where crime has not effectively become a “moral panic” or a bellwether issue in politics, at least not to the extent it has in most English-speaking countries. The problems facing the region—the pseudonymous country of “Falkenmark”—are not the sort that could easily be claimed to be ‘police-able,’ but rather tend to contribute to a generally bleak view of the future and in many cases a growing tribalism and us vs. them mentality, not unlike that which is currently upending local and national politics in much of North America and Europe.