Police Beat: The Emotional Power of Music in Police Work By Simon ...

The problem encountered by Grayville police, that knotty problem of public perception that casts cops as subhuman or even nonhuman, is born of an initial curtailing of emotional expression on the job. Emotional expression has no place in the department for it undermines the principal variety of policing carried out in Grayville: ‘reactive policing’. Reactive policing is carried out because it is cheap and efficient to run and produces statistically demonstrable results relative to evident police work. Reactive policing is a term that has been in constant use in police departments across Australia since G. E. Fitzgerald handed down his findings on police corruption in Queensland in 1989, in which he concluded that a proactive police service is less conducive to corruption than is a reactively oriented department (Fitzgerald, 1989). It is to avoid invocations of the inflammatory term ‘corruption’ that reactive policing is described among cops as ‘law enforcement’ policing or as ‘traditional policing’. The term police force is also occasionally used to contrast reactive policing with its opposite, ‘proactive’ policing, also known as ‘police service’. Reactive policing, by whatever name it is known, calls for the application of a well defined, priorly known, predictable and sanctioned law enforcement response to illegal acts that have already occurred or which appear imminent. In the analyses of some theoreticians (e.g., Cartner, 2000; Ehrlich-Martin, 1999), reactive policing acts are understood to be those which are undertaken by an officer after an offence event has occurred. At Grayville, however, a reactive action is understood to be any response to a crime or potential crime event in which an officer actually invokes or threatens to invoke a law enforcement action (i.e., arrest or the threat of arrest). Thus, reactivity denotes a style and an intention rather than, or at least as well as, the temporal location of a policing action in any given policing context.

A law enforcement response or reactive action is also and equally characterized by the way in which police attention is focused on the crime event that has or is likely to occur and not on the underlying reasons for its occurrence or likely occurrence. Grayville officers often talked about law enforcement or reactive policing as ‘dealing with effects, not causes’ because, where a crime event has occurred and has been dealt with in a law enforcement fashion, that crime event attracts a classification of ‘crime cleared’, indicating that no further specific police work is required on the event or on the circumstances surrounding it. The only other police action that may be carried out is victim support, which is done by specialist officers within the police department.