Police culture & anomie: An evaluation of police typologies using strain theory & the theory of the disciplinary society

Much research has been done about the culture of the police, especially in regards to the varying personality/policing styles of members within law enforcement. While there are varying views on whether police culture is monolithic in nature, and whether it has changed or not with our recently changing society, most researchers agree that there appear to be certain static recurring groups of police personas among the police officers in every police department, regardless of size, time period, and geographic location. Different researchers have distinguished varying professional personas into a variety of different categories over the years. While these various categories used by previous researchers may have served their purpose in being quite informative of the behaviors that the officers demonstrate in a professional capacity, they lack in being cohesive with one another. More importantly, these previous categories of different types of police officers do not merge with any explanations of the motives behind the behavior of these groups of police officers. So researchers appear to have separately investigated different types of police officers and the underlying motives behind their actions in entirely different ways. In other words, there is much research concerning the different kinds of police officers patrolling the streets with widely varying outlooks and attitudes and there is much research about the social factors effecting different police officers in different fashions, as well as social factors effecting police departments as a whole. But there is a need to bring these two different lines of inquiry together into a cohesive understandable whole.
So using content analysis, I have intensely applied the sociological theories of Emile Durkheim, Robert K. Merton, Max Weber, and Michel Foucault in an attempt to bridge the gap between the research and gain more knowledge of the varying subgroups of the police culture and what the underlying motivations for their behavior are. Ultimately, I demonstrate that it is the anomic nature of policing as a profession, including the anomic institutional character of police departments themselves, caused by excessive amounts of strain that is responsible for the attitudes and actions of the varying types of police officers on the streets.