Territoriality And The Los Angeles Police Department Summary

In Steve Herbert's, Territoriality and the Los Angeles Police Department, the author points out six definitive normative orders that are representative of how police officers within the Los Angeles Police Department perform their duties as officers of the law. Each normative order details a specific positionality albeit structural, bureaucratic or individual based on the police offer exercising the order. The normative orders reflect the wide-range of the ways officers delineate and maintain the spaces in which they regulate. Yet, the territorial control that they evoke conjures up concern for how policing as a form of maintaining societal and spatial harmony is implemented. Unlike the normative orders of law and bureaucratic control, adventure/machismo …show more content…
Neighborhoods and community areas that are designed through architectural forms of carceral power: high rise housing projects, row houses, low income housing have become institutionalized and teach police officers, as those designed to serve and protect, how to manages these so called "problem areas." Reflecting on this point, Shabazz reveals, "…prisons were institutions that produced disciplinary techniques that could be learned and appropriated by other institutions. They taught other institutions how to punish and how to discipline their subjects (Shabazz, page 5)." When the prison is turned outward and becomes the neighborhood itself, what remains is the fanatical need to manage it, which comes from systemic orders. As well, the individual agency of the officer comes into play as these areas feed machismo efforts due to how they are place-branded as spaces that are in constant need of police …show more content…
For those that live in carceral neighborhoods, hyper-masculinity is often a means of survival and a way to demonstrate that one is not a "punk" or "soft" and can handle and protect themselves as well as family and friends. For police, this same desire to show courage and that one is not afraid and willing to serve and protect their own, which in this case is the space in which they police. Thus, if we examine how both are performing the same functions of hyper-masculinity, it becomes clear that one is desired and necessary for societal order while the other is seen as a cause for its destruction. Police hyper-masculinity is necessary in the maintenance of space despite similar tactics from those who live in carceral neighborhoods. I say this not to ignore the crime and violence that does occur. However, the same way these normative orders may not be suitable in detailing how another police department upholds spatial order is on par with the irresponsibility of assuming that all hyper-masculine people in carceral neighborhoods are exerting this energy for criminal