Everyday Policing and Legality

Abstract

How does a police force in the capital city of a democracy operate at an everyday level? Ethnographic fieldwork of policing practices inside police stations and outside in the policed territories and interpreting them in the light of police manuals and laws, help develop in this chapter a background to understand the place of the police as an institution and the police personnel as performers of the state, in the self-imaginations of police personnel as well as in the imaginations of those in the margins. Looking at methods of crime investigation and categories such as ‘Bad Character’, the chapter further comments on constructions of crime and criminality. The chapter also briefly engages with the question of the positionality of the researcher and how the identity of an intersectional ‘outsider’ in the space of a police station evokes complex responses.