Instructor S Notes: About the Textbooks

INSTRUCTOR’S NOTES: ABOUT THE TEXTBOOKS

Policing and the Poetics of Everyday Life, Jonathan Wender.

Wender, while a former police sergeant, grounds his practical observations of police-citizen interactions in the discipline of philosophy, which uses a language and viewpoint that many CRJ students might not be familiar with. To facilitate getting used to his language and style, here are some of the words it will be helpful to know about ahead of time:

Aesthetics – relating to the nature, creation, or appreciation of beauty.

Dramaturgical – behavior that represents the way we want others to see us. (Includes how we dress and speak.)

Existential – relating to the experience of being in the world, of existing.

Hermaneutics – the study of interpretation.

Ontological – relating to human existence.

Phenomenological – relating to the development of human consciousness/self-awareness.

Poetics – a theory about creative/emotional impact.

Praxis – common practice; how a theory (abstract concept about how things are) expresses itself in or is applied to the objective (“real,” material) world.

Wender is exploring the creative and emotional elements of interactions between police and citizens, which he believes can’t be explained or responded to effectively only through the lens of bureaucratic (procedural, “objective”) processes and norms, which is the way policing has come to be structured and perceived in our particular society. He uses well known works of art and literature to illustrate the human (“existential”) elements of the ordinary police-citizen encounters he describes. If you can bear with his style until you get used to it and it forms a “cadence” in your own mind, I think you will find his observations and insights valuable in understanding some of the contradictions, dilemmas, and frustrations experienced by police and civilians alike as theymeet and attempt to communicate in both ordinary and extraordinary circumstances.

Community Policing: A Police-Citizen Partnership, Michael Palmiotto.

You will notice that we will not be reading the entire book for this class, though we will be reading most of it. I am hoping that you will keep it on your bookshelf at home as a ready resource in the event that you encounter an active, upcoming, or considered community policing program in a current or future position in law enforcement. While details of training, research, and strategies are beyond the scope of this course (though relevant to any associated individual term project), these chapters and the reference material noted in them would be very useful to anyone actively engaged in planning and/or implementing a community policing program.