Aspects of Police Work.

The publication of collected works and revised editions suggests that scholarly research on police and policing is acquiring respectability. Certainly, the academic reputation of police research is advanced by standing in the reflected glow of the scholarship of these two authors.

Egon Bittner has been not only at the forefront of police research for a quarter of a century, but also the most perceptive of commentators and theorists. His dicta are inescapable: defining the police as |monopolists of force in civil society' and police work as dealing with those situations where |something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had- …