“Having the Right Nose” – The Importance of Narratives in Preventive Policing

Abstract

This paper analyses how the police use empirical data in their preventive work. In order to decipher on-the-ground police practices, it examines the procedure of traffic checks, showing in particular that police officers’ narrative experiential knowledge of space and clientele and the police’s power of definition and its applications serve as preventive tools. The evaluation of the empirical data identifies a number of self-attested police practices and then focuses on how these practices are implemented, showing that proactive policing is much more strongly framed by certain constructions of suspicion and stereotyped generalisations regarding different groups than reactive policing.