Tangled up in blue - Conflicting paths to police legitimacy

Police departments struggle to legitimate themselves to the publics they serve. This challenge is fundamentally related to different possible articulations of the relation between society and state. Three key articulations are critical to the relationship between the police and the citizenry, what I term subservience, separation and generativity. I explore each of these, and illustrate their presence in everyday police practice, drawing upon qualitative data gathered during observations of police patrol and police-community forums in Seattle. Because each of these modes of the state-society relation is significant, and because they lie in some tension with one another, the legitimacy of the police promises to be a site of ongoing political contestation.