NCJ Number
88952
Date Published
1983
Length
25 pages
Annotation
Examination of the communications systems of a Midwest police department and a British police department considers how communications to the police are transformed by framing, encoding, and classifying messages.
Abstract
Semiotics is an approach to the analysis of signs or that which stands for or represents something else, with concern for the rules, conventions, and principles that order them. In applying semiotics to police communications, three things are found to happen: an event is selectively reported, processed, and attended to; the phenomena of interest are transformed from primary experience into secondary or organizationally encoded experience; and the life experience becomes reified. In the two communications systems analyzed, the messages about events initiated as calls become incidents within the organizations and are dispersed as jobs, and ensuing police-citizen encounters may produce formally recorded outcomes. Differences in the systems can be shown in the effects of each organization on messages with respect to degree of centralization of processing, classification, and framing effects; discretion, supervision, and technology; and transformational processes, workload, and interpretative procedures. Management and control within the two bureaucracies relates to how incidents are encoded in the technology of the communication system, although the work of the rank and file involves dealing with the complexities and unique character of each incident. Both of the communication systems examined create a contradiction between the formal schemes of management based upon events as encoded and transformed by the system and the informal working reality of policing before its transformation and processing by the formal communications system. Twelve notes are provided.