Samenvatting

This article scrutinizes the forces that are at play during the work of police officers in the Netherlands in order to unravel how they shape and give meaning to police officers’ workaday practice. By doing so, we contribute to scholarly debates in the fields of criminology and public administration and give a new impulse to the Dutch debate on policy culture. Using insights from the literatures on police culture, policing, police morality and police styles as theoretical background, an empirical study was conducted using fifteen focus groups with a total of 83 police officers working at street-level as main method of data collection. After analyzing the transcripts through an iterative coding process, four main forces that influence police officers’ workaday practice emerged from the data, partly confirming and partly expanding existing research: 1) environment and public; 2) group culture; 3) organization and its supervisors; and 4) personal factors. However, by acquiring a deeper understanding of these forces in relation to each other and to their workaday practice, police officers’ ‘moral resilience’ will increase: it will help them to act well-considered, strengthening their ability to explain the logic of their actions.