Contenu du sommaire : Spécial Police.

J. C. Monet An administration facing its future : the police and the social sciences. How to introduce change into a «blocked» institution whose relationship to a rapidly changing society is thus plunged into a crisis ? The police administration has been motivated to resort to the social sciences for two reasons. First of all, in order to make a close diagnosis both of the age-old factors that explain this blockage, and of the vicious circles into which daily functions have been circuited. Secondly, in order to implement a deliberate strategy based upon training and modernization but also may be the social sciences.

D. Monjardet Looking to find what police work is. Can we talk about police work ? To plan to do so is heuristic, between a naive objectification of this work and the self-proclaimed sureness of disclosures. The complex interrelationships among the motivations, interests and commitments of the actors, their professional practices, the hierarchical organization, the policed territory, and events (whether suffered, hoped-for or invented) can thus come to light. To show that large autonomy within work goes along with a slight autonomy of work is a way to comprehend an ambiguity that may not be specific to police work alone.

R. Lévy ... Scripta manent : How the police writes its reports. This paper studies the way the police produce their reports in the course of their investigations, by comparing the questionning of suspects, witnesses and victims (as observed by the author) with the official written documents which are supposed to account for these interactions. It appears that far from producing some «objective» account of «what happened», the police are in a position to impose their own version of the incident. In particular, the writing techniques that are widely used (and taught in police schools) aim at reconstructing the oral statements in a way that underlines those elements that are unfavorable to the suspect and plays down those which are ambiguous or contradictory, thereby waking any subsequent objections much more difficult.

G. Hauser and S. Tievant Promotions : A mechanism of integration, a factor of differentiation. Till recently, the same very limited and incomplete data about the seriography of the police have been reproduced over and over again. They came out of cursory surveys of a few classes in a few police academies. The extensive survey undertaken by Interface in 1982 enables us to measure the diversity of a profession that recruits and promates personnel in many ways. Using the example of inspectors (commissaires), the authors show that this plurality does not disappear in the socialization of a «subculture» whose existence, though often postulated, remains to be proven.

G. Marx and S. Wexcler Law and order in practice : A new approach to racial violence by the City of Boston. According to one of the oldest established results of sociological research on the police in North America, the police is more effective in maintaining prder in everday life than in preventing or repressing delinquency. At the dividing line between these two functions, but on neither side of this line, ordinary racial violence is not easily «caught» in a such as the police usually has little conviction for intervening. According to an experiment undertaken in Boston since 1978, this situation is not a fatality : insofar as the political will-power directing the police is firm, the latter can also be effective in these cases.

A. Chauvenet and F. Orlic Interrogating the police. What can a survey of the police teach us about sociological surveys ? Can the analysis of the relationship between the researcher and the police — the unspoken understanding that conditions a survey, the interplay of this relationship, the successive mirror effects, the limits upon exchanges — be a fertile, if roundabout, way to obtain knowledge about the object ?