Creating the thin blue line: Twenty-one weeks of police socialization

The specific task of this ethnographic study is to construct a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of socialization that exist within the police training system. In order to better understand the process of becoming a police officer it is important to observe the organizational structures that facilitate this transformation. This was accomplished through twenty-one weeks of participant observation and three waves of questionnaires focused on ascertaining the structure of the recruit group's social network.;The general question that this dissertation sets out to answer is: How is police socialization accomplished? Entailed within this general question are more specific ones: (1) how does the structure of academy training Contribute to resocialization; (2) what are the key mechanisms contained within this system that facilitate the group change; (3) what are the formal and informal mechanisms of socialization within this organization; (4) how do these in/formal mechanisms relate to one and other?;The results of this study were that the police academy training system is the functional equivalent of a total institution and paramilitary recruits play a key role in peer socialization. Moreover, it was discovered that the recruit network evolves with a direct relation to such factors as prior structure, infrastructure, mini-mechanisms. Here again it is assumed that the paramilitary recruits are playing a key role as a part of these factors.