Talking about Danger: The RUC and the Paramilitary Threat

Abstract

Ethnographic research on routine policing has shown how danger is a prominent feature of the self-image of members of many police forces, even though the degree of danger faced is not proportional to its centrality. However, members of the RUC face very real life-threatening dangers at work and home. Based on ethnographic research, this paper addresses the question of how policemen and policewomen in the RUC make accountable their feelings about being targets. Three discrete forms of talk about danger were used by them, and the paper identifies the contextual factors which help to occasion and sustain these vocabularies. It concludes by suggesting that these vocabularies are highly structured ways of making accountable feelings about the threat in an occupational culture which otherwise inhibits the expression of emotion; they make reportable the common sense notions, ideas and patterns of behaviour which normalize the threat; and make accountable the manageability of the threat in order thereby to continue with routines which would otherwise be rendered difficult.