"MATA WEAR SHORTS AGAIN!": IDENTITY WORK AMONGST COMMUNITY POLICING OFFICERS IN SINGAPORE

Abstract

Community policing has been one of the Singapore Police Force’s (SPF) central tenets since the initial inception of the concept in the 1980s and has been identified as being instrumental in building public confidence in the SPF (Shah 2020). The most recent iteration of SPF’s community policing strategy - the Community Policing System (COPS) implemented in 2012 - has introduced a specialised occupational role in the form of Community Policing Officers (CPOs) whose responsibilities and jobscopes are distinct from the “traditional”, “crime-fighting” roles of patrol officers and investigation officers. This paper hence aimed to investigate how CPOs understand and portray their occupational identity in relation to the public and organisational discourses surrounding community policing by utilising Watson’s (2021) four-fold framework of identity work. Upon the conclusion of an ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of three months, it was found that while CPOs actively engage in identity work to fulfil their “professional” role as the “friendly community partner”, these processes are often contradicted and complicated by the continued dominance of public and organisational perceptions of the police as authoritative “crime-fighters”. Officers therefore have to carefully navigate their way around these contradictory expectations and the various structural complexities on the ground by presenting the persona appropriate for the situation that they are faced with in order to continue their work of maintaining police-public relations and enhancing public trust in the SPF.