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Introduction
In his seminal essay "Florence Nightingale in pursuit of Willie Sutton", Egon [1] Bittner (1974) provided one of the most insightful, provocative, and enduring theoretical analyses of the police. Bittner's aim in crafting this work was to provide an explanation of the police function - the task that the police, and the police alone, perform in society. According to Bittner, the function of the police is to provide provisional solutions to emergent problems, which are characterized above all by the involvement of something-that-ought-not-to-be-happening-and-about-which-someone-had-better-do-something-now! The vocational ear of a police officer, says Bittner, is "permanently and specifically attuned to such calls, and his work attitude throughout is permeated by preparedness to respond to it, whatever he might be doing" ([1] Bittner, 1974, p. 28). Importantly, Bittner highlighted the fact that the circumstances prompting a police response are of a "mind-boggling variety" and that while they sometimes involve violations of the criminal law, they are not characterized by them. The class of problems toward which the police direct their attention are characterized by their urgency, not their criminality.
The key benefit of Bittner's conception of the police role, with its focus on the need-to-do-something/here-and-now nature of policing, is its ability to explain police work in all its complexity, not simply in its most visible and culturally salient aspects. Somewhat paradoxically, however, the theory's generality is also its biggest shortcoming: Because it must be sufficiently vague to account for the myriad problems police are called upon to address, it must also be short on details. As a result, Bittner's theory of the police lacks specificity with respect to the very circumstances that elicit a police response. Aside from their status as emergencies "the treatment of which will not abide" ([1] Bittner, 1974, p. 30), what else do we know about the situations police routinely confront?
Using street-level observational data, this study examines the extent to which citizen alcohol use shapes the police function. Though it is widely believed that citizen alcohol use is a catalyst for a significant portion of police officers' workload, empirical research directly examining the topic is scant. Most studies examining the issue have done so only indirectly, focusing primarily on the impact of citizen alcohol use on police officers' demeanor and behavior toward...