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Law in Action
Introduction Ambiguity, giving and competitive exchange
At around one in the morning, I park my patrol car behind two deputies who are speaking with a very intoxicated man on the side of a highway at the outskirts of a small rural town. The intoxicated man is swaying back and forth and balancing himself on the push bar of one of the deputy's patrol cars. T.D.1--an older deputy whom everyone calls a "team player," a guy who "isn't out just for his"--is talking with the other, younger deputy at the back corner of his patrol car. T.D. leans into the younger deputy, as if to avoid alerting the drunk as to what is about to happen. T.D. murmurs, "Why don't you take this hook? I had a busy week and I don't need it. If you need it, you take it." The younger deputy straightens up and, barely containing his happiness, says, "You're sure? Because it's your call... If you don't want the hook, you know I'll take it!" The younger deputy handcuffs the intoxicated man and, as he prepares to drive him to the sobering cell at the jail, he says to T.D., "You're the man!" I ask T.D. why he didn't just take the guy to jail. He replied, "I have my stats. No need to be greedy so I let him have it. You know," he chuckles, "spread the wealth!" (Field Note from Patrol, 5/10/08).
An arrest is a social process with serious consequences; arrests can deprive citizens of their freedom, their jobs, and occasionally their physical well-being. For this reason, arrests are highly regulated, bureaucratized, and rule-governed. Personal exchanges of gifts and favors are not expected to organize or influence the process of arrests. Yet arrests are laden with social meaning for deputies and, as the field note above suggests, they are far from an impersonal process. After working two years as a deputy at the Basin County Sheriff's Office (bcso, a fictional name), the first author of this investigation learned that arrests are not neutral actions simply handled according to the rule of law. Instead, they can be hoarded, bartered, given away as a favor, or...