Paper short abstract:

In the Portuguese Public Security Police, proximity policing coexists with different modalities of policing. Through an ethnographic study in two police stations in Lisbon, this research sought to understand the process of personnel placement in the policing proximity patrols.

Paper long abstract:

In the Portuguese Public Security Police (PSP), proximity policing (Moore, 2002; Skogan, 2006; Skolnick & Bayley, 2002) coexists with different modalities, being the professional policing (Schaap, 2018) the main one in this institution (Durão, 2012). In terms of proximity policing, the programmatic dimension of it (Cordner, 1995) is very evident in the PSP, i.e., the ideas and philosophies of this perspective are translated into specific programs, with their own tactics, operationalities and teams. Through an ethnographic study conducted from October 2019 to October 2021 in two police stations in Lisbon, this research sought to understand the process of personnel placement in the proximity patrols. The data revealed that: i) the process of recruitment and selection is not standardized and neither has well-defined bureaucratic steps, and it can happen by agents' initiative or by the initiative of the chiefs in a complex articulation of network (Ii) there is an ideal profile for the job, with a set of relational and professional skills and great motivation that are expected from the police officer ( the officer needs to be a patient, friendly, good listener, sensitive to vulnerable populations matters, self-disciplined to work with autonomy, flexible to shifts changes) iii) not always the ideal profile or the articulation of social capital are determinant, since the organization uses the proximity teams also to place agents in extraordinary situations that need job reallocation, such as female police officers who have just become mothers and need shifts more suited to their maternal condition, for example.