Paper short abstract:

This paper is based on fieldwork conducted in the Hellenic Police Officers School and analyses how officer cadets perceive their societal positioning as officers-to-be while they imagine a life of a bureaucrat placed behind a desk and “leaving their gun locked in their desks’ drawers”.

Paper long abstract:

This paper is contextualised by the Greek economic crisis and the first election of the far-right Golden Dawn MPs in the Parliament. The fieldwork took place from 2011-12 in the Hellenic Police Officers School with fourth-year police officer cadets that would graduate and receive the rank of a Police Second Lieutenant in a few months. My interlocutors often discussed how their lives after graduation would change and finally would have only to worry about handing documents at their desks and passing the orders of the higher-ups to the police personnel who are doing the “street-work”. Thus, the paper examines how officer cadets aimed to improve their working and living conditions, have a stable salary during the economic crisis, and stay safe in the police departments, away from any “street work”. Central in their narratives was the elevation of their status as officers and their responsibility. However, through ethnographic examples, I will demonstrate how they cultivate informal skills of avoiding responsibility and decisions during their formal training and placements. Following Michael Herzfeld's thoughts, I argue that the majority of Greek Police Officer Cadets aimed to improve their working and living conditions by becoming “humorless automatons” (1992: 1) that ironically talk about accountability, but they practice indifference through their skills that they develop as highly trained bureaucrats. At the same time, I highlight cases of a few officer cadets who opposed indifference and reclaimed the role of the police officer as a civil servant who often had to contend with their colleagues.