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Law Enforcement Officers: A Research Guide and Genre Analysis
Introduction
A discourse community is a group of people who share common goals and interest, there
are hundreds of discourse communities out there, one example of a discourse community is law
enforcement officers. I decided to focus on police or law enforcement officers because they all
share a common goal, and that goal is to ensure our safety and protect our community. Police
officers within a community have special ways of communicating with each other in time of
need, it’s something that they are expected to be familiar with, they also have a code that officers
are expected to follow, on duty and in their personal life. Police officers also make their goals
and interest very public, so everyone knows what to expect from them.
In an interview with Officer John, he told me that when they get sworn in the department,
they take an oath to follow the code of conduct that the department follows. Within that code, it
states that officers must do what is expected from them while working and while handling their
personal life, things that officers do will reflect back on their department and the leader for
example, if an officer is pulled over (off duty) for drinking and driving, that will get out to the
public and will reflect badly upon the department where that certain officer works. It is expected
that officers keep high standards, although, they have the code of conduct and rules to follow,
but that code is sometimes broken. When talking to Officer John, he mentioned that police
officers were human as well and they make mistakes and that yes, they break the code, but it is
not often.
Towards the end of the interview, we got into the discrimination topic. Officer John said
that there is discrimination within the department, but the discrimination is “not race but for
race” and he explained about it further by saying that departments want a diversion but they’re
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doing it wrong. For instance, if the commander is choosing between two people, he looks at the
achievements among other things, so if there was a black guy who had good qualities and rank,
but there’s a white guy who has excellent qualities rank, they would choose the white guy. They
try to be diverse, but it is not done properly. He also mentioned that there is some discrimination
between younger and older officers and discrimination based on sexual orientation, which took
me by surprise.
Swales 6 Characteristics of a discourse community
Swales designed six characteristics that is used to define a discourse community: the first
one is broad set of goals or interest. Police officers have a set of common goals, that includes
protecting and serving the community and following an ethics code. The second one is a
discourse community must have mechanisms of intercommunication. Officers use certain
