Holding down the Fort : policing communities and community oriented policing in rural Germany Introduction Our town: the sociology of policing communities Setting the stage: setting method and perspective Framing police encounters: the dramaturgy of authority Violence and the police Community tales: storytelling experience and local knowledge The police and community maintenance Postscript: retrospective auto ethnography. This Open Access book questions the relationship between institutionalized images and understandings of policing – the monolithic ideas common to most if not all Western law enforcement agencies – and contextual situative and local interactions where the human representatives of policing – street level officers – come into contact with residents. The political and theoretical association of specific forms of “Western” policing with democratic society can be illustrated in the case of German integration: narratives of reform and essentially forging new democratic police agencies in the “new German states” stand at odds with much of the experience and statements of officers who continued to serve following (Re)Unification. Officers who present their works primarily in terms of their local responsibilities expectations and more specifically to their unique and individual relationship and connection to their communities downplay the relevance of high level policing policy. Based on a two year ethnographic study of policing in a rural county in the German state of Brandenburg this book explores the local nature of policing both in terms of how police officers imagine their communities to be and with reference to broader societal expectations and assumptions of what police essentially are can effectively do and should effectively do. About the author Aaron Bielejewski is a research associate at the Centre for Criminological Research Saxony. He studies cultural and interactionist aspects of police work and prison.