Ethnography

  For my ethnography assignment I decided to write about my wife's uncle. He is a police detective in the city of Canton. On a normal day of work he would wear khaki pants, either tan or black with black dress shoes and a long sleeve shirt with a tie. On his belt he had a holstered Glock nine millimeter pistol and his badge. I asked him what a normal day was for him working as a police detective. He responded saying " It's either really slow, or really fast. There's hardly no in between." He went on telling me about his activities from the time he wakes up to the time he leaves work. Most of it was a lot of investigation work having to do with records from stores and receipts because he was a detective working solely with theft.

 I then asked him what he thought of his job and how he liked being a detective. He said he loved his job but was ready for retirement. After doing the job for over twenty plus years he wanted to finally be able to relax with his wife. I asked if he could describe a recent case with me to try and get a better understanding of how everything plays out in a theft investigation. He told me a story of how recently a few teenagers robbed the house of distant relatives taking credit cards and cash. They used the credit cards locally which made it extremely easy for him to trace to the teenagers. All he had to do was find out where they used the card last and approximately what time and get the video footage from the store the cards were used. The same teenagers were in a number of stores wearing jackets from the local high school, buying random expensive things. They could be easily identifiable by there appearance in the videos because of these jackets. He later asked the relatives who had been robbed if they recognized the faces of the teenagers who were at all the stores. They were horrified to recognize that the teenagers were family members. that's pretty