Fuck: The Police

• Published date: 01 March 2025
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/10986111241241750
• Author: Ian T. Adams
• Date: 01 March 2025

Article

Police Quarterly

2025, Vol. 28(1) 3–44

© The Author(s) 2024

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DOI: 10.1177/10986111241241750

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Fuck: The Police

Ian T. Adams

1

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Abstract

This study focuses on police profanity, with a particular interest developing reasonable

policy to regulate the use of the word “fuck.”Officers employ “fuck”as a linguistic tool

to accomplish a range of goals, such as establishing authority, fostering solidarity, and

diffusing tension. However, “fuck”can also be used derogatorily, and negatively impact

public assessments of police actions. Policy in this area is either absent, overly broad, or

inappropriate to its intended use. Following brief, unstructured interviews with line and

executive officers, I propose a novel policy theory of profanity, deriving target and

intent. I test the theory with a pre-registered experiment administered to a national

sample of police and human resources executives (n= 1492), with each respondent

evaluating multiple vignettes (n= 5280 observations). Results support the proposed

theory and generate useful recommendations for practitioners interested in

strengthening the ability of agencies to constrain professionally inappropriate use of

profanity in the police workplace.

Keywords

fuck, police, profanity, policy, expletive, public trust, discipline, target, intent

Introduction

Police officers use brutal language, which has occasionally been the target of scholarly

disapproval.

1

Taking a less critical view, other scholars have portrayed the profanity

used by police officers as “analytically ordinary”(Sausdal, 2020) and no more than

1

Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, USA

Corresponding Author:

Ian T. Adams. Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

29208-0001, USA.

Email: ian.adams@sc.edu

backstage (Goffman, 1959) bullshit (Frankfurt, 2009), lacking either specific intent or

meaning (or both). Profanity, scholars have recently suggested, is not merely something

the police use, but also describes a core police function: “they unfuck people’s

problems”(Huey & Johnston, 2023, p. 1).

Beyond these theoretical considerations, empirical studies have shown thatexcessive

use of profanityadversely affects publicperception of police actions,including the use of

force (Martaindale et al., 2023;Patton et al., 2017;Sharps et al., 2019). This concern

aligns with researchthe connects the use of profanitywith low self-control and generally

deviant behavior (Reisig & Pratt, 2011). Despite these concerns, contemporary police

policy has been inadequate in effectively managing the use of profanity by officers. This

inadequacy, I contend,is a result of a failure to preciselydefine the scope of the problem.

Profanity serves multiple purposes inthe daily lives of officers, thus rendering blanket

prohibitions ineffective. The centralquestion, therefore, is: When should policy prohibit

and sanction police profanity? And when should it recognize such incivility as situa-

tionally normal, healthy, and bond-forming (Baruch et al., 2017;McWhorter, 2023)?

The challenge of regulating officer behavior often rests on the policies instituted by

law enforcement agencies. Crafting effective policies is crucial, especially when

confronting complex and sensitive issues like profanity (Alpert & Smith, 1994a;Noble

& Alpert, 2008). Given the potential negative impact of profanity on public percep-

tions, and the range of contexts and intentions in which profanity is used, neither

blanket bans nor ignoring the issue are effective or realistic. This study seeks to address

this policy void by exploring the innumerable uses of the word ‘fuck’by police officers

with the aim of providing insights that can guide the formulation of more nuanced and

effective policies on the use of profanity in professional policing contexts.

I address this gap in police profanity policy in three parts. First, by canvassing the

concerns of police executives, I demonstrate that there is a great deal of apprehension

around using policy to address profanity, even as they generally understand it to be –in

extremis –a potential problem for community relations. Here, I found that police

executives were often afraid to regulate profanity on the off-chance that some profanity

could be useful, normal, healthy, and even necessary to the safety of officers in some

scenarios. The lack of policy guidance remains problematic, however, as officers are

“highly responsive to managerial directives”(Mummolo, 2018, p. 1) and may exhibit

less professionalism in the absence of guidelines, which can, in turn, undermine public

trust in the police (Tyler, 2004). Second, I draw on my own experience and that of other

front-line police officers (both current and former) to sketch the outward edges of the

use of a specific expletive: fuck. In doing so, I find that both critics and supporters of

police profanity are, in some regard, correct in their views. “Fuck”can be derogatory,

demeaning, and hurtful; however, it can also be the source of much needed humor in

challenging situations, as well as an affirmation of camaraderie: rather than targeting

the public, the word is largely used as an outlet to “let off steam”or, conversely, as

emphasis when praising colleagues and the like.

In considering the executive and line-officer experiences, I propose a theory of

profanity policy that focuses on the target (self, colleague, or public) and intent (neutral,

4Police Quarterly 28(1)

positive, or derogatory) of a particular use of profanity. In the final section, I test the

proposed theory, systematically varying the target and intent in a pre-registered ex-

periment administered to a large sample of police executives and public sector human

resources’managers. I demonstrate a useful path forward for narrow, but effective,

profanity policy: derogatory profanity targeting colleagues, and all forms of profanity

targeting the public, are universally rated less appropriate, less professional, more

harmful to public trust, and more deserving of disciplinary sanction.

Literature Review

The use of illicit, taboo, and improper words is theorized to have been with humanity

for as long as language itself (Jay, 1999). While no single agreed-upon definition exists,

a useable version is “the use of taboo language with the purpose of expressing the

speaker’s emotional state and communicating that information to listeners.”Profanity

across all forms of media has increased, and is paralleled with a rise in publicusage.

In this study, I focus on the particularized use of a specific form of profanity: the

word “fuck”and its derived uses and meaning. Fuck is a versatile, profane term that can

be used as a verb, noun, or interjection; it can be used to express a wide range of

emotions, actions, or descriptions. Depending on the context, it can be used to convey

anger, annoyance, surprise, or even approval.

Fuck, therefore, is the ur-curse, “the word that has the deepest stigma of any in

language”(Read, 1934, p. 264), and, until fairly recently, was considered unfit for

publication. For example, it was not even cited in omnibus dictionaries until late into

the 20

th

century. Previous scholarship proposes that, prior to the Reformation, the worst

of swear words were those that took liberties with the divine. God, damn, and goddamn

were all considered terrible breaches of propriety, while those dealing with intercourse

and excretion had little hold on the lurid imagination, and were as common and in-

nocuous then as the word “damn”is today. Fuck comes to us “quietly out of the mists of

time”in a 1528 letter that mentions “a fuckin abbott”(McWhorter, 2021a, pp. 47–48).

Today, the word extends across national and language barriers, and is commonly used

worldwide as an English “loan word”that replaces local language curses (Fjeld et al.,

2019).

Fuck as a focal subject is common to the scholarly treatment of profanity, with

authors dedicating whole chapters (see, e.g., McWhorter, 2023, Chapter 2), or using it

as the main exemplar for a broader discussion of the general topic of profanity (Adams,

2016). Somewhat perversely, people have studied the word, even when using the actual

word is so terrible that the author opts to only obliquely infer its existence (Read, 1934).

Focusing on fuck here has a useful methodological quality as well, as its primacy of

place allows theorizing guided by the most extreme example of a phenomenon. Lesser

profanities—asshole, bitch, dick—among others, are prevalent in daily police verbiage

(Van Maanen, 1978) and can readily fall under the umbrella of a police policy that

addresses the worst of words.

Adams 5