Not only do the police officers generally have a co-operative relation
with coffee shop managers, but they actually praise them for their compli-
ance and pro-active behaviour. For instance, the police officers state that
managers explicitly pay attention to clients who double-park and act
pro-actively towards them. The managers tell them to park somewhere else
or they will not sell cannabis to them. The observations of the coffee shops
showed that all coffee shops had signs warning that clients who double-
park will not be served. Some actually had put objects on the pavement
to prevent people from parking there. In front of most coffee shops I
observed, there was no illegal parking, except for two cases. In the first
situation a security person employed by the coffee shop would sometimes
approach a client whose car was double-parked after which this person
moved his car. In the second situation there were several cars parked illeg-
ally. The police were handing out fines. When I approached them they told
me that it is always busy in the shop between 17.00 and 18.00 hrs, because
many clients buy their cannabis after work. The police told me that they
came here often and fined people for illegal parking. I pointed to the signs
indicating that clients who park their car illegally will not be served and I
stated that they did not seem to be effective. One officer told me that there
were two people working in the coffee shop, one selling the cannabis and
one doing the surveillance, but when it gets busy he has to help out behind
the counter. When I asked if they would get into trouble for this, he said
that they were doing their best and were not to blame. This line of reason-
ing implies empathy and is, again, related to morality because it refers to
the question of guilt and intention.
The police officers also appreciate the efforts of the coffee shop owners
to combat anti-social behaviour by young men hanging around the coffee
shops. Customers who hang around smoking a joint are requested to leave.
Some coffee shop owners have hired a security person or bouncer to
supervise their clients. According to the police officers I interviewed, not
all coffee shops have done this, but where it is needed, coffee shop
owners have hired extra personnel to intervene in situations of anti-social
behaviour.
When I asked a police officer to tell me which of the coffee shops were
co-operating, he replied ‘you’d better ask who is doing a bad job’, implying
that this question was easier to answer because there were only a few pro-
blematic coffee shops. The officers shared several morality tales which were
the opposite of atrocity tales (Best, 1987; Johnson, 2008). The coffee shop
managers acted as the good citizens in these narratives. One tale was about
a coffee shop owner in District South, who regularly brought minors to the
152 THADDEUS MU ̈LLER