thorough integrity check, called BIBOB, which can give an indication of a
connection to organized crime. The BIBOB-research can alter the opinion
of police-officers about the moral fibre of the coffee shop owners. But
they can also define coffee shops as being related to organized crime based
on rumours and face-to-face interaction. When this is the case, they inter-
pret the transgression of these coffee shop owners differently. In one case
where a coffee shop owner was penalized, a police officer defined this as
‘just desserts’.
CONCLUSION
In this paper we started with conceptsmoral entrepreneur, moral crusa-
der, rule creator and rule enforcer that were developed over half a
century ago by Becker. We then moved to Rotterdam, the Netherlands,
and asked ourselves how Becker’s concepts could be related to police offi-
cers monitoring coffee shops. First, a description of the Dutch cannabis
policy was given in which it became clear that a process of criminalization
of cannabis has been taking place in the last two decades. We then started
off with the assumption that Becker’s rule enforcers, a subcategory of
moral entrepreneurs, would be a good way to understand the work of the
police officers studied in Rotterdam.
Initially there seemed to be a good fit between the concept of the moral
entrepreneur as a rule enforcer and the research material. The police offi-
cers seemed to have ‘a certain detached and objective view’ of their job
(Becker, 1963,p. 156) and to lack the ‘naı ̈ve moral fervor characteristic of
the rule enforcer’ (ibid., p. 159). But this perfect fit started to crumble when
we saw that in their pragmatic approach there are also layers of morality,
which influence their rule enforcing. The way they define the character and
the intentions of the coffee shop owners shapes how they relate to them, as
in for instance giving advice and educating them about the rules and
accepting a minor evasion of the rules because they try their best and are
not to blame. Another difference was observed in relation to the two inter-
ests of the rule enforcer described by Becker. The police officers interviewed
did not have to justify their existence and they did not have to gain respect
by coercion (ibid., p. 158). How is this to be explained?
One more general explanation is related to societal changes in the
Netherlands and other Western countries, such as democratization and
informalization, which have influenced and changed the hierarchical and
154 THADDEUS MU ̈LLER