An important recent topic of historical investigation has been the professionalization of the Ottoman police force, particularly the urban police in Istanbul. Much of the work that has been done on this question revolves around the structure of the police force, its organization and leadership, who was leading the changes and for what purpose. This tendency characterized the single early work on the subject, Glen Swanson’s 1972 “The Ottoman Police,” and is continued in more recent works such as Ferdan Ergut’s State and Social Control and Noémi Lévy Aksu’s “Une institution en formation: la police ottomane à l’époque d’Abdülhamid II.” Another part of the question, however, is what this professionalization meant to the police officers themselves. There were five ranks in the late Ottoman police, and while organizational restructuring affected all of them, little or nothing has been said in the historical literature about the lowest of them, the nefer, the patrol officer. In this paper, I discuss all ranks, but focus on the patrolman. What did it mean to be a policeman in the late Ottoman Empire? What were the requirements to be a policeman? What were their regular duties? What difficulties did they face? This paper begins to address these questions. I do this by working from a variety of sources. One very important archival source consists of exams that were given to police officers testing their knowledge of such fields as police ranks and organizational structures, criminal law, and proper procedures. Other sources include memoirs, newspaper accounts of police activities, and disciplinary reports on police officers who failed to conform to proper procedures. The Ottoman case parallels others in that the police officers often, although not necessarily, shared many of the beliefs and attitudes of the groups associated with criminal activity. While they could show discipline, devotion to duty, and sometimes remarkable courage in pursuit of that duty, they were also at times known to drink, gamble, brawl, and consort with prostitutes. Understanding what the street-level officers were faced with and what their attitudes were will help us understand the effects of the structural changes being undertaken in the late Ottoman Empire. This paper represents a step toward removing the study of the Ottoman police from a purely institutional, state-centric study and expanding it into the increasingly important realm of Ottoman social history.