POLICE ISSUES
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who guards the guardians)

    There are a limited number of issues (matters of trans-jurisdictional concern) in policing, as there are only about ten (10) areas of scholarly interest in the field known as police science.  One or more of these areas make up enough content for a separate course, but only a brief overview is presented here.  There's no specific order in which the issues have to be examined, but the following lineup will be used -- police organization & management; styles of policing; operational strategies; police use of technology; socialization into the police culture, including recruitment, selection, and training; use of force; police dangers and stress; police ethics; accountability of police to the public; and multiculturalism in policing.

POLICE MANAGEMENT

    History has shown, time and time again, the disastrous consequences of bad police management.  Police managers include any sworn rank above that of sergeant.  This isn't just an issue of who gets promoted or the unique stressors at each rank - although those are important areas of research in themselves.  It's more a problem with the shape of the organizational pyramid - always a hierarchy with the chief at the top and rigid chains of command flowing to the bottom.  The pyramid needs to be inverted, with the community at top, followed by line officers, then managers.  Police organizations are tall, closed, hierarchical, paramilitary bureaucracies, and this combination represents the worst of management science.

    Police managers serve as a citizen's gateway to the criminal justice system.  This is reflected in the experience of being told "that's not a police problem", which is a management decision, with line officers simply relaying what their supervisors will or will not accept.  In actual fact, it's probably the line officer and the citizenry who should be deciding what's a police problem.  Unfortunately, the bureaucracy gets in the way by: (1) limiting ingenuity - no lower level employee gets to use their particular skills, ideas, or talents; (2) limiting contact with the community - a pseudo-professional distance develops between people and the police; and (3) limiting contact within the department - employees in one area don't know what employees in the other area are up to.

    Delegation of authority is supposed to make the system work.  The chief delegates authority to commanders, who delegate authority to managers, and so on down the line.  Written guidelines in the form of policies and procedures also regulate conduct.  However, delegation only works in small-to-medium departments where everyone is alike and a generalist.  Large police departments have precincts, divisions, bureaus, and specialists where authority cannot be easily delegated.  The fact that real authority only passes down thru those who fit the mold of uniformed street cop generalist is a factor that inhibits any specialization or progress in policing.  Trying to change things in this area is like trying to bend granite (Guyot 1979).                     

POLICE STYLE

    A police style is how each department and officer view their particular mission or purpose and identify with particular methods or techniques to fulfill that purpose.  At the departmental level, style reflects the historical legacy of the agency, and to a lesser degree, the socio-demographic characteristics of the population it serves.  At the individual officer level, style reflects "grace under pressure", or what has developed in the person as the best part of their philosophy of policing or the "war stories" that make up the symbols of what they see as good police work.  Other definitions of style exist, but these are as good as any.

    The first person to study style was Wilson (1968), and his typology of three styles remains useful today.  Each department usually has one of three styles, although some may be a mix of two.  The three styles are: (1) watchman; (2) legalistic; and (3) service.  Briefly, a watchman style is generally found in poorer communities and emphasizes informal police intervention - persuasion, threats, roughing up - rather than arrest because the priority is maintaining order.  A legalistic style is a commitment to enforcing the letter of the law and frequent use of arrests in a focus on community safety, but takes a hands-off approach to community problems that are not crimes.  A service style is bent on helping the community by working hand in hand with social service agencies, and by using referrals rather than arrest.

    Other models of police work have been suggested by Kleinig (1996) who proposes that police departments tend to think of themselves in one of the following ways: (1) crimefighters - using the military model to portray criminals as the enemy or bad guys and police as the good guys; (2) emergency operators - using the firefighter model to portray themselves as emergency handling professionals who just happen to be competent at crime control; (3) social enforcers - using the band-aid model to portray themselves as fixer-uppers who settle things once and for all by force if necessary; or (4) social peacekeepers - using the peacekeeping model to portray themselves as pacifiers of the populace, bringing peace and psychologically satisfying closure to social conflicts.

    Individual officer styles have been proposed by Broderick (1977) and Muir (1977). Broderick's typology is based on respect for due process, and consists of: (1) enforcers - with little respect for due process; (2) idealists - who want to keep the peace but respect due process; (3) optimists - who emphasize due process; and (4) realists - who don't seem to care about anything, much less due process.  Muir's typology is based on passion to use force, with what he calls professionals and enforcers who use force, and reciprocators and avoiders who avoid force.  Some criminal justice experts find the study of police style to be a futile attempt to stereotype or pigeonhole departments and officers.  Others find it an illuminating and useful area of study.      

POLICE STRATEGY

    A strategy (as opposed to a tactic) is a long-range goal or plan designed to bring about some particular accomplishment or outcome.  Strategies are always practical or operational in character, but often have long-term impacts on both the agency and community.  Most strategies can be identified with the time periods when they were popular.  A strategy popular in the 1960s, for example, was police-community relations.  Abbreviated and known as PCR programs, this was a strategic approach to getting people to respect the police again (since the 1960s were characterized by riots and hatred of police).  Specific operational forms of PCR included ride-alongs (so people could spend a day seeing what police went through), and open houses (so people could come inside police stations and see there were no dungeons, torture chambers, or the like).  Some PCR programs still exist, such as neighborhood watch, Officer Friendly (DARE) programs, Police Athletic Leagues (midnight basketball), and property engraving services.

    During the 1970s, police experimented briefly with team policing, an idea thought to have originated in Aberdeen, Scotland, but took different forms in America.  In some places, it was a demilitarization movement, getting rid of uniforms and replacing them with stylish civilian blazers.  In other places, it was the elimination of detectives (who make up 15% of an average department), and giving patrol officers the authority to do detective work.  In most places, however, it involved officers being semi-permanently assigned to particular neighborhoods, to get to know the local people and problems intimately. 

    In the 1980s, police tried different variations of patrol strategy.  Directed patrol was tried, where police concentrated their patrol time in areas that crime analysis showed were hot spots.  Aggressive patrol was tried, which is the same as roadblocks or crackdowns.  A few places tried foot patrol.  Other places tried split-force policing, known today as differential response, which is when half the patrol cars are committed to certain problem areas and the other half can respond to calls.  The 1980s also saw widespread abandonment of two-person patrol cars.

    The 1990s have been characterized by two strategies: problem-oriented policing, the idea that police find out what is causing citizen calls for service, or the crime problem; and community policing, a philosophy of cooperation with citizens on what citizens regard as their problems and needs.  Research on the effectiveness of police strategies has produced mixed results, although it looks like the general trend toward more community involvement is here to stay.             

POLICE TECHNOLOGY

    Policing has always been technology-driven.  For example, inventions such as radio, telephone, and automobiles have profoundly shaped police work.  Computers and forensic techniques, however, have a long way to go (although there are some sparkling examples of high-tech computing and forensic labs in some places).  Even today, one might find police departments that still use typewriters, Vascar (a low-tech version of radar), and have no idea how to collect and process DNA.  Fairly rapid progress is being made, but the main problem, as most experts see it, is that police are interested primarily in technological advances that deal with weapons, armor, SWAT-like stuff, and newer, better ways of taking people down to control and detain them - as opposed to technology that might get at the root causes of crime and allow police to work smarter, not harder.  For example, a police officer might never complain about the battery life on a laser-guided handgun, but one minor glitch in a software program that analyzes crime hot spots and the whole idea of using computers to do better police work is thrown out the window.       

POLICE SOCIALIZATION

    No other occupation has had their culture and personality more thoroughly analyzed than the police.  In all fairness and frankness, attention in this area is rather embarrassing, but reveals some unpleasant facts.  First of all, there's the problem of recruitment.  Recruits generally come from the blue-collar labor force or the military, people who are tired of being carpenters, plumbers, truck drivers, or contractors, and soldiers who have been steered into police work by military tradition.  The cause may be because newspaper ads for police jobs are typically placed in the unskilled or skilled labor sections of newspapers, but it represents a serious problem because it means police have never figured out how to recruit from college campuses, the private security industry, or places where women and minorities might be found.  

    Following recruitment is selection.  Some good people are weeded out from police work because of unfortunate accidents with the law, drugs, or their credit history.  Some police departments can't hire the foreign-language speaking officers they need because of naturalization requirements.  Some people, with disabilities, could easily do the work, but at best, only get conditional offers of employment and/or a finding that reasonable accommodations cannot be made.  Vision requirements prohibit some from even applying.  The physical fitness standards are very tough.

    After selection comes training, a formal course of study at police academy, which is often nothing more than fourteen weeks of boot camp.  After the academy, there's still a probationary period of field training, where they're told to "forget all that stuff learned at the academy."  On the job, there are few opportunities for in-service training, other than watching videos or the occasional workshop.  

    The process of socialization, defined as learning the values, symbols, and beliefs of a group takes place throughout recruitment, selection, and training.  Add attitudes to what is learned, and you've got what is called a subculture.  The police subculture has been characterized long ago by Skolnick (1966) as consisting of the qualities of danger, authority, and isolation.  Everything that is important to believe in (to become a police officer) revolves around sensing danger, how to exert authority, and keeping quiet about police business.  Experts have been warning for years that this kind of police subculture has got to change because it's a ready-made recipe for excessive force against citizens.

    Socialization results in personality change, or at least a working personality that one puts on for short periods of time.  Few souls have enough hardiness to avoid falling into habits of behaving, knowing, and moralizing that accompany development of the police personality.  Using a trait approach to the study of personalities, experts have consistently found anywhere from 6-13 dominant traits among police officers (Skolnick 1966; Neiderhoffer 1967; Brown 1981; Wilson 1990).  The following table is a list of those traits:
 

POLICE USE OF FORCE

    Nothing defines the central role of police in society better than its monopoly over the unquestionable use of force.  Aggressiveness, toughness, relentlessness, and (one might say) a cult of violence all tend to permeate the adrenaline-soaked nature of police work.  A couple of horrific examples where the monopoly on force was abused would include the Abner Louima case in 1997, where the aggressive tactics of New York City's Street Crimes Unit (SCU) involved rectal damage on a suspect with a toilet plunger.  Over a two year period, the SCU unit processed 45,000 people with their get-tough methods.  Another example would be the Amadou Diallo case in 1999, where an immigrant who fit the profile of a serial rapist was shot 41 times after reaching for his wallet.  Extreme examples such as this are called illegal use of force, where criminal and civil liability issues arise.

    About two million people a year are subjected to police force if we include handcuffing along with physical touching and verbal threats.  Weaponless tactics are the most common use of force, and it occurs most frequently when alcohol, drugs, or mental illness is involved on behalf of the suspect.  A small percentage of officers appear to be over-represented among the more extreme incidents of force.  It makes sense to refer to excessive force as what some individual officers do and excessive use of force as what is practiced on a department-wide basis. 

    In an average year, 600 suspects are shot and killed by police, while another 1,200 are shot and wounded, and 1,800 are shot at and missed.  Black property offenders are twice as likely as any other group to be shot at by police, and another interesting statistic is the growing percentage of cases (over 10%) that involve suicide by cop, where a note is usually found saying "Sorry to get you involved. I just needed to die."

    Criminal justice experts are divided over whether racial differences exist with respect to police use of force (Weisburd et. al. 2000).  On the one hand, the Christopher Commission (1991) stated that white officers were somewhat more likely to use excessive force against African-Americans, and watchdog groups like the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch have stated a pattern exists, but on the other hand, respected researchers like Adams (1996) and Tonry (1995) as well as the U.S. government itself have never unveiled a pattern. 

POLICE STRESS

    There are some unique dangers and stressors that police officers must face.  Some people are not cut out for the work, and others are, but the job takes away the best of them.  Many officers meet their death while performing police work.  On-the-job deaths occur from stress, training accidents, auto crashes, and at the hands of criminals.  Law Enforcement Officers Killed in the Line of Duty have averaged 150 a year until the year 2001, when it jumped to over 200 (the most frequent causes being terrorist attack, criminal gunfire, and auto accidents).  Studies by the FBI have not found that slain officers differ in any respect from non-slain officers.  They were well-liked, friendly, and easy-going.

    Officers are often exposed to blood and other bodily fluids that transmit serious diseases like AIDS.  While only a couple cases of officers contracting the disease are known, precautions are necessary at crime scenes, when frisking suspects, collecting evidence, and such things as the emergency delivery of babies in squad cars.  It's exposure to risks and dangers like these that may contribute to alcoholism or drug abuse.  Other officers report family stress, or the problems of trying to hold together a police family, hence, divorce rates are unusually high among police officers. Others suffer heart disease or gastrointestinal disease.  

    The most debilitating stress in police work may come from the fatigue of working long hours around the clock, such as at a disaster or rescue scene where there is repeated exposure to carnage and suffering.  Shift work in policing is also stressful.  Fatigue contributes to accidents, injuries, and misconduct.

    Another source of stress is the criminal justice system itself.  Police are accustomed to getting things done, and seeing something happen for the good of society.  Unfortunately, not all arrests lead to conviction, not all evidence is admitted in court, and not all punishments are harsh enough.  Police experience a terrible sense of helplessness and powerlessness when they see repeat offenders back on the street and victims go without justice for the harm done them.  It's this kind of stress that is associated with police suicide, which is twice the rate of the general population.   

POLICE ETHICS

    The oldest problem in law enforcement is corruption, but other misbehaviors are of concern, ranging from use of profanity to sexual deviance.  Is it feasible to expect untarnished "goody two shoe" behavior, all the time, from every police officer?  Codes of ethics are either aspirational hopes and dreams or regulatory codes of conduct, and most professions in the U.S. use the aspiration variety.  This allows us to use words like fidelity and integrity as unreachable goals with no practical ideas on how to achieve them.  However, the movement for training in police ethics is growing, and it is based on the idea that police officers need to hold themselves to higher standards than is expected of the average person. 

    The problem of ethics is not so much an individual matter as an issue of professionalization.  A group with professionalization (as opposed to just being a profession) possesses a special morality that attaches to its social roles rather than the people who inhabit those roles.  Mere professions can be created by certification, licensure, or continuing education, and anybody can create a code of ethics.  Some of the defining qualities of professionalization include: a monopoly over an essential public service (and police certainly have that, but must work to maintain that trust); a regulatory code of ethics (one that guarantees the public the exact standards by which services are delivered); special knowledge and expertise (never a resort to plain old-fashioned common sense); higher education (not just training, but lifelong learning); autonomy and discretion (the ability to make judgments and be creative rather than rule-driven); and self-regulation (successfully earning the right to say that outsiders can never appreciate the constraints and pressures of police work).  The basic reason why policing has remained unethical and sub-professionalized is because police have demanded self-regulation instead of earning it (they have also abused their monopoly trust and never made a dent in any of the other defining qualities of professionalism).             

POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY

    Police power and authority exists not because of some inherent quality of the office, but because power and authority exist as social relationships or a characteristic of society.  People comply with authority because they believe that those who exercise authority know what they are doing with it.  People in positions of authority are therefore accountable to those who (continuously, socially) give them authority.  Therefore, it is an incumbent duty of the police to arrange accountability mechanisms for the public, to assure the public that the police know what they are doing.  Accountability is not the same as liability.  Suing the police for damages isn't going to change anything or lead to reforms that makes the police more willing to open themselves up to self-examination, public inspection, or continuous improvement.

    There are a variety of accountability mechanisms that the police could do.  The simplest thing is to prepare annual reports (like corporations), and release them to the public and the media.  These shouldn't be reports about crime rates going up or down, but reports about how citizen complaints were handled and the like.  The next thing would be admission of errors in judgment.  Nobody expects the police to be perfect, or never make mistakes.  People are tired of the blue wall of silence and cover-ups.  The police also should have rulebooks that are sensitive to different local and social conditions.  One policy manual size doesn't fit all.  Police should have civilian advisory boards that assist them with planning, and the logical extension of this -- civilian review boards (replacing Internal Affairs units for the investigation of misconduct).      

POLICE RACISM AND SEXISM

    The issues of diversity and multiculturalism make up the last topic here, and can be approached in different ways.  Statistically, blacks make up 12% of all sworn officers nationwide, and other minorities make up 8%.  Women make up 13% of law enforcement.  These are token levels, and it's also safe to say minorities and women are underutilized and under-promoted.  Some experts have said that policing, following the military, is the world's most racist and sexist organization, but it's debatable over whether that's deliberate or not, intent being a key element of racism and sexism, unless recourse is made to improbable concepts like latent or institutional racism.

    For example, let's take the notion of racial profiling, a late 1990s phenomena defined as any police action that relies on race, ethnicity, or national origin rather than behavior or information in identifying a criminal suspect.  Racial profiling goes in many areas of government and business, and in the most common variety of its practice, it leads police to stop and inspect selected people passing through public places — passengers on airplanes, drivers on highways, pedestrians in urban areas, visitors crossing national borders — because they fit a statistical profile based on group membership (Pampel 2004).  Racial profiling is quite different from psychological profiling, but the technique can be traced to drug courier profiling, a DEA technique developed in the early 1980s to spot traffickers at airports.  Arguments in favor of racial profiling include the statistics that blacks are 13 times more likely to be carrying drugs than whites, that minorities have higher offender rates, and communities are much safer when police focus their efforts on high-incidence and high-prevalence areas and people.  Arguments against racial profiling include the statistics that most people do not favor it, statistical-driven police work leads to stereotype-driven police work, it is morally and ethically wrong, and it generates a public perception of policing as biased.  Of these, perhaps the strongest argument is public perception of bias, because most of what passes for multicultural policing is not substantive, but appearance aimed at improving public perception of the police.  In the end, it may be that perception is all that matters.

INTERNET RESOURCES
About.com Crime's Backgrounder on Police Violence
ACLU Fighting Police Abuse
ACLU Rights to Encounters with Police
Amnesty International Page on Police Brutality
Amnesty International Report on Police Brutality in the U.S.
Human Rights Watch Report on Police Brutality and Accountability
New York City's Precincts
Officer Down Memorial Page
Police Use of Excessive Force against Black Males

PRINTED RESOURCES
Adams, K. (1996) "Measuring the Prevalence of Police Abuse of Force in Police Violence" in W. Geller & H. Toch (eds.) Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Broderick, J. (1977). Police in a Time of Change. Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.
Brown, M. (1981) Working the Street. NY: Russell Sage Foundation.
Fyfe, J. (1978). "Reducing the Use of Deadly Force: The New York Experience" in U.S. Department of Justice (ed.), Police Use of Deadly Force. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Guyot, D. (1979). "Bending Granite: Attempts to Change the Rank Structure of American Police Departments" Journal of Police Science and Administration 7(3):253-84.
Human Rights Watch. (1998). Shielded From Justice: Police Brutality and Accountability in the United States. New York: Human Rights Watch.
Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department (the Christopher Commission). (1991). Report of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department. Los Angeles: International Creative Management.
Kleinig, J. (1996). Police Ethics. NY: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Muir, W. (1977) Police: Streetcorner Politicians. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Neiderhoffer, A. (1967). Behind the Shield. NY: Anchor Press.
Pampel, F. (2004). Racial Profiling. NY: Facts on File.
Skolnick, J. (1966). Justice Without Trial. NY: Wiley.
Tonry, M. (1995). Malignant Neglect-Race, Crime, and Punishment in America. NY: Oxford University Press.
Weisburd, D. et. al. (2000). "Police Attitudes Toward Abuse of Authority: Findings From a National Study." Washington, DC: National Institute of Justice: Research in Brief.
Wilson, J. (1968). Varieties of Police Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
Wilson, C. (1990). Cop Knowledge. NY: Basic.

Last Updated: 08/15/05
Syllabus for JUS 111
Instructor Home Page