Special Populations

Generally considered along with the study of police discretion is an analysis of how police handle various "special populations," variously called disenfranchised populations, fringe groups, deviant subcultures, or the dangerous class, depending on what terminology one cares to use. Although it might be helpful to be more precise about terminology here, what really matters is that we get to a point where a more useful analysis can take place of the police response to these social problems, or as police call them, "disturbance calls." A disturbance can take a variety of forms, including domestic quarrels, conflicts between neighbors, or landlord-tenant disputes, to name a few. It's therefore purely by convenience that I am treating the following areas as the problems of "special populations" -- domestic violence, juveniles, homelessness, drugs, and vice crimes. Gangs could be added to this list, but I prefer to treat that problem in a separate lecture. The vast majority of disturbances that police handle involve only two disputants, and 80% of the time, they involve classic confrontations between man and woman who are living together as man and wife. If children are involved, the well-known "family fight" usually takes place shortly after school lets out; if money is involved, it's usually an early morning fight; and if drugs or alcohol is involved, it's usually late at night. Loud parties make up the preponderance of weekend activity, and Monday, as the first day of the week, is usually when landlords want their (past due) rent, so that's when landlord-tenant disputes occur.

All police officers know that there are many ways to "look bad" and few ways to "look good" when handling a disturbance call. If, as an officer, you are successful in fixing a social problem, then you will never receive sufficient credit for it because it's not "real" police work. If, on the other hand, you bungle a disturbance call, it becomes common locker room knowledge. When dealing with social problems, there are the twin dangers of under-reacting and over-reacting. If you fail to make an arrest, leave the scene, and the situation escalates into a homicide, you have under-reacted. If you trigger violence by humiliating somebody with an unnecessary arrest in front of their family or friends, you have over-reacted. From the point of view of the police subculture, it doesn't do one's career any good to be the one referenced when the station receives a call like "Could you please send that nice, young man who was so helpful to me last time?"

One of the major considerations in this area of study is that police need to learn how to "network" with other agencies in handling these kinds of problems. A network shares responsibility for the social problem, and alleviates the onus of responsibility from being all on the police. Every community has a small number of "problem families" who contribute disproportionately to the police workload and social services workload. Also, every community needs to have a social service network in place that consists of at least the following agencies involved:

Every year, approximately 12% of wives and 28% of girlfriends are the victims of domestic violence (that's one every 18 seconds). A hardcore group of about 4% of wives and an unknown number of girlfriends are the victims of very serious violence. Minor acts of violence typically include throwing things, pushing, kicking, grabbing, slapping, or biting. More serious acts typically include punching, hitting with object, use of a knife or gun, and beatings or pummelings. 30% of all women murdered in the U.S. are murdered by their husbands or boyfriends (Straus & Gelles 1980; 1990). Historically, the police response has been to remain detached and not take action in domestic violence situations (arrest as last resort policy). Arrest practices varied widely by department and by individual police officer, but beginning around 1976, citizen groups began to press for ways to change the police response.

From about 1976 until 1984, police experimented with a social service model in which officers were trained in the techniques of crisis intervention (Pearce & Snortum 1983). They still receive such training, but there is nothing today like the movement back then to turn police officers into social workers (Cumming et. al. 1965). The problem with the social worker response model (also called the pacification model) was that police typically dealt with two (2) emotional extremes -- the aggressor being cantankerous and the alleged victim being hysterical. It often took twenty (20) minutes each to settle each party down, or pacify them, before some form of counseling could take place. Another problem was that alcohol or drugs were sometimes involved (in about one-third, or 33% of cases), and you can't do counseling when one or both parties are intoxicated, although many parties were able to "sober up" rather quickly after police arrived. The basic social worker approach involved the following steps:

Police departments around the nation seemed to move quickly toward MANDATORY ARREST policies with the 1984 publication of the 1981-82 Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman & Berk 1984). Undeniably, this was one of the most influential pieces of criminal justice research in history. Officers were required to randomly select one of three options to resolve domestic violence situations by drawing from color-coded cards -- red for arrest; blue for requiring the offender to leave the home for a cooling-off period; and yellow for mediation (police advice). The results were as follows:

Option:	Short-term Re-offense rate:	Long-term Re-offense rate:
Arrest	19%	10%
Cooling-off	33%	24%
Mediation	37%	19%

Clearly, arrest had the strongest deterrent effect. Arrest alone reduced the re-offense rate. It was one of the first studies to prove that arrest -- something the police do normally -- worked for something. By 1989, 84% of police departments across American had a mandatory arrest policy. Since then, however, police departments and legislatures have drawn back from rather strict mandatory arrest policies to grant-supported pro-arrest policies. The following are the terms used to describe these policy shifts:

It's still rare to see police officer referrals to social service agencies or officers trying to act as social workers, but one thing that has worked well is women's shelters shelters, during those high-risk 2-7 days after the incident. Usually, these are secret (known only to police and social workers), and their effectiveness is probably due to a combination of feminist empowerment and legal/economic assistance. Some jurisdictions also have experimented with specialized night courts (also called emergency or innovative courts), where protection orders, divorces, what-have-you, can be obtained. Community mediation centers have also sprung up in many places and worked well with police departments and clogged court systems. What hasn't worked too well are batterer intervention programs, where the success rate at counseling men who batter is only around 2-3%. Police officers, themselves, don't usually like mandatory or even preferential arrest policies. They much prefer being able to exercise individual discretion. Survey after survey of what victims want, however, is the ability of police, indeed, anyone, to predict the dangers of re-offending and advise whether or not to stay in the relationship. Unfortunately, the ability to predict dangerousness is not all that accurate (hi-risk factors tend to be drug/alcohol abuse, gun ownership, and an obsessive/jealous nature; repeaters tend to be those who hit early in the relationship, do it in the open, are less apologetic, and suffer more work-related stress). Others oppose arrest policies because it destroys family privacy, or from a feminist perspective, encourages weakness and helplessness (Yvette Mimieux syndrome). Police departments stopped citizen self-defense classes a long time ago for liability reasons and controversies exist in the literature on whether it's better to fight back.

Mediation, counseling, and other micro-level solutions might be useful for situated transactions, which typically go like this: (1) insult (2) clarification (3) retaliation (4) counterretaliation (5) presence of weapon (6) police and/or ambulance. However, some situations involve disputants who are so mentally ill and so chronically intoxicated that no counselor or psychotherapist would even consider any kind of counseling.

Many experts, sociologists mostly, say a better strategy might be to focus on macro-level solutions -- things like the following:

This has traditionally been the population with the worst attitudes toward police and a tendency to flaunt the rules. 15% of all police encounters with juveniles result in some form of arrest, often a custodial "station adjustment". A chronic hardcore group of 5% of all juveniles regularly get into trouble with the law every year. Police juvenile units, on average, consume only 4% of police resources. Juvenile contact is the area where the "demeanor hypothesis" (or attitude test) was first tested and developed back in the 1950s, and it was during that decade when most scholarly attention was directed to the "delinquency" problem. Police have traditionally responded by using their discretionary powers to talk or warn juvenile offenders rather than take them into custody, also sometimes talking to the youth's parents or making referrals to social service agencies. The 1980s and 90s brought a change from a welfare model to a justice model, holding youth as responsible for their own actions, and current "get tough" juvenile justice systems leave little room for police discretion and don't really address the wide-ranging juvenile problems that police have to deal with.

Police often have to deal with juveniles who have "special needs" such as emotional or behavioral disturbances, learning disabilities, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and cognitive problems due to having been exposed to drugs prenatally. Police often have to deal with child abuse and neglect, and in these cases, the police are usually mandated to remove and protect the child. There's usually a much better social service network for the child abuse problem than the special needs problem in most communities. Police have responsibility for the missing children problem, from abductions to runaways to throwaways. Also, police have to deal with youth gangs, ranging from amorphous delinquent cliques to organized groups of older and younger profit-oriented offenders. Police chiefs are in a catch-22 position with gangs. If they deny their existence, despite evidence to the contrary, the gang problem grows. If they publicly acknowledge the gang problem, this validates the gang leadership and gives them notoriety. The typical police response to a gang problem is suppression (keeping it down to manageable proportions, often called reducing recidivism) and surveillance.

The problem of homelessness is mostly an inner-city problem, and is especially entrenched in cities like New York, Seattle, Cheyenne, Chicago, Boston, Portland, Miami, and Pittsburgh where they have their own underground networks and newspapers (examples: #1, #2, #3). There's also a network of homeless shelters (rescue missions) around the rest of the country. There's about 2 million "homeless" people, defined as anyone lacking a fixed nighttime shelter. On any given night, about 1 million people don't sleep in any kind of shelter. It's estimated that about a third (sometimes as much as two-thirds) of the homeless population are mentally ill, chronically mentally ill, requiring regular doses of medication. The heavy prevalence of the mentally ill among the homeless is due to the U.S. policy of deinstitutionalization during the 1980s when inpatient, residential mental health facilities were closed down and outpatient community mental health centers were expected to pick up the slack.

The police response to homelessness has been largely conciliatory to whatever the business interests in the community want done about it. Panhandling, of course, can deter customers from entering business establishments, so the police may simply tell them to move on, which they do, until they find a property owner who doesn't care. Some public areas also become de facto homeless living areas, such as certain parks or highway underpasses (a boundary maintenance strategy). Some departments practice a policy of bus therapy, where funds are given to the person and they are monitored as they load a Greyhound out of town. Police can no longer afford, for liability reasons, to lock people up for their own protection (as they used to do with "drunk tanks"), so there's always the risk that a person seeking shelter in the jail might commit a crime just to get in (self-committed arrest). Studies of officer discretion with what to do about homelessness have shown that seriousness of (mental) illness is the prime consideration, yet officers are again imperfect psychiatric clinicians.

Homeless people report that their "life being out of control" is the number one reason for their state of existence. This includes things like loss of job, bad experiences with landlords, or bad experiences with a spouse. A secondary motivation is "desire for freedom" (from responsibilities of all kinds). There's different kinds of homeless people, and one typology is as follows:

A whole semester course could be offered on this topic, so the discussion here will seem extraordinarily brief. The drug problem consumes a vast amount of police resources. In previous lectures, we've talked about demand-side and supply-side strategies (with the dominant thrust in law enforcement being a supply-side, targeted sting approach to catching "Mr. Big"). Another noteworthy goal is the desire to reduce "systemic" violence, the kind of crime that grows up around the drug trade, like drive-by shootings to eliminate rival drug dealers. To reduce user crime, the police tend to operate on a supply-side economics approach to the demand-side, in that by reducing the supply of drugs on the market, there's an increased search time required of addicts to find a new source, thus acting as an incentive to seek treatment. Other strategies that work well make use of known displacement phenomena; like the announcement and phantom effects. Crime mapping technology tends to work well in this problem area if supported by ethnographic data.

The nation has many indicators of the drug problem. One of the most well-known is the MTF (Monitoring the Future) and other ongoing, grant-supported surveys of drug use experimentation among high school freshman, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. An indicator of more serious drug abuse is DAWN (Drug Abuse Warning Network) which looks at hospital emergency room admissions for overdoses. Finally, Justice Department programs like DUF (Drug Use Forecasting) promise to shed light on the drug-crime connection (which comes first?) by tracking, via urinalysis results, the drug levels of "hot" arrests for crime (caught red-handed). There's some variation geographically in the dozen or so cities that participate in DUF, but an average of 32% of offenders are on drugs at the time of offense, and of this number, 68% use crack cocaine and 58% use marijuana. The crack problem is especially difficult because of its unusual addiction cycle. Instead of a normal withdrawal, the pains of trying to quit may last as long as 10 weeks. There's also an unusual binge (high) and crash (anxiety rather than depression) pattern which doesn't produce much downtime. Crack houses have become a target of community mobilization; here's a typology of crack houses:

The traditional police response to vice can be summarized in the three C's: (1) complaint; (2) commercial; and (3) conspicuous. If all three are present -- someone complaining loudly; significant profits being made from it; and blatantly open operation -- then the police typically do something. It's not so much that the police are inconsistent in their response, it's that the nature of vice activity has it's ups and downs because it's disorganized. Take prostitution, for example. Street hookers complain about infrequent and unpredictable police crackdowns, and it is true that departments sometimes get around to some problems when they get the time and resources (toughlove strategies), but the more common pattern is a fluctuating clientele, and that's a demand-side problem. That's why some departments, like the St. Paul Police website, publish the pictures of those involved in prostitution. Other departments target the behavior of pimps, and federal resources are tied up with the internationalization of MOB (mail-order brides) and Internet commerce.

Prostitution is illegal (a misdemeanor) except in certain counties of Nevada. The typical punishment is a $100-$250 fine. Some jurisdictions will take your car if you used it to attempt to hire a prostitute. The police rely too much upon rather unsophisticated street sting operations, where female officers pose as decoys. Johns sometimes try to detect undercover officers by saying things like "I wouldn't think of paying for sex, but I was thinking about making a donation to your children's college fund - say $150?". Truck stop prostitutes ("lot lizards") and where they operate is common knowledge. Massage parlors that provide a sex trade (sexual body rubs) are identifiable by not advertising "therapeutic" massages. Escort services (both call-out & call-in) use a special vocabulary that you need to know; requesting escorts who are "playful", "creative", "enthusiastic", and "athletic" are orders for different kinds of sex services.

Gambling has long been an area typically associated with police corruption in the form of protection money paid to ignore it. In large cities on ward systems (like Philadelphia or Chicago, for example), you may find illegal gambling machines operating inside of bars and taverns. Police will routinely seize these machines in order to instigate contact with the vendor that the bar owner is operating with. Warnings of an impending seizure (or the seizure itself) signal the necessity to include police in a percentage of the profits from the machine. Other examples would include backroom poker games and betting pools on sporting events, although these things by tradition are usually left alone if prominent citizens are involved.

PRINTED RESOURCES
Brown, M. & Pratt, J. (Eds.) (2000). Dangerous Offenders. London: Routledge.
Campbell, J. (1995). Prediction of Homicide of & by Battered Women" Pp. 96-113 of J. Campbell (Ed.) Assessing Dangerousness. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Cumming, E., Cumming, I., & Edell, L. "Policeman as Philosopher, Guide, and Friend." Social Problems 12: 276-86.
Krisberg, B. & Austin, J. (1993). Reinventing Juvenile Justice. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
Pearce, J. & Snortum, J. (1983). "Police Effectiveness in Handling Disturbance Calls," Criminal Justice and Behavior 10(1): 71-92.
Sherman, L. & Berk, R. (1984). The Specific Deterrent Effect of Arrest for Domestic Violence. American Sociological Review 49(2): 261-72.
Straus, M., Gelles, R. & Steinmetz, S. (1980). Behind Closed Doors. Beverly Hills CA: Sage.
Straus, M. & Gelles, R. (1990). Physical Violence in American Families. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction.