Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing The Evidence (2004) / Chapter Skim
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3 The Nature of Policing in the United States
3 The Nature of Policing in the United States
Pages 47-108
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From page 47... ...
In this chapter we rely on the latter to more accurately describe the landscape of policing -- in the United States, a varied and complex structure that we call the "police industry." Especially noteworthy characteristics of this industry include the wide variety of functions that law enforcement organizations are asked to perform and the role of individual police officer discretion, and we give both special attention. Within these two broad themes we focus on issues of importance to the rest of the committee's work: the complexity of police-public encounters and the special question of what determines when, why, and how individual police officers exercise authority and force.
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From page 48... ...
. The main focus of this report is on local police departments.
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From page 49... ...
Law enforcement agencies at different levels of government have substantially different formal responsibilities, as prescribed by law, and therefore engage in different kinds of activities. Local police (municipal police departments, county police departments, and county sheriffs)
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From page 50... ...
As a result of the historic and unique legal status of American Indian tribes, many tribal authorities operate their own police departments (and in some cases entire criminal justice systems) (Feinman, 1986; Luna, 1998; Wakeling et al., 1999)
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From page 51... ...
This represented a near tripling in spending since 1981-1982, when local policing cost about $14 billion. In 2000, the nation's largest local police departments almost equaled the entire allocation of 1981-1982: the 62 local agencies that serve cities with 250,000 or more population spent $13.1 billion operating their departments.
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From page 52... ...
More often reformers attempted to insulate police departments from politics by protecting employees through civil service regulations or guaranteeing the chief executive long or lifetime tenure in office. Consequences of Fragmentation The fragmentation of law enforcement agencies has long raised concerns about the lack of coordination of effort among agencies in the same geographical jurisdiction and a consequent loss of effectiveness and efficiency.
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From page 53... ...
can also take action to protect the rights of citizens. Most recently, the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act authorized the DOJ to sue police departments for a "pattern or practice" of violating the rights of citizens; before 1994, such broad powers were limited to police agencies receiving certain government funds or to individual complaints filed with the DOJ Civil Rights Division.
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From page 54... ...
In the end, however, the typical local law enforcement agency could carry out its core functions without federal support. Aside from financial support, the principal federal legislation affecting police departments are the various equal employment opportunity laws.
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From page 55... ...
Through the appointment process, local officials have a strong voice in shaping the general policies of police departments. For example, a mayor might dismiss a police chief because the chief is perceived to be insufficiently aggressive about fighting crime or has been unable to eliminate corruption in the department.
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From page 56... ...
Not only is the so-called private security industry large and complex, but also there are many arrangements whereby public agencies contract with private security providers and private groups contract with public agencies for services. Some police departments contract out a few of their activities to these firms, including prisoner services, training, court security, dispatching, and traffic and parking control.
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From page 57... ...
. Typically, roughly 60 percent of all sworn officers in city police departments are assigned to the patrol bureau,
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From page 58... ...
People also initiate encounters by walking into their local police station, by flagging down patrol officers in the streets, and by requesting assistance via the telephone. Widespread use of cell phones has made contacting police departments or even individual officers even easier.
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From page 59... ...
Recent thinking on policing, which has been driven by community policing and increased interest in crime prevention, has placed a high priority on increasing proactive activities initiated by uniformed patrol officers. Consequently, attention has turned to the larger management process through which police agencies engage in strategic planning, set clear priorities, and mobilize their resources.
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From page 60... ...
found that one of the most powerful variables in explaining which police departments seemed to be more effective at reducing crime was the frequency of police traffic stops. They interpreted the traffic stops as an indicator of how proactive police departments were in searching for crime and trying to prevent it rather than simply waiting for it
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From page 61... ...
It also remains true that some police departments, under the rubric of community and problem-oriented policing, have embraced strategies that look a great deal like some of the old proactive strategies of policing. Aggressive preventive patrol has been resurrected as zero tolerance policing.
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From page 62... ...
Community policing urges community consultation to create a political warrant for proactive policing. Interacting with the Public Police patrol work involves face-to-face contacts between the public and police officers.
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From page 63... ...
. The first systematic observation of police patrols generating quantifiable data occurred in 1966, when a team of researchers accompanied officers from the Boston, Chicago, and Washington, DC, police departments on patrol, systematically recording what transpired during each shift (Reiss, 1971; Black, 1980)
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From page 64... ...
This study did not find a clear pattern of race discrimination in arrest. Because of public concern about domestic violence in the past 30 years, police handling of domestic disputes has been the subject of considerable research and experimentation.
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From page 65... ...
In the late 1980s, these concerns led many police departments to move away from the escalated force model to one that relies instead on meeting with protest
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From page 66... ...
The race of the officer did not explain variations in shooting rates. In Fyfe's study, black officers fired their weapons more often than white officers, and this was explained largely by their low seniority, which resulted in more assignments to high-crime areas and also because these officers were more likely to live in such neighborhoods.
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From page 67... ...
Subsequent studies have confirmed such matters as variability in shooting rates both between and within police agencies, and they have offered fresh insights into the use of deadly force by police officers (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993)
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From page 68... ...
examined use of force reports filed by the Savannah, Georgia, police department. He developed a use of force continuum, based on police training that directed officers to use force proportionate to the degree of resistance offered by their protagonists.
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From page 69... ...
In part because of public controversy over police use of deadly force, nonlethal technologies have been developed and adopted by police departments. These technologies include chemical agents, electronic stun guns, and various other tools designed to subdue the combative without killing or seriously injuring them.
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From page 70... ...
Officers, for example, often jail individuals as a means to prevent potentially volatile situations from spinning out of control and to restore order when it had already been breeched. The research also disclosed that police officers exercise their authority through a variety of means other than arrest to control situations and to maintain order.
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From page 71... ...
and one-half (Wilson, 1968) of all calls for service to police departments.
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From page 72... ...
. Traffic stops comprise the most common form of contact between police officers and the public (Langan et al., 2001)
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From page 73... ...
The new crime prevention model tends to involve a wider range of officers, to be more closely integrated into basic police operations and to be more proactive. Many, if not most, of these activities are closely related to community policing and problem-oriented policing activities and involve neighborhood residents and partner agencies in the community (Rosenbaum, 1989)
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From page 74... ...
Research on the factors that are linked to "solvability" have been used by most police agencies to establish guidelines for determining which cases will actually be investigated, with the remainder being administratively closed (Eck, 1983b)
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From page 75... ...
. Finally, undercover work necessarily involves the use of deception by police officers, a practice that potentially compromises their moral integrity (Marx, 1988)
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From page 76... ...
. Bolstered by the 1994 federal funds, important innovations of recent years involve police department efforts to engage in systematic data collection and analysis, for purposes of both crime fighting and accountability.
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From page 77... ...
Prior to the late 1960s, police departments responded to special threat situations -- such as those involving barricaded gunmen and hostages -- on an ad hoc basis, simply handling the situation in whatever way seemed appropriate at the time. When several notorious incidents during the 1960s -- one example is Charles Whitman's 1966 murderous sniping rampage in Austin, Texas -- showed that the ad hoc approach was wanting in many regards, many police departments developed cadres of specially trained and equipped officers who could handle
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From page 78... ...
. As noted above, some community policing programs involve specialized units, while others are department-wide efforts.
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From page 79... ...
. Employment of Women Through the early 20th century, American police departments employed women only as matrons who handled only female arrestees.
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From page 80... ...
It is not known whether this continued underemployment is the result of a lack of recruiting effort on the part of police agencies or a lingering perception on the part of potential female applicants that policing is a male occupation and that police departments are likely to be hostile workplaces. The advent of women had a significant impact on the norms of the police officer subculture.
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From page 81... ...
Only a few police departments met this standard by the 1990s. While big-city police departments are more representative today than they were even 10 years ago, minorities represent 38 percent of the police force, a percentage that does not equal the minority presence in the communities that these police agencies serve (Brown and Langan, 2001)
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From page 82... ...
. Yet this group made the largest gains in representation on big-city police forces throughout the 1990s; only 9.2 percent of large police departments were Hispanic in 1990, but by 2000, Hispanics constituted 14.1 percent of the full-time sworn personnel in these agencies.
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From page 83... ...
As noted above, they have made special efforts to recruit members of the community who were not traditionally represented in police forces. They have also experimented with new methods of selecting and training police officers and with new methods of identifying those officers who seem to be particularly prone to abuse.
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From page 84... ...
There has been uncertainty about whether these ideas represent programmatic innovations, administrative innovations, or genuinely strategic innovations that seek to redefine, or at least prioritize, the ends of policing, to call for dramatically new means of accomplishing those ends, and to propose importantly new working relationships both within the police department and between the police department and other government agencies and the communities in which they operate. To many, the idea of community policing, for example, seems to consist of certain kinds of programmatic ideas (e.g., that the police should shift from patrolling in cars to patrolling on foot or on bicycles)
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From page 85... ...
At root, however, community policing is not defined by a list of particular activities but rather as an organizational adaptation to a changing environment. Police departments embracing the philosophy of practicing community policing tend to adopt at least four new, interrelated organizational stances.
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From page 86... ...
In short, the idea of community policing called for a wider engagement with the community in the interests of more effective crime control. Community policing also involves an expansion of the means of polic
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From page 87... ...
To this, community policing introduces the idea that the police can enlarge and widen their efforts to prevent as well as respond to crimes. The ideas of prevention focused on at least two different concepts.
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From page 88... ...
And it is these ideas about which goals are important to achieve and how they might best be accomplished that lead to the three other principles of community policing. Decentralization Decentralization is an organizational strategy that is closely linked to the implementation of community policing in law enforcement agencies.
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From page 89... ...
Community policing often promises to strengthen the capacity of communities to fight and prevent crime on their own. Residents sometimes get involved in the coordinated or collaborative projects, such as when they participate in crime prevention projects or walk in officially sanctioned neighborhood patrol groups.
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From page 90... ...
As noted above, problem-oriented policing is an analytic method for developing crime reduction strategies. The key difference between problem solving and community policing is that the latter stresses civic engagement in identifying and prioritizing a broad range of neighborhood problems, while the former frequently focuses on patterns of traditionally defined crimes that are identified on the basis of police information systems.
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From page 91... ...
Recall that community policing explicitly
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From page 92... ...
They could be expected to find ways to reduce fear, control disorder, and provide certain kinds of service and assistance that would allow the public to use public space more securely and more easily than they otherwise could. So while the focus on problems seems to admit a wider set of purposes than the idea of crime control, problem-solving policing does not usually take an explicit stance on whether the police could or should take responsibility for problems in the community that are not, strictly speaking, crime problems, but to which the police can make important contributions.
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From page 93... ...
Most police departments think of themselves as centralized in a paramilitary structure. They also have divided themselves functionally by dividing the patrol force from the investigative units; both of these operational
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From page 94... ...
They seek to widen the focus of police attention to include minor offenses, disorder, fear, and other community problems beyond serious crime. They seek to change the structure of police departments by encouraging operational initiative and creativity at lower levels of the organization and by encouraging the police to abandon their habitual autonomy and seek close working relationships with other government agencies and community groups.
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From page 95... ...
But one of the most important things to understand about these ideas of community and problem-oriented policing is that they are not designed to make only a one-time change in the way police departments operate. The fundamental idea of both these ideas is that police departments should not only engage in this one important strategic innovation, but also that the point of each of these strategic innovations is to create police organizations that are continually innovative.
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what causes or allows organizations to embrace a strategic change, (2) what has caused or allowed police departments in particular to embrace a strategy of community or problem-oriented policing, or (3)
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THE NATURE OF POLICING IN THE UNITED STATES 97 Studying Innovation In studying innovation, one can focus on three somewhat different phenomena. One is the process that produces an idea that is wholly new to the world -- the original innovation.
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From page 98... ...
Given these observations, it is surprising, then, to see how much consistency exists in the field of policing, how stable those patterns have been over time, and how, when strategies, programs, or administrative systems change in these organizations, they seem to change very rapidly and all at once. Apparently, there are some forces acting on thousands of local police departments that push them toward conformity with some kind of professional norm.
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From page 99... ...
Yet one could save the idea that internal, agency-specific decisions and factors were the key if one considered as an important environmental factor the number of other police departments that seemed to be embracing or resisting a new innovation. If the individual choices of departments to embrace or reject an innovation are based in part on what the other organizations around them or known to them have done, then one could conclude that the distinction between the environmental hypothesis on one hand and the organizational decision-making process on the other were not so different.
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From page 100... ...
, for example, played a major role in undermining the traditional assumptions about preventive patrol and forced the search for alternative modes of service that culminated in the development of community policing and problem-oriented policing. The Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment (Sherman, 1992)
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From page 101... ...
The community policing movement was driven by increased public demands for both more effective crime control and more positive relations between police and the public (Walker, 1977, 1998)
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From page 102... ...
Those standards, in turn, tend to be set by past traditions and understandings rather than emergent ideas. As a result, many innovative ideas in policing are viewed by conventional auditing agencies as problems rather than advantages for police departments, and it takes a while for new ideas about what is valuable, efficient, and effective to work their way into existing audit standards.
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From page 103... ...
In drawing these distinctions among police agencies, Weiss's finding that networks of communication vary based on the type of innovation must be considered. For instance, Weiss found that on administrative topics, police planners contacted their "regional dyad or clique," yet on substantive strategies or issues, such as domestic violence or community policing, police agencies contacted the cosmopolitan "opinion leaders" (Weiss, 2001:12)
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From page 104... ...
The Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics program conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics found that, by 1999, almost twothirds of local police departments reported they had officers serving in full-time community policing roles. More than 91,000 officers reportedly were serving in that capacity, or 21 percent of all sworn personnel (Hickman and Reaves, 2001)
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From page 105... ...
The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 funded new positions for officers with community assignments, supported community policing training academies in every region of the country, and facilitated the purchase and utilization of new technologies that promised to support neighborhoodoriented policing and return sworn officers from desk jobs to the street. These responsibilities were assigned to a new agency in the Justice Department, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.
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From page 106... ...
Whether police departments will continue to expand and staff these projects in the absence of federal support remains an open question, as is whether local governments will continue to invest in new technologies for policing. Even where there is such a commitment, implementing an effective program also can prove difficult, for adopting community policing can involve significant structural changes in departments and a reorientation of their basic mission, as well as asking officers and their supervisors to think and act in new and unaccustomed ways.
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From page 107... ...
There appears to have been tremendous growth in the private security sector in America, but the committee was unable to identify any reliable indicators of its size or operating characteristics. The committee recommends a special study of the dimensions of the private security industry, and that the Current Population Survey be used to secure an estimate of the size and characteristics of the labor force in this sector.
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From page 108... ...
108 FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING both traffic and other kinds of encounters, including pedestrian stops. The survey should include measures of subjective assessments of the quality of those encounters.
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