Fairness and Effectiveness in Policing The Evidence (2004) / Chapter Skim
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5 Explaining Police Behavior: Organizations and Context
5 Explaining Police Behavior: Organizations and Context
Pages 155-216
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From page 155... ...
Yet these characteristics do powerfully shape the workload of the police, so understanding the influence of these factors and the boundaries they may set on police practice is therefore an important component of police research. Because the effectiveness of a given policy in promoting a desired practice may vary across different environments, police leaders may find it especially useful to know when and where those policies are most and least effective.
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From page 156... ...
In terms of police organization, the committee reviews research on important law enforcement actions that administrative policy or structure might be expected to affect, such as the use of force, both lethal and nonlethal; citizen complaints and legal actions against the organization; arrest and clearance rates; and traffic citations. Each of these represents an important output in its own right, and each might also speak to and help depict a larger organizational style.
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From page 157... ...
. For instance, DC police averaged 2.3 fatal police shootings per 1,000 officers, compared with 1.5 in 26 other big city police departments and 1.7 in the nine U.S.
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From page 158... ...
Nonlethal Force The past decade has seen a pronounced increase in the level of research attention devoted to nonlethal force by police. While many individual police agencies track use of force by their officers, they have only recently begun to collect and assemble these data in a format useful for comparing police organizations.
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From page 159... ...
. Arrest Rates Arrest rates represent one of the most visible output measures of police agencies.
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From page 160... ...
. Despite these problems with the measurement of clearance rates, they are reported routinely by police departments and used routinely by researchers.
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From page 161... ...
Since the police issue field citations with such frequency, understanding the factors responsible for interagency variation in their use seems to be an important component of explaining what police organizations do. Civilian Complaints Citizen complaints arise when a citizen takes action in response to an encounter with an officer that generates a record of the grievance.
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From page 162... ...
However, these measures are clearly insufficient for tracking police organizations' progress in achieving new notions of the police mission that became popular in the late 20th century and are likely to continue well into the 21st century. Indeed, research over the last 40 years clearly shows that most police resources are expended on activities that do not result in formal enforcement, and that citizens care a great deal about when, where, and how these informal activities occur (Mastrofski, 1983; Whitaker et al., 1980)
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From page 163... ...
, yet police departments do not routinely record most of these actions, making it difficult to determine how and how thoroughly this approach has been implemented. Many departments do maintain records on certain field interrogations, which are stops of suspects that do not result in an arrest, and of traffic stops that do not result in a citation.
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From page 164... ...
Such a system would enable police leaders and policy makers to develop a far more comprehensive picture of policing as most people in their communities are actually experiencing it. The committee recommends that support be given to the Bureau of Justice Statistics to develop and pilot test in a variety of police departments a system to document informal applications of police authority.
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From page 165... ...
Chapter 8 recommends a way to generate useful information about these processes by conducting surveys of police "clients." Here we note that the character of those processes appears to be so important to securing police legitimacy and crime reduction that developing a national jurisdiction-level system of data collection on policing processes is essential to a comprehensive characterization of what police organizations do. Mobilizing and Working with the Community Community policing reformers have made it widely expected that police in the United States work closely with community groups to prevent crime and enhance the quality of life.
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From page 166... ...
Because problemsolving can occur at many levels and in many ways in a given police organization, a feasible measurement method will undoubtedly require sampling problem-solving efforts over a given time period in each surveyed department. Police as Information Brokers Some researchers have argued that by the late 20th century, the core police capacity had shifted from being purely that of coercion to that of information gathering, processing, analysis, and dissemination (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997)
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From page 167... ...
In the first case, police departments around the country are undergoing major changes in the technology of gathering, storing, mapping, and analyzing criminal events (Anselin et al., 2000)
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From page 168... ...
In this section we consider several features of police organizations thought to influence police practices that are presumed relevant to the accomplishment of these goals. We first consider the size of a police agency.
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From page 169... ...
It surfaced briefly in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Many police progressives of the time claimed that breaking up large police departments would threaten impartial law enforcement and return to the corruption and inefficiencies of machine-era policing (Mastrofski, 1981:44-45)
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From page 170... ...
. Consequently, most of what researchers know of the consequence of police agency size for police practice comes from comparisons of a cross-section of large and small departments at a given point in time.
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From page 171... ...
To what extent does research support these stereotypes? Some of the research suggests that the relationship between police department size and actual practice is weak or nonexistent, but a fair amount of the available research does in fact tend to support the popular stereotypes (see Mastrofski, 1981:Ch.
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From page 172... ...
The impact of agency size on enforcement levels, as measured by arrest rates, has been shown to vary with the type of offense. For example, one study found that small middle-class suburbs showed higher arrest rates for breaches of the peace than did the nearby large county police force, but the reverse was true when agencies were compared on arrest rates for theft (Wilson, 1968:211-215)
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From page 173... ...
First, policy makers should not assume that consolidation of small police departments will yield greater productivity or changes in the quality of police practice. Many studies suggest that smaller agencies serve their jurisdictions as well or better than do larger agencies serving similar areas.
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From page 174... ...
Decentralization of police departments has had its advocates since the late 1960s (Mastrofski, 1981) , and it has remained a staple of police reform in the 1990s under both community policing (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997)
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From page 175... ...
The principal obstacle to measuring police practices relevant to decentralization is determining the criteria that establish what is the best police activity relevant to a given targeted population, such as a neighborhood. One way to deal with this might be to establish how much actual police practice (documented in agency records, officer surveys, or field observations)
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From page 176... ...
, they are said to be functionally differentiated. The general trend in policing for the 20th century has been to increase the degree of occupational and functional specialization in police departments, with civilians taking over many functions previously performed by sworn officers, and increasingly dividing and subdividing responsibilities among different organizational units, often at the cost of reducing the proportion of the organization devoted to the most generalist work, patrol (Reiss, 1992; Maguire, 2002b)
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From page 177... ...
Reformers have called for police organizations to despecialize, placing more authority in the hands of generalist officers, and encouraging them to provide a broader range of services. Although there have been numerous studies on the causes and correlates of functional differentiation (Langworthy, 1986; Maguire, 2002a)
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From page 178... ...
. Both of these reasons have probably caused police departments to sustain or even increase the level of functional specialization, even in a time when community policing reform rhetoric calls for despecialization.
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From page 179... ...
The results of four studies in three police departments are insufficient to draw conclusions about the effects of functional specialization on police practice. When differences have been found, they have been measured in how and with whom officers spend their time, although even here, being assigned to a specialist unit is no guarantee that the officer will expend more time engaged in the activities designated for the job specialty than his or her generalist colleague.
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From page 180... ...
The committee finds insufficient evidence to draw conclusions about the effects of hierarchy on police practices. As with functional specialization, police organizations during the 20th century have tended to become increasingly differentiated vertically.
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From page 181... ...
The available research suggests that geo-focused structures may have facilitated greater police knowledge of the neighborhoods to which officers were assigned, but unless other organizational structures were implemented to reinforce the desired practices, the prospects of achieving those results were slim and the scope of the effects usually modest. Police organizations devoted much of the 20th century to reducing the significance of geographic assignment to police work (Reiss, 1992)
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From page 182... ...
, and by 1999, 94 percent of local police departments with 100 or more sworn officers reported giving patrol officers responsibility for fixed geographic areas, and 47 percent reported assigning cases to detectives on that basis (Reaves and Hart, 2000:xii)
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From page 183... ...
. Ironically, even though team policing tended to increase officers' sense that citizens supported them, when police practices were viewed through the lens offered by citizen surveys, most studies showed that team policing produced few significant changes (Gay et al., 1977; Fowler et al., 1979:127-139)
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From page 184... ...
Formalization is often measured as the extent to which rules, procedures, and practices are written, thus associating formalization with standardization and documentation. Police agencies resort frequently to formalization as a strategy to govern the practice of their officers, so there should be ample opportunity to judge the impact of formalization on police practice.
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From page 185... ...
The previous discussion has focused on the impact of discrete structural features of police departments, but contemporary reform efforts often entail changing a number of features as a package of "organizational development." In recent years, police leaders in the United States have shown tremendous interest in adopting an innovation called CompStat, which surfaced in New York City in 1994. A 1999 national survey of departments with 100 or more sworn officers showed that a quarter of the sample reported implementing a CompStat-like program and another third of the sample was planning to do so (Weisburd et al., 2003)
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From page 186... ...
. An interesting feature of this reform is that the primary targets of change are the middle managers of the police organization, especially those charged with commanding the precincts and districts into which the territory of large urban departments are divided.
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From page 187... ...
These middle managers keenly felt the pressure of their responsibility to know about crime in their districts and act quickly to intervene where spikes in crime statistics and hot spots emerged. Virtually all of these middle managers reported that CompStat had changed the way they spent their work time, devoting many hours to studying crime reports and crime maps to prepare for CompStat meetings.
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From page 188... ...
A national survey and a handful of case studies are not adequate to draw conclusions about the impact of CompStat on police practice in the United States. The above findings are at best suggestive.
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From page 189... ...
crime analysis units are given substantially larger staffs with the requisite expertise and resources to provide more cutting-edge support services? INFLUENCE OF EXTERNAL FORCES Police and police organizations are often targeted by outside individuals and groups who seek to influence the way policing is practiced.
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From page 190... ...
Nevertheless, a relatively small body of research has examined whether neighborhood characteristics are related to police practices and thus far suggests only weak links. Motivated by concerns about equity, this research has studied whether police respond in similar ways to incidents that occur in different kinds of communities.
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From page 191... ...
. Generally, this research has found that a variety of neighborhood characteristics are related to police behavior, although the direct effects are much smaller than the effects of legally relevant characteristics (Smith, 1984, 1986, 1987)
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From page 192... ...
The citizen's race and social status were not significantly related to outcome; however, younger police officers committed to community policing ideals were more likely to comply with requests. While community characteristics were not the focus of this research, it was noted that, despite differences between the two cities in poverty rates and race and family composition, there was very little variation in the predictors of these police behaviors across the two sites.
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From page 193... ...
The general approach of this research has been to use census data and police department information to examine whether such factors as levels of poverty, economic inequality, minority population size, and segre
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From page 194... ...
. In two of the most complete investigations of variation in arrest rates, Liska and colleagues studied how urban characteristics influenced police crime control activity (i.e., the ratio of arrests to number of reported crimes)
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From page 195... ...
. This research found that income inequality, percentage nonwhite, and levels of segregation were significantly related to property and personal crime arrest rates, while police size was not.
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From page 196... ...
Those holding to a classic overhead model of democracy assume that democratic accountability is possible only if police departments are responsive to the will and political preferences of the officials that the public has elected. Political Principals and Their Agents Cross-cutting this difference in normative perspective is the empirical question of the extent to which elected officials actually do (or even could)
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From page 197... ...
in her review of some of the key mechanisms that one might have assumed would be useful in maintaining the accountability of police departments to their political overseers. Appointing a new police chief, Guyot observes, is sometimes so fraught with multiple political considerations having nothing to do with substantive police policy issues that it becomes ineffective as a tool to ensure accountability (1991:237)
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From page 198... ...
over time. By and large, such studies tend to find that political officials have a limited influence on police policy and practice, or that the influence that political officials do have is pernicious.
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From page 199... ...
. Guyot's results might be interpreted somewhat differently if the question is simply an empirical one of the extent to which police policy and practice are influenced by elected officials (regardless of the efficiency, effectiveness, fairness or propriety of that influence)
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From page 200... ...
And Salzstein (1989) , using a cross-sectional design based on a national sample of police departments, found that the presence or absence of a black mayor did not affect police practice in handling public disorder incidents, such as vagrancy, loitering, public drunkenness, noise complaints, and the like.
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From page 201... ...
Still other studies reflect elected officials' impact on both police policy and practice. In a time-series analysis of two police departments, Meehan (2000)
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From page 202... ...
in his comparison of policing styles in eight local jurisdictions in the 1960s. Political Oversight: Citizen Review Boards Proposition 11: When police departments face charges of police mis conduct, there is often pressure to institute citizen review boards, which in various ways involve nonpolice in gathering and assessing facts about allegations, review of investigative documents, hearing appeals of com plaint dispositions, and reviewing police policies and practices.
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From page 203... ...
Some efforts have been made to reduce this complexity in order to describe the main features of citizen review. One such effort describes four models of citizen review: · complaint review that provides for fact-finding investigations of complaints by persons who are not sworn police officers (i.e., external investigations)
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From page 204... ...
The popularity of citizen review and optimism about its benefits far outstrip the empirical evidence that citizen review has salutary effects. The committee recommends that a program of rigorous evaluation research consider a wide variety of citizen review boards, assessing their impact on a range of police practices (but especially those features that are frequent targets of citizens' complaints)
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From page 205... ...
, in a study based on survey data from police departments and district attorneys, found that the existence of a state hate crime law influenced the perceived likelihood of police arrest in a hypothetical hate crime incident, as well as district attorney pursuit of such cases, although it did not influence the perceived likelihood that police officers on the scene would classify the crime as a hate crime. The proposition that changes in the criminal justice system influence police behavior, sometimes in unintended and unanticipated ways, has not
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From page 206... ...
Intergovernmental Influences: Court Rulings Proposition 13: The American system of government relies heavily on the judicial branch to oversee police practices, and many legal scholars and policy makers assume that most police dutifully follow court rul ings when made. The available research suggests that police compliance with restrictive court rulings tends to be gradual and incomplete at first, but it increases over time.
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From page 207... ...
grants made a difference in the adoption of the community policing model (Moore et al., 2000)
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From page 208... ...
. In sum, through court decisions, presidential commissions, and training courses, the federal government changed the legal and informational contexts in ways that significantly altered the incentives of police departments with respect to the policing of protests.
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From page 209... ...
The most important public study to date was conducted in 1992, by researchers from the RAND Corporation. They surveyed several hundred state and local law enforcement agencies about their level of preparation to deal with terrorist incidents (Riley and Hoffman, 1995)
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. In an effort to improve this state of affairs in the wake of September 11, FBI Director Robert Mueller created the Office of Law Enforcement Coordination and selected a retired police chief to head the office.
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Local response teams should include a law enforcement officer whose responsibility is to "establish relationships with the local FBI office and other law enforcement agencies sufficient to ensure that the team has the maximum prior warning of potential nuclear, chemical, or biological incidents" (p.
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From page 212... ...
The infrequency of actual terrorist incidents on American soil means that random samples of agencies would include few or even none that had experience in dealing with terrorism. Security concerns have probably made repetition of the RAND study even more difficult, for police agencies are nervous about sharing their preparation strategies, perhaps fearing this will increase their vulnerability (Pluchinsky, 2002)
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From page 213... ...
describe Quinney's concern as with "the alliance being forged between the criminal justice establishment and corporations that require markets for technologies of social control." The effects and extent of militarism must be examined much more closely, since the attacks of September 11 suggest that this trend will continue. Police organizations around the nation are struggling to prepare themselves for the possibility of future attacks, and some of these responses are likely to be paramilitaristic.
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From page 214... ...
The areas of lethal and nonlethal force should be especially high priorities for improvement, since they generate so much concern among the public and are the cause for the more extreme legal measures taken to seek civil remedies for individuals, as well as to enjoin and alter police practices. A fourth deficiency is that measures of organizational practice tend to be heavily biased in favor of measures of policing that are now regarded as traditional such as arrest, use of force, and case clearances.
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From page 215... ...
The effects of size appear to be contingent on many other factors, although current research is unable to specify what those conditions are. Second, when police organizations create new job specialties, such as community policing officer, how those officers
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From page 216... ...
Fourth, formalizing restrictive policies on the use of lethal force can reduce the frequency with which police use it, but the strongest effects may occur only when the policy change is stimulated by a crisis. Fifth, how police behave toward the public does appear to be conditioned by the character of the neighborhood, disadvantaged and high crime areas receiving more punitive policing than other areas.
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