the legalistic style of policing essay

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Styles of policing.

Police officers typically have a large amount of discretion   when deciding what situations to become involved in and how to handle them. While a few situations demand specific and well-defined responses (for example, mandatory arrests in domestic violence cases), the vast majority allow for a variety of possible responses that are neither correct nor incorrect. As with any job that allows discretion, police departments and police officers develop ”working personalities” or ”styles” that guide their general decision making.

Police personalities and policing styles are   informal approaches to police work and represent ways that police officers ”do their jobs.” They tend to be unique for each police department and police officer and can change from situation to situation. Departmental policing styles are influenced by the mission and goals of the department, the needs of the town or jurisdiction, and residents’ views of the role of the police in their community. In addition, individual policing styles are influenced by an officer’s personal belief system, moral character, and outlook on police work.

A department’s policing style greatly influences   individual policing styles through hiring decisions (hiring those officers whose personal belief system mirrors that of the department), recruit training (selecting trainers who best represent the mission and philosophy of the department), and rewards and disciplinary action (promoting officers whose performance is most in line with the departmental style while punishing officers whose behavior deviates from it).

Departmental Policing Styles

Police departments have their own styles that   reflect the organizational culture of the department. The departmental style influences every aspect of police work in that jurisdiction, ranging from hiring and promotional decisions, everyday police-community interactions, and budget decisions and resource allocation to police strategies and identification of crime problems within the jurisdiction.

The most widely cited study   on police departmental styles was conducted by James Q. Wilson (1968). He found three distinct departmental styles: watchman, legalistic, and service. The watchman style is based mostly on order maintenance. With this style, police officers judge the seriousness of violations by examining the immediate and personal consequences of the offense rather than the legal status of the offense. A watchman style department focuses its law enforcement activities on keeping the peace in the community. A police officer in a watchman department typically has the most discretion.

In contrast,   legalistic style departments have one standard: strict enforcement of the law. This type of department produces large numbers of arrests and traffic citations. Most calls for service are resolved in a formal manner in which an arrest or a formal complaint is made. The third type, the service style department, prioritizes all requests for assistance without differentiating between order maintenance or law enforcement functions. Police officers in these departments are not likely to make an arrest unless the situation renders it absolutely necessary.

For example,   in handling a situation where a group of youths is out past the town’s curfew, police officers in a watchman style department may not intervene at all, speak with the group without taking any further action, or simply tell them to go home, whereas police officers in a legalistic department would more likely write them a citation or arrest them. If the community or department deems the juvenile curfew as important, police officers operating in a service style would not be as likely to make an arrest as officers from a legalistic department but would intervene in some way, perhaps by taking the youths home or calling their parents to pick them up.

State police and state highway   patrol agencies more closely follow a paramilitary structure than other police departments and are most likely to have a legalistic style. These departments view themselves as law enforcers and require every officer to handle every situation in a similar manner. Suburban police departments usually follow service-oriented styles, since their role is defined by the community in which they serve. Suburban communities want the police to maintain public order and intervene whenever possible but tend to prefer informal outcomes to arrests. By their nature, rural and small-town police departments afford their officers the most discretion and are most likely to fit the watchman style. In these departments, police officers are asked to perform an array of nontraditional police functions and often have little outside assistance to complete them (Weisheit, Falcone, and Wells 1999).

Individual Styles of Policing

While departmental policing styles do influence individual performance and behavior, police officers have their own unique policing styles. These individual styles are based on predispositions that provide police officers with an array of responses to various situations. They reflect the officers’ attitudes, personal beliefs, morals and values, professional aspirations, and views of police work.

William Muir (1977)   believed that officers developed distinctive styles and that their selection of an operational style was premised on whether officers possessed two specific attitudes. The first attitude, which Muir termed passion, pertained to whether officers recognized the need to use coercion and were willing to employ it to attain job-related goals and objectives. The second attitude, perspective, involved the willingness of officers to empathize with the circumstances of citizens with whom officers interacted. Muir developed a typology based on these attitudes. The typology consists of four policing styles: professionals (officers possessing both passion and perspective), enforcers (officers possessing passion but not perspective), reciprocators (officers possessing perspective but lacking passion), and avoiders (officers who had neither passion nor perspective).

Some officers will be   able to justify their use of force and will not feel guilt or remorse for their actions (an integrated morality of coercion), while other officers may hesitate to use force and will be unable to justify its use even when necessary (conflicted morality of coercion). Muir’s professional policing style has both the tragic perspective and the integrated morality of coercion. Police officers with a professional style will carefully evaluate each situation before taking actions and will use force only when necessary, using only the amount of force appropriate to the situation. These police officers view their roles as being both difficult and complex. The professional understands and accepts the limits of the police. Professionals tend to have high levels of job satisfaction.

In contrast,   enforcers have a more cynical perspective that results in ”us versus them” and ”good guy versus bad guy” attitudes. Enforcers see police work as strictly enforcing the law and can become too task oriented to understand or care about offenders’ motivations or mitigating circumstances. These police officers have a higher likelihood of becoming frustrated with the limited amount of time they can be crime fighters.

The reciprocator is similar to the professional in that   these officers have a more tragic perspective. They are oriented to helping people in ways that will have a lasting effect. Unlike the professional, reciprocators have a conflicted morality of coercion. They are uncomfortable with using force as part of their law enforcement responsibilities. Reciprocators tend to believe that every citizen has a good side and should be given second chances. These police officers are more likely to suffer from job dissatisfaction and burnout due to their frustration and disappointment.

The avoider style is the exact   opposite of the professional style. Avoiders have a cynical perspective and a conflicted morality of coercion. Assuming that most social and crime-related problems are beyond their control, avoiders approach law enforcement as if they only want employment and minimally perform their duties. Since avoiders have little motivation to be police officers, they have a high level of job dissatisfaction.

John Broderick’s ”working personalities” (1977)   consisted of four individual policing styles (realists, optimists, enforcers, and idealists) that were based on two dimensions (emphasis on due process of law and emphasis on the need for social order). The emphasis on due process of law calls for the protection of one’s constitutional rights through strict enforcement of the law, while the emphasis on the need for social order reflects order maintenance duties. Broderick believed that while some officers viewed law enforcement as their most important function, other officers viewed themselves as public servants.

Like Muir’s enforcers,   Broderick’s enforcers view policing as the means to protect society and place low value on individual rights. Enforcers see their role as strictly performing police work and tend to become frustrated when required to perform non-crime fighting activities. Idealists place a high value on both due process and the need for social order. Like Muir’s reciprocators, idealists believe that every person has a good side, and they try to bring it out while enforcing the law. It is common for idealists to become frustrated and dissatisfied.

Broderick’s optimist mirrors Muir’s professional.   Optimists are oriented toward helping people but realize the limits of trying to enforce the law and can avoid becoming frustrated when their goals are not met. Their emphasis on due process is high, while their emphasis on the need for social order is low. These police officers acknowledge that they will not be spending most of their time fighting crime. The fourth type of Broderick’s styles is the realist. These police officers are low in both dimensions and, like Muir’s avoiders, see many problems with no solutions. A typical response to any problem is that it is not police business and there is little the police can do to resolve the matter.

Michael Brown (1981)   also created a theory of four individual policing styles using two different underlying dimensions: ”selectivity of enforcement” and ”aggressiveness on the street.” His four styles were old style crime fighter, clean beat crime fighter, service style I and II, and professional style. The old style crime fighter and the clean beat crime fighter are similar to Muir’s enforcers. They are very aggressive when enforcing the law but are also very selective. The old style crime fighter will solve problems using all available means, legal or illegal, while the clean beat crime fighter will only use legal means. These police officers are very selective, choosing to enforce all serious crime while not wasting time looking for minor violations. Like Muir’s enforcers, they become frustrated when forced to perform duties other than enforcing the law.

The service style I is related to Muir’s reciprocator.   This type of officer is sensitive to community values and needs while not being overly concerned with the suppression of crime. These police officers are not aggressive and tend to be selective in enforcing those laws that are deemed important by community standards. The service style II type is very selective in enforcement and not very aggressive. As in the case of Muir’s avoiders, this type of police officer does not want to be involved and may even have chosen police work simply as an alternative to unemployment. The professional style is nonselective as well as nonaggressive. Enforcing the law is very important but should not be the sole aim of police work. The professional style is directly in line with Muir’s professional and Broderick’s idealist police officers. This type of police officer uses the greatest amount of discretion in choosing what will be enforced and how it will be enforced.

Table 1 compares the underlying dimensions of the   three types of individual policing styles. Muir’s passion, Broderick’s due process of law, and Brown’s selection of enforcement center on police officers’ decisions to strictly enforce the law. In contrast, the other dimensions are based on the amount of compassion police officers undertake when carrying out their duties. The differences are that Brown concentrated on use of force, Muir on the lack of use of force, and Broderick on officers’ emphasis on the need for social order.

One way to compare the actual individual policing styles of Muir,   Broderick, and Brown is to place these types into Wilson’s departmental styles. It is likely that Muir’s and Broderick’s enforcers and Brown’s old style crime fighters would be found in legalistic police departments (with their heavy emphasis on a paramilitary structure). Professionals and optimists as well as reciprocators, idealists, and service style I police officers would more commonly be found in departments that emphasize the service aspects of police work. Finally, avoiders, realists, and service style II police officers would best fit into Wilson’s watchman style department.

Table 1. Dimensions of Individual Policing Styles

Table 2 . Types of Individual Policing Styles

Influences of Policing Styles

It is popular to stereotype police   officers and compartmentalize their behavior, and it is commonly done so that future behaviors can be predicted based on prior typologies. However, police work entails a variety of activities that may call for behaviors that cannot be placed in a single category (Cox and Frank 1992). While research has supported the notion that police officers have general styles that influence their behavior, consensus on styles dissipates when other issues are examined. These factors can be personal (age, race/ethnicity, gender, education, experience), situational (reactive call for service or proactive police-initiated contacts, demeanor of involved parties, seriousness of the offense, mental state of the citizens involved), environmental (socioeconomic status of the neighborhood, amount of crime, presence of social disorganization, racial or ethnic composition, and racial or ethnic homogeneity), and organizational (departmental style, work shift, and supervisory support for certain police actions) (Roberg, Novak, Cordner 2005; Brooks 1997).

Two factors appear to have significant   influences on policing styles. First, situa-tional factors have been found to influence behavior to a far greater degree than other factors. One such situational factor is the manner in which the officer enters the situation (proactive versus reactive). In the proactive situation a police officer takes the initiative to get involved. As such, the police officer will first make a decision whether police intervention is even necessary. In contrast, reactive situations typically require some type of police response to a citizen complaint. The behavioral decision focuses on how to intervene, not whether to intervene.

Second,   the contextual characteristics of the neighborhood in which the behavior occurs can have a large influence on the behavior of police officers. Several researchers have found that police in high-crime areas adopted a style that presumably differed from the style utilized in other types of communities (Roberg, Novak, Cordner 2005; Brooks 1997). For instance, police officers tend to be more aggressive in high-crime neighborhoods but rely more on informal dispositions in low-crime neighborhoods.

Policing styles,   whether departmental or individual, play an important role in understanding police attitudes and behaviors. Many police departments make hiring and promotional decisions based on a police personality that is closely aligned with the goals and mission of the department. In addition, assignments to specialized units are made with policing styles in mind (for example, youth bureau, detective bureau, community police officers, school resource officers, SWAT teams, and so forth).

See also: Order Maintenance; Role of the Police; Theories of Policing

References:

• Broderick, John. 1977. Police in a time of change. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
• Brooks, L. W. 1997. Police discretionary behavior: A study of style. In Critical Issues in Policing, 3rd ed., ed. Dunham and Alpert, 149-66. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
• Brown, Michael. 1981. Working the street: Po­lice discretion and the dilemmas of New York: Russell Sage.
• Cox, Stephen. M., and J. Frank. 1992. The influence of neighborhood context and method of entry on individual styles of po­licing. American Journal of Police 11:1-22.
• Muir, William. 1977. Police: Streetcorner poli­ticians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
• Roberg, Roy, K. Novak, and G. Cordner. 2005. Police & Society. 3rd ed. Los Angeles: Roxbury Publishing.
• Weisheit, Ralph A., D. N. Falcone, and L. E. 1995. Crime and policing in rural and small-town America. 2nd ed. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.
• Wilson, James Q. 1968. Varieties of police be­havior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, Stanford University. Marty Berger provided superb research assistance. I received helpful criticism and suggestions from my colleagues at Stanford Law School, especially Michelle Anderson, Ralph Richard Banks, George Brown, John Donohue, and Robert Weisberg; from students here and at Fordham Law School; and from Randall Kennedy and Jeffrey Sklansky.

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David Alan Sklansky; POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES. American Journal of Law and Equality 2022; 2 3–35. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00036

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Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968. 1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology. 2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate. 3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.

Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets. 4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be. 5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans. 6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community. 7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.

In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.

Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans. 8

Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.

How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.

The Toll of Crime

Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.

There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States. 9

The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization. 10

Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality. 11

Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable. 12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color. 13

The Toll of Policing

If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified. 14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police. 15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely. 16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man. 17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one. 18

Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested. 19

The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society. 20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites. 21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well. 22

The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams. 23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media. 24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable. 25

The Crime Decline and Partial Rebound

As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops. 26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.” 27

The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021. 28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year. 29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods. 30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively. 31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.

The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts. 32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period. 33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.” 34

Successes and Failures of Police Reform

American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone. 35

Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color. 36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms. 37

One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police accountability, and combat racial biases in law enforcement. Police unions are not always implacable opponents of reform, but even today they do more to obstruct than to champion measures for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less lethal. 38 One reason for that is that the leadership of police unions remains considerably older and whiter than police officers overall. Organizations of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms opposed by police unions, and the presence of officers of color may in some cases have led police unions to moderate their own positions. 39

The most important of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and problem-oriented policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes as actual programs and sometimes, unfortunately, just as slogans. 40 Virtually every police department in the country eventually claimed to practice “community policing,” in part because it became a routine requirement for federal grants. At its best, though, community policing was more than a slogan. It was a comprehensive reorientation of law enforcement away from a go-it-alone “warrior model” and toward a collaborative “guardian model” that relies on consultation and cooperation with the public and with other government agencies. 41

Community policing had major weaknesses, some of which will be discussed below. And because community policing was implemented with varying levels of seriousness, it was hard to rigorously evaluate. It spread, though, because it often greatly increased public satisfaction with the police and made people feel safer. Decreased fear of crime itself probably led to real reductions in crime: when people felt safer they ventured out more, and streets and parks tended to become safer with more people around. 42

When implemented most fully, community policing also decentralized control within police departments, and it broadened officers’ focus beyond crime suppression, allowing them to address a range of other concerns raised by the communities they served. It therefore fit well with problem-oriented policing, which called on officers to work creatively, and on an ongoing basis, with other agencies and the public to address issues of particular local concern. Sometimes, but not always, problem-oriented policing involved reallocating resources to “hot spots” responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime; sometimes, but not always, the resources reallocated were patrol officers. Unlike community policing, problem-oriented policing—especially the focus on hot spots—lent itself to statistical evaluation, and a steadily increasing body of evidence credits these techniques with significant crime reductions. 43 Furthermore, there are indications that hot spots and other forms of problem-oriented policing have helped some cities defy the national trend and reduce homicides in 2021. 44

Beyond hot spots, community policing and problem-oriented policing frequently also involved increased attention to low-level, “quality of life” offenses, such as vandalism, loitering, and disturbing the peace. Part of the idea was that when these kinds of violations were left unaddressed, neighborhoods spiraled toward greater disorder, fewer people on the streets, and higher rates of serious crime; this was the famous, later infamous, theory of “broken windows.” Police initiatives focused on quality-of-life offenses could be empirically evaluated, too, and the results suggested that these programs were in fact effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as hot-spots policing and only when the programs involved community collaboration and carefully targeted particular problems in particular places. Aggressive, indiscriminate crackdowns on quality-of-life offenses, although frequently billed as community policing and problem-oriented policing, did not reduce crime. 45

At the other end of the spectrum from quality-of-life policing, problem-oriented policing sometimes took the form of programs in which the police worked with community groups and other government agencies to address particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate share of a city’s gun violence. These programs—the first and most famous of which was Boston’s Ceasefire initiative in the 1980s and 1990s—were sometimes called “focused deterrence” because their most prominent component was often threats of heavy penal consequences targeted at the individuals and groups driving violence in a particular area. But the programs also included offers of social support to the same people, and some, more recent versions of this approach emphasize peer-to-peer counseling more than policing. Evidence is growing that these programs, when done right, significantly reduced gun violence. 46

At their best, moreover, community policing and problem-oriented policing provided their greatest benefits in poor neighborhoods. These programs were redistributive, and not just because they were resource intensive, requiring lots of time from lots of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. Community policing and problem-oriented policing required police to adopt what the criminologist James Q. Wilson had called the “service style” of law enforcement—the kind of policing typically found in relatively well-off suburbs—and to move away from the types of law enforcement traditionally pursued in poorer areas—what Wilson had called the “legalistic style,” which prioritized arrests, and the “watchman style,” which emphasized order maintenance. 47 (Conversely, when community policing and problem-oriented policing were reduced to “zero tolerance” campaigns against quality-of life offenses, they doubled down on the watchman style.) In addition, community policing and order-maintenance policing frequently required officers to arrange for crime-ridden neighborhoods to receive a range of services other than law enforcement: trash cleanup, rodent abatement, streetlight repair, and so on. Officers might complain that they had not signed up to be social workers, but it turned out they often were good at getting other municipal agencies to pay more attention to marginalized neighborhoods. 48

For several different reasons, community policing and problem-oriented policing have lost much of their luster over the past two decades. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and state and local budget shortfalls in the early 2000s led many departments to view community policing and problem-oriented policing as unaffordable luxuries. Degraded forms of these programs, like the zero-tolerance crackdowns on turnstile jumping and “squeegee men” in New York City, helped to sour community activists against them and, eventually, in many cases, against the whole project of police reform. 49 And it became increasingly clear that, even at their best, community policing and problem-oriented policing had some glaring flaws.

One was that these programs paid little attention to police violence. This was not inherent in the philosophy of either set of reforms. Departments could have collaborated with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police violence. But they rarely did. Police reformers deemphasized the problem of police violence, especially police killings, because they did not appreciate the gravity of the problem. This was partly because the victims were generally members of marginalized groups (poor, young, and Black, Latino, or Native American), partly because federal government did not (and still does not) collect reliable data on police killings or other forms of police violence, and partly because, until the advent of body cameras and smartphones, officers’ accounts of these episodes were difficult to challenge. It took those technological developments and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the issue of police killings the attention it had long deserved. 50

Nonetheless, lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has declined significantly over the past half century. Controlling for the age of the victims, the risk of being killed by a police officer in the United States fell during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly dramatic—around fifty percent—for Black Americans and Latinos. The decline in police killings over the course of that decade appears to have been mainly attributable to new policies restricting the use of lethal force against fleeing suspects. 51 In the following three decades, in contrast, the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant nationwide, while the rate for white Americans increased; as a result, the age-adjusted figure for Americans overall also rose somewhat. In some places, though, rates continued to drop. From 2013 through 2019, police killings rose in rural areas and suburbs but declined by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, probably because of new restrictions on officers’ use of deadly force. 52

Police violence in some cities has dropped especially sharply. In Los Angeles, for example, significant uses of force by the police appear to have been cut in half between 2006 and 2019, and police shootings appear to have declined by forty percent. 53 Shootings by LAPD officers increased alarmingly in 2021 but remained far lower than in past decades. 54 In Cincinnati, on the other hand, uses of force by the police have dropped by fifty percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not shown a similar decline. Police shootings in Cincinnati rose sharply between 2006 and 2011, plummeted in 2012 and 2013, spiked again in 2014 and 2015, and then gradually dropped over the next several years, returning by 2019 to roughly the 2006 level. 55 Los Angeles and Cincinnati have been sites of major, sustained efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the statistics regarding uses of force by police in these cities over the past decade are encouraging in some respects (significant reductions in uses of force in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los Angeles) but disappointing in others (no overall progress on police shootings in Cincinnati).

The statistics also underscore the great variation in patterns of police violence, as in crime rates, across the United States. The Police Scorecard Project, led by the activist and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, compared the number of uses of deadly force per ten thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from 2016 to 2020: the results ranged widely, from fifteen down to zero. 56 If the United States as a whole had New York City’s rate of police killings, almost 600 fewer Americans would have been killed by the police in 2019. 57 (If America had New York City’s homicide rate, 4,400 fewer people would have died violently that same year. 58 ) Police reformers can succeed, and have succeeded, but the victories have been slow, partial, and often fleeting.

By the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, a small but growing number of activists and scholars were losing faith in the project of police reform and were calling for the police to be abolished altogether. 59 A milder version of this idea, “defund the police,” spread widely in 2020. The argument was straightforward. If officers victimize poor people and people of color and also fail to protect them from crime, why not replace police departments, partly or entirely, with something less harmful and more effective?

Like the details of “community policing,” the precise meaning of “defund the police” could be hard to pin down. Asked what a world with defunded police would look like, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in June 2020 that it would look “like a suburb.” 60 That suggested that defunding the police might involve not taking money away from law enforcement but instead bringing the service style of policing to poor and marginalized neighborhoods—much as community policing had aimed to do in the 1980s and 1990s. More commonly, though, advocates of police defunding sharply disassociated themselves from the agenda of community policing: their principal goal was not “better” policing but less policing. Activists argued that “[t]he more cops you have, the more encounters our communities have with law enforcement, the more violent encounters there are.” 61 Ocasio-Cortez herself later criticized proposed budget cuts at the New York Police Department for not going far enough. “Defunding police means defunding police,” she explained. 62

It is hard to blame “defund the police” for the rising rates of homicide during the pandemic or the spikes some localities saw in property offenses because average police budgets were not substantially leaner at the end of 2020 than when the year began, and many cities restored funding to police in 2021. 63 That was partly because the slogan never was embraced by a majority of Americans, regardless of race or party, and support for it steadily declined as the protests of 2020 grew more distant, the pandemic dragged on, and worries about crime deepened. By the end of 2021, nearly half of American adults, including thirty-eight percent of the Black population and forty-six percent of the Latino population, wanted more spending on law enforcement. 64

The argument for police defunding deserves to be taken seriously. A significant minority of Americans, including more than forty percent of Black adults, a quarter of Latino adults, and many activists and scholars, continue to favor cutting police budgets. 65 And the checkered history of police reform gives ample reason to wonder whether, as activists suggest, it is time to try something different. 66

But defunding the police is not the answer, for three reasons. The first reason is political, the second is practical, and the third is conceptual.

To begin with the politics: it matters that most people oppose defunding, including and often especially in the nonwhite neighborhoods hit hardest by both crime and abusive forms of policing. And it matters even more when, as today, politics are highly polarized. Eric Adams, a former police captain, campaigned successfully for mayor of New York in 2021, opposing calls to defund the police and promising to reform the NYPD instead. His key support came from Black, Latino, and low-income voters in the outer boroughs. 67 In November 2021, a year and a half after George Floyd died brutally at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, voters in that city rejected a measure to replace the police department with a new Department of Public Safety. The measure failed in part because it was opposed by a majority of voters in the city’s largest Black neighborhoods. 68 In the fall of 2020, I helped supervise a group of law students at Stanford who met with members of the African American Mayors Association to identify responsibilities that might usefully be shifted away from the police. What surprised the students most was how opposed the mayors were to removing police officers from schools. (The students wound up recommending that step anyway, for reasons that will be discussed below.) 69

Remaking public safety takes time. This is particularly true of approaches like community policing and problem-oriented policing, which aim to turn police departments into learning organizations committed to continual improvement. 70 Progress in reforming the police has been frustratingly slow in part because so many reforms, including programs of community policing and problem-oriented policing, are abandoned when new police chiefs are appointed, political winds shift, crime rates rise, or budgets are tightened. 71 Successful transformation of public safety systems requires reforms that can be sustained over the long haul. 72 But the weak public support for police defunding and the shifting politics of crime mean that even when police budgets are trimmed, the cuts are likely to be reversed. This is in fact precisely what happened across the United States in 2021, as cities restored funding they had taken from police departments in 2020 and in many cases gave them additional money. 73 Police defunding is not, to put it mildly, a politically resilient strategy, especially in a period marked by extreme polarization.

Sometimes radical change is necessary despite its lack of political support. But the problems with police defunding go beyond its unpopularity. As a practical matter, voters are right to be skeptical that taking money from law enforcement will reduce police abuse, let alone improve public safety. Calls to defund the police draw inspiration from the movement to abolish prisons; in both cases, abolition is understood both as a utopian endpoint—a horizon to aim for—and a path for practical, incremental progress toward a better society. 74 This makes sense for prisons, because the grotesque hypertrophy of the American carceral system may be its signal vice. There are so many people in prison who plainly don’t need to be there that it would take years of aggressive decarceration before we got to difficult cases. For the foreseeable future, any decreases in the number of people the United States locks up will very clearly be changes for the better, reducing the harms of mass incarceration without endangering public safety.

But the benefits of incremental reductions in the scale of policing are less obvious. Smaller police departments, with fewer contacts with the public, are not necessarily less lethal, and larger, better-funded departments are not, for that reason, more abusive. Community policing, problem-oriented policing, and better systems of police oversight all cost money; this is particularly true of the first two, which require freeing up officers’ time. Cutting funding for police departments means making these reforms more difficult. It also can mean officers who are overworked, overstressed, and cut off from the people and neighborhoods they are supposed to be protecting, all of which can lead to more, rather than fewer, violent encounters. After the 2008 financial crisis forced the city of Vallejo, California, to reduce the size of its police force by close to forty percent, police killings skyrocketed. 75 In contrast, Camden, New Jersey, significantly reduced police violence through reforms that ultimately involved more officers, more contacts with the public, and a larger police budget. 76

Vallejo and Camden are only two cities, and in different ways their experiences are exceptional. But it is difficult to identify any city that has reduced police violence by shrinking its department, or any department that has been successfully reformed on the cheap. The suburbs that Representative Ocasio-Cortez called models of police defunding often spend more money and employ more officers per capita than large urban departments. The disparity is even greater when the large number of private security guards supplementing public police in many American suburbs is taken into account. 77

Advocates of police defunding often stress that they are calling not just for cuts in police budgets but for allocating the savings to schools and social services. 78 What happened in Vallejo, they would say, is not a fair test of their agenda. On the other hand, Camden—which disbanded its police department and created a new one, without a union contract—has sometimes been cited as a good example of what it truly means to “defund the police.” 79 But most advocates of police defunding make clear that they really do mean taking money away from law enforcement and reducing the number of contacts between police and the public. 80 The opposite happened in Camden.

Furthermore, when money is taken away from police, there is no guarantee where it will be spent or if it will be spent at all. Advocates of mental health deinstitutionalization in the 1970s called for closing mental hospitals and replacing them with community mental health services; they succeeded in closing mental hospitals. 81 To quote the criminologist Cynthia Lum, who began her career as a patrol officer in East Baltimore in the late 1990s, America’s poorest neighborhoods suffer from “under-everything.” They need more resources for every kind of municipal service, including the police. And Lum doubts that other social service providers “will suddenly care more about these communities and do so without disparity if given the responsibilities previously delivered by the police.” That is wishful thinking, she says, contradicted by the experience of “any police officer who has tried to get social services to respond to an abandoned or neglected child at three in the morning.” 82 In fact, some of the best documented successes of community policing came when officers helped neighborhoods secure help from other city agencies. It should not take a police officer to get more social services in an impoverished neighborhood—or better streetlights, or rodent abatement—but often that was precisely what it took.

The most fundamental problem with the strategy of police defunding, though, does not have to do with its weak political support or with concerns about its practical operation. The most fundamental problem is conceptual: a lack of clarity about what is to be defunded and what should replace it. Advocates of defunding often say that communities themselves can provide public safety better than the police. But what counts as the community, and what counts as the police? Do the police stop being “the police” if they pursue problem-solving or public-health approaches to community safety? Are they defined by their uniforms? Their guns? Their badges and legal powers? If wealthy communities replace public officers with private guards, does that count as defunding the police?

The sociologist Egon Bittner defined the police by their unique social role: their responsibility for responding in emergencies where force may need to be used because “ something that should not be happening is happening and someone must do something about it now! ” What is special about the police, he said, is their ability to threaten force, and their responsibility to do so, in situations that require it. 83 One reason this is a helpful way to define “the police” is that much of what is problematic about law enforcement—so many of the pathologies of police work—can be traced to officers’ ability to use or threaten force and to the circumstances in which, for that reason, they are called to respond.

Understood in this way—defined in terms of their distinctive social function—the police will be with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future. The key questions about the police are how they will be managed, how they will be held accountable, and what tasks they will be given beyond their core responsibility of responding to situations where force may be needed.

It is not much of an answer to say that resources should be invested in the community instead of in the police, or that the community rather than the police should keep neighborhoods safe. Communities act through groups, organizations, and governments—including police departments. Moreover, communities do not have clear, natural boundaries, and however they are defined, they contain people with varying points of view. Communities are not monolithic. What needs to be decided is not whether the community should be empowered, but how: what kinds of agencies should provide public safety, how they should be configured and controlled, and how conflicting values and expectations will be reconciled. 84

Advocates of police defunding who imagine communities to be organic, naturally defined, and homogeneous are repeating a key mistake of the backers of deinstitutionalization in the 1970s, who assumed that communities would come together to take care of people released from mental hospitals. 85 The community policing movement made a similar mistake; that is how it wound up blind to police violence. Backers of community policing often supposed that residents of a neighborhood would speak with one voice. Young or old, working or unemployed, conforming or rebellious, they would share common values. Because of this simplifying assumption, community policing programs often relied on business owners and older residents to express the sentiments of the community, and little effort was made, in particular, to solicit the views of young people. 86 That was a critical error, in part because it is young people who tend to be the victims of police violence. 87

Community policing would have been more successful and more “durable” (to borrow Patrick Sharkey’s term for policies that can be sustained over the long term) 88 had it paid more attention to the complexity of communities. 89 But instead of working to incorporate the concerns of all members of the public, community policing relied too often on the small, unrepresentative groups who showed up at neighborhood meetings. Those groups were unrepresentative in part because departments often worked hardest to involve community members whose views they found congenial; as a result, the voices elevated in community policing were often less critical of the police, and more supportive of aggressive law enforcement tactics, then the public as a whole. 90 All of this meant that community policing, like deinstitutionalization in the 1970s, was critically undermined by a certain naivety about actual communities. 91 Arguments for defunding the police often have the same fault.

A key element of the extraordinarily punitive turn of American criminal justice in the 1980s and 1990s was the rejection of rehabilitation: the abandonment of any effort to make prisons places that would help people convicted of crimes instead of warehousing them and making them suffer. This reimagination of the prison, making pain and containment its defining objectives, was commonly justified by the claim that rehabilitation was a proven, unmitigated failure. Studies of rehabilitation programs, it was said, had exhaustively demonstrated that “nothing works.” That was an egregious misreading of the research, distorting even the article from which the phrase “nothing works” had been lifted. As the sociologist David Garland has written, the aggressive insistence that “nothing works” was less a careful assessment of the evidence than an “emotive overreaction” to the excessive faith that had earlier been placed in rehabilitation, a cathartic expression of “the righteous anger of the disillusioned.” 92

If police reformers feel disillusioned and angry today, it is hard to blame them. It is easy to understand why many scholars and activists now say community policing made things worse, not better, by legitimizing the police and expanding their footprint. 93 But police reform has had successes as well as failures. Deep, long-lasting change will require recognizing what has gone right as well as what has gone wrong.

The successes and failures of police reform over the past half century offer three lessons. The first is that successful reform requires broad public support. Transforming law enforcement takes time and persistence, usually over a decade or more, and reforms opposed by significant parts of the public are likely to be abandoned too quickly, typically after only a few years. The second lesson, connected to the first, is that even in the smallest communities, people have conflicting aspirations about policing and public safety; they often disagree about how to balance crime control and order maintenance with the interests of privacy, liberty, freedom from harassment, and protection against state violence. There is no single, unified “people,” no homogenous “community.” The third and final lesson grows out of the first two. Because police reform requires balancing contradictory values and mediating between competing groups, reformers need models. Big successes, when they come, are built on earlier, smaller successes.

New efforts to remake public safety should heed each of these lessons. Police reform stands the best chance of working when it is durable, pluralistic, and experience-based.

Defunding the police fails these tests. It isn’t durable, because it lacks broad public support or even support by a narrow majority. Most Americans, regardless of race, oppose defunding the police. Defunding the police isn’t a pluralistic agenda, partly because it is opposed by large portions of the American public—indeed, by a majority—and partly because it relies on a simplified view of communities as organic, well-defined, and homogenous, with clear and uniform ideas about law enforcement. And defunding the police isn’t experience-based: we don’t have models of where it has succeeded in making policing more effective, more equitable, or less harmful.

On the other hand, broad majorities of the American public do support reforming the police. This is partly because, across lines of race and party, Americans share some of the core beliefs motivating calls to defund the police: that law enforcement is frequently too violent, that officers are insufficiently accountable, and that many of the functions carried out by the police could be better carried out by other agencies or community organizations, working separately or in conjunction with the police. 94 These areas of consensus open up avenues of police reform that are politically feasible, have long-term resilience, respect the diversity of communities, and build on past successes.

A durable, pluralistic, and experience-based agenda for police reform should be centered around four elements: a revival and strengthening of community policing; an expansion of problem-oriented policing, with a particular focus on programs targeting serious violence; a renewed commitment to diversity in police hiring and promotion; and improved mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

Community Policing

The central idea of community policing—that law enforcement should consult with and work in partnership with communities to pursue the community’s goals for public safety rather than operate as freestanding, largely autonomous crime fighters—remains broadly popular with Americans of all races. 95 And for good reason: the successes of community policing in the 1980s and 1990s were real.

The older versions of community policing had critical weaknesses, though, that newer versions should avoid repeating. Most glaringly, community policing programs in the 1980s and 1990s typically failed to address the issue of police violence. This failure was connected to a larger deficiency: a narrow, simplistic understanding of “the community.” Reformers tended to assume that communities had unambiguous boundaries and clear, consistent ideas about public safety. Divides within communities were often ignored, or—worse—departments worked to elevate only the voices within the community that they valued. Discussions of community policing also tended to proceed as though there were three distinct groups of people in any given area: the “community,” the police, and the people from whom the community needed protection. The community generally wasn’t thought to need protection from the police themselves. And the people from whom the community did need protection—in particular, young people—generally weren’t understood to be part of the community. Community policing fell far short of its potential in part because it ignored the divides within communities, and because it tended to treat young people as threats, not as stakeholders and partners. 96

In a similar way, community policing programs often erred by writing police officers themselves out of the community. As originally conceived, community policing aimed in part to tap into the idealism and initiative of line officers. This was true to an even greater extent of problem-oriented policing. But as community policing turned from an idea into a movement and then into something of an orthodoxy, it became more and more top-down. Less effort was spent drawing on the experience of the rank and file and enlisting their enthusiasm. In this respect, community policing continued a long tradition in American law enforcement. Patrol officers are necessarily given broad discretion; there is no way to regulate the vast majority of the decisions they make on every shift. But police departments have rarely made serious efforts to draw on the experience of line officers in ways that are systematic and publicly accountable or to involve them in the ongoing enterprise of remaking law enforcement. Police unions, with the implacable opposition they have often shown to reform, have done little to bolster the case for empowering the rank and file. But across the country there are hundreds of thousands of officers who want to work collaboratively with the public in confronting both crime and police misconduct. Community policing, like the older forms of law enforcement it aimed to supplant, took too little advantage of those officers. 97

These weaknesses were not inherent, though, in the basic idea of community policing. There were versions of community policing that took seriously the diversity of aspirations within any given community, the disputed boundaries of the community, and the need to protect members of the community from police violence and other forms of official abuse. There were versions of community policing that involved structured discussions among people with conflicting ideas about how public safety should be pursued in a particular locality—about what tactics the police should use, how police resources should be allocated, and how officers should be held accountable. 98 There were departments that made conscious efforts to bring together parts of the public that disagreed about policing tactics, including those highly critical of the police. 99 There were opportunities, too rarely pursued, to strengthen community policing by treating young people as members of the community with distinct concerns and distinct contributions to offer in pursuing public safety. There were versions of community policing and problem-solving policing that drew heavily on the experience and enthusiasm of the rank and file, and there were initiatives to rein in police violence that did the same.

In Lowell, Massachusetts, for example, police brought together residents of a largely white neighborhood and a poorer, heavily Cambodian neighborhood to discuss which neighborhood should be the site of a new police precinct that both wanted; the result was an overwhelming consensus that the interests of the Cambodian neighborhood should prevail. 100 When residents of Fremont, California, complained to police about a low-income apartment complex they thought, erroneously, was a hot spot of drug dealing and sex work, police brought them into the complex to encounter the actual tenants. 101 Some beat meetings at the heart of Chicago’s community policing program successfully employed structured discussions among residents with conflicting ideas about public safety, sometimes aided by professional facilitators; Chicago also used organizers to boost participation at these meetings by poor people and people of color. 102 A community policing initiative in Riverside, California, involved officers reaching out to, and working to address concerns of, not just seniors and other groups they thought would welcome partnership with law enforcement but neighborhood activists who had long been harsh critics of the police. 103 More recently, the Community Safety Partnership in Los Angeles—which has successfully reduced violence and increased public satisfaction with the police at four public housing projects over the past decade—grew out of meetings at which police officers sought out, listened to, and apologized to residents who were distrustful and sharply critical of the police. 104 Police in Boston reached out to Black clergy to secure the participation of young people in an anti-violence initiative. 105 And the most successful programs of community policing tended to be the ones that drew significantly on the ideas and initiative of rank-and-file officers; that was also true of a promising program to reduce police violence that was developed, and prematurely abandoned, in Oakland in the 1970s. 106

Recommitting to community policing, with or without a broader and more sophisticated understanding of community, does mean rejecting one key objective of many advocates of police defunding: reducing how often officers interact with the public. Community policing can and should be reconfigured to address police violence, to respect the diversity of communities, and to broaden who is treated as belonging to the community. But extensive contact between the police and the public is central to the very idea of community policing; there is no other way for the police to consult with and partner with the community.

Community policing is fully consistent, though, with shifting some responsibilities away from the police to other agencies or community organizations. Indeed, part of the idea of community policing is that the police do not and should not have a monopoly on the provision of public safety, and key parts of that job can and should be performed by others. And—jumping ahead—part of the idea of problem-oriented policing was that some kinds of crime and disorder are best addressed by agencies and organizations outside law enforcement, alone or in coordination with the police, and even when the police are involved, arrests and criminal sanctions should be used only when necessary. 107

So, a revival of community policing and problem-oriented policing can and should include a reexamination of which functions, currently carried out by police officers, could be better performed by others. 108 Advocates of defunding the police have suggested shifting responsibilities for mental health response, traffic enforcement, and school security to agencies outside law enforcement, and those suggestions deserve careful consideration. Much of the work in these categories does not require officers authorized to employ “situationally justified force” 109 —the core, distinguishing feature of the police. Others may be able to perform these functions more skillfully and with less potential for violence. Roughly a quarter of the people killed by the police show signs of mental illness, for example. 110 A growing number of cities dispatch medical and behavioral health professionals, rather than police officers, in response to 911 calls involving people in mental health distress, and the evidence suggests that these programs defuse situations that could otherwise escalate into violence. 111 Perhaps ten percent of police shootings originate in traffic stops, and these stops also serve as principal point of entry into the criminal justice system for many people of color. Many of these stops could safely be carried out by unarmed, non-police personnel or replaced with violation notices sent in the mail. 112 Similarly, police officers in schools are a key element of the “school-to-prison pipeline” that draws many children of color into the criminal justice system, and there is little evidence that replacing them with educational personnel would make schools less safe. 113

Shifting responsibilities away from law enforcement is different than defunding police departments, let alone abolishing them. For one thing, most of what the police do falls outside the categories of mental health response, traffic enforcement, and school security. Estimates of the percentage of 911 calls that involve people in mental health distress range from roughly one percent to around twelve percent; the true figure is likely somewhere in the middle of that range. 114 Traffic enforcement takes up a larger share of officers’ time, but probably under twenty percent. 115 In 2016 there were twenty-seven thousand police officers assigned to schools; that was roughly four percent of the six hundred fifty thousand police officers in the United States. 116 Almost certainly there are other jobs that could and should be transferred away from the police, but many, maybe most, calls to the police are calls for someone with the defining attribute of the police, the authority to use force. And when other agencies or organizations take on responsibilities for responding to mental health emergencies, enforcing traffic laws, or keeping schools safe, they will sometimes need to call the police for backup—albeit less commonly than might be expected. 117 It is possible, moreover, that the best results will be obtained by creating teams in which police officers work alongside paramedics and mental health professionals; this approach has been adopted in Dallas, Texas, with promising results. 118

Shifting responsibilities from the police, or leveraging police resources by having the police work alongside other professionals, will often free up funds that can be shifted, too. It is hard to say how much of a constraint law enforcement budgets place on the ability of local governments to fund other services. Nationwide, about one percent of state expenditures and six percent of local government expenditures go to the police, but per capita spending on law enforcement varies widely from place to place. 119 Poor neighborhoods generally will benefit most if new services are provided without cuts to the police budget. But even when the only way to fund new services is to shift expenditures away from law enforcement, the focus should be on providing the new services, not on cutting police budgets. Otherwise, police defunding could wind up looking like mental health deinstitutionalization: program cuts without the promised reinvestments.

Problem-Oriented Policing

Community policing, done right, can make police more responsive and accountable to the public, it can make people feel safer, and it can help groups with conflicting goals and concerns work together on issues of public safety. It is less clear whether it can decrease crime, although there is reason to expect that when people feel more secure, they will spend more time on the street and in other public spaces, which in turn will make those places safer. There is better evidence for the effectiveness of problem-oriented policing in reducing crime, particularly certain forms of problem-oriented policing, when they are integrated with strong programs of community policing. The types of problem-oriented policing with the strongest records of success are programs that concentrate law enforcement resources on specific, crime-plagued locations (“hot spots”) and programs that focus on particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate share of a city’s gun violence.

The most famous program of the latter variety was Boston’s Ceasefire initiative, which dramatically reduced youth homicides by interrupting cycles of retaliatory gang violence. Ceasefire identified a relatively small number of groups responsible for the bulk of youth shootings in Boston and targeted their members with threats of criminal enforcement along with offers of economic support and social services if they refrained from gun violence. The program relied on consultation and coordination between the police department, a range of other municipal agencies and nonprofit groups, and inner-city clergy. Ceasefire cut youth homicides in Boston by roughly fifty percent. Those gains began to disappear in the early 2000s when the program was discontinued, then were recovered when the program was restarted. 120 A variation on the Ceasefire approach, implemented in Oakland, California, reduced both homicides and nonfatal shootings by roughly half. The Oakland program focused on adult shooters rather than juveniles, reflecting differences between homicide patterns in Oakland and Boston; it also reduced (but did not eliminate) the role of the police and expanded the role of peer-to-peer counseling. 121

Ceasefire programs are not cure-alls: both Boston and Oakland have seen increases in gun violence during the pandemic. More importantly, the experience in both cities demonstrates the importance of developing programs in close consultation with community groups, members of the public, and other municipal and county agencies, in part to tailor the program to local circumstances and local concerns. This process often requires several iterations of the program and can take several years. Moreover, even successful programs, like Boston’s, are difficult to sustain over the long term without broad public support. For all these reasons, Ceasefire initiatives work best, and are most likely to have a lasting impact, when they are paired with strong programs of community policing. That is also true of problem-oriented policing more generally. 122

Programs like hot-spots policing and Ceasefire initiatives can themselves become abusive forms of law enforcement, even—or maybe especially—when they enjoy broad public support. The theory of hot-spots policing calls for patrol officers to be concentrated in high-crime areas, but it leaves open the question how they should patrol: in particular, how aggressively they should employ their arrest powers or their authority to conduct investigatory stops and frisks. The simplest way to answer those questions, though, is with lots of stops, lots of frisks, and lots of arrests, and unfortunately this is sometimes what hot-spots policing has become. 123 Ceasefire initiatives, for their part, can wind up looking like systems of arbitrary and draconian punishment for people the police think, but cannot prove, are responsible for neighborhood violence. 124 The best versions of hot spots and Ceasefire have minimized these risks of abuse, but the risks are real, and cities employing these strategies need to keep them constantly in mind.

Community policing and problem-oriented policing both rely on community engagement, and that engagement is easier to obtain when police forces reflect the diversity of the communities that they serve. Police diversity is important for other reasons, as well. A growing body of evidence suggests that female officers use less force than male officers and that officers of color use less force than white officers, especially against African Americans. 125 Male officers partnered with female officers, and white officers partnered with officers of color, are also likely to use less force. 126 And diverse police forces are less insular and parochial. They are more open to outside ideas—including ideas that grow out of efforts at community policing and problem-oriented policing—and they have more-vibrant internal discussions. Furthermore, they are more likely to have strong, vocal organizations of Black officers, Latino officers, or female officers. Those groups, in turn, can serve as bridges to identity-based groups in the communities the officers patrol, and they are often effective champions of reforms that are opposed by police unions and other workplace organizations dominated by white, male officers. 127

The ranks of American police forces grew more diverse in the closing three decades of the twentieth century, but unfortunately that progress, which was far from complete, 128 has since stalled and in many cases is beginning to be reversed. Much of the progress was the result of affirmative action plans required by court orders or adopted under the threat of litigation; many of those plans have since been abandoned as the law has grown less supportive of race- and gender-conscious remedies for past discrimination. 129 Partly for that reason, American police forces on the whole look less like their surrounding communities today than they did twenty years ago. Federal data indicate, for example, that two-thirds of police departments employing a hundred or more officers grew whiter relative to their surrounding communities between 2007 and 2016. 130

The problem is particularly acute with regard to Black officers. Black officers hired in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are now retiring, and new Black officers are not joining in anywhere near the numbers that would be required to make up for the retirements. The NYPD, for example, has fourteen percent fewer Black officers today than in 2008. In Philadelphia there are nineteen percent fewer Black officers than in 2017. The drop in Chicago has been twelve percent since 2019. 131

Improving police diversity is often something of an orphan cause, opposed by people on the right who oppose affirmative action in general and viewed warily by people on the left who fear that tokenism will substitute for real reform. But community policing, problem-oriented policing, or any other effort at transforming law enforcement is unlikely to succeed, especially in the long term, unless it is coupled with a renewed commitment to diversifying the demographics of American law enforcement.

Oversight and Accountability

Community policing and problem-oriented policing lost credibility in part by worrying too little about police abuse, and especially about police violence. For new programs of community policing and problem-oriented policing to succeed over the long term, they need to be durable, and they will not be durable unless they are accompanied by effective strategies for addressing violent, discriminatory, and otherwise abusive forms of policing. Diversifying police departments will help in this regard but is not sufficient. Policing needs effective mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

The most effective mechanisms will be adapted to local circumstances, and they should be continually improved, capitalizing on successes and correcting for failure. The “problems” addressed by problem-oriented policing and community policing can and should include police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement. But decades of experience have already helped to identify a range of best practices for controlling abusive policing and making police more accountable. Among them are the following:

(1) Strong civilian oversight. Most large police departments in the United States now have some form of institutionalized public oversight, whether from a commission, an independent auditor or inspector general, or both. But many smaller departments still lack anything along these lines. Community policing, which involves departments consulting with and partnering with the public, is not a substitute for systems that place law enforcement under the formal supervision of civilian officials. 132

(2) Meaningful judicial review. Courts, by themselves, are notoriously weak tools for guarding against police abuse. 133 But transforming public safety requires the availability of judicial forums for pressing claims of police misconduct, not least to make clear that the police, like everyone else, are not above the law. Doctrines of qualified immunity that can make it practically impossible to sue the police also reinforce sensations of disempowerment and habits of disengagement that eviscerate efforts at meaningful reform. 134

(3) Transparent systems of internal discipline. Even without qualified immunity, most instances of police misconduct will not wind up in court. This is one reason that law enforcement agencies need their own, robust systems for detecting and remedying official abuse. And it is difficult for these systems to be strong if they are opaque. Experience has shown that civilians involved in police discipline are no tougher than command staff on rank-and-file officers—if anything, quite the opposite—but over the long term the involvement of civilians helps to keep the system honest. 135

(4) Independent investigation of police killings. While it is important that police departments maintain their own, robust systems of internal discipline, public confidence requires that the most serious cases—when a police officer kills a civilian—be handled, to the extent possible, by investigators and prosecutors independent of the officer’s own agency and the prosecutorial office that works regularly with that agency. 136

(5) Tracking of problem officers. Abusive policing is not just a problem of “bad apples”; systems and occupational cultures are to blame, as well. 137 Still, a disproportionate share of police violence and other forms of official misconduct can be traced to officers who break the rules repeatedly. Just as programs of community violence reduction have often focused, successfully, on the small number of individuals responsible for an outsize share of violent crime, tackling police abuse is partly a matter of identifying and dealing with problem officers. This requires reliable systems for tracking the officers within a department with unusually high numbers of civilian complaints, disciplinary infractions, or episodes of violence, but it also requires ways to track these officers between departments, so they do not simply move from agency to agency, leaving their disciplinary records and risk-assessment flags behind them. 138

(6) Mandatory use of dash cameras and body cameras. Dash cameras and body cameras, like every tool of police reform, are not cure-alls. Early expectations were that officers would be less abusive if they knew their actions were being recorded, but the evidence on that so far is equivocal. 139 Moreover, there are serious, unresolved questions about the best rules for handling the recordings these cameras generate and under what circumstances officers should be allowed to turn them off. 140 But dash cameras and body cameras can powerfully counteract one of the greatest obstacles, historically, to holding officers accountable: the dearth of reliable, objective evidence about what happened in interactions between citizens and the police. 141

(7) Bright-line rules. Even the most robust systems of after-the-fact review, whether in the form of civil lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, or internal disciplinary proceedings, will have limited effectiveness if the guidelines under which police officers operate are vague. In particular, it can be difficult for judges, jurors, and disciplinary boards to second-guess an officer’s decision about what constitutes “reasonable” use of force in a certain situation. So it is important to supplement vague standards of this kind with more specific, per se bans on practices—such as choke holds and no-knock drug raids—that experience has shown are deadly and unjustifiable. 142

None of these mechanisms of police accountability, nor any of the other reforms sketched in this article, can succeed in isolation. Decades of experience have shown that innovative approaches to public safety, no matter how promising they seem for reducing crime, controlling police abuse, or strengthening communities, are unlikely to last longer than a few years, even in a political environment less polarized than today’s, unless the reforms enjoy broad public support. And that kind of support materializes only when a comprehensive package of reforms—drawing on the lessons of community policing and problem-oriented policing, embracing a commitment to police diversity, and including robust systems of oversight and accountability—is hammered out and continually refined by the police working in genuine collaboration with a broad range of government agencies, community organizations, and advocacy groups. Cities that have sustained police reform over the long haul—Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York—all have well-established systems of civilian oversight, and all have benefited from reform processes pushed along by judicial orders and monitoring. Los Angeles, Cincinnati, and New York all have seen homicide rates spike over the past two years, and all three cities—especially Cincinnati and Los Angeles—continue to have unacceptably high rates of police violence. But each of these cities has better policing today than it did thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago.

Most of the chief elements of effective police reform enjoy broad, bipartisan support, and most are also strongly endorsed by people of color, especially African Americans, who are the most burdened by crime and by police abuse. This is true of community policing and problem-solving policing, and it is true of the leading proposals for increasing accountability and oversight of the police—including mandating body cameras, requiring independent investigations of police killings, banning choke holds and no-knock warrants, and facilitating civil liability for police illegality by stripping officers of qualified immunity—and it is true of suggestions to shift certain responsibilities, like mental health response, away from the police. 143 Evidence is weaker regarding the level of public support for efforts to expand the recruitment, hiring, and promotion of minority officers and female officers, but those programs are unlikely to elicit strong opposition as long as they avoid the use of quotas or other rigid preferences. 144 There is therefore reason to hope that a comprehensive program of police reform can be fashioned that will cut crime, rein in police violence, reduce some of the nation’s worst forms of inequality, and—not least important—enjoy the kind of broad public support that will allow it to last, even in times as divided as ours.

M ichael W. F lamm , L aw and O rder : S treet C rime , C ivil U nrest , and the C risis of L iberalism in the 1960 s (2005); E lizabeth H inton , A merica on F ire : T he U ntold H istory of P olice V iolence and B lack R ebellion S ince the 1960 s (2021); D avid A lan S klansky , D emocracy and the P olice 59–73 (2008).

D avid H. B ayley & J erome S kolnick , T he N ew B lue L ine : P olice I nnovation in S ix A merican C ities (1986); Dan M. Kahan & Tracey L. Meares, Foreword: The Coming Crisis of Criminal Procedure , 86 G eo . L.J. 1153, 1160–66 (1998).

Michael C. Dorf & Charles F. Sabel, A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism , 98 C olum . L. R ev . 267, 327–32 (1998); Kami Chavis Simmons, New Governance and the “New Paradigm” of Police Accountability: A Democratic Approach to Police Reform , 59 C ath . U. L. R ev . 373 (2010).

For thoughtful reflections on the abolitionist project, see Amna A. Akbar, An Abolitionist Horizon for (Police) Reform , 108 C alif . L. R ev . 1781 (2020); Tracey L. Meares, Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad , B os . R ev . (Aug. 1, 2017), https://bostonreview.net/articles/tracey-l-meares-public-good-gone-bad/ .

See Ashley Hackett, Why National Republicans Love Talking About “Defund the Police,” M inn P ost (Sept. 9, 2021), https://www.minnpost.com/national/2021/09/why-national-republicans-love-talking-about-defund-the-police/ ; William Saletan, Americans Don’t Want to Defund the Police. Here’s What They Do Want , S late (Oct. 21, 2021, 7:00 PM), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html .

See , e.g. , Erika D. Smith, Tough-on-Crime Pleas Sound All Too Familiar , L.A. T imes , Dec. 17, 2021, at B1.

Id. ; Kellen Browning & Brian X. Chen, Asian and Black Leaders Unite to End Hate but Split on Policing , N.Y. T imes , Dec. 20, 2021, at A11; Kim Parker & Kiley Hurst, Growing Share of Americans Say They Want More Spending on Police in Their Area , P ew R sch . C tr . B log (Oct. 26, 2021), https://pewrsr.ch/3pE9B2V .

For a nuanced call to give more power over policing to the people most affected by it, see Jocelyn Simonson, Police Reform Through a Power Lens , 130 Y ale L.J. 778 (2021).

E lliott C urrie , A P eculiar I ndifference : T he N eglected T oll of V iolence on B lack A merica 19–38 (2020); D avid A lan S klansky , A P attern of V iolence : H ow the L aw C lassifies C rimes and W hat I t M eans for J ustice 230 (2021); M ichael P lanty et al ., U.S. D ep ’ t of J ust ., B ureau of J ust . S tat ., F emale V ictims of S exual V iolence , 1994-2000, at 3 (2013).

C urrie , supra note 9 , at 6–7.

P atrick S harkey , U neasy P eace : T he G reat C rime D ecline , the R enewal of C ity L ife , and the N ext W ar on V iolence 15–17, 76–96 (2018); T homas A bt , B leeding O ut : T he D evastating C onsequences of U rban V iolence — and a B old N ew P lan for P eace in the S treets 21–28 (2019).

C urrie , supra note 9 , at 78–177; A bt , supra note 11 , at 18–20.

See , e.g. , R andall K ennedy , C rime , R ace , and the L aw 29–75 (1997); J ill L eovy , G hettoside : A T rue S tory of M urder in A merica (2015); Alexandra Natapoff, Underenforcement , 75 F ordham L. R ev . 1715 (2006).

Franklin E. Zimring, Police Killings as a Problem of Governance , 687 A nn . A m . A cad . P ol . & S oc . S ci . 114, 114–15 (2020).

Christine Tamir et al., Facts About the U.S. Black Population , P ew R sch . C tr . B log (Mar. 25, 2021), https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/ . From 2015 through 2021, Black people were twenty-seven percent of the victims of police shootings for which race could be identified. W ash . P ost P olice S hootings D atabase , https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/ (last visited Feb. 15, 2022).

GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, Fatal Police Violence by Race and State in the USA, 1980–2019: A Network Meta-Regression , 398 L ancet 1239, 1245 (2021) (hereinafter Fatal Police Violence by Race and State ).

Joe Fox et al., What We’ve Learned About Police Shootings 5 Years After Ferguson , W ash . P ost (Aug. 9, 2019), https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/09/what-weve-learned-about-police-shootings-years-after-ferguson/ .

Marc Schindler & Jeremy Kittredge, A Crisis Within a Crisis: Police Killings of Black Emerging Adults , H ow W e R ise (B rookings ) B log (Dec. 2, 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/12/02/a-crisis-within-a-crisis-police-killings-of-black-emerging-adults/ ; Email to author from Jeremy Kittredge, Dec. 9, 2021 (clarifying time period of analysis); see also Frank Edwards et al., Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex , 116 P roc . N at ’ l A cad . S cis . 16793, 16795 fig.3 (2019) (indicating that between 2013 and 2018, a twenty-year-old Black male in the United States was five times as likely to be killed by the police as a white male of the same age).

See , e.g. , P aul B utler , C hokehold : P olicing B lack M en 81–115 (2017); V ictor M. R ios , P unished : P olicing the L ives of B lack and L atino B oys 4–5, 125–26, 147, 149, 155 (2011); Kami Chavis Simmons, The Legacy of Stop and Frisk: Addressing the Vestiges of a Violent Police Culture , 49 W ake F orest L. R ev . 849 (2014).

See , e.g. , Jeffrey Fagan & Tracey L. Meares, Punishment, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of Punishment in Minority Communities , 6 O hio S t . J. C rim . L. 173 (2008).

E.g. , Jeffrey M. Jones, Black, White Adults’ Confidence Diverges Most on Police , G allup B log (Aug. 12, 2020), https://news.gallup.com/poll/317114/black-white-adults-confidence-diverges-police.aspx ; Rachel Lawler & Deja Thomas, Black Californians Stand Out in Views on Police Treatment , P ub . P ol ’ y I nst . C al . B log (Apr. 16, 2021), https://www.ppic.org/blog/black-californians-stand-out-in-views-of-police-treatment/ ; Saletan, supra note 5 .

Monica Bell, Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement , 126 Y ale L.J. 2054 (2017); see also Devon W. Carbado, (E)racing the Fourth Amendment , 100 M ich . L. R ev . 946, 947–64 (2002); Benjamin Justice & Tracey L. Meares, How the Criminal Justice System Educates Citizens , 651 A nn . A m . A cad . P ol . & S oc . S ci . 159 (2020).

R adley B alko , T he R ise of the W arrior C op : T he M ilitarization of A merica ’ s P olice F orces (2014); B ernard H arcourt , I llusion of O rder : T he F alse P romise of B roken W indows P olicing (2005); E lizabeth H inton , F rom the W ar on P overty to the W ar on C rime : T he M aking of M ass I ncarceration in A merica (2017).

F ranklin E. Z imring , W hen P olice K ill 202–18 (2017); Amna A. Akbar, Toward a Radical Reimagining of Law , 93 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 405 (2018); Curtis Bunn, Why Black Lives Matter Matters , in C urtis B unn et al ., S ay T heir N ames : H ow B lack L ives C ame to M atter in A merica 1, 6–62 (2021).

S harkey , supra note 11 , at 28–30.

Id. at 3–13; F ranklin E. Z imring , T he G reat A merican C rime D ecline (2006).

S harkey , supra note 11 , at 14–38, 66–71.

E.g. , id. at 12–13; Julie Bosman et al., Lives Lost: Inside a Surging Homicide Rate , N.Y. T imes , Nov. 16, 2021, at A1.

Priya Krishnakumar et al., Fueled by Gun Violence, Cities Across the US Are Breaking All-Time Homicide Records This Year , CNN (Dec. 12, 2021), https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/homicides-major-cities-increase-end-of-year-2021/ .

Patrick Sharkey & Alisabeth Marsteller, Neighborhood Inequality and Violence in Chicago, 1965–2020 , 89 U. C hi . L. R ev . 349, 375–76, 380 tbl.3 (2022).

U.S. C ensus , Q uick F acts , L os A ngeles C ity , C alifornia , https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/losangelescitycalifornia ; Tim Arango, For Host City, Super Bowl Is Proof of Progress , N.Y. T imes , Feb. 13, 2022, at A1, A21; Jim Quinn & Hannah E. Meyers, These Policies Were Supposed to Help Black People. They’re Backfiring , N.Y. T imes (Feb. 15, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims-crime.html .

E.g. , S harkey , supra note 11 , at 45–47; Aaron Chalfin et al., Police Force Size and Civilian Race (Nat’l Bureau of Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 28202, 2020), https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202 ; Aaron Chalfin & Justin McCrary, Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature , 55 J. E con . L it . 5, 13–16, 21–22 (2017); John MacDonald et al., The Effects of Local Police Surges on Crime and Arrests in New York City , PL o S ONE, 11(6): e0157223 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157223 .

Z imring , supra note 26 , at 135–68; F ranklin E. Z imring , T he C ity T hat B ecame S afe : N ew Y ork ’ s L essons for U rban C rime and I ts C ontrol 100–50 (2012).

E.g. , P roblem -O riented P olicing : S uccessful C ase S tudies (Michael S. Scott & Ronald V. Clarke eds., 2020); N at ’ l R sch . C ouncil , F airness and E ffectiveness in P olicing : T he E vidence 217–51 (2004); Joshua C. Hinkle et al., Problem-Oriented Policing for Reducing Crime and Disorder: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis , C ampbell S ystematic R evs . (2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1089 ; Chalfin & McCrary, supra note 32 , at 17–19. On hot-spots policing as a form of problem-oriented policing, see also M alcolm S parrow , H andcuffed : W hat H olds P olicing B ack , and the K eys to R eform (2016).

David Alan Sklansky, Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement , 96 J. C rim . L. & C riminology 1209 (2006); Lauren Leatherby & Richard A. Oppel Jr., Which Police Departments Are as Diverse as Their Communities? , N.Y. T imes , Sept. 23, 2020; David A. Graham, America Is Losing Its Black Officers , A tlantic , Oct. 4, 2021.

E.g. , Bocar A. Ba et al., The Role of Officer Race and Gender in Police-Civilian Interactions in Chicago , 371 S cience 696 (2021); Mark Hoekstra & CarlyWill Sloan, Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence From 911 Calls , 112 A m . E con . R ev . 827 (2022).

Sklansky, supra note 35 .

Noam Scheiber et al., Fierce Protectors of Police Impede Efforts at Reform , N.Y. T imes , June 7, 2020, at A1. For a careful, balanced assessment of police unionism placing it in the context both of criminal justice reform and of public sector unionism more broadly, see Benjamin Levin, What’s Wrong with Police Unions? , 120 C olum . L. R ev . 1333 (2020).

Levin, supra note 38 , at 1229–33; Catherine L. Fisk & L. Song Richardson, Police Unions , 85 G eo . W ash . L. R ev . 712, 744–80 (2017); Eli Hager & Weihua Li, A Major Obstacle to Police Reform: The Whiteness of Their Union Bosses , M arshall P roject (June 10, 2020), https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/10/a-major-obstacle-to-police-reform-the-whiteness-of-their-union-bosses .

S parrow , supra note 34 .

James Forman Jr., Community Policing and Youth as Assets , 95 J. C rim . L. & C riminology 1 (2004); see also, e.g. , S parrow , supra note 34 .

See , e.g. , Debra A. Livingston, Police Discretion and the Quality of Life in Public Places: Courts, Communities, and the New Policing , 97 C olum . L. R ev . 551 (1997).

See sources cited supra note 34 .

Josiah Bates, Amid a Continuing Wave of Gun Violence, This U.S. City Is Bucking the Trend , T ime (Dec. 29, 2021), https://time.com/6129859/st-louis-shootings-homicides-decrease/ (regarding St. Louis); Sharon Grigsby, Dallas Homicide Numbers Dropped by 13% in 2021. How Did Chief Eddie Garcia Pull That Off? , D allas M orning N ews (Dec. 30, 2021), https://www.dallasnews.com/news/commentary/2021/12/30/year-end-dallas-stats-show-an-impressive-drop-in-violent-crime-how-did-chief-eddie-garcia-do-it/ ; Sarah Holder & Fola Akinnibi, As Violent Crime Falls in Dallas, Answers Go Beyond Policing , B loomberg (Feb. 3, 2022), https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-02-03/defying-national-trend-violent-crime-in-dallas-is-down .

Anthony A. Braga et al., Disorder Policing to Reduce Crime: A Systematic Review , C ampbell S ystematic R evs . (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1050 .

Anthony A. Braga et al., Focused Deterrence Strategies Effects on Crime: A Systematic Review , C ampbell S ystematic R evs . (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1051 ; see infra notes 121 – 122 and accompanying text.

J ames Q. W ilson , V arieties of P olice B ehavior : T he M anagement of L aw and O rder in E ight C ommunities (1968); see D orothy G uyot , P olicing as T hough P eople M atter 5–7 (1991); S klansky , supra note 1 , at 4.

See , e.g. , W esley G. S kogan , P olice and C ommunity in C hicago : A T ale of T hree C ities 174, 177–210 (2006).

S klansky , supra note 9 , at 111–14.

Lawrence W. Sherman, Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: Research, Theory, and Practice , 1 A nn . R ev . C riminology 421 (2017); Fatal Police Violence by Race and State , supra note 16 , at 1246, 1251.

Samuel Sinyangwe, Police Are Killing Fewer People in Big Cities, But More in Suburban and Rural America , F ive T hirty E ight B log (June 1, 2020), https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/police-are-killing-fewer-people-in-big-cities-but-more-in-suburban-and-rural-america/ .

These statistics are based on figures provided by the LAPD. L.A. Police Dep’t, Categorical Use of Force Totals 2003–2005 (2021) (on file with author); L.A. Police Dep’t, Categorical Use of Force Totals 2006–2020 (2021) (on file with author).

Kevin Rector, Shootings by LAPD Officers Rising Again After Years of Decline , L.A. T imes , (Oct. 15, 2021), https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-15/string-of-recent-lapd-shootings-pushes-2021-count-beyond-2020-2019-totals ; see also Kevin Rector et al., LAPD Tactics Under Scrutiny After Officer Fatally Shoots Girl in Burlington Dressing Room , L.A. T imes (Dec. 24, 2021), https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-24/a-girl-trying-on-clothes-a-cop-and-a-shocking-shooting-at-burlington-dressing-room .

See PDI (Police Data Initiative) CPD Shootings , C ity of C incinnati , https://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/Safety/PDI-Police-Data-Initiative-CPD-Shootings/7a3r-kxji ; PDI (Police Data Initiative) Officer Involved Shootings , C ity of C incinnati , https://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/Safety/PDI-Police-Data-Initiative-Officer-Involved-Shooti/r6q4-muts . Calculations are on file with the author.

P olice S corecard , https://www.policescorecard.org .

According to Mapping Police Violence, another project led by Sinyangwe, police killed 1,096 people nationwide in 2019 and 14 in New York City. M apping P olice V iolence , https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ . The 2020 census estimated the population of the United States at 331,449,281 and the population of New York City at 8,804,190. Q uick F acts , U.S. C ensus , https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/ .

The FBI estimates there were 16,425 homicides nationwide in 2019; New York City recorded 319 homicides that year. See 2019 Crime in the United States , U.S. D ep ’ t of J ust ., https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/murder ; N.Y. P olice D ep ’ t , C rime and E nforcement A ctivity in N ew Y ork C ity (2019).

E.g. , A lex V itale , T he E nd of P olicing (2017).

Katherine Fung, AOC Says NYPD’s $1 Billion Budget Cut Doesn’t Go Far Enough to Defund Police , N ewsweek (June 30, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-says-nypds-1-billion-budget-cut-doesnt-go-far-enough-defund-police-1514523 .

Smith, supra note 6 , at B2 (quoting Cat Brooks); see also, e.g. , Mariame Kaba, Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police , N.Y. T imes , June 14, 2020, at SR2 (arguing that “[t]he only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police”).

Fung, supra note 60 .

E.g. , Smith, supra note 6 , at B2; Fola Akinnibi et al., Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say Otherwise , B loomberg (Jan. 12, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-funding/ ; Zusha Elinson et al., Cities Reverse Police Defunding Amid Rising Crime , W all S t . J., May 27, 2021; J. David Goodman, Cities Reverse on Police Cuts as Crime Rises , N.Y. T imes , Oct. 11, 2021, at A1.

Parker & Hurst, supra note 7 ; As Violent Crime Leaps, Liberal Cities Rethink Cutting Police Budgets , E conomist , Jan. 15, 2022.

Parker & Hurst, supra note 7 .

Martin Kuz, “It’s Way Past Time to Try Something New”: The Push to Defend Police , C hristian S ci . M onitor (June 19, 2020) (quoting Mike Griffin), https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0619/It-s-way-past-time-to-try-something-new-The-push-to-defund-police . For a helpful effort to incorporate abolitionist insights into an agenda for police reform, see Meares, supra note 4 .

Andre J. Ellington, Eric Adams, Who Opposed Defunding the Police, Poised to Be New York’s Second Black Mayor After Primary Win , N ewsweek (July 6, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/eric-adams-who-opposed-defunding-police-poised-new-yorks-second-black-mayor-after-primary-win-1607379 ; Raeedah Wahid, Adams Won By Betting on a New York Divided By Race and Income , B loomberg (July 21, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-nyc-mayoral-analysis/ .

Nekima Levy Armstrong, Black Voters Want Better Policing , N.Y. T imes , Nov. 11, 2021, at A23; Michelle S. Phelps, Why Voters Rejected Plans to Replace the Minneapolis Police Department—and What’s Next for Policing Reform , C onversation (Nov. 4, 2021), https://theconversation.com/why-voters-rejected-plans-to-replace-the-minneapolis-police-department-and-whats-next-for-policing-reform-171183 .

See M adelyn C oles et al ., S afety B eyond P olicing : P romoting C are O ver C riminalization (2021).

See Charles F. Sabel & William H. Simon, The Duty of Responsible Administration and the Problem of Police Accountability , 33 Y ale J. R eg . 165, 193–200 (2016).

See , e.g. , Samuel Walker, Institutionalizing Police Accountability Reforms: The Problem of Making Police Reforms Endure , 32 S t . L ouis U. P ub . L. R ev . 57, 60–65 (2012).

See S harkey , supra note 11 , at 183.

Elinson et al., supra note 63 ; Goodman, supra note 63 ; see also Jay Caspian King, In Big City Politics, a Call to Fund the Police , N.Y. T imes (Dec. 20, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/opinion/mayors-fund-police.html .

See Akbar, supra note 4 ; Allegra M. McLeod, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice , 62 UCLA L. R ev . 1156 (2015).

Peter Jamison, This California City Defunded Its Police Force. Killings by Officers Soared , W ash . P ost (June 23, 2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/this-california-city-defunded-its-police-force-killings-by-officers-soared/2020/06/22/253eeddc-b198-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html ; Sam Levin, 19 Dead in a Decade: The Small American City Where Violent Police Thrive , G uardian (June 13, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/13/vallejo-california-police-violence-sean-monterrosa .

Joseph Goldstein & Kevin Armstrong, The City That Fired Its Whole Police Department , N.Y. T imes , July 12, 2020, at A1; Allison Steele & Sean Collins Walsh, Camden Disbanded Its Police Department and Built a New One. Can Others Learn From It? , P hila . I nquirer (June 14, 2020), https://www.inquirer.com/news/camden-police-defund-minneapolis-george-floyd-protest-20200609.html ; Nathan Layne, One American City’s Model of Policing Reform Means Building “Social Currency,” R euters (June 12, 2020), https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-camden/one-american-citys-model-of-policing-reform-means-building-social-currency-idUSKBN23J2RU .

David A. Sklansky, The Private Police , 46 UCLA L. R ev . 1165, 1171–83 (1999).

Ryan W. Miller, What Does “Defund the Police” Mean and Why Some Say “Reform” Is Not Enough , USA T oday (June 8, 2020), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/08/what-does-defund-police-mean-george-floyd-black-lives-matter/5317240002/ .

Rashawn Ray, What Does “Defund the Police” Mean and Does it Have Merit? , B rookings B log (June 19, 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/ .

See , e.g. , Akbar, supra note 4 , at 1804; Philip V. McHarris, Community Policing Is Not the Answer , A ppeal (Dec. 2, 2019), https://theappeal.org/community-policing-is-not-the-answer/ .

See , e.g. , Robert Weisberg, Restorative Justice and the Danger of Community , 2003 U tah L. R ev . 343, 363–68 (2003); Máximo Langer, Penal Abolitionism and Criminal Law Minimalism: Here and There, Then and Now , 134 H arv . L. R ev . 42, 66–67 (2020); Rachel E. Barkow, The Political Path of Prison Abolition in America 37–43 (unpublished manuscript, April 2, 2022). Regarding the dangers of relying on budget cutting as a route to criminal justice reform, see also H adar A viram , C heap on C rime : R ecession -E ra P olitics and the T ransformation of A merican P unishment (2015). On the importance of “building up” in addition to “dismantling,” see Tracey L. Meares, Synthesizing Narratives of Policing and Making a Case for Policing as a Public Good , 53 S t . L ouis U. L.J. 553, 558–61 (2019).

Cynthia Lum, Perspectives on Policing: Cynthia Lum , 4 A nn . R ev . C riminology 19, 23 (2021).

E gon B ittner , Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton: A Theory of the Police , in A spects of P olice W ork 233, 249 (1990).

Cf. Langer, supra note 81 , at 44 (stressing that “[e]very society has to structure power relations and regimes somehow,” and that therefore “the question is which power relations and regimes are more just than other alternatives”).

See Weisberg, supra note 81 , at 363–68.

For the definitive exploration of this failure, see Forman, supra note 41 , at 16–25.

Id. at 25–36.

S harkey , supra note 11 , at 183–85; P atrick S harkey , S tuck in P lace : U rban N eighborhoods and the E nd of P rogress T oward R acial E quality 12, 166–99 (2013).

See Tracey L. Meares, Place and Crime , 73 C hi .-K ent L. R ev . 669, 684–94 (1998).

David Thacher, Conflicting Values in Community Policing , 35 L. & S oc ’ y R ev . 765, 773–80, 788 (2001).

See S teve H erbert , C itizens , C ops , and P ower : R ecognizing the L imits of C ommunity (2006); S klansky , supra note 1 , at 86–90, 98–102. On the complexity of real communities and the implications for criminal justice reform, see also John Rappaport, Some Doubts About “Democratizing” Criminal Justice , 87 U. C hi . L. R ev . 711, 739–57 (2020).

D avid G arland , T he C ulture of C ontrol : C rime and S ocial O rder in C ontemporary S ociety 69 (2002).

See , e.g. , Akbar, supra note 4 , at 1804; McHarris, supra note 80 .

Saletan, supra note 5 .

The failure of community policing to view young people as stakeholders and partners is the central theme of Forman, supra note 41 .

S klansky , supra note 1 , at 155–88.

The best discussion of this point is Thacher, Conflicting Values in Community Policing , supra note 90 .

David Thacher, Equity and Community Policing: A New View of Community Partnerships , C rim. J ust. E thics 3, 8–9 (Winter/Spring 2001).

Id. at 9–11.

Forman, supra note 41 , at 40–45.

Thacher, supra note 90 , at 785–89; Jose Adolfo Gomez, Policing Accountability: An Empirical Investigation of State-Sponsored Police Reform in Riverside, California (2008) (doctoral dissertation, University of Southern California, Department of Political Science).

J orja L eap et al ., E valuation of the LAPD C ommunity S afety P artnership ii–iii, 15, 63–64 (2020).

See , e.g. , S klansky , supra note 1 , at 163, 167–68, 172, 184; Fisk & Richardson, supra note 39 , at 760–66, 771–74.

See , e.g., H erman G oldstein , P olicing a F ree S ociety 71–91 (1977); Michael S. Scott & Ronald V. Clarke, Introduction , in P roblem -O riented P olicing : S uccessful C ase S tudies , supra note 34 , at 1–3; Robin S. Engel et al., The Impact of Police on Criminal Justice Reform: Evidence from Cincinnati, Ohio , 16 C riminology & P ub . P ol ’ y 375 (2017); Sabel & Simon, supra note 70 , at 194–95, 199.

See Barry Friedman, Disaggregating the Police Function , 169 U. P a . L. R ev . 925 (2021).

E gon B ittner , T he F unctions of the P olice in M odern S ociety 39 (1970).

Amam Z. Zaleh et al., Deaths of People with Mental Illness During Interactions with Law Enforcement , 58 I nt ’ l J. L. & P sych . 110 (2018).

C oles et al ., supra note 69 , at 18–23.

Id. at 30–40; S arah A. S eo , A P ath to N on -P olice E nforcement of C ivil T raffic V iolations (2020); Z imring , supra note 24 , at 52–53; Jordan Blair Woods, Traffic Without the Police , 73 S tan . L. R ev . 1472 (2021); Jordan Blair Woods, Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traffic Stops , 117 M ich . L. R ev . 635 (2019); David D. Kirkpatrick et al., Cities Rethink Traffic Stops by the Police , N.Y. T imes , Apr. 15, 2022, at A1.

C oles et al ., supra note 69 , at 41–51.

A decades-old program in Eugene, Oregon, diverts five to eight percent of 911 calls to a mobile response team overseen by a community mental health clinic. CAHOOTS , E ugene P olice D ep ’ t , https://www.eugene-or.gov/4508/CAHOOTS (last visited Jan. 6, 2022). Compare Mike Maciag, The Daily Crisis Cops Aren’t Trained to Handle , G overning , Apr. 27, 2016 (stating that “mental health situations are responsible for about 1 in 10 police calls”), with Cynthia Lum et al., Can We Really Defund the Police? A Nine-Agency Study of Police Response to Calls for Service , P olice Q., https://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211035002 (forthcoming, published online 2021) (finding that calls relating to mental health concerns amounted to an average 1.3% of the 911 calls across nine law enforcement agencies). The estimates at the low end of the range almost certainly reflect the fact that as much as sixty percent of 911 calls involving people in mental health distress may be miscoded by operators. David A. Graham, The Stumbling Blocks to One of the Most Promising Police Reforms , A tlantic (Feb. 22, 2022), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/mental-health-crisis-police-intervention/622842/ .

Jeff Asher & Ben Horwitz, How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time? , N.Y. T imes (June 19, 2020), https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html (reporting that traffic enforcement took fifteen percent of officers’ time in New Orleans, thirteen percent in Montgomery County, Maryland, and nineteen percent in Sacramento).

S trategies for Y outh , T wo B illion D ollars L ater : S tates B egin to R egulate S chool R esource O fficers in the N ation ’ s S chools , A S urvey of S tate L aws 7 (2019); FBI, C rime in the U nited S tates 2016, tbl.25, https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/table-25 .

In 2019, twenty-four thousand mental health emergency calls in Eugene, Oregon, were diverted to a mobile response team staffed with medical personnel and crisis workers, and only one hundred fifty of these calls resulted in requests for police backup. What Is CAHOOTS? , W hite B ird C linic (Oct. 29, 2020), https://whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/ .

M eadows M ental H ealth P ol ’ y I nst ., M ulti -D isciplinary R esponse T eams : T ransforming E mergency M ental H ealth R esponse in T exas (2021).

Criminal Justice Expenditures: Police, Corrections, and Courts , U rban I nst ., https://www.urban.org/policy-centers/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-finance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police-corrections-courts-expenditures (last visited Jan. 7, 2022); Chris Edwards, Spending on Police by State , C ato I nst . B log (June 5, 2020, 4:37 PM), https://www.cato.org/blog/spending-police-state .

Anthony A. Braga, Youth Gun Violence in Boston, Massachusetts , in P roblem -O riented P olicing : S uccessful C ase S tudies , supra note 34 , at 15–27. This paragraph and the one that follows are adapted from David Alan Sklansky, Addressing Violent Crime More Effectively , B rennan C tr . for J ust . B log (Sept. 27, 2021), https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/addressing-violent-crime-more-effectively .

Samantha Michaels, Whose Streets? , M other J ones , Sept./Oct. 2020, at 24–63; A nthony A. B raga et al ., O akland C easefire E valuation : F inal R eport to the C ity of O akland (2019); M ike M c L ively & B rittany N ieto , G iffords L aw C enter , A C ase S tudy in H ope : L essons from O akland ’ s R emarkable R eduction in G un V iolence (2019).

Cincinnati’s successful implementation of problem-oriented policing and a Ceasefire-style program in the early 2000s illustrated all these points. See Engel et al., supra note 107 ; Sabel & Simon, supra note 70 , at 193–200.

S parrow , supra note 34 , at 99, 116–19; Anthony A. Braga et al., Hot Spots Policing of Small Geographic Areas Effects on Crime , C ampbell S ystematic R evs . (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1046 .

David Alan Sklansky, Crime, Immigration, and Ad Hoc Instrumentalism , 15 N ew C rim . L. R ev . 157, 202–03 (2012).

Ba et al., supra note 36 ; Hoekstra & Sloan, supra note 36 .

Id. ; Jeremy Ashkenas & Haeyoun Park, The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments , N.Y. T imes (Apr. 8, 2015), https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/03/us/the-race-gap-in-americas-police-departments.html .

Sklansky, supra note 35 , at 1235–38.

Leatherby & Oppel, supra note 35 .

Graham, supra note 35 .

See , e.g. , Walker, supra note 71 , at 85–91. On the importance of democratic oversight and strategies for improving it, see, for example, B arry F riedman , U nwarranted : P olicing W ithout P ermission (2017); Maria Ponomarenko, Rethinking Police Rulemaking , 114 N w . U. L. R ev . 1 (2019); Simonson, supra note 8 .

See , e.g. , Forman, supra note 41 , at 9–16.

See , e.g. , Joanna C. Schwartz, The Case Against Qualified Immunity , 93 N otre D ame L. R ev . 1797 (2018).

See , e.g. , S amuel W alker , P olice A ccountability : T he R ole of C itizen O versight (2001).

A mari L. H ammonds et al ., S tanford C riminal J ustice C enter , A t A rm ’ s L ength : I mproving C riminal I nvestigation of P olice S hootings (2016).

See , e.g. , Barbara E. Armacost, Organizational Culture and Police Misconduct , 72 G eo . W ash . L. R ev . 453 (2004); Joanna C. Schwartz, Systems Failures in Policing , 51 S uffolk U. L. R ev . 535 (2018).

Ben Grunwalt & John Rappaport, The Wandering Officer , 129 Y ale L.J. 1676 (2020).

Cynthia Lum et al., Body-Worn Cameras’ Effects on Police Officer and Citizen Behavior: A Systematic Review , C ampbell S ystematic R evs . (2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1112 .

M ary D. F an , C amera P ower : P roof , P olicing , and A udiovisual B ig D ata 156–246 (2019).

Id. at 82–111.

See S klansky , supra note 9 , at 95–107.

Frank Newport, Affirmative Action and Public Opinion , G allup B log (Aug. 7, 2020), https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/317006/affirmative-action-public-opinion.aspx .

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The Spatial Dimension of Police Legitimacy: An Exploration of Two Pacific Island States

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• Published: 02 November 2023
• Volume 18 , pages 459–478, ( 2023 )

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• Tyler Cawthray   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1679-5381 1 , 2 &
• Melissa Bull 2 , 3  

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The police legitimacy literature is grounded predominantly in studies from the Global North. In these contexts, technology and economic resources allow policing institutions to exercise significant reach in ways that mitigate the challenges to service delivery posed by distance and geography while the bureaucratic state relationally distances these same institutions from the public. This scholarship tends to take these governmental ‘fixes’ as given. In Global South contexts, these fixes are less reliable. The complexities of policing in dispersed states—rural, remote, and island—are frequently mentioned within scholarship. However, the question of how spatial relations impact police legitimacy and services largely remains a passing concern. In this paper, we argue that in the Global South, spatial relations are important elements contributing to police legitimacy. This argument is made by reframing the rural and remote policing literature to explore how spatial archipelagic features influence how policing by the state occurs. This work is used as our analytical scaffold in two case studies of the Solomon Islands and Tonga that illustrate how space influences local views of police. We argue that space is a key contextual characteristic that needs to be considered within future police legitimacy research and theorisation.

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Introduction

Police legitimacy has been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship for the last three decades. This research emphasis is well founded as legitimacy is contemporaneously regarded as an essential ingredient of effective policing (e.g. Murphy & Tyler, 2017 ). Legitimacy is commonly defined within the literature as the belief that the actions taken by a legal authority are right or morally good, and therefore, there is an obligation to obey (Tyler, 2006a , b ), or a perception or shared norms (moral alignment) (Jackson et al., 2012 ). Practical acknowledgement of its critical value is expressed through global agendas to promote forms of security governance that fairly serve the public (United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations, 2015 ). The results of this work have been significant in terms of both theoretical advancement (e.g. Tankebe et al., 2016 ; Tyler, 2006a ) and practical influence on policing practices in the Global North (Murphy & Tyler, 2017 ). At the same time, developments within the post-conflict state building, security sector reform (SSR) and police reform literature have correspondingly included a shift towards goals of cultivating local legitimacy and ownership of reformed institutions as a means to improve their sustainability (Hills, 2014 ; Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2016 ).

Despite these shifts, notable limitations remain within both areas of inquiry. Police legitimacy research and practice have been predominantly grounded in studies conducted within the Global North (e.g. Jackson & Bradford, 2016 ; Tyler, 2006b ). While scholars have examined perceptions of legitimacy across diverse social and cultural groups (Miles-Johnson, 2016 ; Murphy & Cherney, 2011 ), much of this work has occurred in the context of Anglo-American policing; thus, its proliferation has been contextually limited. Equally, within the SSR-associated literature, the turn towards legitimacy and local ownership has been difficult to implement in practice and has faced criticism (e.g. Mac Ginty & Richmond, 2016 ; Wozniak, 2018 ). Research conducted within non-Western settings, however, has started to recognise the importance of contextual and cultural differences and their implications for police legitimacy and approaches to measuring it by researchers (e.g. Jackson & Bradford, 2019 ). Police building practices have, nevertheless, largely remained technically focused with limited explicit consideration of the contextual setting (Wozniak, 2018 ). In short, such practices tend to sidestep the importance of social, political, and cultural distance in relation to policing or the viability of measures to overcome geographical and logistical variation in service delivery and their relationship to perceptions of police legitimacy.

There have been notable forays by police legitimacy researchers into the investigation of non-Western contexts that have important implications for guiding how future research should progress (Akinlabi & Murphy, 2018 ; Jackson et al., 2014 ; Tankebe, 2009 ). This work predominantly builds on the theory of procedural justice. It argues that procedural fairness, which can be defined as neutrality, trustworthiness, voice, and respectful treatment in interactions with police (Goodman-Delahunty, 2010 ), is the main determinant of individual perceptions of police legitimacy (Tyler, 2006a ). Procedural justice is the most commonly deployed theoretical framework but is not the only scholarly conceptualisation of police legitimacy. Others have developed in relation to service delivery and authority (Cawthray, 2020 ). Discussions of the impact of service delivery have shifted over time. More recent normative conceptualisations assert that police effectiveness or service delivery positively impacts legitimacy judgements when it is responsive to local populations’ service expectations (Cawthray, 2020 ; Tankebe et al., 2016 ) through demonstrating preparedness (the capacity to deliver services) and responsiveness (the willingness to respond to societal needs or problems) (Cawthray, 2020 ; Van Craen & Skogan, 2015 ). Authority is the most recent theoretical inclusion in scholarly discussions of police legitimacy. Developed through the frames of system justification theory (Harkin, 2015 ) and the concept of lawfulness (Tankebe et al., 2016 ), this perspective contends that police can cultivate legitimacy through ideological pressure exerted through their unequal power relationships with individuals, helping to perpetuate cooperation and compliance with the status quo (Harkin, 2015 ). Together these theories or conceptual perspectives on police legitimacy provide limited scope to explicitly address the impact of social proximity—cultural or political—and geographical contextual elements—expressed as physical distance—on perceptions of police legitimacy.

These spatial dimensions restrict the state’s policing reach. In rural, remote, and island settings, non-state forms of policing, security, and governance often occupy the spaces between the state and the population, providing necessary services (Dinnen & Allen, 2015 ). Space, therefore, has an important impact on the constitution of policing services, what services different state and non-state actors provide, and their social relationships with local populations. In the rural, remote, and Pacific Island policing literature, legitimacy is mentioned as important in ensuring effective policing across actors, but there is limited discussion of how it can be cultivated (or how it is or could be impacted by spatial relations). In short, while rural, remote, and island policing literature acknowledges the significance of legitimacy in achieving effective policing, it does not speak to or directly engage with police legitimacy theories. With few notable exceptions, police legitimacy theories, when addressing dispersed or diverse social and geographical contexts, do not incorporate lessons regarding the impact of spatial relations (physical and social) from the rural, remote, and island policing literature.

This paper addresses this gap by discussing the influence of space on perceptions of police legitimacy and its intersections with existing models and theoretical frameworks. This is done by exploring how the spatial dimensions of policing—defined in terms of physical and social distance—in two archipelagic island contexts located within the Global South (the Solomon Islands and Tonga) affect how policing occurs and, in turn, impact views of state police institutions. We begin by providing an overview of our methodological approach. Before then reviewing and reframing the rural, remote, and island policing literature drawing out the ways spatiality can be explicitly linked to the conceptual dimensions of police legitimacy theories. This reframe serves the dual purposes of identifying gap within the exiting literature while also allowing us to develop our conceptual framework for spatiality which is then used as the cornerstone of our analysis. The value of this analytical scaffold is then demonstrated using the two island case studies through its application to empirical data. This involves a secondary analysis of qualitative interview data collected in 2014 as part of a broader study of police legitimacy in these settings. Our secondary analysis demonstrates how spatial relations (physical and/or social) impact participants’ views and perceptions of local and international police. The paper concludes by emphasising the significance of spatiality as a dimension that needs to be considered, alongside other key contextual characteristics, as a means of advancing police legitimacy theory and research to fit broader policing environments across a variety of contexts.

Methodology

Research design.

This paper explores understandings of policing legitimacy in island contexts, hypothesising that space and distance are important but so far largely neglected considerations. We test this hypothesis in the hybrid regulatory contexts of Pacific Islands countries (PICs) that have faced challenges to policing legitimacy in recent years. The case studies discussed are the Solomon Islands and Tonga, both of which have experienced different types of civil unrest tied in part to perceived policing shortcomings.

Procedures and Participants

This paper builds on earlier work conducted by Cawthray ( 2020 ). This larger project examined the antecedents of police legitimacy in these contexts and built a model by applying three conceptual perspectives—‘procedural justice’, ‘service delivery’, and ‘authority’—constructed from the existing literature framing police legitimacy theory (Cawthray, 2020 ). We examine our proposition through a secondary analysis of 22 semi-structured interviews with 24 participants (two interviews included two participants) conducted in 2014 with community stakeholders at both case study sites. Five participants were former or current government officials, while the remainder were from non-government bodies. All the individuals interviewed held leadership or managerial positions within their respective organisations. Every participant was informed of their rights to participate in the project voluntarily and anonymously, as well as withdraw at any time. Each reviewed project information packages and signed consent forms prior to being interviewed.

Table 1 provides an overview of demographic details for the participants. However, it should be noted that due to the close-knit character of Pacific Islands communities and therefore the increased risk of identification of interviewees only organisational membership and gender information were collected.

The labelling used to ensure participant anonymity in this paper includes a letter to indicate at which case study site the interview was conducted (SI for Solomon Islands, T for Tonga), followed by a randomly assigned number. An additional identifying number is included for interviews that involved more than one participant representing each separate individual (e.g. T11-1 and T11-2).

Analytical Strategy

Our secondary thematic analysis of the data was scaffolded by the ways that space is linked to legitimacy in policing literature. To build this framework, the review of the literature below explores how considerations of space and distance (whether physical or social), as discussed in rural, remote or island policing literature, can be directly linked to conceptualisations of police legitimacy. This provides the foundation for our secondary analysis, empirically demonstrating how spatial considerations are linked to applied assessments of police legitimacy in our case study settings. Results of our analysis are reported according to two themes that emerged from the interviews through deductive coding developed from the relevant literature: (i) policing service provision and issues of physical distance and (ii) police officers and social proximity (distance and closeness). Lastly, we discuss how space and distance influence police legitimacy by considering the alignment between different conceptual perspectives on police legitimacy and the evidence presented within this paper.

Exploring Space through the Literature

Space or distance are commonly mentioned throughout the rural, remote, and PIC policing literature. The necessity of its inclusion as an environmental variable impacting how policing occurs would seem obvious when considering or being familiar with these settings. Rural contexts in countries such as Australia are often characterised by large distances between urban centres and dispersed regional populations. Similarly, PIC populations may be separated by significant geographic obstacles, such as oceans, mountains, or dense jungles. However, this surface-level assessment that equates space solely to geographic distance belies the complex and multidimensional character of spatiality explored in depth within both bodies of work. There are common and divergent themes across the literature that are worthy of deliberation when conceptualising spatiality to consider its impact on police legitimacy. The following section uses an indicative selection of sources to demonstrate the themes of physical distance and social proximity evident within the literature and to build a case that these elements are fundamentally linked to conceptualisations of police legitimacy.

Physical Distance: A ‘Distant Presence’ with an ‘Uncertain Relevance’

Considerations of distance and space are fundamental concepts in the Global North rural crime and policing literature. This is unsurprising as they are defining concepts in the terrain of analysis. In the Global North, different policing models have been used to overcome the challenges associated with policing in rural and remote locales. In Europe, for example France, Spain, and Italy, the rural policing model involves militaristic police services deployed to specialised barracks where they are physically cut off from and unable to be influenced by the local community (Mawby, 2016 , p. 11). In Australia, Canada, and New Zealand accounts commonly discuss the difficulty of responding across long distances to dispersed populations and policing distant or isolated communities as challenges faced by officers who are members of bureaucratically centralised policing organisations. Similar themes are discussed with the context of rural policing in China as police units struggle to operate cross-regionally because of the costs of travel associated with pursuing offenders across different regions (Keke, et al., 2023 ). In the Australian rural context, the police and health services are the most geographically widespread government agencies (Putt, 2010 , p. 36). As Dwyer et al. ( 2021 ) highlight, the centralised nature of policing organisations leads to difficulties in local service delivery. Officers deployed to rural or remote areas are often isolated and may be based on their own, with limited access to backup (Ricciardelli, 2018 ; Ruddell, 2017 ). Historically, when responding to this type of remoteness, officers provided what Mawby ( 2016 ) describes as ‘instant justice’ and had limited accountability to officials in urban administrative centres. Similar themes are evident in the works exploring rural policing in Scotland (see Wooff, 2017 ), Canada (see Ruddell & Jones, 2020 ), and Sweden (Rantatalo et al., 2021 ). Technology has helped but has its limitations. Centralising communications through distant urban call centres that carry out tasking and coordination poses risks when disruptions occur because of internet, network outages, or lack of sufficient coverage. It should not be assumed that technology is necessarily equally distributed across rural and urban areas or that all officers have the requisite skills to utilise available tools (Keke, et al., 2023 ). Balanced against problems such as accountability or responsiveness that arise because of physical distance to centralised command is the high visibility of individual officers who are well known in rural communities. This higher profile can improve ‘localisation’, making officers more responsive to the rural communities they police (Putt, 2010 ).

Physical distance poses different types of problems for island settings, where backup and support are not only hampered by physical distance but vehicle availability, including seaworthy vessels, and the vicissitudes of weather. For example, in Global North settings with police that are well-equipped and resourced, policing efficacy can be undermined by distance. Souhami ( 2022 ), for example, describes how severe weather in the Shetland Islands can rapidly isolate the local communities and the police stationed within them from their connections with the mainland United Kingdom. Storms, cyclonic winds, thick fog, and open landscapes can restrict movement, disrupt transportation by ferry or plane, disconnect communications, and damage infrastructure (Souhami, 2022 ). The technological ‘fixes’ of contemporary mobile, radio, and internet communications may be cut off or only intermittently available (Souhami, 2022 ). Police in this environment “feared being cut off from their colleagues, without support” (Souhami, 2022 , p. 9). This demonstrates how confidence in police—even in jurisdictions with developed policing frameworks and established expectations about the role of public police—can be undermined by distance.

Such problems are amplified in PICs and territories with hybridised systems of regulatory authority because local populations commonly regard systems that derive their authority from the state as having a “distant presence with uncertain relevance” (White, 2007 , p. 6). In these contexts, institutionalised policing agencies commonly work with limited access to serviceable vehicles for transport on land and seaworthy vessels between islands, technology and network coverage, widely dispersed territories (e.g. islands), and populations. Many countries and territories include unpopulated or sparsely populated islands spread across vast seascapes without police or other governmental and social support services. Dinnen and Haley’s ( 2012 ) work on the Solomon Islands exemplifies the challenges present within archipelagic island environments. They describe the difficulties police face in servicing the majority (more than 80%) of the rural and dispersed population in terms of geographic obstacles, distance, and inadequacy or disruption of the transport and communication methods used to mitigate these (Dinnen & Haley, 2012 ). Further, this occurs within a context where non-state sources of conflict management and social regulation are prevalent and relied upon in the absence of state authorities. People tend to turn to and prefer the ‘kastom’ systems even though such local traditional systems of authority often struggle to respond effectively to some types of crime, including substance abuse, serious crimes, and domestic and family violence. Staines et al.’s ( 2021 ) study of policing in the Torres Strait Islands similarly concluded that “The region’s geography demands a unique policing response, particularly since the outer islands remain relatively inaccessible to state police” (p. 17). This contributes to the potential for under-reporting and uneven responses to crime because of reliance on community-based authorities and non-sworn police.

The challenge of meeting the needs of dispersed island populations, who live in small villages distant from urban centres with no proximity to a permanent police presence, is a common thread in much policing in the Pacific literature (Bull & George, 2021 ; Dinnen & Haley, 2012 ). Howes et al.’s ( 2021 ) study of community policing in Tuvalu, for example, highlights how, at times, there was not an officer on duty on the outer islands and the lack of availability or serviceability of equipment and infrastructure contributed to less favourable perceptions of police. Unreliable communications systems contributed to poor service coordination between Funafuti headquarters and the outer islands, and transportation was scarce, impacting police responsiveness (Howes et al., 2021 ).

Social Proximity: “Law Enforcer” or “Local Resident”

We have described how physical distance can undermine police responsiveness, reliability, accountability and effectiveness—all elements that contribute to perceptions of police legitimacy. Physical distance, however, is not the only challenge; social closeness and distance also influence perceptions of legitimacy. Scott and Jobes ( 2007 ) describe the criticality of police–community relationships within rural policing settings. The practical, community-focused style of policing that occurs in these contexts draws on the informal social networks that exist within rural communities, where officers utilise their socially close relationships with community members to carry out their roles (Jobes, 2002 ; Scott & Jobes, 2007 ). Police adopt ‘localistic’ approaches, which require them to consider the community’s needs and expectations while simultaneously balancing these with central organisational directions (Wooff, 2017 ). Adopting the strict ‘legalistic’ style of policing commonly used in urban settings is problematic for rural officers as they are not socially distant state officials but rather recognised members of the community. Ricciardelli ( 2018 , p. 433) asserts that adopting strategies that are “culturally and contextually informed” and involve “increased reliance on civilian community members” can benefit rural officers by reducing their exposure to operational risk. Similarly, Keke et al. ( 2023 ) asserts that police officers can both, reduce manpower costs and extend their effective reach through working with local leaders and community members. This localised approach may benefit even specialist police personnel, such as investigators, as they can better grapple with “local criminogenic conditions” when undertaking their work (Rantatalo et al., 2021 , p. 1364). Interpreted through the conceptual lens of legitimacy, rural officers can give voice to local concerns while working to enforce the law and maintain order.

This social closeness, however, can complicate and impact the application of police discretion. The organisation of rural communities, their social and spatial relations, and ideas about insiders and outsiders can influence the way that local police personnel apply their discretionary powers, impacting perceptions of impartiality and how the law is enforced (Mawby, 2016 ; Ruddell, 2017 ; Scott & Jobes, 2007 ). This diverges from urban policing, which involves the exercise of discretion exclusively within organisationally determined structures (Mawby, 2016 ). The isolation experienced by rural police further exacerbates the impacts of this ‘social clouding’ on decision-making. Their separation from available backup, which may take hours to arrive, means they must adapt how they respond to incidents, relying more heavily on the local community for support (Mawby, 2016 ) and informal conflict management techniques (Ruddell & Jones, 2020 ). The outcomes of this localistic policing style, therefore, do not necessarily result in “an idealised form of community policing” because officers may perpetuate local norms about ‘what’ trouble is and ‘who’ troublemakers are (Scott & Jobes, 2007 , p. 133). This, in turn, may increase the likelihood that police may be perceived as being ‘more legitimate’ if they align their decision-making processes and behaviours with the values and expectations of local rural and remote communities. However, officers who lack experience or sufficient grounding in local communities may act in an antonymic manner, consciously favouring “a more assertive style of policing” because of their isolation and outsider status (Ruddell & Jones, 2020 , p. 422). This can have negative consequences for securing residents’ future cooperation and collaboration. Rural police must strike a balance between local embeddedness cultivated through “developing productive relationships with local service providers as well as leaders and brokers” and “being perceived as professional and impartial” (Putt, 2010 , p. 38). There is a clear tension between officers’ responsibility to engage in law enforcement in alignment with central organisational objectives, maintain ‘social distance’ and cultivate ‘social closeness’ through facilitating local voice and accountability of officers’ decision-making.

Achieving this balance is complex. In jurisdictions such as Australia (Mawby, 2016 ) and Canada (Ruddell & Jones, 2020 ), officers are frequently recruited from outside the rural and remote communities they police. Thus, they may be perceived as outsiders or transient visitors (Ruddell, 2017 ; Stewart, 2011 ), eroding police capacity to understand local contextual conditions. In the Australian context, this can be especially problematic in remote Aboriginal communities or Torres Strait Islander communities. Dwyer et al., ( 2021 , p. 220) describe how in such communities, “the strong police presence and distinct racial differences between police and the community assist in the formation of an exclusive and ‘closed’ police culture”. Police are seen and see themselves as strangers, and this undermines localistic policing styles. Pilkington’s ( 2009 ) study of the establishment of 18 new police stations in the remote Northern Territory found that policing service delivery could follow two different paths in these remote communities. First, officers could engage in “appropriate policing”, which for Aboriginal people meant demonstrating both cultural awareness and a broader understanding of how life within communities occurs through adapting practices to fit this context (Pilkington, 2009 ). Second, police could implement unchanged practices or “underpolicing” that resulted in either unproductive, unanticipated or conflict-producing outcomes (Pilkington, 2009 ). This, in turn, led to ‘mutual disengagement’ with residents as they sought to resolve their problems without the involvement of the police (Pilkington, 2009 ). In this study, the common dimensions of ‘appropriate policing’ were engaged, visible, proactive officers who were involved and had socially close relationships with local leaders and the community (Pilkington, 2009 ). Juxtaposed with this, however, were the common characteristics of underpolicing: police did not respond to calls for assistance and stayed at the station (Pilkington, 2009 ). Put differently, police were aloof and socially distant from the communities they were policing.

In island contexts, maintaining this social balance within policing is similarly difficult. This challenge is more poignant when these environments exist within settler states, such as Australia (e.g. Staines & Scott, 2020 ), and post-colonial settings, such as PICs (e.g. Dinnen & Allen, 2015 ), where Indigenous peoples and the state may have contested relations. Community-based policing models have been used within these communities to navigate the regulatory plurality characterising these contexts. The state police are only one source of security that local populations draw on in these pluralist environments and failing to recognise this can have consequences for perceptions of policing legitimacy. Staines et al. ( 2021 ), for example, describe how in Australian Torres Strait Island communities, community–police partnerships and policing by consent are valued and encouraged. They suggest that, in part, the region’s vast geography has prompted the settler state to accept and support the ongoing utilisation of hybrid policing arrangements (Staines et al., 2021 ). Further, this has fostered largely positive and socially close relationships between policing authorities, local justice providers (see Scott et al., 2021 ) and the community. However, there are evident downsides that stem from these arrangements, such as under-reporting of specific offences (e.g. property crime and domestic violence), that demonstrate negative impacts resulting from heightened social closeness within policing.

Dinnen and Allen ( 2015 ) illustrate the risk of overemphasising social distance through their discussion of the police building and reform program led by the Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI) (2003–2017) in the wake of civil unrest in the island state. Across several of their works, they are critical of the mission’s focus on ‘institutional capacity building’ and privileging of distant state-based policing organisations to the detriment of wider forms of community engagement (Allen & Dinnen, 2010 ; Dinnen & Allen, 2013 , 2015 ). The resulting impacts of this strategic orientation have been the relative neglect of community-based policing and justice providers that support and provide services to rural communities across the Solomon Islands, accompanied by reduced confidence in and perceived legitimacy of the Solomon Islands police (Dinnen & Allen, 2015 ). Counterproductively, the social distance between the police and communities has been reinforced, limiting the reach and legitimacy of state policing institutions because of the disconnect between them and these local informal sources of order (Dinnen & Allen, 2013 , 2015 ). This failure to maintain an appropriate socially proximal balance has thus resulted in reduced effective service delivery capacity and a missed opportunity to cultivate police legitimacy.

Watson et al. ( 2021 ) similarly describe the difference between conceptions of trust, confidence and legitimacy in Western communities versus rural and remote island communities. Using Tuvalu as their example, the authors explain that in small island settings, trust and confidence in justice service providers are connected to tradition and cultural practices rather than Western ideas of “civic collaboration” and a democratic process (Watson et al., 2021 , pp. 624–625). The effectiveness of policing arrangements is mediated through the social relationships between and cohesion of police with traditional leaders and local communities (Watson et al., 2021 ). Tuvalu’s local population expect policing to align with their norms, which means sharing authority and acting in partnership with communities (Watson et al., 2021 ). It is the community that gives their intentional consent to the police to act as agents of the state within a broader values framework centred on taking cooperative action to address issues of crime and communal cohesion within the bounds of traditional authority structures (Watson et al., 2021 ). This clearly contrasts with the descriptions of confidence and legitimacy offered by Cao ( 2015 , p. 244) in their summary of police public perception literature, as being grounded in normative connections between citizens and legal authorities in a democracy. Furthermore, Cao’s ( 2015 ) work makes a strong case that individuals or citizens can distinguish between concepts of trust, satisfaction, and confidence/legitimacy. Like Staines et al. ( 2021 ), Watson et al. draw attention to the downside of this type of social closeness, which includes the potential for traditional justice processes to neglect victims’ rights and selectively ‘police’ offences.

This brief review of research on policing in rural, remote, and island territories demonstrates that considerations of distance—both physical and social—significantly impact perceptions of policing legitimacy. Physical distance impacts perceptions of responsiveness, effectiveness, accountability, and impartiality. This is the case both in rural and remote contexts of countries like Australia and is amplified in island settings. Physical distance could impact responsiveness because of the limits of centralised tasking and coordination or the inaccessibility of a job. This is exacerbated on islands where resources are constrained or the weather limits or challenges technology and communications. Our exploration demonstrates that the challenges arising from physical distance might be mitigated through social closeness. Balanced against the problems of accountability to centralised command or responsiveness to dispersed populations is the high visibility of locally deployed officers who are well-known in country settings (Putt, 2010 ). This local embeddedness can improve officers’ accountability and willingness to respond to local residents (Putt, 2010 ).

But social closeness is not a panacea. While stronger community–police relationships may offer officers informal social support, too much closeness has pitfalls. Enhanced police visibility in remote or island communities means their actions are conspicuous. For example, the greatest challenge for police deployed on the northern Scottish islands is the sense of being in a ‘goldfish bowl’ (Souhami, 2019 , p. 45). Mistakes are ‘quickly noticed’ and ‘not easily forgotten’, undermining trust and expectations of effectiveness (Souhami, 2019 , p. 45). Social closeness can influence the impartial application of police discretion, as officers are influenced by local views of what constitutes criminality and who its perpetrators are (Scott & Jobes, 2007 ). Island settings characterised by hybrid policing involve close relationships between state police and other regulatory authorities. Watson et al. ( 2021 ) explain police are expected to reflect the community’s views. Giving the community too much voice in this way can impact how policing is carried out, resulting in the underpolicing of some offences and failures to respect or protect victims’ rights (Staines et al., 2021 ; Watson et al., 2021 ). This review strengthens our claim that space and distance are important but so far largely neglected considerations about perceptions of police legitimacy. This hypothesis is tested in relation to the hybrid regulatory contexts of PICs in the empirical analysis below.

The Island Case Studies

We begin our empirical demonstration of the value of spatial considerations in relation to police legitimacy with a brief overview of the geographical, historical, social, and political characteristics of our case study sites. This provides important context for our analysis.

The Solomon Islands

The Solomon Islands are located in the Southwest Pacific. Its ethnically diverse population of over half a million people is concentrated on the six largest islands (of over 1000), predominantly in rural or remote areas (Allen & Dinnen, 2010 ; Dinnen & Allen, 2015 ). Colonisation by the British in the late 1800s provided the conditions for a hybridised system of governance that established a village constable and local traditional courts system (Allen & Dinnen, 2016 ). Following independence in 1978, these structures were retained, and politics was dominated by competition between strong regional ethnic identities and desires to centralise government resources in the national capital Honiara (Allen & Dinnen, 2016 ). In practice, constrained resources meant that the centralised state had a limited impact on the daily lives of people dispersed across its territories, and most relied on traditional forms of authority to resolve disputes (Allen et al., 2014 ). From 1998 to 2003, tensions broke out between the two largest ethnic groups (Guales and Malaitians). Attempts to end the conflict failed due to ethnic polarisation (Allen & Dinnen, 2010 ). The Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF), comprising 75% Malaitian personnel, and other elements chose to side with their ethnic militia counterparts, aiding them in capturing the national armoury in 2000 (Allen & Dinnen, 2010 ). RAMSI was formed in 2003 as a cooperative intervention in response to the ensuing civil unrest. The police-led mission primarily funded by Australia (Putt et al., 2018 ) was in place for 14 years (2003–2017), and the RAMSI Participating Police Force included contingent members deployed from 13 PICs: Cook Islands, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Tonga, Vanuatu, Niue, Tuvalu and the Federated States of Micronesia. Key priorities were restoring law and order, the RSIPF’s integrity and capacity, and community confidence in national policing (Putt et al., 2018 ).

The Kingdom of Tonga

The Kingdom of Tonga stretches across 176 islands in the South Pacific. Two-thirds of its 106,000 ethnically homogenous citizens are concentrated on the island of Tongatapu, where the capital Nuku’alofa is located (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2019 ). Tonga became a constitutional monarchy in 1875 and a protectorate of Great Britain in 1900 (Wood-Ellam, 1999 ). British influence on the justice system saw Europeans appointed to key positions leading the police and courts (Wood-Ellam, 1999 ). This system remained in place after independence in 1970 (Campbell, 2014 ). The monarchy and aristocracy continued to monopolise political authority, including leading and directly controlling the Tonga Police (TP) through appointments to the roles of Police Commander and Minister of Police (Campbell, 2014 ). The TP was not a priority for funding and, as a result, standards of training, officer skills, specialist capabilities and services declined in quality (McGovern, 2007 ). There were allegations of police misconduct, such as familial or kin bias, bribery, brutality and politicisation over this period (Campbell, 2014 ). This environment ignited a grassroots campaign for democratic constitutional reform in the late 1980s (Lātūkefu, 1993 ). Tensions in Tonga became openly apparent in 2005 when public servants’ resolution of a strike paved the way for greater pro-democracy political activism (Campbell, 2014 ). This was followed in 2006 by a riot in Nuku’alofa that resulted in the declaration of a state of emergency and the deployment of the Tongan military (Community Para-Legal Taskforce on Human Rights, 2007 ). Assistance came from Australia and New Zealand, with police and military personnel deployed for several weeks in late 2006 (Australian Federal Police, 2007 ; New Zealand Government, 2006 ). The trilateral Tonga Police Development Programme that ran from 2008 to 2020 was subsequently established, focusing on phased capacity building, logistics and infrastructure assistance for the TP (Tennant & Bernklau, 2016 ).

Themes of Distance: Island Case Studies

The following empirical analysis explores the physical and social dimensions of spatiality identified within the literature through themes drawn from interviews conducted at the two case sites. It is important to state that this study does not assess the suitability or effectiveness of the external police or state-building interventions deployed to the Solomon Islands and Tonga (e.g. Tennant & Bernklau, 2016 ). Rather, this section tests our argument that spatiality has an important impact on perceptions of policing and legitimacy, discussing two illustrative themes: participants’ perspectives on policing services and the impact of geographic distance and influences of social proximity on perceptions of police officers.

Policing Services and Geographic Distance

In both the Solomon Islands and Tonga, interviewees commented on the impacts that space had on the delivery of policing services and the influence of this on their perceptions. The two case study sites face similar challenges in providing state policing because of their archipelagic geography. Moreover, given their comparatively small populations and consequent economic bases, both governments have limited resources to facilitate service delivery. Participants at both sites commonly mentioned the impacts of ‘distance’ on state policing in terms of travel between places and the scarcity of logistical resources to mitigate these challenges. Specifically, in the Solomon Islands interviews, participants contrasted the relative abundance of transportation methods available to RAMSI against the scarcity of logistical resources available to the RSIPF and discussed how local non-state forms of security filled this service gap. These discussions did not occur in Tonga, where participants focused on local police responsiveness, availability of police vehicles and fuel. Nevertheless, across both sites, interviewees noted that distance had a substantive impact on the delivery of policing by state-based organisations and their views of such service effectiveness.

The challenges of geographic distance featured in many of the interviews across both case studies. The issues described in the Solomon Islands interviews included the population’s predominantly rural distribution across different islands, the logistical difficulties in accessing these village communities, and the inconsistencies of state-based policing services (S1, S2, S3, S4, S5, S6, S7, and S8). As one interviewee explained, “Solomon Islanders are scattered, and the central government services sometimes are quite difficult to deliver or even access.” They further expressed the view that even when services were delivered, “they are not that reliable” and that there was “a gap in the line of communication between village people and government” (S1). This view was echoed by another participant when they stated that in the past, police “used to travel around the communities … walk from community to community … they walked across the island”, but that this was not something local police did now as “there are some communities in the middle of the island that [are] yet to see a police officer” (S5). The logistical capabilities of the local police were contrasted with those of RAMSI: “if a [RAMSI officer] wants to arrest somebody now from Gizo they fly out from helicopter”, but local police would say, “maybe next week we will wait for the ship, or maybe we will have to … get the funds to get the boat” (S6). Other participants similarly highlighted the transportation advantages that RAMSI delivered, noting that “trucks and choppers were everywhere” (S3) and “they did travel with a lot of vehicles using helicopters” (S4). In contrast, local police were described as having to rely instead on the community, with villagers providing police with “a truck that is a private vehicle, and the boat used is some village’s own boat” (S6). S3, S6, and S8 noted that RAMSI had helped the RSIPF with logistical support but that there were still challenges with fuel, maintenance, and limited manpower. An interviewee explained that non-state forms of governance and security filled the service gaps: “[Chiefs and church workers] are important players who are always close to the people in the villages and are committed to their responsibilities to maintain peace and harmony” (S1). The tyranny of geographic distance evident in the Solomon Islands’ responses appeared to have important impacts on views of the consistency, reliability, and relevance of state-based policing services to the lives of the majority rural population.

Similar problems were identified in Tonga, though participants were more concerned with issues of responsiveness rather than impeded access to the TP. Interviewees expressed mixed views on how responsive they believed the TP were, with some suggesting new strategies and equipment had improved response times (T1, T5-2, T9, T10, and T13), while others claimed that these changes were negligible (T2, T5-1, T11-1, and T11-2). In one interview, the positive impact of the introduction of community policing was highlighted as improving access to the TP: “they are starting now to deploy more community police; I think logistically they are much closer to them … the people know it will be directly sent back to the main office and they will get a response” (T10). Most participants mentioned the provision of new vehicles as an important change; for example, T5-2 explained, “now after they have got more vehicles they can respond quicker”. However, there was some disagreement over whether this had resulted in genuine improvements in police responsiveness, as demonstrated by comments made by T2: “they used to drive around when they had a few vehicles … until some of those vehicles ended up hugging trees and coconut palms”. Disparate views were expressed over the availability of fuel for police vehicles. There were assertions that there had been improvements: “I don’t hear the answer that I was told before; you call the police, and they would say there is no fuel in the tank or … we don’t have transport. The police response, I think, is improving” (T13). In contrast, other respondents stated that “now there are so many new vehicles available from New Zealand and yet the response times are still slow” (T11-1) and “I have heard of cases where police have asked the homeowner ‘Can we have $20 to get back to the police station?’ once they visited” (T5-1). The views expressed by Tongan participants differed in their focus on logistical capacity, resources and impacts of responsiveness as a proxy for distance rather than a specific focus on geographic obstacles.

Police Officers and Social Proximity

In both case study sites, interviewees commonly explored the impacts of social proximity when they described how police officers carried out their duties. The Solomon Islands and Tonga are societies characterised by strong family and cultural bonds. Participants commented on the influence that social closeness had on police interactions with members of the public by reflecting on how personal affiliations with family, kin, or ethnic groups influenced conduct. There were similarities in the views expressed, noting the significance that local or cultural knowledge had on how officers engaged with communities. However, mixed and nuanced beliefs were reported across the Solomon Islands and Tonga interviews regarding whether these influences had positive or negative impacts. In the Solomon Islands, social closeness was viewed positively as a means of facilitating cultural understanding and local participation in decision-making when accompanied by impartiality or a degree of authoritative social distance. Conversely, in Tonga, interviewees regarded social closeness negatively as a factor that hindered fair and impartial policing, inappropriately amplified the voices of kinship connections and diminished the trustworthiness of the police.

The impacts of social proximity were evidenced in the interviews through various statements on how officers responded to requests for assistance or approached issues within communities. In the Solomon Islands, these discussions emphasised the importance of social closeness by contrasting the actions of RAMSI personnel from different national backgrounds with those of local police. S4’s statement illustrates this: “the Pacific islanders … know how to approach the community. With the Australians and New Zealanders, they are more distant, they are more suspicious”. Another interviewee highlighted cultural dimensions of social proximity:

[People] really took to the New Zealand officer like fire; he goes to the community, he talks with people, he engages; he sees them fishing, and he goes fishing, so there is more social cohesion ... then you get an Australian that's just brute and rough. (S2)

Social closeness was evident in a description of how the RSIPF operated before the tensions in rural communities: “our local force, they go in there and talk to the people, they approach the people … have a chat about what they're there for … they can solicit the community’s assistance” (S7). S8 argued that the RSIPF needed to engage in this style of policing at present because of the prior conflict to repair its “reputation through police officers visiting people; it helps people to understand them more and to relate to them” rather than just “going to catch a criminal” (S8). In parallel, the need for social distance in police dealings with the public was highlighted as an important complementary dimension of effective policing. S2 exemplified this: “[local police] create an impartial environment for everybody to come together and talk … they are the authority. So everybody, while they may not respect each other, they respect this”. Similarly, S3 argued that they wanted local police to exercise this authority when they had made a complaint: “they negotiated with him [the offender] to bring the stuff back … [to] sort it out quietly before going to court … I wanted him charged”.

Two incidents demonstrate the tensions present when balancing social closeness and distance across cultures. S4 described a disagreement over how to approach an arrest:

The Fijian soldiers, they went and tried to negotiate for this guy to ... surrender to the police. They were trying to do a Melanesian approach ... the Australian officers accused them of trying to help this guy and asked them why they didn't arrest him.

The Fijian personnel were accused of being biased in this account because they did not demonstrate the level of social distance expected by their Australian counterparts. S3 detailed a similar dispute over how the officers should arrest a young offender: “the Australian officer wanted to kick in the door and arrest him, while the Fijian and Samoan officers they wanted to talk to his father”. The participant went on further to explain that the Pacific Islander officers counselled that the officer should “respect their culture; he already broke the law, but if you go kick in the door and arrest him, if any other crime happens here, they won't want to talk to you” (S3). These views demonstrate the nuance in how social proximity impacted perceptions of police. Participants wanted ‘social closeness’ in the form of cultural familiarity and engaged relationships and, critically, social distance through impartial arbitration or use of authority when required.

In contrast, in Tonga, it was commonly argued that social closeness had negative impacts and that social distance was needed for local officers to police effectively. The conundrum faced by TP was described as follows:

Tonga is such a small place; there are so many relationships ... That person who just broke the law, he was coming to ask me to drop the case because we were in school together, or this person here we’re going to the same church. So, it’s very hard, but with independent people that’s good because we’ll just take things as they should be. (T1).

T10 corroborated this view, stating that before the contemporary police reform efforts, “members of the community, instead of reporting through official channels, they would seek out their relatives in the police department … This was because the system did not get used, the side business was more trustworthy”. Yet, despite these strong social connections, one participant remarked that community policing was “not natural to them [TP]” (T12). Across the interviews, participants commonly contended that local officers needed to act independently of relationships but that this was difficult to do in practice. This view was exemplified by an interviewee who stated, “policing is still linked to the Tongan family and sometimes they might enforce the law but only partially” (T8). They argued that local police needed to be trained to “know how important it is to enforce the law impartially” (T8). T13 echoed this perspective, musing that “it would be interesting if they had a way to train police in a small community on how to maintain a more objective and neutral role”. Across several interviews (T11-2, T12, and TP6), participants commended ‘ palangi ’ (white expatriate officers) for being independent of family or cultural concerns: “when a white man comes to a position, we expect a better result and better performance because, generally, for them rules are rules and orders are orders. It's just black-and-white” (T11-2). In both case studies, officers’ social proximity to members of the public impacted perceptions of police. Yet, while social distance was commonly viewed as necessary, social closeness was viewed differently across the sites as a positive influence on effective policing in the Solomon Islands and a negative barrier in Tonga.

The analysis in this paper linked spatial dimensions of policing—physical and social—evident in rural and island policing literature with conceptualisations of police legitimacy. Until now, spatiality has generally only been an implicit feature of research on police legitimacy, which has not explicitly addressed the impact of space on perceptions of policing. We have demonstrated empirically how this conceptual alignment is important when interpreting perceptions of police in applied contexts of the Solomon Islands and Tonga. The empirical evidence presented here makes it clear that spatiality deserves explicit research attention, partly because it has wider utility as a concept to assist in explaining individuals’ legitimacy judgements in various policing contexts outside the urban settings of the Global North. The analysis indicates that spatiality influences views of policing and, thus, perceptions of police legitimacy, though its impacts are complex and layered.

Our contention is that the relationship between conceptualisations of police legitimacy and spatiality holds across several different theory formulations of police legitimacy. We make this argument by using the expanded definition of police legitimacy articulated by Jackson (et. al., 2012 ) that includes moral alignment, the perception of shared moral values as the mediating dimension between police actions and individual’s compliance. Watson’s (et al., 2021 ) work in an island context identifies the expectation that policing needs to align with communal norms to be consented to or perceived as legitimate. Further, Cao ( 2015 , p. 244) states that “legitimacy is expressed through confidence in the police” which is the “moral connection between citizens and legal authorities”. Thus, we assert based on our empirical analysis that the dimensions of spatiality impact moral alignment and confidence in the police through enhancing or reducing the effects of the theoretical antecedents of police legitimacy as outlined in the succeeding paragraphs.

First, procedural fairness has been a dominant feature of police legitimacy discourses since Tyler’s ( 2006b ) work was initially published in 1990, which established procedural justice theory as an explanatory model. The evidence presented here suggests that the social proximity component of spatiality intersects with the “four ingredients” of procedural justice: “trust, respectful treatment, neutrality and voice” (Goodman-Delahunty, 2010 ). In our case studies, social closeness influenced individuals’ perceptions of whether the police were viewed as allowing locals to voice their views (voice), whether they were treated respectfully in culturally appropriate ways (respectful treatment) and impacted assessments of their trust in officers (trustworthiness) (Goodman-Delahunty, 2010 ). Similarly, appropriate social distance was described as critical to ensuring impartial decision-making, unbiased use of authority, consistent process (neutrality), and assessment of police trustworthiness (Goodman-Delahunty, 2010 ).

Second, perceptions of service delivery or police effectiveness have been proposed as an alternate explanation for police legitimacy since the inception of procedural justice theory (Tyler, 2006a ). The positioning of service delivery and/or effectiveness as an explanatory element has shifted, with more recent conceptualisations arguably encompassing elements of spatiality. Earlier instrumental positioning argued that judgements of effectiveness are based on considerations of the risk of sanction versus the rewards of cooperating with police (Tyler, 2006a ). The later normative perspective, however, proposes that service delivery forms part of the social contract with the public and is couched within the idea that for police to exercise legitimate authority, they should be responsive to citizens’ security needs (Tankebe et al., 2016 ), or the ‘local realities’ of providing these services (Cawthray, 2020 ). Cawthray ( 2020 ) demonstrates that there are two components of service delivery: preparedness (capacity to deliver services) and responsiveness (willingness to respond to societal needs or problems) (Cawthray, 2020 ). Both elements intersect with the dimensions of space articulated within this paper. Physical distance impacted participants’ perceptions of police preparedness. The archipelagic context, geographic obstacles (i.e. ocean, jungle, and mountains), dispersed populations, poor infrastructure, and limited transportation resources all influenced individuals’ assessments of the logistical capabilities and service coverage of police in both PICs. This result corroborates Akinlabi and Murphy’s ( 2018 , p. 195) reflection that “what benefit is a police force that treats people fairly but lacks the ability to protect its citizens”. Social proximity impacted interviewees’ perceptions of police responsiveness. An appropriate balance between social closeness and distance again influenced whether police were viewed as being engaged with and willing to do something about local issues versus being distant or disconnected. Thus, spatiality is central to effective service delivery, as police need to have the resources to navigate their geographical context and appropriate social proximity to connect with and respond to local community issues.

Finally, the most recent conceptual addition to police legitimacy discourse is authority (Cawthray, 2020 ), which has been configured primarily through two theoretical frames: system justification theory (Harkin, 2015 ) and lawfulness, a constituent part of Tankebe et al.’s ( 2016 ) model of police legitimacy. Commonly these approaches hold that police use of power operates within the bounds of social order and its established rules (Harkin, 2015 ; Tankebe et al., 2016 ). This enables the cultivation of legitimate authority through the generation of pro-authority beliefs through unequal power relations, the perpetuation of this order, and compliance with it (Harkin, 2015 ). The evidence presented here indicates that spatiality intersects with this theoretical perspective through the dimensions of physical distance and appropriate social proximity. Physical distance impacted participants’ assessments of the relevance of police authority: if officers were not physically present within a community or a police station was too far away and difficult to access, police authority was perceived as irrelevant or transient. Social proximity, meanwhile, impacted interviewee perceptions, as the balance between closeness and distance influenced their judgements of the strength and rightness of police authority. Appropriate social distance was described as reinforcing officers’ authority while demonstrating closeness was also judged to be necessary so that officers understood community issues and culture and could exercise their coercive powers as locally expected.

There are numerous potential practical implications of this research for policing in rural, remote and island contexts. Chief amongst these is consideration of how this theorisation can help inform police in their efforts to cultivate perceptions of legitimacy within communities in different contextual settings. The findings presented here suggest that police legitimacy can be cultivated through efforts to achieve a balance between social proximity and social distance that is communally and socially expected as well as contextually dependent. Further, the challenges to legitimacy and confidence posed by physical distance can be managed through improving both the accessibility, and thus perceived relevance and responsiveness of police to local needs. It is through addressing these aims that the greatest positive effect on enhancing confidence in the police, moral alignment with them, and thus perceptions of their legitimacy may be achieved. Adopting these objectives has further implications for how police organisations deploy their resources and personnel, train officers for deployment to contextual varied settings, and how individual officers or units manage their relationships with local communities.

It is important to address the limitations of this research. This paper is a first step to developing an understanding of the impacts of spatiality on police legitimacy. As such this work has aimed to construct the concept of spatiality and its dimensions by drawing on reframed literature and secondary analysis of existing interview data. This means that the evidence base used was not primarily collected for this purpose and further that this paper draws on two specific case studies in one type of context islands. However, this work still makes an important theoretical contribution given it develops a conceptual construct that has not previously been examined or drawn out explicitly in existing research. Future studies should build upon this work by engaging in direct purposeful data collection using a variety of methods, and analysis aimed specifically at exploring spatiality alongside other police legitimacy components. This work should occur across a variety of contextual settings islands, rural, urban, and different cultural environments to test the broader utility of spatiality and its layered dimensions.

This paper illustrates the relevance of spatiality to judgements of police legitimacy in our case study contexts through the conceptual linkages between the dimensions of space (geographic distance and social proximity) and theoretical conceptualisations of police legitimacy in terms of procedural justice theory, service delivery, and authority. The findings demonstrate how spatiality and the different dimensions of this concept intersect with each of these three primary theoretical perspectives. As Beetham ( 2013 ) contends, the legitimacy of power needs to be understood in the context that it occurs, not in the abstract, and spatiality impacts every policing setting, though its influence on police legitimacy may be contextually nuanced and complex. Further, Tankebe et al. ( 2016 ) state that legitimacy’s role in prompting cooperation with police may vary in different societal contexts, so taking account of the spatial variation between settings is an important step to acknowledging and adapting to environmental differences. Thus, this paper is potentially an introduction to the broader theoretical and practical potential of our conceptualisation. Our reframing of the rural and island policing literature and our empirical analysis evidenced the link between spatiality and police legitimacy in these environments. Further research is needed to examine the significance of spatiality concerning perceptions of legitimacy in various urban or, indeed, virtual policing settings.

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Cawthray, T., Bull, M. The Spatial Dimension of Police Legitimacy: An Exploration of Two Pacific Island States. Asian J Criminol 18 , 459–478 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11417-023-09413-x

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19 Legitimacy and Lawful Policing

Sanja Kutnjak Ivković is associate professor of criminal justice at the Michigan State University.

• Published: 18 September 2012
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This article is organized as follows. Section I focuses on the concept of police legitimacy, exploring it from the police agency perspective (i.e., why people obey the authority), and presents the empirical findings on legitimacy. Section II discusses what happens when police officers cross the line that separates legitimate and illegitimate conduct. Section III analyzes traditional and novel responses to the situations in which policing went wrong, including internal mechanisms (e.g., internal affairs, early warning systems), external mechanisms (e.g., criminal courts, independent commissions), and mixed mechanisms of control and accountability (e.g., accreditation, citizen reviews). Section IV reflects on the key issues and provides ideas for future research.

Policing carries with it the legitimate right to use coercive force (Klockars 1985 , 12). At the same time, it is a highly discretionary activity, routinely performed outside of the supervisor’s site, before witnesses who would lack credibility in court, or before credible witnesses unwilling to talk. Thus, policing is rife with opportunities for unlawful conduct. Traditionally, the lawfulness of police actions is evaluated against legal rules, be they constitutional rules (e.g., Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution), laws (e.g., Section 1983 lawsuits, 1983 42 U.S.C. §1983 [1871]), or decisions by the highest court of the land (e.g., Miranda v. Arizona , 384 U.S. 436 [1966]), as well as against administrative standards (e.g., Standard Operating Procedures, Rules of Conduct) established by the society at large and by individual police departments. Various mechanisms of control and accountability have been put in place to evaluate whether, and to what extent, police officers cross the line. At the same time, ultimately, it is the public that evaluates police officer conduct. Compared to judgments about legality of police actions, public perceptions about the legitimacy of the police and their actions are subjective in nature; they truly lie in the hearts and minds of the public (National Research Council 2004 , 291).

This article addresses a wide range of related literatures, from which a number of important generalizations can be distilled:

Personal moral values influence whether people will obey the law and the instructions provided by the authority. Empirical research shows that people’s views about the legitimacy strongly influence their willingness to obey the law. Well-publicized critical incidents of police misconduct have both short- and long-term effects on several measures of legitimacy (citizens’ level of confidence in the police; citizens’ willingness to obey the law). The effects of these critical incidents are not uniformly distributed across all racial and ethnic groups.

Perceptions of police legitimacy are not static. They are influenced by personal experiences with the police. Personal experience, in turn, is evaluated through the general views about police legitimacy. Research indicates that citizens expect the police to treat them fairly, both in terms of the outcomes and, even more importantly, the procedures, particularly when the nature of the contact with the police is negative.

Numerous studies have shown that African American citizens are less supportive of the police than white citizens are. African Americans are more likely to evaluate their contact with the police negatively and experience less satisfactory treatment. Research has documented that race and personal experience are the strongest predictors of negative attitudes toward the police.

Although various legal rules and norms regulate police work, policing as an occupation requires a substantial degree of discretion, which creates opportunities for the police to engage in various forms of misconduct, ranging from the use of excessive force to police corruption. For a host of reasons, current measures of prevalence of police misconduct may be regarded, at best, as crude estimates of the actual prevalence of police misconduct.

Societal reaction to police misconduct relies on various types of mechanisms of police control and accountability, from the internal ones (e.g., administrative rules, internal investigations), to the external ones (e.g., criminal courts, independent commissions), as well as mixed mechanisms (e.g., citizen reviews, accreditation). Research emphasizes that each of these mechanisms plays a critical role but, at the same time, points out certain problems associated with the application of these mechanisms toward effective control of misconduct and enhancement of accountability. Although largely understudied, the most promising novel mechanisms of control and accountability include the CompStat, early warning systems, police monitors, and pattern-and-practice lawsuits.

This chapter is organized as follows. Section I focuses on the concept of police legitimacy, explores it from the police agency perspective (i.e., why people obey the authority), and presents the empirical findings on legitimacy. The section proceeds with an analysis of legitimacy from the public’s perspective, reviews empirical studies concerning the effect of the actual experience with the police, and analyzes the related racial differences. Section II discusses what happens when police officers cross the line that separates legitimate and illegitimate conduct. It describes police corruption, use of excessive force, and racial profiling, with a particular emphasis on the potential causes of such behavior and the results of empirical studies seeking to measure their prevalence. Section III analyzes traditional and novel responses to the situations in which policing went wrong, including internal mechanisms (e.g., internal affairs, early warning systems), external mechanisms (e.g., criminal courts, independent commissions), and mixed mechanisms of control and accountability (e.g., accreditation, citizen reviews). Section IV reflects on the key issues and provides ideas for future research.

I. Police Legitimacy

The National Research Council ( 2004 , 291) defines police legitimacy as “the judgments that ordinary citizens make about the rightfulness of police conduct and the organizations that employ and supervise them.” Literature on legitimacy (e.g., Tyler 1990 ; Tyler and Darley 2000 ; Tyler and Huo 2002 ) discusses three models of motivation for people to obey the law.

The first is the deterrence model or the instrumental model (Tyler 1990 ; Tyler and Darley 2000 ). This model postulates that individuals calculate potential gains and losses before they decide whether they will obey or violate the law. This model of human motivation, viewed as the rational-choice theory (e.g., Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin 1978 ; Paternoster 1989 ) or social control model or deterrence (e.g., Zimring and Hawkins 1973 ; Paternoster and Iovanni 1986 ; Paternoster 1989 ; Nagin and Paternoster 1991 ), is the one guiding the American legal system (Tyler and Darley 2000 , 712). Although the deterrence model has been supported by a number of empirical studies (e.g., Paternoster and Iovanni 1986 ; Paternoster 1989 ; Nagin and Paternoster 1991 ), the deterrent effect is not strong. For example, MacCoun ( 1993 , 501) reports that the perceived severity of punishment explains only 5 percent of the variance in drug-use behavior. On the other hand, research reports that certainty of punishment has more deterrent potential (e.g., Paternoster and Iovanni 1986 ; Paternoster 1989 ; Nagin and Paternoster 1991 ).

The second model of human motivation to obey the law relies on personal moral values about appropriate or ethic conduct that rest on “the belief that following the rules is the morally appropriate thing to do” (e.g., Tyler and Darley 2000 , 714). When the laws or decisions by the authority correspond with the moral beliefs held by the individuals, these individuals will voluntarily obey the law and respect the decisions because they share the belief that this is a morally right thing to do. Research suggests that the degree to which the individuals assess that the law overlaps with their own moral values directly affects whether they obey the law (e.g., Tyler 1990 ; Robinson and Darley 1995 ; Tyler and Darley 2000 ; Sunshine and Tyler 2003 ). In reality, congruence between the legal norms and the moral values of various groups of citizens is not perfect, at least for some laws (e.g., laws prohibiting prostitution, euthanasia drug laws) and some decisions (e.g., Roe v. Wade 410 U.S. 113 [1973], declaring the right to abortion; Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka , 347 U.S. 483 [1954], ordering desegregation). In such instances, when citizens feel that the laws are morally unjust, their own moral values could lead them to disobey the law. Thus, as Tyler and Darley ( 2000 ) argue, the reliance on moral values could result in either the promotion or undermining of the rule of law.

The third model is the social-psychological model. It relies on the belief that authorities are viewed as legitimate and thus should be obeyed (e.g., Tyler and Darley 2000 ). Individuals who obey the law do so not because they think that the laws are morally right but because they believe that the authorities who enacted the laws or made such decisions were legitimate and thus should be obeyed (Tyler 1990 , 4; Tyler and Darley 2000 , 716).

When a citizen faces a dilemma and decides whether to engage in a behavior that is acceptable by his or her own moral norms but is prohibited by the law, there are two possible outcomes. If the citizen decides not to engage in the behavior because it violates the citizen’s own moral norms, the decision is primarily influenced by personal morality. On the other hand, if the citizen decides not to engage in the behavior because the law that prohibits it was enacted by the authority and should be obeyed, the decision is primarily influenced by legitimacy of the authority (see, e.g., Tyler 1990 , 25). When authorities need to make potentially unpopular decisions, they rely on the fact that authority is viewed as legitimate and that it ought to be obeyed. Tyler and Darley ( 2000 , 722) give the example of the Roe v. Wade decision (410 U.S. 113 [1973]), in which the Supreme Court declared abortion to be a legal right. Although many citizens viewed this decision as morally wrong, they still obeyed the decision “[b]ecause they view the Supreme Court as a legitimate social institution whose decisions ought to be obeyed.” Research (e.g., Tyler 1990 ; Tyler and Huo 2002 ) shows very clearly that legitimacy—independently of other motivations—strongly influences peoples’ willingness to obey the law.

Tyler ( 1990 , 45) measures legitimacy in two ways: as the perceived obligation to obey the law and as support for legal authorities. In two waves of his survey, Tyler ( 1990 , 45) finds that the degree to which the respondents supported this obligation is “striking.” In fact, more than 80 percent of the respondents in both waves of the survey agreed with the following two statements: “People should obey the law even if it goes against what they think is right” and “I always try to follow the law even if I think that it is wrong” (Tyler 1990 , 45). When asked specific questions about the support for the police, the respondents still showed a substantial degree of support for the police in general (e.g., more than 75 percent agreed that “I feel that I should support the Chicago police” and that “I have a great deal of respect for the Chicago police”), but indicated that they were more skeptical about the honesty of the police (e.g., around 60 percent agreed that “On the whole Chicago police officers are honest”; Tyler 1990 , 48). Measures of obligation to obey and support are only moderately strongly correlated, suggesting that the types of the questions asked and the way they are phrased affects the results and thus the results could differ substantially across empirical studies.

A. Data on Legitimacy

The annual Gallup Poll asks a nationwide sample of citizens about their confidence in various social institutions, including the police (Gallup 2010 ). The data covering the period of sixteen years (1993–2009) show that the majority of the citizens show “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the police. These confidence rates vary from as low as 52 percent in 1993 to as high as 64 percent in 2004 (Gallup 2010 ). A more direct measure of legitimacy considers the perceived duty to obey the law, even when the authorities’ decision or conduct violates one’s own moral norms. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) General Social Survey (reported in Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ) explores the respondents’ level of approval of a police officer potential misconduct (hitting a male adult citizen). Starting from 1973, the rate of approval has been high, with about 70 percent of the respondents approving such behavior from year to year, with the lowest approval in 1991 (65 percent; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ), the year of the Rodney King beating.

A limited number of studies explore the influence of a critical police incident—like the Rodney King incident—on the level of public support for the police (e.g., Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ; Kaminski and Jefferis 1998 ). The results of Kaminski and Jefferis’s study ( 1998 ) show that a televised use-of-force arrest had no efffect on any measure of the Cincinnati respondents’ overall support; its effect was limited to just one aspect of specific support (the perceptions of the police use of excessive force) and to a nonwhite subset of their Cincinnati sample (Kaminski and Jefferis 1998 ).

Tuch and Weitzer ( 1997 ) analyze the influence of two such high-profile incidents. In 1979 a black woman, Eulia Love, was shot and killed by two LAPD officers; the majority of the citizens (51 percent of whites, 66 percent of Latinos, and 81 percent of blacks; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 , 642) evaluated the incident as a case of police brutality. According to the Los Angeles Times 1977 poll, the percentage of citizens who approved of the way the LAPD was doing its job declined in 1979 by 13 percent overall, but the effect was much stronger for minorities than it was for whites (10 percent decline for whites, 20 percent for Latinos, and 23 percent for blacks).

The Rodney King beating on March 3, 1991, videotaped and broadcast across the globe, was another such critical incident. It had a devastating effect on the citizens’ view of the LAPD. Compared to the overall approval of the way the LAPD was doing its job in 1988 (74 percent approval; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ), the approval dropped to 46 percent immediately after the incident (March 7–8) and even lower, to its rock bottom of 34 percent, two weeks later (March 20–21). As was the case with Eulia Love in 1979, the Rodney King incident did not affect all racial/ethnic groups to the same extent. LAPD approval dropped in mid-May 1991 from the pre–Rodney King approval ratings by 33 percent for whites (from 74 percent in 1988 to 41 percent in mid-March of 1991), 49 percent for Latinos (from 80 percent to 31 percent), and 50 percent for blacks (from 64 percent to 14 percent; see Table 1, Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ). The overall approval approached the pre–Rodney King levels only four years later, in 1995 (Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ). Thus, it seems that the incidents of police misconduct publicized by the media have not only direct, short-term effects on public support for the police, but also sizeable long-term effects. In their subsequent study, Weitzer and Tuch ( 2006 ) report that serial or ongoing exposure to negative media reporting on the police was one of the most consistent factors related to public support for the police.

B. Procedural Justice

Tyler ( 1990 , 71) argues that legitimacy should not only be explored from the perspective of legal authority but also from the public’s perspective. The traditional view—the instrumental perspective—was to assume that people evaluate the authority based on the favorability of the outcomes (Tyler 1990 , 71); those individuals who receive a more favorable outcome are more likely to evaluate the authority positively (see Tyler 1990 for the overview of the studies). Whereas this perspective argues that citizens are concerned only with securing favorable outcomes for themselves (see Tyler 1990 , 2000 , 2001 ), the normative perspective of justice is based on the citizens’ perceptions of fairness and equity (see Tyler 1990 , 2001 ). Tyler ( 1990 , 2000 ) suggests that citizens’ views of justice are primarily based on the notion of fairness, both distributive justice (fairness of outcomes) and procedural justice (fairness of the procedures).

Thibaut and Walker ( 1975 ) argue that people would be more likely to accept the outcomes if they were obtained through fair procedures. The results of their study and subsequent studies (Lind and Tyler 1988 ; Tyler 1990 ; Tyler and Huo 2002 ) strongly confirm this notion. Although the fairness of outcomes is important, fairness of procedures is even more important. In fact, Tyler ( 1990 , 80) reports that fairness of the procedure is the only factor that has a significant influence “on generalizations from experiences to attitudes toward legal authorities, law, and government.”

Tyler ( 2000 , 121) elaborates on the theory of procedural justice, analyzes the data (e.g., Tyler 1990 , 141), and proposes that four elements (participation, neutrality, trustworthiness of authorities, and treatment with dignity and respect) are the key factors affecting evaluations of procedural fairness. However, his analyses show that these elements are complex and that they may not matter equally for all legal settings (e.g., Tyler 1990 , 142, 144–45). Participation (Tyler 2000 , 121), or representation (Leventhal 1976 , 1980 ), refers to the extent to which the parties believe that they have control over the process, not necessarily in terms of determining the outcome of the dispute, but in terms of being given opportunities to present their side of the story to the decision makers. Research shows that “having a voice” resonated quite positively in diverse settings, from plea bargaining (Houlden 1980 ) and sentencing hearings (Heinz and Kerstetter 1979 ) to mediation (Kitzmann and Emery 1993 ; MacCoun et al. 1988 ; Shapiro and Brett 1993 ), especially if the parties had the impression that their statements had a direct effect on the outcome of the case (see, e.g., Shapiro and Brett 1993 ). Neutrality (Tyler and Lind 1992 ; Tyler 2000 , 122), or impartiality (Paternoster et al. 1997 , 168), occurs when the decision makers do not allow personal characteristics of the parties or favoritism of one party to influence the decision and treatment during the process. Simply put, neutrality involves honesty and lack of bias (Tyler and Lind 1992 , 141). Trustworthiness of authorities (Tyler 2000 , 122) refers to the degree to which the decision maker can be trusted to behave fairly. Treatment with dignity and respect (Tyler 2000 , 122), status recognition (Tyler and Lind 1992 ), or ethicality (Paternoster et al. 1997 , 168), imply that evaluations of procedural fairness will be affected by views as to whether the decision makers treat the participants with dignity and with respect for their rights. Based on their empirical tests of the key elements, Tyler and Huo ( 2002 , 195) conclude that “[p]eople’s judgments about their trust in the legal authority with whom they dealt were influenced by respect, voice, and neutrality. When people knew their outcome, they relied on respect, voice, and neutrality. When they did not know their outcome, they relied primarily on respect.”

C. Personal Experience with the Police and Police Legitimacy

Tyler ( 1990 , 26) argues that legitimate authorities have discretion to perform their tasks and that “[the scope of legitimate authority] rests on a conception of obligation to obey any commands an authority issues so long as that authority is acting within appropriate limits.” When citizens feel that the authority is overstepping its boundaries, the level of legitimacy will decrease. In the context of policing, police agencies and individual police officers—both of whom could be characterized as having legitimacy (see, e.g., Tyler 1990 , 29)—exercise discretion as a regular part of their jobs (e.g., Davis 1969 ). Indeed, when a police agency decides to enforce the DUI laws more aggressively or when a police officer stops a motorist for speeding, both of these situations have the potential to affect their legitimacy.

As Tyler and Darley ( 2000 , 718) emphasize, although the roots of law-abiding culture are planted in childhood, people are also influenced in their views of authorities by adult experiences with the authorities, be they in the form of suspects, victims, or third parties. Tyler summarizes the findings about the influence of experience on the perceptions of legitimacy (1990, 94):

These findings confirm that personal experience with police officers or court officials affects general views about the legitimacy of these authorities and the quality of their job performance. The data also suggest that the effect of experience on performance evaluations is much stronger than its effect on legitimacy. People’s views about the legitimacy of legal authorities are more strongly insulated than performance evaluations are from the influence of a good or bad experience with police officers or a judge.

Tyler ( 1990 , 95) further emphasizes that the effect of personal experience on the general views about legitimacy is strong and that it persists even after controlling for prior views. However, how people will evaluate their own personal experience with the police depends on what they thought about the police before the experience (Tyler 1990 , 95). In that sense, general views about legitimacy lead people to attribute more positive evaluations of the actual experience, which in turn affects their general views of legitimacy. In their subsequent work, Tyler and Huo ( 2002 ) find that people who evaluate police officers as legitimate are more likely to obey their orders. At the same time, the behavior of specific police officers influences the overall level of legitimacy toward the police.

Sunshine and Tyler ( 2003 ) report that general views about the police are primarily influenced by the procedural justice variables. Whereas people base their evaluations partly on the perceptions of fairness of outcomes, unfair or disrespectful treatment by particular police officers carries substantial weight (Tyler 1990 ; Tyler and Huo 2002 ) and influences how likely both the individual who went through the experience and other people who learned about the experience are to obey the law in the future. Regardless of how trivial the reason for the interaction between the police and citizens, people generalize from their own experiences with the police and from the experiences of their friends and relatives. Unfair or disrespectful treatment leads toward less obedience (see, e.g., Tyler 1990 ; Paternoster et al. 1997 ; Tyler and Smith 1997 ) and more resistance (e.g., White et al. 1994 ; Mastrofski et al. 1996 ), which makes the police job more difficult in the future. Reiss’s empirical study ( 1971 ) shows that when people, both suspects and third parties, attach low legitimacy to the police, the police officers responding to calls for service are more likely to use force and the encounters are more likely to end with severe injuries to both citizens and officers.

On the other hand, Tyler and Huo ( 2002 ) point out that one encounter evaluated as unfair or disrespectful will lead citizens in the future to put more emphasis on the quality of the treatment by the authorities and less on their general views of the authority (see, also Tyler 1990 , 172). Thus, experiencing unfair treatment sensitizes individuals more toward such issues, shifts the focus away from legitimacy of legal authorities to the fairness of the specific experience, and effectively undermines legitimacy (Tyler 1990 , 172). Furthermore, Tyler and Huo ( 2002 , 185) argue and confirm through their empirical research that the subsequent general evaluations of the authorities are more influenced by the perceptions of the quality of treatment than by their judgments about the outcomes.

Other empirical studies explored the influence of various types of contacts with the police (e.g., involuntary contacts, contacts initiated by the police, such as being arrested or receiving a traffic ticket; voluntary contacts, contacts initiated by the citizens, such as requesting police service or reporting victimization on the confidence in the police [see Decker 1981 on public evaluations of the police]). Some studies (e.g., Winfree and Griffiths 1977 ) suggest that involuntary contacts have a stronger effect on the public opinion about the police than voluntary contacts do. Tyler and Folger ( 1980 ) report that procedural justice is more important for the evaluation of the encounter when the contact is involuntary (i.e., being stopped by the police) than when it is voluntary (i.e., called the police for help). Moreover, whereas involuntary contacts erode the individual’s opinion about the police, voluntary contacts do not substantially improve it (Jacob 1971 ). Other studies (see, e.g., Carter 1985 ) find that, regardless of the nature of contacts (i.e., voluntary or involuntary), as the number of contacts with the police increases, the level of satisfaction decreases. Thus, it is quite possible that the nature of the contact may not have as much effect on the level of public opinion about the police as the satisfaction with, or perceived fairness of, the treatment does. Indeed, several studies confirm this conclusion (see, e.g., Correia et al. 1996 ; Reisig and Parks 2000 ). Thus, although certain types of contacts are more likely than others to generate dissatisfaction (see, e.g., Southgate and Eklbom 1984 ; Skogan 1996 ), it seems that, on average, having any contact with the police results in more negative attitudes toward the police (Yeo and Budd 2000 ; see also Dean 1980 ) because contact with the police likely will be perceived as unfair, disrespectful, or antagonistic.

The most frequently studied type of voluntary contact occurs when a person becomes a crime victim and decides to report the victimization to the police. Studies show that reporting the victimization to the police further erodes the overall satisfaction with the police (e.g., Homant et al. 1984 ; Kutnjak Ivković 2008 ). Similarly, Shapland et al. ( 1985 , 85) report that the victims’ “lack of knowledge of what was happening to the case and, for a few, the consequent feeling that the police did not care and were not doing anything” are detrimental for the victims’ opinions about the police. Just like Tyler and Huo ( 2002 ) find that both quality of treatment and outcome favorability matter (although quality of treatment has a stronger effect), other prior studies exploring public evaluations of the police have shown that both the treatment and the outcome matter. Poister and McDavid ( 1978 ) report that the victims’ overall satisfaction with the police is related to both procedural variables (e.g., satisfaction with the response time, satisfaction with the initial investigation) and outcome variables (e.g., whether the investigation was initiated, quality of the investigation, likelihood of an arrest). The 1996 International Crime Victimization Survey results demonstrate that the respondents from a number of European and North American countries who were victimized and were dissatisfied with their reporting experiences attributed the reasons for their dissatisfaction to both procedural-justice issues (e.g., lack of interest in pursuing the case, impoliteness, slow to arrive) and substantive-justice issues (e.g., the offender was not caught, the property was not recovered; van Dijk 1999 , 39). The results of the 1998 British Crime Survey support the same argument: Yeo and Budd ( 2000 , 3) find that the “police received higher ratings when they: recovered all or some of the victim’s property (77 percent), charged the offender (73 percent), [and] had face-to-face contact with the victim (66 percent).”

D. Minority Views and Experiences

Since the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice ( 1967 a ) and the Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission 1968 ), research studies have found that race unequivocally matters in the context of analyzing public opinion about the police: African American respondents seem less satisfied with, and less confident in, the local police than white respondents are 1 (e.g., Jacob 1971 ; Walker et al. 1973 ; Hadar and Snortum 1975 ; Albrecht and Green 1977 ; Garofalo 1977 ; Scaglion and Condon 1980 ; Peek et al. 1981 ; Jesilow et al. 1995 ; Webb and Marshall 1995 ; Cao et al, 1996 ; Correia et al. 1996 ; Flanagan and Vaughn 1996 ; Huang and Vaughn 1996 ; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ; Kaminski and Jefferis 1998 ; Sampson and Bartusch 1998 ; Weitzer and Tuch 1999 , 2002 ; Reisig and Parks 2000 , 2002 ). 2

Divergent opinions between African American and white respondents stem from different experiences and cultural norms and expectations. The police may treat minority citizens differently, including more frequent searches (but not more frequent questioning or chasing, according to Erez 1984 ; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 ), stops (e.g., Weitzer and Tuch 2002 ), tickets (e.g., Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 ), and arrests (e.g., Harris 1997 ; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 , 2007 a ), all of which might induce perceptions of injustice and differential treatment. Weitzer and Tuch ( 2002 ) point out that only 5 percent of white respondents reported being stopped exclusively because of their race or ethnic background, yet the same is true for about 40 percent of black respondents, particularly young, black men. The Bureau of Justice survey of citizens stopped by the police in 2002 (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 ) shows that white and black drivers were stopped at similar rates (compared to their proportion in the US population of drivers), but black drivers, particularly young, black men, were more likely to say that the police did not give them the reason for the stop and were less likely to evaluate the stop as legitimate. They were also less likely to estimate that they were stopped for speeding, but more likely to be ticketed, to be physically searched, to have their vehicles searched (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 ), or to be arrested (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007a , 6). Among the residents who had any contact with the police (not just a traffic stop), black residents were more likely to say that the police used force or threatened to use force (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2006 , 9; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007 a , 8), but there were no differences in the percentages of black and white respondents who evaluated the force as excessive (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007 a , 8). Research further suggests that African Americans are more likely to see traffic stops as unjustified (Wortley et al. 1997 ; Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001 ) and to say that they are at risk of unfair treatment by the police (Huang and Vaughn 1996 , 39). African American respondents typically are more likely to say that the police “are allowed to use too much force” than whites report (60 percent and 33 percent, respectively; Huang and Vaughn 1996 , 40), and that they have been victims of racial profiling (Weitzer and Tuch 2002 ).

Respondents who perceive the police to engage in misconduct more frequently, as African American respondents do (e.g., Flanagan and Vaughn 1996 ; Weitzer and Tuch 2002 ), are also less likely to express strong support for the police (see, e.g., Smith and Hawkins 1973 ; Dean 1980 ; Benson 1981 ; Soo Son et al. 1997 ; Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ; Weitzer and Tuch 2002 ). Weitzer and Tuch ( 2002 ) identify race and personal experience with police racial profiling are the strongest predictors of attitudes toward the police.

II. Police Misconduct

Police agencies and police officers enjoy substantial discretion in the performance of their duties (Davis 1969 ). In addition to the federal and state statutes, the US Constitution serves as the springboard to evaluate the legality of police actions and the way they exercise discretion. Police officer discretion is also channeled by court cases, both criminal and civil, as well as the police agency’s administrative rules. Still, some police officers cross the line, violate the rules, and engage in police misconduct. Legitimacy is a characteristic of both police agencies and individual police officers, and they can enhance it or undermine it. One way of undermining is to engage in police misconduct (line officers) or to allow misconduct to flourish in the police agency (supervisors).

A. Police Corruption

Police corruption is a form of police misconduct typically defined through the motivation to achieve personal gain (e.g., Sherman 1974 ; Goldstein 1975 ; Barker and Carter 1986 ; Klockars et al. 2000 ). It may involve a violation of the laws, police agency’s internal administrative rules, and/or the codes of ethics.

In their joint work Barker and Roebuck (Barker and Roebuck 1973 ; Roebuck and Barker 1974 ) point out that corruption takes many forms. Based on several dimensions (e.g., acts and actors involved, norms violated, support from peer group, organizational degree, police department’s reaction), they specify eight types of corruption: corruption of authority (which incorporates the acceptance of gratuities), kickbacks, opportunistic thefts, shakedowns, protection of illegal activity, the fix, illegal criminal activity, and internal payoffs. Punch ( 1985 ) added “flaking” or “padding” of evidence as the ninth type of corruption, which, according to Punch, typically is evident in drug-related cases. In a nationwide study of more than 3,000 police officers from thirty diverse US police agencies, Klockars et al. ( 2000 ) find that shakedowns and opportunistic thefts were evaluated to be the most serious types of corruption in all thirty agencies, while the acceptance of gratuities—be it on a regular basis or only for the holidays—was viewed as the least serious form of corruption in all thirty agencies, with the cases of internal corruption and kickbacks lying somewhere between these two extremes. These results are very consistent with results of surveys of police officers from thirteen other countries as diverse as Croatia, Finland, Japan, Pakistan, and South Africa (Klockars, Kutnjak Ivković, and Haberfeld 2004).

1. Causes of Police Corruption

The National Research Council ( 2004 , 271) points out that “[t]he research literature [on causes of police corruption] is long on theory and short on evidence about what causes police corruption.” Existing literature on causes of corruption could be classified into several categories.

First, some studies explore individual police officers and their characteristics (e.g., Muir 1977 ) or the “rotten apples” (Knapp Commission 1972 ). The literature tries to establish which features make police officers particularly prone to corruption (e.g., prior criminal record, weak moral values) but, at the same time, indicates that psychological screening tests are not accurate predictors of future behavior (e.g., Malouff and Schutte 1986 ; Talley and Hinz 1990 ).

Second, the literature focuses on the opportunities for corruption. Policing as an occupation is rife with opportunities for corruption (Klockars et al. 2000 ), with differential opportunities across various assignments, ranks, and laws that the police enforce. Detectives, particularly those assigned to narcotic units, have especially extensive opportunities for corruption (General Accounting Office 1998 ), as do police officers in charge of laws without moral consensus and vaguely defined laws (Knapp Commission 1972 ).

Third, a strand of the literature focuses on the police agency itself (“rotten barrels” or “rotten orchards,” Punch 2003 ) and what the police agency does to influence the contours of corruption within the agency. The effect of the police agency on corruption within the agency is multifaceted. The police chief plays one of the dominant roles (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 ; Goldstein 1975 ; Weisburd and Greenspan 2000 ; Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ), as do first-line supervisors (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Burns and Sechrest 1992 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ; Weisburd and Greenspan 2000 ) and peers (e.g., McNamara 1967 ; Stoddard 1974 ; Klitgaard 1988 ; Sparrow et al. 1990 ; Weisburd and Greenspan 2000 ; Chen 2003 ; Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ). In a nutshell, police agencies play crucial roles by creating systems that establish rules, enforce rules, detect corruption, and control the code of silence (e.g., Sherman 1974 , 1978 ; Klockars et al. 2000 ; Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ;).

Fourth, some studies examine the role of the broader environment and the influence it has on the level of corruption in the police agency. By criminalizing or by failing to criminalize certain behaviors, the society at large—through its legislative branch of government—sends the message about the standards of appropriate behavior and regulates the demand for corruption (Walker 1999 ). By enacting the laws prohibiting corruption, but by not enforcing them or enforcing them only sporadically, the society at large communicates a relaxed view of corruption and its seriousness (Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ). Public expectations of the appropriate ethical behavior by all governmental employees, including police officers, guide police agencies and police officers in their conduct (e.g., Goldstein 1975 ; Sherman 1977 ; Klockars 2003 ). These expectations are generated as part of the local political culture; as Sherman ( 1977 ) argues, communities differ greatly in their expectations, from “communities with a more public-regarding ethos” (like Charlotte, North Carolina; Kansas City, Missouri; and Portland, Oregon) to communities with more “private-regarding” (like New York City and New Orleans). Kutnjak Ivković’s ( 2003 , 612) study of International Crime Victim Surveys reveals that “the countries with the reputation in the international business community of being more corrupt, as indicated by a low score on the 1999 Corruption Perception Index (CPI) …, appear also to have a higher percentage of the respondents who said that they had been asked to pay a bribe to a police officer last year.”

2. Data on Police Corruption

Obtaining accurate data on police corruption is very challenging. First, in most countries legal statutes do not feature a crime specifically titled “corruption” (instead, criminal statutes prohibit behaviors such as “bribery,” “extortion,” and “theft”). The same applies to police agencies; precisely what corrupt behaviors are prohibited by internal agency rules varies from agency to agency and across time within the same agency. Second, for various reasons, neither police officers nor citizens (participants or potential witnesses) have motives to report a corrupt transaction; in fact, they have motives not to report it (e.g., Stoddard 1974 ; Klockars 1999 ; Klockars et al. 2000 ; Kutnjak Ivković 2003 , 2005 ;).

Surveys of citizens and police officers alike are burdened with these problems and are not reliable sources of data on corruption (see, e.g., Kutnjak Ivković 2003 ; National Research Council 2004 , 269). In addition, most of the existing surveys focus on one country and are conducted locally, usually with the purpose of surveying the population of a particular city. The results of citizen surveys provide quite a divergent picture about police corruption, from fewer than 2 percent of Caucasian respondents nationwide who perceived in the 1960s that most of the police were corrupt (President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967 b ) to 93 percent of New Yorkers in the 1990s who perceived corruption to be widespread (Kraus 1994). On the comparative front, the Gallup International 50th Anniversary Survey (1996) reports that approximately one-third of the respondents in the West European countries and Israel, and more than two-thirds of the respondents in the East European countries, the Far Eastern countries, and the Central and South American countries assessed that police corruption was widespread in their countries. Among the respondents in the International Crime Victimization Survey, about 1 percent of the respondents or fewer from Western democracies reported paying a bribe to the police, while the corresponding percentages were dramatically higher (between 10 percent and 20 percent) in some East European, Asian, and Latin American countries (Kutnjak Ivković 2003 ).

The official data, be they arrest rates or complaint rates within a police agency, at best reveal only the tip of the iceberg. At the federal level, there were between 83 and 150 officers convicted annually in the period from 1993 to 1997 (General Accounting Office 1998 , 11). For a country with more than 600,000 officers (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007 b ), focusing on these miniscule conviction rates would suggest naïvely that corruption is a minor issue. On the other hand, the Knapp Commission ( 1972 ) reports finding widespread corruption in the NYPD (the largest police agency in the country) in the 1970s. At the same time, the prosecutors filed about thirty cases of corruption annually (Kutnjak Ivković 2003 ), with about one-third of the police officers charged with corruption-related crimes not being convicted and, among those convicted, only one out of five receiving a prison sentence of a year or longer (Kutnjak Ivković 2003 ).

Similar problems could be encountered regarding the police agency’s complaint data, if they are available at all, and compared with other sources of data about corruption. Reports by independent commissions (e.g., Mollen Commission 1994 ; Royal Commission 1997 ) and the results of victimization surveys across the world (Kutnjak Ivković 2003 ) suggest that citizens rarely report corruption to the police, and the official agency data are severe underestimates of the extent of corruption. For example, at the time the Knapp Commission ( 1972 ) reported widespread corruption in the NYPD, the complaint rate was less than 1 per 100 officers (Cohen 1972 ).

The best, most detailed and accurate data come from independent commissions, but they pertain only to a specific agency, time period, and are bound by the resources and powers granted to the commission. The Knapp Commission ( 1972 ), the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (1974), the Christopher Commission ( 1991 ), the Mollen Commission ( 1994 ), and the Royal Commission ( 1997 ) are examples of the best-known recent commissions. Their findings illustrate the evolving and dynamic nature of police corruption. Both the Knapp Commission and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission found widespread corruption in the NYPD and Philadelphia Police Department, respectively, along with the presence of a strong code of silence. In contrast, the Mollen Commission reported that most police officers in the NYPD were honest but still found pockets of police officers aggressively seeking opportunities to obtain money and drugs.

A novel approach toward collecting data about police corruption incorporates the approach developed by Klockars and Kutnjak Ivković ( 2003 ), in which the authors measure the level of police integrity and thus alleviate the methodological problems associated with the direct measurement of police corruption. A study of thirty police agencies (Klockars et al. 2000 ) revealed that police agencies varied considerably in the contours of their police integrity.

B. Use of (Excessive) Force

The right to use coercive force is a defining feature of policing (see, e.g., Bittner 1970 ; Klockars 1985 ). The police use of force has been studied extensively since the 1960s, when the President’s Commission for Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice ( 1967 a ) confirmed that the allegations of use of excessive force, which ignited riots across the US cities, were legitimate. Despite intensive research activity, there is no clear consensus on what constitutes the use of force and, particularly, the use of excessive force. Typically, use of force is explored through the continuum of force (see, e.g., Desmedt and Marsh 1990 ), but the items on the matrix differ from one police agency to another (see, e.g., National Institute of Justice 1999 ).

Drawing a line between the appropriate and excessive force is even more challenging. The CALEA accreditation standards require that police officers “will use only the force necessary to accomplish lawful objectives.” Klockars ( 1995 ) argues that the line between the legitimate force and excessive force can be drawn across several standards—excessive force creates criminal responsibility, civil liability, and/or a scandal. However, Klockars ( 1995 , 17) further points out that these standards are necessary but not sufficient to define excessive force, and that the definition should be related to the skilled police officer standard (“the use of any more force than a highly skilled police officer would find necessary to use in a particular situation”). This approach fits with the US Supreme Court standard of a “reasonable police officer” decided in Graham v. Connor (490 U.S. 386 [1989]).

A particular kind of the use of force—the use of deadly or lethal force—is more regulated. The Supreme Court held in Tennessee v. Garner (471 U.S. 1 [1985]) that the fleeing-felon rule, which authorized police officers to use “all the means necessary to effect an arrest,” was unconstitutional. Instead, the guidelines issued by the Court suggest that police officers are allowed to legitimately use deadly force only in the situations in which the suspect presents clear and present danger to himself or others (“deadly force … may not be used unless necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others”).

1. Causes of Use of (Excessive) Force

Unlike the study of corruption, the study of the use of force has been mostly atheoretical. In general, empirical research has sought to explore which variables are related to the use of (excessive) force (e.g., Riksheim and Chermak 1993 ; Terrill 2001 ). The issue is further complicated by the fact that this literature is situated within the broader topic of police behavior and discretion. Based on the nature of the variables explored, four dominant strands of the literature have emerged.

First, some studies focus on individual police officers and their characteristics (e.g., Muir 1977 ). Early research in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g., Balch 1972 ) sought to distinguish the degree to which police officers exhibit characteristics of an authoritarian personality, which would predispose them to use (excessive) force. Although Scrivner (1994) reports finding some evidence of those characteristics among the group of police officers referred to him for their use of excessive force, the jury is still out on whether police officers indeed generally are more likely to have these characteristics and, if they do, whether they are related to the use of excessive force. Another avenue of research explored police officer value or belief system and encountered two serious problems: first, the difficulty of separating the effects of contextual and organizational variables from the attitudes and, second, respondents’ low attitude-behavior consistency. The few empirical tests conducted found very limited support for the role of individual characteristics (e.g., Worden 1995 ; Terrill and Mastrofski 2002 ). Worden ( 1995 ) reports that police officer use of force and excessive force is related to their views about citizens, but not to their views of the police role.

Second, the literature focuses on the dynamics of police-citizen encounters. Following Donald Black’s theory of law (1976), the predictions are that the police will be more likely to use (excessive) force in the encounters with citizens who have a lower status, such as minorities and the poor (see, e.g., Terrill 2001 , 14). The existing research (e.g., Reiss 1967 ; Friedrich 1980 ; Worden 1995 ; Terrill 2001 ) documents that police officers are more likely to use force (and use of excessive force when included in the studies) when citizens are defiant and antagonistic (recent evidence is somewhat less supportive; e.g., Terrill and Mastrofski 2002   v. Garner et al. 2002 ), lower-class (e.g., Terrill and Mastrofski 2002 ), intoxicated (e.g., Terrill 2001 ), male (e.g., Mastrofski et al., 1995 ; Worden 1995 ; Terrill 2001 ; Terrill and Mastrofski 2002 ), and black/nonwhite (recent evidence is more mixed; e.g., Alpert 1989 ; Garner et al. 1995 , 2002 ; Engel et al. 2000   v. Fyfe 1982 ; Worden 1995 ; Terrill and Mastrofski 2002 ). In fact, situational factors seem to be more relevant than individual police officer or organizational characteristics (see, e.g., Worden 1989 ; Riksheim and Chermak 1993 for reviews).

Third, a strand of the literature focuses on the police agency. Wilson’s organizational theory (1968) emphasizes the importance of the police agency’s hierarchical structure and the larger social and political environment in which the police agency operates. By establishing administrative rules, the police agency creates a certain organizational culture or common vision about how policing should be done. However, establishing the official policies is a necessary but not sufficient step. Studies exploring individual police agencies show support for this idea, particularly in the case of deadly force. Fyfe ( 1979 ) analyzes the effect of the newly implemented policy on the use of firearms in the NYPD in 1972 and shows a decrease of about 30 percent in the number of police firearm discharges. At the same time, Fyfe ( 1982 ) compares the shooting rates in Memphis and the NYPD, and explains the difference between the two cities through the differences in the extent of official rules and the activity of the internal control mechanisms. The second subset of the literature focuses on police culture and its effect on the use of (excessive) force. Police culture (see, e.g., Bittner 1970 ; Stoddard 1974 ; Van Maanen 1974 ; Reuss-Ianni 1983 ; Sparrow et al. 1990 ) emphasizes danger, social isolation, group loyalty, and solidarity. Although the debate is centered on whether the increased diversity and the introduction of the community policing may challenge traditional views about the police culture, there are few studies that explored the influence of police culture on the use of (excessive) force. Researchers typically assumed that the police culture includes a predetermined set of values relatively static in nature (see, e.g., National Research Council 2004 , 132). Worden ( 1995 ) compares the formal effects of the organizational structure (e.g., degree of bureaucratization, emphasis on crime-fighting activities) and the informal culture on the use of force and concludes that, of these three variables, only the degree of bureaucratization is related to the use of force.

Fourth, the literature focuses on the society at large and its effects on the use of (excessive) force. The “racial threat” hypothesis proposes that, once the percentage of minorities reaches a certain proportion of the population (e.g., Liska et al., 1985 ), they will be perceived as a threat to the existing order and, as such, will receive a harsher treatment by the police. At the neighborhood level, research suggests that the police officers are more likely to use force in the disadvantaged neighborhoods (e.g., Reisig and Parks 2000 ). At the state level, research suggests that police were more likely to use deadly force in the states with higher levels of income inequality (e.g., Jacobs and Britt 1979 ).

2. Data on the Use of (Excessive) Force

The lack of the common definitions of the use of force and, particularly, the use of excessive force is a serious problem in the collection of data as well. Consequently, there is no nationwide data source about the extent and nature of the use of force. The key sources of data on the use of (excessive) force have been observational studies, surveys, police officer use of force reports, and citizen complaints, each of which features serious shortcomings.

Research indicates that the police use force rarely (e.g., McLaughlin 1992 ; Klinger 1995 ; Garner et al. 1996 ) and that, when police officers do use force, they typically rely on the less severe items on the use of force continuum, such as issuing verbal commands or grabbing the citizen (e.g., Klinger 1995 ; Garner and Maxwell 1999 ; Terrill 2001 ). Observational studies from the 1960s and 1970s (Reiss 1967 ; Friedrich 1977 ; Worden 1995 ) suggest that police officers had used force in fewer than 5 percent of the police-citizen contacts and had used excessive force even less frequently, in fewer than 3 percent of the contacts. More recent studies (e.g., Klinger 1995 ) incorporate verbal commands into the use of force as well, and find force to be used more frequently (17 percent of the time), with verbal commands accounting for more than one-third of the events.

The findings of the Bureau of Justice Statistics nationwide survey (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2001 ) of police-public contacts are consistent with the results of observational studies. Based on the survey of more than 80,000 people in 1999, the police officers used force, or threatened to use force, in fewer than 1 percent of the encounters with the citizens. The 2005 sweep of the survey shows that about 1.6 percent of the citizens experienced police using force or were threatened with the use of force (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007 a , 1). In about one-half of the incidents, 55 percent, the police used physical force (as opposed to verbal commands or threats to use force); when they used physical force, the police tended to use the least serious forms of physical force (they pushed or grabbed the person). The overwhelming majority of the citizens who said that they were either threatened with the use of force or actually experienced force claimed that the force was excessive (75 percent in 1999 and 83 percent in 2005).

Pate and Fridell ( 1993 , 48) surveyed more than 1,000 police agencies, including sheriff’s departments, country police departments, city police departments, and state agencies, and asked them to provide information about the use of force reports, citizen complaints, and the litigation concerning allegations of excessive force. Whereas their findings show substantial variation over different types of police agencies, the common feature is that police officers from all police agencies tended to use less serious forms of force more frequently. For example, among the city police agencies, police officers used handcuffs at the rate of 490 per 1,000, bodily force at the rate of 272, and weapons being drawn at the rate of 130 per 1,000 sworn officers (Pate and Fridell 1993 , 74). On the other hand, police officers shot at civilians at the rate of less than 5 per 1,000, used electrical devices at the rate of 5 per 1,000, and used neck restraints at the rate of 1 per 1,000 sworn officers (Pate and Fridell 1993 , 74). Pate and Fridell ( 1993 , 107) document the rates of use-of-force citizen complaints per 1,000 sworn offices and report that these rates varied from 16 percent for the state agencies to 48 percent for the city police agencies. Fewer than 15 percent of all these complaints were sustained by the agencies (Pate and Fridell 1993 , 114).

3. Data on the Use of Deadly Force

Although it is rare, the use of deadly force nevertheless is an important and sensitive topic; the disparity in the fatal shootings of African Americans and whites in the 1960s, sometimes to the extent of 6 or 8 to 1 (Robin 1963 ; Walker and Katz 2008 , 404), sparked riots in the 1960s. The change occurred in the 1980s after the Garner decision ( Tennessee v. Garner , 471 U.S. 1 [1985]), when the old fleeing-felon rule was reversed. Research suggests that the Garner decision was not as effective in changing state laws (Cassell and Hayman 1998 ) as it was effective in changing the police agencies’ internal administrative rules (e.g., Skolnick and Fyfe 1993 ). Fyfe ( 1979 ) analyzed the NYPD data and reported that the number of shots fired was reduced by 30 percent, particularly in the area of fleeing-felon situations. In the end, the estimates are that the decision seemed to reduce the number of fatal police shootings nationwide by about 60 incidents annually (e.g., Tennenbaum 1994 ) or from 400 in 1983 to 300 in 1987 (Geller and Scott 1992 ) and that the ratio of African Americans and whites shot and killed dropped from 8 to 1 in the 1960s to 4 to 1 in the 1980s (Geller and Scott 1992 ).

Obtaining accurate data on the police use of deadly force or fatal shootings is challenging (National Research Council 2004 , 259). The existing studies on lethal force show substantial variation across jurisdictions. Milton et al. ( 1977 ) analyze the rates of shootings in seven large US cities in the period 1973–74 and note that the rates of shooting varied from 1.6 to 8.5 shootings per 100,000 citizens (or by a factor of five). Fyfe’s analyses (2002) of the fatal shootings in fifty-one municipal, county, and sheriff’s departments in the period 1990–2000 also detect extensive variation across the agencies. The rate of shooting differential between the lowest and the highest varied by a factor of fourteen in county police agencies, a factor of eight within city agencies, and a factor of six among the sheriff’s agencies.

C. Racial Profiling

The issue of racial profiling quickly grabbed the attention of the public in the mid-1990s, in the aftermath of two lawsuits that alleged racial profiling by state police agencies in Maryland and New Jersey ( New Jersey v. Soto, 734 A.2d 350, Superior Court of New Jersey [1996]; Wilkins v. Maryland State Police , No. CCB-93-468 [D. Md. 1993], filed November 14, 1996). Despite the importance of the issue, there is no common definition of what constitutes unlawful racial profiling (Northeastern University Data Collection Resource Center 2010 ). Racial profiling is typically referred to as the use of race as a key or the key variable in the police practice of stopping, searching, arresting, and ticketing citizens (see, e.g., Weitzer and Tuch 2002 , 435; Walker and Katz 2008 , 415.

Whereas more than 60 percent of the police chiefs participating in a recent survey (Fridell et al. 2001 ) thought that racial profiling was not a problem in their jurisdiction, the overwhelming majority of citizens (black citizens in particular) believed that racial profiling indeed was widespread (Weitzer and Tuch 2002 , 442). Black respondents—especially young, black men—were substantially more likely to say that they experienced racial profiling than white respondents were (Weitzer and Tuch 2002 ). Based on multivariate analyses, Weitzer and Tuch ( 2002 , 446) conclude that race and personal experience with profiling were the strongest predictors of citizens’ attitudes toward the police.

1. Data on Racial Profiling

The difficulty in data collection involves several different dimensions. First, racial profiling is a highly political issue. Second, the debate among criminologists on how to measure racial profiling correctly has not been resolved and “no industry standard exists for measuring racial or gender profiling” (Northeastern University Data Collection Resource Center 2010 ). Third, there is no established rule that would unequivocally determine when racial disparity becomes racial discrimination. In measuring racial profiling, the first step is to determine the number of persons stopped, arrested, searched, and/or ticked (“the numerator”). The second step is to compare their racial distribution with the racial distribution of the benchmark (“the denominator”). Determining the denominator, particularly for traffic and other moving violations, is particularly challenging. The last step in the process is to explore the size of the differences detected through the analyses and conclude whether the differences point toward racial disparity or racial discrimination.

As part of his expert testimony in New Jersey v. Soto (734 A.2d 350, Superior Court of New Jersey [1996]), John Lamberth undertook the first thorough effort to measure racial profiling. Lamberth and his team measured the speed of passing traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike and compared the racial distribution of drivers speeding with the racial distribution of the drivers stopped and ticketed by the New Jersey State Police. His analyses show that African Americans constituted 13.5 percent of drivers, 15 percent of drivers speeding, 35 percent of drivers stopped, and 73.2 percent of drivers arrested. In the Maryland case ( Wilkins v. Maryland State Police , No. CCB-93-468 [D. Md. 1993], filed November 14, 1996; Consent Decree, US District Court for the District of Maryland), Lamberth showed that African Americans constituted 17.5 percent of the drivers speeding, 28.8 percent of the drivers stopped, and 71.3 percent of the drivers whose cars were searched. Matt Zingraff’s team (2000) studied the North Carolina Highway Patrol and improved the benchmark by measuring not only whether the drivers were speeding but also the rate at which they were speeding (which indicates the severity of the violation).

The collection of official data on racial profiling is spurred by the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and by individual lawsuits. The act authorizes the attorney general to investigate any “pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers … that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution or the laws of the United States.” The threat of the lawsuit, the consent decree between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and a police agency, as well as the push from the civil liberties groups, have had two effects: (1) the sudden increase in the number of police departments collecting the data on racial profiling (more than 400 by 2003; McMahon et al. 2003 ) and (2) the enactment of state laws requiring racial profiling policies (see, e.g., Northeastern University Data Collection Resource Center 2010 ). According to that document, “more than twenty states have passed legislation prohibiting racial profiling and/or requiring jurisdictions within the state to collect the data on law enforcement stops and searches” and additional five have the legislation pending. With few exceptions (e.g., San Jose Police Department 1999 ), the police efforts in data collection were primarily focused on the numerator (see, e.g., National Research Council 2004 , 321).

III. Responses to Police Misconduct

Reactions to the instances of police misconduct are far from uniform. On the one hand, instances could go completely unnoticed; on the other hand, they have the potential to create a scandal, ignite riots, lead toward the establishment of an independent commission or an citizen review board, result in convictions of police officers and their dismissal from the police agency, firing of the police chief, and the decline of police legitimacy. The extent and nature of the reaction depend on many factors including, for example, the nature of the legal rules violated, severity of misconduct, form of misconduct, level of organization, seriousness of consequences, and characteristics of the victims.

Control mechanisms have traditionally been divided into external ones (those housed outside of the police agency) and internal ones (those housed within the police agency). In addition, there are a few mixed mechanisms of accountability that have elements of both internal and external mechanisms (those housed outside of the police agency but potentially having police officers as members).

A. Internal Mechanisms of Control and Accountability

The police agency itself has one of the crucial roles in achieving accountability and controlling misconduct. What the agency does or does not do to control misconduct varies greatly: “[i]t starts with the recruitment and selection process and continues with training and supervision, incorporating various aspects of rule establishment, communication, and enforcement that stimulate, allow, or prevent police officers from turning their propensity toward corruption into actual corrupt behavior” (Kutnjak Ivković 2005 , 68).

1. Administrative Rules

Administrative rules channel the use of discretion, describe appropriate conduct of police officers, and prohibit inappropriate conduct. These rules, typically made either by the police chief or the police chief and the mayor (see, e.g., Mastrofski 1988 ), seek to prescribe the use of discretion in critical incidents (e.g., arrest, use of force, use of deadly force, high-speed pursuits, domestic violence), instruct officers to complete written reports after each such incident, and require supervisory oversight (see, e.g., National Research Council 2004 ; Walker and Katz 2008 ). The content and nature of the rules vary substantially across police agencies; these official administrative rules, codified in the standard operating procedure manuals (SOP), could be several hundred pages long and typically put more emphasis on trivial issues (see, e.g., Bittner 1970 ; Walker and Katz 2008 ).

Even in the agencies with extensive rules, the rules could open the doors to misconduct by being ambiguous or by failing to regulate certain aspects. Fishman ( 1978 ) reports that police officers in the police agencies characterized as corrupt were more likely to say that the rules were not clear than did the police officers in the police agencies that were relatively free of corruption. Furthermore, multiple commission reports (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ;) document many instances in which police administrators, particularly the police chief, created unofficial rules that, in reality, trumped the official ones (Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ).

Official administrative rules have been used to characterize the use of deadly force, use of force, high-speed pursuits, and domestic violence. Studies exploring the effect of the administrative rules on the use of deadly force reported positive changes (Fyfe 1979 ; Geller and Scott 1992 ). For example, Fyfe’s study of the NYPD restrictive policy on deadly force (1979) finds that the number of shots fired was reduced by 30 percent. Similarly, the regulation of the high-speed pursuits via administrative rulemaking seem to be successful (e.g., Alpert 1997 ). In his study of high-speed pursuits, Alpert ( 1997 ) finds strong evidence that official policies affect such pursuits. Alpert’s results (1997) indicate that, when one of the agencies (Metro-Dade Police Department) implemented a more restricted policy of high-speed pursuits, the number of pursuits decreased dramatically the next year (82 percent). On the other hand, when another agency (Omaha Police Department) relaxed its rules regarding the high-speed pursuits, the number of pursuits increased by 600 percent the following year (Alpert 1997 ). The effect of administrative rulemaking on misconduct has been explored in several other areas (e.g., use of force, domestic violence); the evidence is more limited and shows less success (National Research Council 2004 , 285).

2. Police Chief and Administration

Police chief and the top leadership in the police agency play one of the critical roles. Kutnjak Ivković ( 2005 , 70) describes their role:

Although the powers of police chiefs are either explicitly or implicitly limited by the mayor, politicians, public, media, civil service rules, police unions, existing laws, and court cases, police chiefs and the administration determine “the rules of the game” within the police agency. They may exert a substantial influence on the recruitment standards, training in ethics, leadership and management style, supervisory accountability and standards, internal control mechanisms, discipline, and rewards.

The importance of this role is recognized by police officers as well; in a nationwide sample of police officers (Weisburd and Greenspan 2000 , 6), the majority agreed that “a chief’s strong position against the abuse of authority can make a big difference in deterring officers from abusing their authority.” The chief may himself behave ethically (see examples to the contrary in Kutnjak Ivković 2005 , 74) but fail to perform the traditional managerial functions—planning, organizing, coordinating, and controlling (Moore and Stephens 1991 )— that he is expected to perform as part of his role. Finding examples of such failures is not difficult.

Terrill’s study (2001) of the police use of force shows that the official position of the police chief and his administration on the “style of policing practiced” had a direct influence on how police officers used force; in Indianapolis, where the top police administration emphasized the “get tough” approach, police officers were more likely to use higher levels of force than police officers in St. Petersburg, where the top administration emphasized a problem-solving model.

Both the Knapp Commission ( 1972 ) and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (1974) enumerate many examples of police chiefs adhering to the “rotten apple” approach, turning a blind eye to corruption, and thus allowing it to flourish. The discrepancy between the official stance and the police chief’s actual behavior has substantial influence on police officers’ behavior (see, e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 , 170–71).

3. Supervisors

Another layer of control and accountability in a police agency consists of supervisors. In a recent nationwide survey of police officers (Weisburd and Greenspan 2000 , 6), the overwhelming majority of police officers (90 percent) viewed the supervisors’ role in preventing misconduct as critical. Indeed, supervisors are expected to monitor police officers under their command, review their reports (e.g., use of force, arrest), advise police officers when their performance is less than satisfactory (e.g., annual performance evaluations), and file a report when they are aware that police officers violated the rules (Walker and Katz 2008 , 482).

Supervisors can either actively take part in misconduct, as the Knapp Commission ( 1972 ) and the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (1974) find regarding supervisors in the NYPD and the Philadelphia Police Department, or may fail to take a stance on misconduct and enforce the official rules, as the Mollen Commission ( 1994 ) and the Christopher Commission ( 1991 ) document for the NYPD and the LAPD. Supervisors who reported misconduct in the NYPD in the 1990s were not rewarded for it; in fact, they suffered informal punishment for doing so (Mollen Commission 1994 , 13). Overall, many reports by independent commissions suggest that supervisors in troubled agencies were not held accountable for behavior of their subordinates (e.g., Christopher Commission 1991 ; Los Angeles Police Department 2000 ; Knapp Commission 1972 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ).

The Christopher Commission ( 1991 ) reports that the supervisors, expected to monitor the discussion on the mobile digital terminal (MDT) communications (which contained numerous examples of racist language), failed to do so. The Mollen Commission ( 1994 ) points out that supervisors failed to review the reports and question subordinates who were falsifying search and arrest forms (29) or overtime payment forms (39). The LAPD’s Board of Inquiry (Los Angeles Police Department 2000 , 61) writes about the examples of poor supervision in the Rampart area, characterized by both corruption and use of excessive force; “the practice of officers printing or signing a sergeant’s name to booking approvals and arrest reports was a particularly glaring illustration of poor CRASH [Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums] supervision.”

The scandal that led toward the establishment of the Mollen Commission in July 1994 was ignited with the arrest of Michael Dowd and five other NYPD officers in May 1994. Dowd did not just accept bribes, he actually became a drug dealer himself, helped operate large drug rings (Mollen Commission 1994 , 17), and was subsequently convicted to a fourteen-year sentence (Treaser 1994 ). His supervisors did not report his evident misconduct (which gave the impression to Dowd that he could do anything; Mollen Commission 1994 , 82) and, in fact, gave Dowd glowing performance evaluations, citing him as “a role model” (Mollen Commission 1994 , 118). The Christopher Commission ( 1991 , ix), investigating the allegations of racism, sexism, and use of excessive force, heard the testimony from the Assistant Chief Dotson who said that “we [the top administration] have failed miserably” to hold supervisors accountable for excessive force by officers under their command.

In 1994 Bill Bratton and other top administrators in the NYPD developed CompStat, a new mechanisms to reduce crime and enhance accountability of the administrators and managers (see, e.g., McDonald et al. 2001 ). CompStat’s purposes are achieved through the meetings in which the top administrators require of middle managers to discuss crime problems in their areas and hold them accountable. After the initial debut in New York, CompStat became popular and widespread; in 1999, one-quarter of the sample of police agencies with one hundred or more employees reported implementing CompStat, while an additional one-third of the sample was planning to do so (Weisburd et al. 2003 ). Research evaluating CompStat across both dimensions is scant; Silverman ( 1999 ) gave an excellent grade to the NYPD’s CompStat, while Willis and colleagues (2003) expressed a more skeptical view of the CompStat in Lowell, Massachusetts; Newark, New Jersey; and Minneapolis. Research suggests that CompStat may be working as an accountability mechanism at the middle-manager level (existing studies conclude that middle managers experience more pressure to know about, and react to, crime in their areas). However, the accountability did not incorporate the middle managers’ subordinates—these middle managers did not hold the CompStat meetings with their subordinates (National Research Council 2004 , 188). Furthermore, accountability, as achieved through the CompStat meetings, extends to the crime level in the area but does not incorporate accountability for the level of integrity and control of rule-violating behavior by middle managers’ subordinates.

4. Internal System of Control

The internal systems of control typically rely on separate units within the police agency (i.e., internal affairs units) to receive complaints, investigate them, and forward the case to the decision-making structures (e.g., police chief, chain of command). The overwhelming majority of these systems are exclusively internal (see, e.g., Perez 1994 ). Whereas the work of internal mechanisms could be both reactive (e.g., investigating a complaint) and proactive (e.g., integrity tests, conducted by a few agencies, Baueris 1977 ; Giuliani and Bratton 1995 ), proactive investigations are more an exception than the rule (Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ).

The internal system of control is typically initiated with the complained filed by citizens or police officers, or reports generated by police supervisors. As the existing research reports, whether citizens will choose to file a complaint depends on many issues. Citizens may be unfamiliar with the system (e.g., Russell 1978 ), required to sign, swear, or have their complaints notarized (e.g., Pate and Fridell 1993 ), or otherwise be asked to go through substantial hurdles to file the complaint, be threatened with criminal charges for false reports (e.g., President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice 1967 b ), fear that the police would retaliate (e.g., Guerrero-Daley 2000 ), be discouraged by the police to file a complaint (e.g., Walker and Bumphus 1992 ), distrust the police or think that the police will not investigate the complaint (e.g., Walker and Bumphus 1992 ). An in-depth study of citizen complaints by Klockars, Kutnjak Ivković, and Haberfeld ( 2006 ) illustrates the nature of the problems associated with the comparison of citizen complaints in three US police agencies. Rates of complaints vary greatly across cities, suggesting that more than just the level of misconduct influences them (e.g., West 1988 ). For example, a nationwide survey of police agencies by Pate and Fridell ( 1993 ) suggests that the rate of use of force complaints per 1,000 officers varies widely across agency types (20.7 percent for sheriff’s departments, 33.8 percent for county agencies, 47.5 percent for municipal agencies, and 15.7 percent for state agencies), as well as across agency sizes within the same type. Pate and Hamilton’s study (1991, 144) of the largest six police departments reports that the rate of complaints per 100 sworn officers ranged from 5.5 in Philadelphia, 10.5 in Los Angeles, 13.8 in Detroit, and 19.5 in New York, to 27.1 in Chicago and 36.9 in Houston.

Matters are even more complex in the context of complaint resolution; typically, police agencies sustain between 0 and 25 percent of all complaints (Pate and Fridell 1993 , 42; Dugan and Breda 1991 ; Perez 1994 ), with 10 percent being typical (e.g., Pate and Fridell, 1993 ; Wagner 1980 ). However, the key issue is that the rate of complaints and the rate with which complaints are sustained are influenced by so many factors other than the actual rate of misconduct that these rates likely can tell more about the agency’s openness to complaints, the ease with which citizens could file complaints, and the level of legitimacy of the police, than about the actual level of misconduct (see, e.g., Adams 1999 ; Walker 2001 ). Pate and Hamilton ( 1991 , 142) conclude in their seminal research that “methods of filing and investigating complaints vary notably across departments. As a result, data concerning the disposition of complaints are not comparable.”

The idea of the police policing themselves seems appealing in theory. The reality, however, is that these systems have failed, resulting in some cases with most severe violations of official rules going unprocessed. Findings by a few research studies (e.g., Sherman 1978 ) and reports by independent commissions, the best source of information on the topic, provide numerous examples of such failures (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 ; Christopher Commission 1991 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ). They can affect, and may be noticed in, many aspects of the system, from not establishing written guidelines and providing resources and manpower to the internal affairs units, to failing to investigate complaints, ignoring information, and openly hiding complaints (see, e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 ; Christopher Commission 1991 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ;). The Mollen Commission ( 1994 , 78) finds that the message from the top administrators not only failed to encourage reporting and investigation of corruption but actually condemned discovery of corruption and evaluated it as a “management failure.”

The most recent addition to the arsenal of internal system of control or the internal accountability system, regarded as the “best practice” by the Department of Justice “Principles for Promoting Police Integrity,” is the early warning systems. Although the US Commission on Civil Rights ( 1981 ) recommended the implementation of early warning systems in the 1980s, the idea did not gain popularity until the 1990s, with a few exceptions (e.g., Miami-Dade Police Department). The underlying philosophy of early warning systems complements and advances the earlier findings that, typically, a small group of police officers within the agency—as identified in the NYPD by the Mollen Commission ( 1994 ) and in the LAPD by the Christopher Commission ( 1991 )—is responsible for a disproportionately large percentage of complaints. Before the early warning systems, typically nothing was done with such problem police officers (Walker 2001 , 110). These systems, exclusively proactive in nature, operate under the assumption that, if potential problems are spotted and addressed early, they would not become serious problems later. Although the extent and nature of the information input in the early warning system varies, it typically includes use of force reports, accident reports, complaints, financial records, and other information sometimes routinely collected by the police agency (see, e.g., Walker, Alpert, and Kenney 2000 ; Walker and Katz 2008 ). Once red flags are raised, the process proceeds into intervention (typically informal counseling by the supervisor or retraining) and post-intervention (monitoring for a certain period of time; Walker, Alpert, and Kenney 2000 ). A 1998 nationwide survey of municipal police agencies reveals that about one-third of them either have already implemented or are developing their early warning systems (Walker, Alpert, and Kenney 2000 ). Additional systems are being developed as a consequence of the decrees between the Department of Justice and several police agencies (Walker and Katz, 2008 , 489). Presently, the research evaluating the effectiveness of early warning systems is limited (e.g., Vera Institute of Justice 1999 ; Walker, Alpert, and Kenney 2000 ). The findings largely suggest that these early warning systems seem to be effective with respect to the reduction in the number of use of force reports and citizen complaints by the officers subject to early warning systems.

B. External Mechanisms of Control and Accountability

Aside from the police agency itself, various institutions and organizations play important roles in control of police misconduct and enhancement of police accountability. Their effects may potentially be limited to mostly the case at hand (e.g., prosecutions and convictions of police officers who used excessive force) or they may be far reaching (e.g., the US Supreme Court precedents), affecting policies and the practice of policing for decades.

1. The Supreme Court

The Supreme Court decided a number of cases relevant for policing in the 1960s, using the Fourteenth Amendment to expand the application of many federally established standards to the state and local police.

One of the key cases is Mapp v. Ohio (367 U.S. 643 [1961]), in which the Supreme Court decided that the evidence against Dolree Mapp was obtained illegally and concluded that illegally obtained evidence is inadmissible in a state court. Through the application of the Fourteenth Amendment, the Supreme Court extended the application of the exclusionary rule—which already existed at the federal level—to the state and local police agencies. Studies (e.g., Controller General of the United States 1979 ; Krantz et al. 1979 ) report that the exclusionary rule applies directly to a very small percentage of cases; the motion to suppress evidence (i.e., the exercise of the exclusionary rule) is filed in a relatively small percentage of cases (below 15 percent), and when the motion is filed, it is granted infrequently (about 20 percent of the motions). Thus, the overall “rate of success” of the motion to suppress evidence is under 3 percent.

Earlier studies exploring the effects of the Mapp decision on the police behavior (e.g., Skolnick 1966 ; Oaks 1970 ; Canon 1974 ) diverge in their assessments regarding whether the decision had a positive effect on police officer behavior during search and seizure. More recent studies (e.g., Orfield 1987 ; Cannon 1991 ) focus either on the effect of the Mapp decision or on the severity and nature of the search and seizure violations. Based on his interviews with twenty-six narcotics officers in Chicago, Orfield reports positive effects of the exclusionary rule at the institutional level among the police, prosecutors, and judges. On the individual level, Orfield reports that the detectives typically said during the interviews that they adhered to the constitutional standards of search and seizure when their conduct was motivated primarily by the potential prosecution of the offender. The exclusionary rule seems to have been less effective when other motives were dominant (confiscation of contraband, Ofield 1987 ; disruption of illicit networks or assertion of police powers, LaFave 1965 ; LaFave and Remington 1965 ).

The second critical Supreme Court decision is Miranda v. Arizona (372 U.S. 436 [1966]). The Miranda warnings have become part of the American popular culture (see, e.g., Dickerson v. United States, 530 U.S. 428 [2000]). In a nutshell, the Supreme Court held in Miranda that a confession obtained during custodial police interrogation constitutes a violation of the Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, unless the police provide specific warnings to the persons that they have the right to remain silent, that anything they say could be used against them, and that they have the right to counsel.

The early empirical studies, conducted immediately after the decision, were concerned with the effect these new Miranda warnings would have on the police ability to investigate crimes. They find that the Miranda warnings had only minimal effects (see, e.g., Black and Reiss 1967 ; Wald et al. 1967 ; Schaefer 1971 ). In fact, Black and Reiss ( 1967 ) find that there is plenty of other evidence available in the felony cases that the police could use instead of relying on the confession. Later studies suggest that the effect of the warning, measured as the reduction in confessions, resulted in a 4–16 percent decrease in the number of confessions, depending on the study (see, e.g., Wald et al. 1967 ; Stephens et al. 1972 ; Witt 1973 ; Neubauer 1974 ). Evidence further suggests that, even when the Miranda warnings were issued, they did not have a lot of weight on the outcome of the case because in most cases suspects—84 percent of suspects in Cassell and Hayman’s study (1998) and 78 percent in Leo’s study (1998)—voluntarily waived their Miranda rights.

The early study by Black and Reiss ( 1967 ), already in progress when the Miranda decision was made, suggests that police officers rarely gave the Miranda warnings. Later studies (Leiken 1971 ; Baum 1979 ; Leo 1998 ) show that the warning is issued routinely, although the style in which the warning is issued tends to be superficial. The most recent study (Leo 1998 ), relying on direct observation, confirms that the police issued the Miranda warnings in about 96 percent of the cases and thus shows that the Miranda decision had a long-term effect on the police behavior (Leo and Thomas 1998 ).

2. Criminal Courts

Like any other citizens, police officers can be prosecuted, tried, and convicted for a broad range of crimes (e.g., robbery, assault). Unlike other citizens, they can also be prosecuted, tried, and convicted for crimes that require that the person who committed the crime is a public employee (e.g., extortion, 18 U.S.C. 1951; criminal liability for deprivation of civil rights, 18 U.S.C. 242). Despite the potential for general deterrence these convictions could bring, the reality is that, because of the very limited number of cases, their primary focus is more on specific deterrence and retribution.

Both state and federal prosecution for the use of excessive force cases are rare (e.g., Adams 1995 ; Cheh 1995 , 241; Human Rights Watch 1998 ) and the rate of conviction is low. Out of about eight thousand police misconduct complaints that the Department of Justice receives annually (Cheh 1995 , 241), about three thousand are investigated and only fifty presented to the grand jury. Thus, researchers have concluded that, because the chances of arrest and conviction are so low, criminal convictions for the use of force are not an effective deterrent mechanism (Skolnick and Fyfe 1993 ; Cheh 1995 ).

Similarly, in the period from 1992 to 1998, there were fewer than fifty convictions each year for federal law enforcement corruption (Kutnjak Ivković 2005 , 59). At the state level, the convictions are almost equally sparse. At the time the Knapp Commission ( 1972 ) found corruption to be widespread in the NYPD, prosecutors initiated only about thirty cases per year, and, even then, only one out of five police officers prosecuted, tried, and convicted received a prison sentence of more than a year (Knapp Commission 1972 , 252). Similarly, the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (1974), which investigated the extent and nature of corruption in the Philadelphia Police Department and found widespread corruption in the agency, reports that there were on average only seven arrest per year for corruption (Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 , 446).

3. Civil Courts

Citizens who want to sue police agencies for violation of their civil rights can do so by relying on the state law or on the federal law. The payments resulting from the civil lawsuits vary from an average of 1.6 million annually in Cincinnati to an average of 35.8 million annually in Los Angeles (Kappeler 2006 , 10). Civil lawsuits cover only a small segment of the overall number of contacts between the police and citizens—“one-tenth of 1 percent of all encounters between police and persons suspected of committing a crime could result in civil litigation” (Novak, Smith, and Frank 2003 , 355).

At the federal level, citizens could file Section 1983 lawsuits (42 U.S.C. 1983), viewed as the most powerful of lawsuits. The power of the Section 1983 lawsuits is grounded on two Supreme Court decisions. In Monroe v. Pape (365 U.S. 167 [1961]), the Supreme Court determined that police officers could be held liable for deprivation of the Fourth Amendment rights under the civil rights statute. In Monell v. Department of Social Services (436 U.S. 658 [1978]), the Supreme Court established that municipalities could be held liable for police misconduct if it was pursuant to the agency’s policy or custom. As these Supreme Court decisions opened the doors for citizens to sue police officers and police agencies, the estimates are (there is no systematic nationwide data) that the number of the Section 1983 lawsuits increased dramatically since the 1960s (Cheh 1995 , 250).

The effect of Section 1983 for citizens as plaintiffs is limited to compensatory and punitive damages (Cheh 1995 , 255); the Supreme Court in Lyons ( City of Los Angeles v. Lyons, 461 U.S. 95 [1983]) set up a practically unattainable threshold and thus implicitly eliminated the possibility of injunctive relief for individual citizens. Some studies suggest that police officers are bothered by the idea that they could be sued (e.g., Kappeler 1997 , 6), but the reality is that police officers face no financial incentives to change their behavior as a consequence of these lawsuits. The compensatory damages (and sometimes punitive damages) resulting from the lawsuit are paid by the city government, not by individual police officers or the police agency. Police officers in some jurisdictions are protected by law from paying legal fees and damages, and city attorneys represent the officers in the lawsuits (e.g., Patton 1993 ). Furthermore, even when police officers had lost the lawsuits, their careers as police officers were not affected; Chevigny ( 1995 , 102) reports that, out of 185 officers involved in civil lawsuits, only eight were disciplined and fourteen were actually promoted.

The effect of civil suits on the police agencies is no stronger. Several studies that focus on specific cities (e.g., Yale Law Journal 1979 ; Littlejohn 1981 ) report that police misconduct suits have had very limited effect on the police agencies. Neither New York nor Los Angeles implemented any resulting changes (see Chevigny 1995 ). One police agency, concerned with the rising costs of lawsuits (e.g., Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department), took proactive steps to address the issue of civil lawsuits. In 1993 the Office of the Special Counsel was established to investigate problems, recommend reforms, and reduce the costs of litigation (Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department 1996). The reports issued by the Special Counsel (a form of citizen review) suggest positive changes (Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department 1999, 2002).

As authorized by the 1994 Violent Crime Control Act (42 U.S.C. 14141, 1994), the Department of Justice could act as a plaintiff and sue a police department when there is “a pattern or practice of conduct by law enforcement officers … that deprives persons of rights, privileges, or immunities secured or protected by the Constitution.” The most recent data available from the Department of Justice (January 31, 2003) indicate that the investigation of fourteen police agencies is ongoing, that out of the ten lawsuits, four ended with consent decrees and six with out-of-court settlements (Department of Justice 2010 ). Each consent decree or memorandum of agreement required police agencies to conduct extensive reforms that, typically, would include revising the use of force reporting system, establishing the early warning system, revising the complaint procedures, and improving training (Walker and Katz 2008 , 502). To ensure that the police agencies are implementing the required changes, all consent decrees and memoranda of agreement contain a provision of a court-appointed monitor. Walker and Katz ( 2008 , 503) report that the 2005 conference on the pattern-and-practice lawsuits suggests that this litigation could be an effective tool in enhancing police accountability, particularly in the agencies in which the standards of accountability are low. However, systematic empirical evidence on the effects of these lawsuits does not exist. The Vera Institute, serving as a monitor for the Pittsburgh Police Department, generally reports that the police are on track with the required changes (Vera Institute of Justice 2002 ). On the other hand, the reports concerning police agencies in Los Angeles and Washington, DC indicate that they failed to meet some of the deadlines (Walker and Katz 2008 , 503).

4. Independent Commissions

Independent commissions typically are established in the wake of scandals. Political pressure is generated and demands are made on the political leadership to establish an independent commission to investigate the extent and nature of misconduct and recommend changes. For example, the Christopher Commission ( 1991 ) was established after the Rodney King video circled the globe. The Mollen Commission ( 1994 ) was established after the arrest of Michael Dowd and five other police officers made front-page news. Other prominent examples of independent commissions include the Wickersham Commission (National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement 1931), the President’s Crime Commission (1967), and the Kerner Commission (National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders 1968 ), Knapp Commission ( 1972 ), and Pennsylvania Crime Commission ( 1974 ).

A key advantage of the independent commissions, composed of prominent community members and experts on policing, is that they set the standards that could affect the way policing is done across the country (see, e.g., National Research Council 2004 ; Walker and Katz 2008 ). On the other side of the spectrum, the work of independent commissions could be troubled by the lack of political independence (e.g., Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 ), insufficient legal authority (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 , 44), or inadequate resources (e.g., Pennsylvania Crime Commission 1974 , 762).

The most serious challenge related to independent commissions is their temporary nature (e.g., Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ; National Research Council 2004 ; Walker and Katz 2008 ). Even when the commission engages in a thorough investigation and proposes a set of recommendations, the quality work done by the commission would be largely wasted if nobody were to implement them. Illustrative of this point is the example of the aftermath of the Christopher Commission ( 1991 ). It recommended the establishment of the Office of Inspector General who would be in charge of auditing, investigating, and overseeing the LAPD’s efforts to handle complaints, and the establishment of the early intervention system. A decade after the recommendation, the LAPD still did not have the early warning system (Walker 2005 , 179). The establishment of the Office of Inspector General was postponed until 1995, and Katherine Mader, the inspector general, started performing her role in mid-1996. The opposition from the police administration and the police commission made the job impossible to perform and Mader resigned in 1998, after further attempts by the chairman of the police commission to restrict her authority (Walker 2001 , 39).

C. Mixed Mechanisms of Control and Accountability

Finally, the last group incorporates mechanisms of control or accountability that may have police officers participating in them but which are housed outside the police agency.

1. Citizen Reviews

The idea of an independent agency entrusted to review citizen complaints had existed since the 1960s, yet citizen reviews gained popularity only in the last two decades (e.g., Walker 1995 ; Walker 2005 ). By 2005, scholars estimated that almost all large municipal agencies have some form of citizen review (e.g., Walker 2005 , 37). However, the classification of citizen reviews as a mixed mechanism of control rests on the results of a survey conducted by Walker and Kreisel ( 2001 ), according to which about 23 percent (15 out of 65) of citizen reviews have police officers as members.

The idea behind citizen reviews is to establish a review of citizen complaints independent of the police agency itself. However, the only survey of citizen reviews (Class I citizen review; Walker 2001 ) suggests that citizens conduct the initial fact-finding completely independently from the police in only 34 percent of the reviews; they provide input in police processes in an additional 46 percent of the reviews (Class II citizen input; Walker 2001 ; Walker and Kreisel 2001 ). Class III citizen reviews (“citizen monitors”) serve as appellate reviews once the investigation by the police agency is completed. Unless entrusted to do policy reviews as well, the focus of these three classes of citizen reviews is on individual cases; they try to ensure that justice is done in these cases and probably enhance the confidence in the complaint process (but not necessarily in the police!). Even when entrusted with the policy review, the scope of their investigation is limited to the issues raised in the complaints and is unlikely to explore some of the critical issues (e.g., failure to hold supervisors accountable).

The number of studies exploring the effect of these citizen reviews is very limited. One of the problems is associated with the accurate assessment of the citizen review effectiveness is that of finding matching cases investigated by the citizen reviews and internal affairs units; Hudson’s comparative study (1972) uncovers that the citizen review (“Police Advisory Board”) sustained a lower percentage of complaints than the internal affairs unit did, which may be explained by different nature of the cases handled by each unit. Kerstetter and Rasinski ( 1994 ) report that the level of public confidence in the complaint process increases after the establishment of a citizen review. On the other hand, Sviridoff and McElroy ( 1989 ) report that both citizens and the police officers evaluated the New York City Civilian Review Board to be biased against them.

Class IV citizen reviews (“citizen auditors”) “do not investigate individual complaints, but are authorized to review, monitor, or audit the police department’s complaint process” (Walker 2001 , 62). Auditors constitute a small percentage of the overall number of citizen reviews (3 percent in the 1990s survey, Walker and Kreisel 2001 ; a total of twelve reviews as of 2005, Walker 2005 , 136). These citizen reviews have the greatest potential to provide feedback relevant for the improvement of the overall complaint system and the operation of the police agency. The San Jose Independent Police Auditor, an example of a successful citizen auditor, used the information contained in the complaints to expand the inquiry into other elements of the system. The auditor, established in 1993, made over ninety policy recommendations by 2005, only seven of which were not accepted by the San Jose Police Department (Walker 2005 , 156). Walker describes another successful auditor (Special Counsel to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department), but also lists examples of unsuccessful auditors (e.g., Seattle Police Auditor, Albuquerque Independent Counsel; Walker 2005 , 165–66). Indeed, whereas this form of citizen review has the greatest potential of having a long-lasting and continuous effect on the police agency, “the police auditor concept does not automatically translate into success” (Walker 2005 , 167). Indeed, citizen auditors may suffer from the failures in vision and direction, lack of cooperation, and political opposition. Systematic research into the effect of this and other types of citizen reviews is limited at best (see, e.g., Walker 2005 ).

2. Accreditation

The Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies (CALEA), established in 1979, is the primary source of self-regulation by the police profession. Since 1983 CALEA has been publishing standards, partly required and partly only recommended for the police agencies that seek accreditation. As of September 2009, CALEA has 463 standards (CALEA 2010 ). An agency that plans to become accredited typically has to undergo extensive organizational changes to comply with the CALEA standards. Walker and Katz ( 2008 , 492) estimate that more than five hundred police agencies have been accredited at the time of publication of their book.

CALEA lists benefits to accreditation, which, among others, include enhanced internal accountability and reduced risk of civil lawsuits (CALEA 2010 ). Walker and Katz ( 2008 , 493) provide examples of how accreditation reduced insurance costs, improved the use of force reporting, and improved procedures for juveniles in several agencies. Participation in the CALEA accreditation program is voluntary, however. Agencies characterized by widespread misconduct, those in the greatest need of control, are the least likely to go through the lengths to get accredited. Furthermore, while CALEA standards try to capture relevant innovations, a number of them are not required. In fact, they provide only the minimum standards and do not even try to assess the optimal or ideal standards (Walker and Katz 2008 , 494).

IV. Challenges and Future Directions

More than four decades ago, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice ( 1967 a , 144) emphasized the importance of strong public support for the police as a necessary prerequisite for effective policing:

Poor police-community relations adversely affect the ability of the police to prevent crime and apprehend criminals. People hostile to the police are not so likely to report violations of the law, even when they are the victims. They are even less likely to report suspicious persons or incidents, to testify as witnesses voluntarily, or to come forward and provide information…. Yet, citizen assistance is crucial to law enforcement agencies if the police are to solve an appreciable portion of the crimes that are committed.

Since Sir Robert Peel’s times, legitimacy of the police has been an important requirement for successful democratic policing. Empirical assessments of the public support for the police show that public support varies over time (e.g., Tuch and Weitzer 1997 ) and is affected—both short- and long-term—by publicized critical incidents of police misconduct and personal experience with the authorities. Incidents like the Rodney King beating have an effect on how the public perceives the police and how the police subsequently behave. Research regarding the effects of these critical incidents on the legitimacy of the police is quite limited; the extant studies indicate that such incidents may exert differential influence on the views held by various racial/ethnic groups. Future research could carry out in-depth explorations of the effects of such critical incidents, the reasons why some groups tend to experience deeper decreases in confidence in the police as a consequence of these incidents, and why the recovery process varies across all groups. Furthermore, it is not clear how publicized incidents, personal experience, and race interact in shaping views about police legitimacy.

Although research has identified that the perceived procedural fairness is important and that unfair treatment by the police directly leads toward reduced legitimacy and less obedience, empirical research has only begun to explore the importance of procedural justice compared to distributive justice in police-citizen encounters. We also do not know whether all of the elements of procedural justice (participation, neutrality, trustworthiness, and treatment with dignity and respect) have to be activated and, if so, whether some of them carry more weight than others. Tyler and Huo ( 2002 ) seem to indicate that this may be the case. However, Leventhal’s work ( 1976 ) and Tyler’s work ( 1990 ; 2000 ) suggest that more than only four elements could be at play, but research on how they—individually or in some logical clusters—affect perceptions of police-citizen encounters is yet to be done.

Prior research did not provide in-depth assessment of how the perceptions of police legitimacy and the elements of procedural justice are associated with, and shaped by, different types of contacts with the police (e.g., voluntary, involuntary; Decker 1981 ). Do people who distrust the police evaluate all contacts equally, regardless of whether they or the police have initiated the contact? How low would the level of legitimacy have to be so that a pleasant and fair encounter with the police does not count and, if it does count, to what extent could it improve general views of legitimacy? How many unpleasant encounters with the police (and of what nature) can a citizen who supports the police have before his level of confidence in the police decreases? Are the pathways of assessment different for a victim who reported a crime to the police from those a person caught speeding faces when a police officer stops him? To what degree are those assessments affected by the characteristics of individual officers and police agencies, as opposed to the characteristics of citizens, neighborhoods, and cities in which they live? Tyler ( 2000 , 123) argues that cultural backgrounds may affect the factors that individuals use to define fairness. To what degree do these diverse cultural backgrounds exert influence on the general assessments of police legitimacy and assessments of each individual encounter with the police? Current research also seems to indicate that what matters is not only personal experience but also vicarious experience (i.e., experience of other family members and friends). To what degree does personal experience—both positive and negative—carry more weight on the assessments of legitimacy than a vicarious experience?

Although the American society has made substantial strides toward equality of white and minority citizens since Brown v. Board of Education , the relationship between the police and the minority communities is far from ideal; research studies show that minorities are more likely to perceive the contact with the police as unfair than whites are, and are more likely, at least occasionally, to receive unfair treatment from the police, from more frequent stops and searches to more frequent tickets and arrests. Current research tends to indicate that, when they perceive that the police had mistreated them, people are more likely to disobey police commands in their subsequent encounters and evaluate further contacts primarily in terms of their procedural fairness. Research further shows that police officers are more likely to use force toward disrespectful and disobedient citizens, which in turn increases the risk of injury to both citizens and police officers and, at the same time, undermines citizens’ views of police legitimacy. However, the extant research addressing a number of these issues is primarily focused on a small number of jurisdictions surveyed at a particular point in time. How race and ethnicity affect police-citizen interaction nationwide and how the nature and quality of this relationship could be enhanced (e.g., the role that community policing could play in enhancing legitimacy of the police) is far from clear; these pivotal issues crave further research.

It is equally crucial to get a firmer grasp on the actual extent of police misconduct. If citizens perceive that the police are treating them unfairly, do their perceptions match reality? Empirical research into the prevalence and nature of police misconduct did not reach the point at which reliable and systematic nationwide statistics on police corruption, use of excessive force, racial profiling, or other forms of police violation of constitutional, legal, and administrative rules are available. We have bits and pieces of information, obtained using various research methods, typically focusing on one police agency, but, in all honesty, we do not know what the prevalence and nature of police misconduct is. Problems associated with successful measurement are numerous and quite heterogeneous (see, e.g., Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ), ranging from building a common definition, designing research methodology, and obtaining funding, to convincing citizens and police officers alike to share their experiences as victims and witnesses with researchers and authorities. The Bureau of Justice Statistics police-citizen survey (Bureau of Justice Statistics 2007 a ), for example, is a promising step in the right direction.

At the outset, lack of reliable and systematic nationwide data on police misconduct implies problems with the mechanisms of control and accountability. Indeed, if we are struggling to measure the prevalence of the problem, we will not be able to assess the success in controlling misconduct and enhancing accountability. Faced with the reality of limited resources, how far do we want to go to push for control and accountability? What is the right balance in which we are able to control misconduct, but are not constraining discretion and creating unnecessary hurdles that undermine the efficiency of the fulfillment of the police role (see, e.g., Anechiarico and Jacobs 1996 )?

Although the system of control and accountability incorporates many agencies and institutions (see, e.g., Kutnjak Ivković 2005 ), the reality is that most of these agencies and institutions do not operate proactively but reactively. The reports provided by independent commissions (e.g., Knapp Commission 1972 ; Christopher Commission 1991 ; Mollen Commission 1994 ) are the best illustrations of how low these mechanisms could sink in and around the agencies in the greatest need of successful control and accountability. With a few exceptions (e.g., Sherman 1974 ; Walker 2001 ; Klockars, Kutnjak Ivković, and Haberfeld 2006 ), research on the effect of these mechanisms of control and accountability is mostly limited to a single police agency and, thus, there cannot be any variation in a number of potentially crucial issues (e.g., level of police misconduct, administrative rules, internal system, larger social and political environment). Nevertheless, several promising mechanisms of control and accountability have surfaced, typically those that can have long-lasting, continuous, and proactive effect on police behavior—administrative rules, pattern-and-practice lawsuits, early warning systems, CompStat, and police auditors. Systematic and thorough evaluations of these mechanisms either do not exist or are just starting (e.g., Walker, Alpert, and Kenney 2000 ; Walker 2001 ). Further research could try to develop measures of success, design criteria to recognize successful mechanisms, explore how effective they are both short- and long-term, detect the obstacles they face, and identify conditions that could make them more successful. Indeed, although this topic has been studied for some time, a plethora of new, exciting, and undiscovered material awaits to be explored.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Law Enforcement — Why is Law Enforcement Important

Why is Law Enforcement Important

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Preserving public safety, upholding the rule of law, crime prevention and deterrence, emergency response and disaster management, protection of individual rights, building trust and community relations.

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