In part 1 of this series, I explored the use of crime statistics to hold the police to account. I examined various issues with crime statistics, and proposed a number of reasons why they are unreliable proxies for police effectiveness. How, then, ought police effectiveness be evaluated? I propose that answering this question requires a more in-depth analysis of the role that the police play in society. This post will focus on the notion that violence is integral to policing. I do not mean by this that police are violent, though they certainly can be, but rather that both the regulation and allocation of violence are key elements of policing. The first goal of this post is to provide a rough history of violence in society, in order to clarify the way in which violence is now the domain of the police. The second goal of this, drawing on the historical account, is to explain why policing is inherently politically controversial.
The account of the essence of policing that I have found most persuasive is that of Egon Bittner, who proposed that "...the role of the police is to address all sorts of human problems when and insofar as their solutions do or may possibly require the use of force at the point of their occurrence" (Bittner, 1970). This theory is not a prescription of what he believed that the police ought to do, but rather a description that ties all the desperate activities of the police together, formed through his careful observations of police officers at work. This certainly encompasses crime-fighting, but it is not limited to it. This post is, in many ways, a reflection on Bittner’s work.
As our starting point, let us note that the police are not a prerequisite for society, but only one method by which society can regulate behaviour. Other methods of regulation include social norms, shared values, vigilantism, and traditions. Smaller groups, such as hunter-gathers, primarily regulate behaviour through social relationships (as being shunned by one’s tribe would almost inevitably mean death). As societies grew larger, more sophisticated and impersonal behaviour-management tools became necessary.
In authoritarian oligarchies, plutocracies, and dictatorships, the powerful enforced their rule through violence. Those responsible for enforcing this kind of rule are sometimes called police, but they are police of a substantially different kind then that found in modern democracies. They are responsible for maintaining order, but they are only accountable to the ruling class. Though a very strong argument can be made that law enforcement in western democracies favors the wealthy and powerful, the degree to which this is the case differs significantly between democracies and authoritarian states.
As philosophers are wont to do, I found an interesting case in Ancient Athens. Whether ancient Athens can properly be considered a democracy has been hotly debated, given that less than half of the adult population could participate in the democratic process. However, the fact remains that Athens population of some 300,000 governed itself without police or formal law enforcement. Courts were not run by experts, but rather represented an official and formal method of calling on peers to resolve disputes and interpret the law. As there was no official law enforcement, courts did not allocate the enforcement of law. Instead, if they deemed it necessary, private citizens could request permission from the courts to enforce the law (e.g. someone could apply to take a debt they were owed by force). The decisions of the court were significant because they were collectively respected by citizens. Failure to comply with court rulings was potentially devastating: people would not trade with you, they would shun you socially, and they would not come to your aid to protect you if someone with permission were to bring a group of associates to do violence to you (Carugati et. all, 2015).
I think that there are important insights to take from the case of ancient Athens. First, it is not impossible for complex societies to function without police. As long as they are respected, laws can propagate and flourish through informal enforcement. However, the Athenian system was dependent on strong and long-lasting social ties and citizens who were knowledgeable of social norms because they regularly participated in defining them in the court system.
Let us move from ancient history to the development of policing as we are familiar with it today. The policing traditions of Canada and the United States have their origins in the United Kingdom. Before the advent of modern professional policing, it was incumbent that regular non-professional citizens maintain order. Men took turns acting as volunteer constables, but generally people were supposed to contribute when necessary (e.g. chasing down a criminal). When the notion of a professional police force was put forward in the early 19th century, the public was initially resistant. They feared that these police would essentially be an extension of the military, and that would restrict freedom. To assuage these concerns, Robert Peel, two-time British prime minister and widely regarded as the father of British policing, developed a policing code of ethics, since distilled into the Peelian Principles (link). Crucially, he emphasized the importance of public approval, alongside the notion that the police are merely individuals paid to carry out duties “which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”
Since the professionalization of policing, I would make the sweeping generalization that enforcement of laws and norms has drifted further and further from the public into the professional sphere. I would further theorize that one of the primary reasons for this shift is the transition of population from rural to city living. In small towns with stable populations and strong social bonds, neighbors protect one another. Though I do not live in a small town, I have an anecdote that demonstrates the importance of social connections. Several years ago a member of my family accidentally left the garage door open, a garage filled with expensive sports equipment. My 6’10 neighbor was in his back yard chopping wood, and saw a suspicious looking guy walk past him down the back alley. Concerned, my neighbor followed him down the alley, and found him pulling out one of our bikes from the garage. The neighbor confronted the man, while still holding his wood-chopping axe. The man promptly left the bike and ran. Contrast this scenario with cities with a highly mobile population where people do not know their neighbors. When citizens are not well connected with the people around them, they must turn to the police as their primary source of law enforcement. However, though I speculate that this is an important factor, it would be one among many reasons that the public has retreated from law enforcement. Examples of other potentially important factors include cultural and policy change, economic changes, and technology (e.g. cars).
Thus far we have explored the following. The professional enforcement of law and order is a very recent development. Before the existence of professional policing, communities were responsible for maintaining their own order. Formal enforcement in such circumstances is complimented by social norms: abide by the rules or be shunned by your neighbors. In modern society as we know it violence primarily appears to belongs to the police. There are many explanations we could give for this state of affairs, but one contributing factor that seems key to me is the low connectivity that can exist between neighbors in cities.
A picture of the demand on the police begins to emerge. They serve as a source of backup: where people would have called on family and neighbors, they now call on the police. These scenarios may range from crime to dispute resolution to dealing with the mentally unwell. Mental illness is increasingly becoming the domain of the police in the UK, and there is research to suggest that the same is true in Canada. The police, in many of their responsibilities, are substitutes for community. I do not mean for this to sound wholly negative. Having professionals handle violence certainly has its benefits, and there is a reason that ‘small-town justice’ has a pejorative ring.
However, it does perhaps illuminate several reasons why policing is politically controversial. First, it places those responsible for maintaining order in society as an ‘other’. We, as humans, have yet to develop a society that does not rely, to some degree, on violence. However, by making a specific set of people responsible for the application of violence, we distance ourselves from violence while still benefiting from its application. In other words the police, as the inheritors of the perennial problem of violence, are very easy to criticize.
Second, the police are responsible for arbitrating between people, groups, and social classes. This makes their job distinctly different from other social services. Unlike people such as medical workers, teachers, and firefighters, the police do not distribute services but rather are regularly responsible for limiting the freedom of some for the benefits of others. Given limited information, even in the hypothetical scenario where the police were perfectly just, different groups in society could reasonably perceive themselves as being treated unequally. This is particularly true when different groups are unequal to begin with. It is, further, highly contestable that ‘perfect justice’ actually exists. If it does not exist, then disagreement over what the police ought to be doing is more or less inevitable. Social conflict and debate is transformed into a contest of who can exert the most influence over and pressure upon the police to realize their conception of justice.
To summarize, policing used to be public domain. Before professional policing, the public maintained their own order, for better or for worse. The right to enforce laws and norms has now been shifted to the police, along with the burden of doing so justly.
In my first post on police accountability, I explored why crime statistics are a poor tool for managing police performance. In this post I examined one of the key components of policing, the regulation and allocation of violence, and explored some reasons why policing is inevitably controversial. In my next post I will be looking more closely at the relationship between the police, the media, politicians, and the public.
References
Bittner, Egon. The Functions of the Police in Modern Society. National Institute of Mental Health, 1970.
Carugati, F., Hadfield K., Weingast B. Building Legal Order in Ancient Athens. Journal of Legal Analysis, 2015.
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