"Police are to the government as the edge is to the knife" (Bayley quoted in Chevigny 1995).
A particular facet of politics that is often neglected is that though politicians are involved in the making of policy, they are not the ones who implement it. The collective behaviours of those public-service workers responsible for actually implementing policy (e.g. teachers, social-service workers, the police) are crucial components of the laws and norms that govern our society. In other words, in implementing the law public-service-workers also play a role in defining it. Teachers interpret curriculum, doctors allocate healthcare resources, the police prioritize enforcing particular types of crime over others. One particularly acute example of "street-level bureaucracy" (as this phenomenon is called) gone wrong are countries where bribery is considered the norm when dealing with public officials.
I aim to illustrate the following point: policy and law do not fully determine police behaviour, and, by extension, the police's interpretation of their duties and responsibilities plays an important role in defining public norms. Further, as I shall explore later in this series, politician's efforts to exert control over the police can have unpredictable results.
The purpose of this series of blog posts is to explore the following question: how ought police behaviour be measured, regulated, and held accountable to the public? The discussion will proceed as follows:
Part 1 - Policing crime statistics
In many countries crime is primarily measured and tracked through police statistics. These statistics are then simultaneously used as a measure of police performance. This dynamic, A, incentivizes the police to distort crime statistics, and B, fosters a reactionary crime-control politics that focuses on simple explanations for changing crime figures. In the first post of the series, I will explore this dynamic to show how policing is currently 'governed' in many countries.
Part 2 - A (very brief) history of violence
In his seminal work The Functions of the Police in Modern Society Egon Bittner wrote: "...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." Whether or not you agree with Bittner that the right to use force defines the police, it seems incontestable that the right to use force is integral to policing. The police are a genie in a bottle: violence constrained, tamed, but never truly banished. In the second post of the series, I will first illuminate the nature of police powers through a brief history of violence management in society, and then use this to articulate why policing is, inherently and inevitably, a controversial profession.
Part 3 - In the spotlight
Police brutality and corruption are currently matters of significant concern in many countries, particularly in the United States. In the third post of the series, I will be expanding on how media affects the relationship between the police and the public in a democratic context. I will propose that media oversight of the police creates a number of problems.
Part 4 - Police discretion
As explored at the beginning of this introduction, the police are "street-level bureaucrats." A core component of this is that police forces and police officers have significant discretion over when and how they enforce the law. The instinctive reaction of policy-makers and the public is to limit police discretion. Policy-makers seek to bridge the gap between the policies they enact and the way in which the police implement those policies. The public, seeking equality before the law, perceiving police discretion as an enabler of poor and corrupt behaviours such as sexism, racism, and brutality. In the fourth post of the series I will argue, first, that police discretion cannot be eliminated. I will then argue, second, that eliminating discretion would not be desirable even if we could do so.
Part 5 - Models of policing and accountability
Having provided a thorough background in the previous four posts, in the fifth post I will explore an evaluate different theoretical policing models, including how the police could be held to account while operating under these models.
Part 6 - Implementing change
A particular focus of this series is going to have been on the gap between those who make policy and those who implement it. Among other goals, I am aiming to articulate how the relationship between the police and policy-makers could be improved. As such, it is important to note that the implementation of changes such as are to be described will be much more successful with police "buy-in". In the sixth post I will discuss what getting such buy-in could look like.
Part 7 - Conclusion
I will finish the series with a summary of all the material covered.
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