Hello, and welcome to my blog. I will be using this space to explore policy ideas and issues. My primary focus is on policing policy, but many of the issues I will be exploring will also have broader policy implications. To launch the blog, I will be writing a series of posts on theoretical issues relating to measuring crime and monitoring police performance. Before I start the series, however, I would like to write a brief reflection on some of the challenges that are inherent in writing about the police.
One of my favorite quotes about the police (loosely attributed to David H. Bayley) is as follows: "The Police are to the government as the edge is to the knife." Governments make policy, but it is the police who are responsible for enforcing it. The ways in which the police exercise their powers literally defines the law.
Opinions on the police can therefore be highly polarized. When I started working in policing policy, a friend of mine said I should "undermine them from the inside". To many, the police represent oppression, the physical manifestation of an unjust society. In Calgary's 2017 Gay Pride Parade, organizers, in light of historical oppression, requested that police officers "participate without uniforms, firearms, vehicles, or any forms of institutional representation" (link). On the other hand, as noted by Egon Bittner:
"policemen are viewed as the fire it takes to fight fire, that they in the natural course of their duties inflict harm, albeit deserved... their very existence attests that the nobler aspirations of mankind do not contain the means necessary to insure survival. But even as those necessities are accepted, those who accept them seem to prefer to have no part in acting upon them, and they enjoy the more than slightly perverse pleasure of looking down on the police who take the responsibility of doing the job." (link)
The police are permitted to utilize violence because violence is still deemed necessary for the functioning of society. The regulation and control of violence is one of the perennial problems of human civilization, which makes policing inherently controversial. All police forces perpetrate injustice because it is impossible to be perfectly just, and the police have the misfortune of being responsible for delivering justice. Further, it is essential to acknowledge the influence of society and government on the police: in many cases the injustices they perpetrate are caused by forces beyond their control, or enabled by institutional or cultural failings.
When I write on the police, I therefore do so as a sympathetic critic and commentator. I believe that the police fulfill a crucial role in our society, and that they deserve our respect. I also believe that it is inevitable that the police systematically perpetrate injustice, that "a few bad apples" rhetoric overlooks institutional failings, and that both the police and society should continuously aim to better themselves.
Thank you for visiting my website, and I hope you find what you read interesting and challenging.
Ryan Workman
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