Two Cultures of Policing

Street Cops and Management Cops

John Leo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351300940
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Corruption & Misconduct
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The emergence and functioning of two competing and sometimes conflicting cultures within police departments demonstrates how competition between street cops and "bosses" is at the heart of the organizational dilemma of modern urban policing. Unlike other works in this field that focus on the monolithic culture or familial quality of policing, this study demonstrates that which might look cohesive from the point of view of outsiders has its own internal dynamics and conflicts. The book shows that police departments are not immune to the conflict inherent in any large-scale bureaucracy, when externally imposed management schemes for increasing efficiency and effectiveness are imposed on an existing social organization.

Based upon two years of extensive field work, in which the author covered every major aspect of policing at the precinct level in the New York City police department from manning the complaint desk to riding in squad cars. Ianni shows how the organized structure of the police department is disintegrating. The new "Management Cop Culture" is bureaucratically juxtaposed to the precinct level "Street Cop Culture, " and bosses' loyalties to the social and political networks of management cops rather than to the men on the street causes a sharp division with grave consequences for the departments.

The study concentrates on a series of dramatic events, such as the suicide of a police officer charged with corruption, a major riot, and the trial of an officer accused of killing a prisoner while in police custody. Ianni traces how these events affected relationships among fellow officers and between officers and "bosses."

1

The Two Cultures of Policing

Early in September of 1976, Francis Ianni and I, with financial support from the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice, began a long-term study of the social organization of the police precinct in New York City. What we learned through the two-year study, after hundreds of hours working, observing, and interviewing officers in two precincts, is that the organization of policing is best described and understood in terms of the interactions of two distinct cultures: a street cop culture and a management cop culture. These two cultures are increasingly characterized by competing and often conflicting perspectives on procedure and practice in policing. This situation is significant since much of the research and literature of policing describes the working of a monolithic single cop culture that pervades all levels of the organization. The emergence of two cultures has implications for the introduction of new techniques for management and operation, and for the introduction of new personnel policies and procedures, as well as for understanding the manner and method of the day-to-day practice of policing.

The pervasive conception of the “good old days” of policing is the organizing ethos of street cop culture, orienting individual officers and precinct social networks and defining the day-to-day job of policing. In the good old days, the public valued and respected the cop, fellow officers could be counted on and the “bosses,” or higher ranking officers, were an integral part of the police family. Cops not only had public respect and the sense of security which came from belonging to a cohesive, interdependent organization, but were treated as professionals who knew their job and how best to get it done. A grateful public and an understanding city hall seldom asked how. Everybody, say the cops, knew who were the good guys and who were the bad guys, and the political system and the community they represented agreed with their definitions. Being a policeman was something special; a cop put his life on the line and people appreciated and respected his willingness to do so. As a result, policemen were allowed to do their jobs without too many questions or too much interference from outside the department. Not only the street cops, but everyone in the department was socialized to this ethos. Since there is no lateral entry into the department, everyone began his career as a cop and, they believed, everyone from the chief on down accepted the values of loyalty, privilege, and the importance of keeping department business inside the department. One monolithic culture permeated the department.

The police career path began with being a “good cop” who would then move to higher command positions or, in many cases, chose to remain within the same precinct, in the same assignment throughout that career. Success was based upon some combination of ability, luck, political, ethnic or family connections, or having some sponsorship in the departmental hierarchy. Even for those who made it to the top, retirement frequently meant a job (such as director of security for a corporation or hotel) where they could use their experience as a policeman to recognize the “bad guys” and use their connections in the department to take care of a situation or get information.

Because this ethos was universal throughout the department, we were told, there was one culture which everyone, whether in the street or in headquarters, shared. But a number of social and political forces have weakened that culture and as a result the organic structure of the department is disintegrating. The changing political structure of the city introduced an escalating competition for scarce resources which has had the effect of pitting agency against agency in securing jobs and fiscal allocations. Political leadership has become increasingly management-oriented as the financial excesses of the old clubhouse days very nearly bankrupted the city. For the police department as well as other city agencies, this meant greater emphasis on accountability and productivity — on management process and products that could be quantified and measured in a cost-effective equation. The new politics also included those minority groups who were disenfranchised in the old days. Ever since the civil rights movement, there has been growing political sensitivity about relationships with minority groups which holds the department accountable not only for providing adequate police service to those groups, but for affirmative action in seeking minority recruitment.

All of these forces have contributed to the development of a new headquarters management cop culture which is bureaucratically juxtaposed to the precinct street cop culture. This new management cop culture, say the cops, is positively oriented towards public administration and looks to scientific management and its associated technologies for guidance on how to run the department. Despite their new training and orientation, however, they must continue to justify their positions within the department not by their new expertise or specialization, but because at one time they were also street cops. Regulations require that they continue to display the two most important symbols of the old culture, the shield (i.e., the badge) and the gun. Unlike other bureaucratic systems, in which the upper echelon of the hierarchy is recruited from different socioeconomic and educational levels than the lower ranks, managers at all levels in the NYPD come from the same socioeconomic and work experience groups as the “workers” or cops. But, the cops maintain, their bosses have forgotten about being cops and are now professional managers. “They would give us up in a moment, if necessary, in order to save their own careers and they think we’ll put up with anything because of our pension.” Career paths for the managers begin when they are first assigned to headquarters, and careers in administration in the department or after retirement in business or industry are what this new breed of police administrator aspires to today.

Since our study concentrated at the precinct level of operation, we cannot explicate the values of the new management culture with the same certainty as we can with the street cop culture. However, it would seem that they are essentially those found in any managerial network in a bureaucracy and, as we shall describe through the events, are often antithetical to the values of the precinct street cop culture.

While it is improbable that any single event could transform an organization as large and complex as the New York City Police Department, many of the officers with whom we spoke during this study pointed to the Knapp Commission investigation into allegations of police corruption and its aftermath in the New York City Police Department as a kind of watershed or line of demarcation between the present reality of the policeman’s job and “the good old days” of what the job used to be like.

This nostalgic sense of the good old days may or may not be an accurate interpretation of the past, but street cops believe police work should be organized and carried out that way today. The values of this culture, operationalized in maxims guiding day-to-day behavior and performance, form the reference for precinct level officers, and socialize officers to the job at the precinct. Interviews and observations of individual and collective behavior in the two precincts indicated that precinct level cops believed that a number of social and political forces have weakened the character and performance of police work and that the policing function is under strong attack as a result. According to these officers, calumny and contempt, rather than respect, are experienced daily in the community and in the media. Frequent charges of brutality and corruption have led to distrust and suspicion among policemen, and these concerns, rather than the mutuality of the old days, relates them to their bosses and the command structure. These same bosses and their political allies at city hall are tying the hands of the street cop, we were told, reducing the level of performance and making it both difficult and dangerous for police in the community. All of these forces combine to produce a new headquarters level “management cop culture,” bureaucratically juxtaposed to the precinct street cop culture. What was once a family is now a factory. Now, say the street cops, not only the values, but the real loyalties of their bosses are not to the men, but to the social and political networks which embody management cop culture.

While there is some uneasy accommodation between these two cultures, they are increasingly in conflict, and this conflict isolates the precinct functionally, if not structurally, from headquarters. The isolation produces disaffection, strong stress reactions, increasing attrition of personnel, and growing problems of integrity. This in turn reinforces street cop culture resistance to attempts by headquarters managers to introduce organizational change. Instead, the precinct as a social organization rather than any loyalty to the department in general, becomes the major reference structure for the men.

Most of the officers with whom we worked see the destruction of the street cop culture as an inevitable outcome of the changing organizational character and, with obvious resignation, say that this is what the bosses want anyway because then they can more easily control cops as individuals rather than as unified groups.

The existence of these two cultures of policing is of more than academic interest. Their incongruent value systems and the differences in their expectations are major factors in the growing alienation of the street cop. This displacement of quasi-familial relationships, in which loyalties and commitments took precedence over the rule book, by the more impersonal ideology of modern management is visible in other public service sectors such as education and social welfare. Teachers and social workers, too, increasingly see their administrators as management rather than fellow professionals. Wherever this shift occurs, it produces conflict which sooner or later must affect the way a client public experiences policies and services. In many urban centers, the growing cynicism of the police is seen by citizens and supervisors alike as little different from worker disaffection in other sectors of the economy. To the street cop, at least to those I worked with, this alienation results from the inconsistencies in the variety of jobs they are expected to do; the resources they are given to do those jobs; and the compromises they must make with themselves, the public, and their jobs. Whether or not these rationalizations reflect the present relationship between the individual policeman and the structure of urban policing accurately, the critical first step in examining the disparity between policy and performance in urban policing is understanding how and why this differentiation into two cultures has occurred.

An Organizational Dilemma

The conflict of these two cultures is, in one respect, almost a classical case of what organizational theory describes as the opposition of bureaucratic and organic forms of organization. This is usually expressed as the difference between formal and informal organization. “Formal organization” refers to the formal organization chart, specifying the relations of people in the organization, while “informal organization” describes relationships or connections which are not written down or described by the formal organization chart. Management theorists often recommend beginning with the organization chart and proceeding deductively to determine patterns of informal structures in an organization (Blau, 1974). We have proceeded differently, looking at informal structures first. In doing so, we found that the formal bureaucratic structure emanating from headquarters coexisted with, rather than contained, the local precinct street culture.

From what we were told, this separation of structure was not always characteristic of the New York police department. Most of the cops I talked to believed that in the old days, the department was a cohesive organizational home for the commonly shared ethos we call street cop culture. It unified the department through a code of shared understandings and conventions of behavior binding on everyone, from the top brass to the newest recruits. The department was integrated with and accommodated to a political organization which valued them and their ethos. Because of its solidarity and integration into the political system, the department was, by and large, left to run its own affairs. The results were predictable: The mutuality and interdependence, cloaked by the secrecy which develops in such closed systems, produced both organizationally positive and socially negative results. The mutual dependence created morale and esprit de corps; the same mutuality and secrecy led to the institutionalization of widespread organized graft and corruption.

While the police emphasize the role of the Knapp Commission’s investigations in disrupting the organic relationships this shared ethos created, other, equally important, pressures for its demise came from both inside and outside the department. Externally, a changing political system characterized by increasing attention to the rights of disenfranchised minorities and a spreading financial and social accountability led to increasing scrutiny of department management that would eventually have produced the same results. Also, as social mobility resulting from higher salaries allowed officers to purchase homes outside the city proper, social bonds were increasingly restricted to work time and were diminished in extrawork settings. The educational level of officers in the department rose along with that of the general population, but also as the result of special governmental programs intended to improve police performance through education. Increased education made alternative job possibilities and careers outside of the department available, further reducing solidarity since one’s entire career was no longer necessarily tied to the job or to relations with fellow cops. In the “good old days,” the department was sexually and ethnically homogeneous; there were a few women and some minority officers, but their number and their token acceptance kept them outside the social bounds which organized the rest of the department. Pressures for minority recruitment and redress of past discrimination led to new criteria for promotional advancement, and these further eroded the sense of solidarity supported by the similarity of socioeconomic, cultural, religious and ethnic backgrounds.

Street cop culture still exists, and currently gives salience and meaning to the social organization of the precinct. But a competing ethos, concentrated at the headquarters management level, finds its salience and meaning not in the traditions of the job, but rather in theories and practices of scientific management and public administration. Management cop culture seeks to maximize the bureaucratic benefits of efficient organization, rational decision making, cost-effective procedures, and objective accountability at all levels of policing. As in all classical bureaucracies, the model proposed by management culture would do away with the organic and non-rational bounds among people as the basis for organization and decision making, substituting a consistent system of abstract rules and departmental operations and applying these rules to particular cases. It would organize departmental structure hierarchically, each lower office under the control and supervision of a higher one with authority and power distributed similarly, and would base employment and advancement on merit rather than personal characteristics or relationships. In the management model, the individual’s office or role in the organizational chart (rather than personal relationships and informal networks) define what the job requires of the individual and what the individual can contribute to the organization. Since the model originated in business and industry it is not surprising that it has gradually produced a departmental structure which now, for better or worse, has a classical managers versus workers structure. Even more important, the two functionally defined groups have distinctive cultures which increasingly come into conflict.

Abstractly, both cultures share the goals of combating crime and insuring a safe and secure city. They differ on the definitions of these abstract concepts and, more concretely, the choice of the means by which such goals can be achieved. The street cop culture sees immediate local police response as more important than preplanned and “packaged” solutions to problems which may never occur in day-to-day police work. The street cop judges performance by the standard of “the professional cop.” By “professionalism,” they refer to on-the-job experience, and the experientially acquired street sense which permits them to recognize “dirty” people and situations which require police intervention. For them, this reactive “gut level” ability to recognize, identify, and respond to a situation, rather than the internalization of standardized rules and procedures, characterizes “good police work.” Decision making thus takes place personally and immediately. Officers support each other, and their common interests bind them into a cohesive brotherhood. Command relationships arise in the same way and the officer’s loyalty to his working peers and immediate supervisors are part of the same social bond which incorporates him and his organizational unit into larger organizational structures.

Since our study concentrated on the precinct, we did not systematically trace social networks beyond the precinct, that is, up through intervening levels to headquarters. As a result, what we know about management cop culture comes largely from what we heard and saw in the precincts as well as from a number of meetings we attended at headquarters. Those observations suggest that street cops’ identification and sense of social integration seldom go beyond the precinct except where such outside forces intervene in their precinct’s functioning. Management cop culture, on the other hand, concerns itself with crime on a systemwide or citywide, rather than localized, level. Management cops do care about crime at the local level, but their sense of territoriality encompasses all of the city and they must allocate resources throughout the system based upon some set of priorities. They must weigh and establish those priorities within political, social, and economic constraints and justify them within each of these contexts as well as within the policing context. Law enforcement, for the management cop, is not the immediate day-to-day interaction with a local community that the street cop sees. It is rather a carefully planned, well-designed, and effciently implemented program in which the individual officer and the unit are impersonal resources to be used.

Our observations convinced us that precinct level or street cop culture presently determines the day-to-day practices of policing. Since the values of that culture underwrite and inform the social organization of the precinct, they determine behavior and the dispositions and attitudes of its members. I came to think of the relationship between the two cultures of policing as a form of gaming because so much of what street cops say and do emerges from their efforts to maneuver around, outwit, or nullify policy decisions from headquarters. This, however, is not meant to trivialize it, since I believe that the future character of urban policing in New York City depends on who, if anyone, wins.

The Social Organization of the Precinct and the Cop’s Code

The precinct social organization can be described as a systematic set of relationships which are not nearly so informal as the characterization “informal organization” would lead one to believe. That organization is characterized by a set of emergent structures which organize social behavior and define the code of rules to which the officer is socialized. These rules are then intern...