Beyond Community Policing

From Early American Beginnings to the 21st Century

James J. Chriss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781594518461
• eBook ISBN: 9781317263210
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Beyond Community Policing uses history and general sociological theory to examine the trajectory of municipal policing from Britain in the 1830s to its adoption and evolution in the America. By analysing the uncertain and uneven historical development of policing, this book illustrates in great detail the functional connections between cities (or communities) and police departments. Chriss also considers the development of municipal policing in the American West between 1850 and 1890, which helps to situate the current discussion of policing in the post 9/11 United States.

1

Explaining the Police

On December 6, 2008, riots broke out in several Greek cities after word spread of the fatal police shooting of Alexandros Grigoropoulos, a fifteen-year-old youth living in Exarchia, a central district of Athens.¹ The rioting started in Athens, then spread north to Thessaloniki, Komotini, Ionnina, and later as far south as Crete. Although as of mid-December, 2008 no deaths had been attributed to the rioting, there was substantial damage to banks and stores in the main shopping districts of these cities. Indeed, Greece’s retail association estimated that the losses were at least 100 million Euros (about 135 million dollars).

Two officers involved in the shooting were immediately suspended pending further investigation, and Greek authorities pleaded with the rioters to stop the violence. There had been longstanding tense relations between the police and anarchists who viewed Exarchia as their fortress or home base. Indeed, the last round of serious rioting in Greece occurred twenty years earlier, and it too pitted anarchists against the local police. The rioters eventually moved inside the gates of Athens University, where they took sanctuary thanks to a Greek law which bars police from university campuses. Now ensconced safely out of reach of the police, the rioters were free to pelt them with rocks, bottles, and whatever else was available.

Since the 1820s Greece has experienced persistent levels of instability brought about by conflicts and sometimes open warfare both internally and externally. After gaining its independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832, a Bavarian monarch was installed to reign over the kingdom as decreed by the Convention of London. Further conflicts continued, including Greece’s involvement in the Balkan Wars, World War I, ongoing skirmishes against Turkish nationalists, and the German occupation of Greece leading to a devastating civil war which pitted royalists against communists. As a result of these military exigencies Greece’s municipal police force, first established in the 1830s, was oftentimes indistinguishable from national military forces. (Indeed, during some periods the police force was disbanded altogether.) Because of this, Greek police have historically been actively engaged in the political policing of its citizens. As Rigakos and Papanicolaou (2003, p. 283) note, “This engagement had been a direct consequence of institutional, and even constitutional, arrangements that allowed continuous surveillance and suppression of individuals and organizations (political or other) connected with, or friendly to, the Greek Communist Party.”²

Much of the actions of the anarchists (far leftists in ideology, many of whom are openly communistic) are driven by general opposition to the current conservative government of Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and, by extension, the police as the most visible defenders of the status quo. Socialist opposition leader George Papandreou called for early elections, and proclaimed that the current Greek government cannot identify with the anxieties felt by the younger generation.³

For years local police in Greece realized they had their hands full attempting to control increasingly restless groups, whether they identified themselves as anarchists—groups overtly and avowedly opposed to the government and its police forces—or in other ways (see, e.g., Di Paola 2007). These “other ways” or reasons often amount to groups claiming oppression on the basis of race, class, nationality, religion, or other aspects of group identity which the broader society is alleged to devalue (Feldman 2002; Taylor 1994; Walby 2001). For example, in the United States, England, and other western nations persons of color (Blacks, Hispanics, and increasingly those of Middle Eastern descent) are apt to view the police less favorably than Whites (see Brunson 2007).

Although this observation holds in a general sense, a more fine-grained analysis reveals some intriguing nuances. One recent study asked survey respondents about the nature of their contact with police under various circumstances (Durose et al. 2007, p. 3). The research focused on the percentage of persons who felt that the police acted properly during contact, and whether or not these opinions varied significantly on the basis of race (the categories being White, Black/African-American, and Hispanic/Latino). There were no significant differences by race when the reason for the contact involved routine police actions such as responding to a traffic accident, providing assistance or service to citizens, or when persons reported a crime or problem to the police. Specifically, under these circumstances the percent who felt police acted properly was 95% for Whites, 93.1% for Blacks, and 93.6% for Hispanics.

However, when persons were asked about situations in which they were the target of police actions, clear differences by race began to emerge. When persons were the driver during a traffic stop, the percent who felt police acted properly during the contact was as follows: Whites 91.7%; Blacks 83.7%; and Hispanics 87.5%. Even more dramatically, when persons were under police investigation for a crime or suspected of wrongdoing, the percent who felt police acted properly was as follows: Whites 79.7%; Blacks 55.3%; and Hispanics 73.4%. The steep decline in favorable attitudes toward the police among Blacks being targeted for police actions is reflective of a pervasive sense, especially among minority residents of poor, inner-city areas, that police are biased against African-Americans as a group, whether in the form of police violence or neglect, heightened levels of suspicion or circumspection, the problem of Driving while Black, or racial profiling more generally (see, e.g., Anderson 1999; Chriss 2007b; Kowalski and Lundman 2007; Weitzer and Brunson 2009).

The bottom line is that citizen encounters with the police may best be described as “asymmetrical.” A clarification of this idea is provided by Wesley Skogan (2006b), who suggests that negative encounters with the police are weighted far more heavily than positive encounters. Indeed, the impact of having a bad encounter with the police is four to fourteen times greater than the impact of a positive encounter (Skogan 2006b, p. 100).

THE ANOMALY OF THE POLICE

These events illustrate the somewhat paradoxical and precarious place the police hold in modern society. We want the police to come to our aid when we call them, and put away the “bad guys” in the name of public order and preserving the peace. But when the police turn their attention to us, when we are under suspicion or arrest, then we are less apt to think of them in positive terms. Indeed, ever since the 1960s, a period marked by increasingly visible clashes between the police and a restless citizenry embroiled in any number of social movements—gay rights, antiwar protest, civil rights, school protest, and experimentation with drugs and lifestyle choices—the police have been searching for ways to present themselves in a more favorable light. For example, where once the police viewed the media as an enemy because of its penchant for portraying the police in a negative and critical way, now most police departments have their own media relations departments which overtly are concerned with citizen satisfaction regarding police operations and services. Indeed, community policing arises as much as anything as a statement that today’s police care about citizens, and are eager to present themselves as more “user friendly” and compassionate about the various problems facing citizens (Meliala 2001).

Although this turn toward “soft” policing strategies has been hailed by many as reflective of a more educated, thoughtful, and professional police force positioned to deal effectively with an increasingly diverse citizenry, others are not so confident it is for the better. A cynical perspective on the rise of community policing is that it is simply a ruse whereby police slip a new and softer “velvet glove” over the old “iron fist” of brute force and coercion, the latter of which has always been, and always will be, the true work police do at the behest of the state (Loader and Walker 2006, p. 174).

Community policing is real, in terms of how police talk about it and how everyday citizens understand it. But from a scholarly perspective, there is a need to be more precise about the concepts being discussed. One goal of this book, then, is to provide a systematic overview and understanding of policing in modern society, including various types of policing such as community policing. In order to achieve this goal it must be clear what I am referring to when I talk about the “police.” By police I mean sworn, uniformed law enforcement officers with arrest powers covering some legal and/or territorial jurisdiction. Although legal jurisdiction can encompass the federal, state, county, or local levels, for the most part in this book I will be interested in the situation of local policing, that is, modern municipal police departments which are concerned with enforcing the laws of their local cities or municipalities. Nevertheless, on occasion I will be discussing state, federal, and cross-national policing issues, especially as these relate to the problem of terrorism which has profoundly affected the organization of law enforcement in America in general and local or municipal policing in particular since September 11, 2001.

SOCIOLOGY AND CRIMINOLOGY

Although police can be understood and studied from a variety of perspectives including common sense, journalism, psychology, or politics, my approach to the topic is influenced by my training in sociology and criminology. Sociology is the scientific study of society, although within sociology itself there are a variety of competing perspectives for explaining the social world. Criminology, the study of crime and criminals, but also those social organizations dedicated to dealing with crime (police, courts, and corrections), is a specialized social science discipline which began with the rise of the Classical School of Criminology in Europe in the mid-1700s, and which has been most closely aligned with sociology since its founding beginning in the late 1800s.

Like all social sciences, sociology is multiparadigmatic, meaning that there are a variety of theories vying for attention within the field (Ritzer 1975). A paradigm represents the shared commitments of a group of theorists, and in this sense is broader than a theory. Another way of thinking about a paradigm is that it represents a worldview, or a specific way of seeing the subject matter to which members of a theory group turn their attention. A paradigm, then, allows theorists sharing the same or similar sets of assumptions to solve the puzzles that are of interest to them, and the theories that are produced are the tools for this puzzle solving (see Eckberg and Hill 1979; Kuhn 1962; Merton 1968). Each paradigm contains or encompasses a family of theories, each one somewhat distinct but nevertheless sharing certain basic assumptions about reality, about society, and about knowledge with other theories that are consistent with the paradigm.

I would argue that both sociology and criminology are dominated by three basic paradigms, which are the positivist, the interpretive, and the evaluative (Wagner 1963). A handy way of distinguishing the three paradigms is to think about the major goal of each, these being:

• Positivist—To discover the laws of society;

• Interpretive—To learn how persons make the social world meaningful;

• Evaluative—To change the social world.

The positivist approach is modeled after the natural sciences, and it operates with the assumption that timeless laws of the social universe can be derived through systematic observation and experimentation. The goal of the positivistic approach is to develop causal theories by way of deducing hypotheses from more general covering laws, with the findings in turn being generalizable beyond the specific data that are being analyzed (Roth and Mehta 2002, p. 133). The founder of positivism (and sociology for that matter) was French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Comte believed in the unity of knowledge, and also that later social science disciplines (such as economics, political science, psychology, and sociology) build upon the basic findings (or “first principles”) of the earlier natural science disciplines such as mathematics, biology, chemistry, astronomy, and geology (Ward 1883).

The primary distinguishing characteristic of the positivist paradigm is that its authors consider, or actually treat, sociology as a natural science. As such, positivist theorists view society as akin to a machine, or an organism, or see human beings as carbon-based life forms subject to the same laws of physics as other natural objects. I am in agreement with Comte about the nature of knowledge and science, and for the most part I will be utilizing a positivistic theory called functionalism to explain modern municipal policing in this book. But I will also be crossing paradigmatic boundaries occasionally as well, as some aspects of policing—especially the “micro” realm of face-to-face behavior—can be fruitfully explored from the interpretive perspective.

The primary distinguishing characteristic of the interpretive paradigm is that its authors consider, or actually treat, sociology as a social science rather than as a natural science. Interpretive theorists assume social phenomena are fundamentally different than natural phenomena, and as a result sociology and criminology require distinct methodological and explanatory approaches from those found in the natural sciences. Rather than seeking to discover the timeless laws of the social universe, interpretive theorists emphasize the importance of meaning and the subjective orientations of persons as they do things together. Additionally, “The interpretivist approach does not seek an objective truth so much as to unravel patterns of subjective understanding” (Roth and Mehta 2002, p. 132).

For example, behaviorism is a type of positivist theory which suggests that one may develop general explanations about human behavior if one assumes that human beings—like other animals—respond to external stimuli in the same way. That is, human beings will repeat behavior that is pleasurable or rewarding, and desist from or try to avoid behaviors that are painful. This is known as the stimulus–response (S-R) theory, namely, that as sentient life forms human beings are predictable insofar as pleasurable stimuli will produce certain forms of concrete, observable behavior and painful stimuli will produce other types.

Interpretive theorists would respond by suggesting that the behaviorist or S-R approach is leaving one crucial element out of its explanation: human cognition. From the interpretive perspective, the S-R approach is overly deterministic in that it sees human beings as empty vessels being buffeted about by various external stimuli. This, they would contend, is simply not an accurate portrayal of human behavior. Between the external stimulus (S) and the response (R) of the organism to that stimulus is the cognitive process at work within the organism (O), whereby the organism interprets what the stimulus means. For example, a person who gets kicked in the shin will react very differently to this “painful” stimulus in different social situations. Someone walking down the street minding his or her own business who gets kicked in the shin out of the blue by a passerby would likely interpret the kick as both painful and shocking, while a soccer player who likewise gets kicked might not even notice the pain because of the heat of the battle and because kicks to the shin are a rather routine part of the game of soccer.

Rather than attempting to develop causal explanations of social phenomena à la positivist theory, or seeking to develop deeper understanding about social life from the perspective of the human subjects being studied à la interpretive theory, evaluative theories attempt to effect some fundamental change in the world, and thus contain an explicit normative or ideological agenda. Whereas both positivist and interpretive theories report on what is, evaluative theories are at least as concerned with what ought to be. For example, Marxist or critical theory is a type of evaluative theory concerned with examining the ways in which certain social classes (owners or capitalists) dominate and oppress other social classes (workers) within capitalist society, the purpose of which is to reduce or eliminate such oppression toward the ultimate goal of establishing a classless (i.e., socialist or communist) society. Likewise, feminist theory is evaluative to the extent that it seeks to end the historical advantages men have enjoyed over women and to assure that women as a group are provided access to full participation in society alongside men.

SOME CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

Above I suggested that sociology is the scientific study of society. Even given this general understanding of what sociology is, there are still disagreements over just how a scientific discipline such as sociology could claim to study the totality of the human experience, including the structure, functioning, and culture of the social system as experienced by its members. American sociologist Talcott Parsons had a particular take on this issue that has always struck me as reasonable, and so I have followed many of his recommendations for making sense of human social systems and the various units within the system. In order to reduce the complexity of the social system in its totality, Parsons suggested that sociologists should focus on the basic functions which operate at all levels of the social system. Parsons went on to suggest that any social system must solve four critical functional problems if it is to remain viable as a going concern over time. These ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Permissions
• 1. Explaining the Police
• 2. Three Eras of Policing
• 3. Policing in the Wild West
• 4. Integrity Testing and the Decision to Arrest
• 5. Post 9-11 Policing: A Functional Analysis
• 6. Elements of Police Discretion
• 7. The Concept of Proactivity: From Indirect Conation to Modern Municipal Policing
• 8. Police as Contact Men and Women
• 9. Security and Private Policing
• 10. Police and Society: A Summary of Principles
• Bibliography
• Index