Police Reform from the Bottom Up

Officers and their Unions as Agents of Change

Monique Marks, David Sklansky, Monique Marks, David Sklansky

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415686792
• eBook ISBN: 9781317995487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

What role can and should police unions and rank-and-file officers play in driving and shaping police reform? Police unions and their members are often viewed as obstructionist and conservative, not as change agents. But reform efforts are much more likely to succeed when they are supported by the rank-and-file, and line officers have knowledge, skills and insights that can be invaluable in promoting reform. Efforts to involve police unions and rank-and-file officers in police reform are less common than they should be, but they are increasing, and there is a good deal to learn about policing, police reform and participatory management from the efforts made to date.

In this pioneering volume, an international, cross-disciplinary collection of scholars and police unionists address a range of neglected questions, both empirical and theoretical, about the place of police officers themselves in the process of reform – what it has been, and what it could be. They provide a fresh view of police reform as occurring from the bottom up rather than the top down. This book will be highly useful for practitioners and scholars who have a serious interest in the possibilities and limits of police organizational change.

This book is based on special issues of Police Practice and Research and Policing and Society.

Introduction: The role of the ranks and file and police unions in police reform

Monique Marks and David Sklansky

The dominant mindset of police departments, police reformers, and police scholars—the dominant mindset, in short, of nearly everyone who thinks about policing and its problems—is, and always has been, that policing needs strong, top-down management. Good police officers are police officers who follow rules. Rank-and-file organizing is an obstacle to reform and sits uneasily beside the rule of law. Police departments are famously bureaucratic because they are necessarily bureaucratic. Even strong advocates for organized labor often lose some of their enthusiasm when it comes to law enforcement. It was not a great surprise, for example, when the International Labor Organisation (ILO) upheld, in 2003, the Argentine government’s determination to curtail the right of the police to unionise and bargain collectively (ILO 2003)—notwithstanding the ILO’s general commitment to freedom of association and collective bargaining as basic employment rights for employees in any democratic society (see Braithwaite and Drahos 2000).

And yet suggestions have been made off and on for decades that rank-and-file police officers should have a greater collective voice in shaping the nature of their work. Sometimes the argument has sounded in management theory: participation in departmental decision-making will make officers more engaged and more committed, will lessen their opposition to reform, and will infuse managerial judgments with localized, hands-on knowledge of the day-to-day realities of policing. At other times the argument has sounded in civics: police are citizens and should be awarded the same rights as other citizens; police are most likely to respect and protect citizen rights if they themselves are afforded those rights—not only rights to speech and free association, but also rights to bargain collectively, and to fair and impartial adjudication of disciplinary allegations and workplace grievances. Democratic policing, it has been suggested, should entail a measure of workplace democracy for police officers (see Sklansky 2008; Marks and Fleming 2006b; Birzer 1996).

Those ideas are still outside the mainstream, but there are reasons to think they may be coalescing and gathering strength. A growing number of police executives borrow heavily from the rhetoric and practices of managers in other service sectors (Kiely & Peek 2002), and many of the ideas to which they are attracted call for greater flexibility, less hierarchical rigidity, and more openness to “bottom up” processes of decisionmaking. Police managers and leaders increasingly demonstrate “a predilection for articulating new philosophies, concepts and approaches to the provision of policing ‘services’”; policing, some argue, now “meets the criteria of a ‘performance culture’, offers ‘best value’, advocates ‘partnerships’ with the communities policed, supports the development of a new legal and political culture with ‘human rights’ at its core and is confident in its ‘professionalism’” (Adlam 2002).

A familiar range of political, economic and social changes in policing have cast doubt on previously accepted managerial practices. Community oriented policing calls for more localized and flexible decision-making, which in turn requires recognizing and encouraging greater responsibility and initiative from police officers who work directly with communities (Goldstein 1979; Deukmedjian 2003). New governance arrangements throughout the industrialized world are less bureaucratic (or at least claim to be), and emphasize “partnerships” and “networks” (Fleming & Rhodes 2005). And public sector organizations are expected, increasingly, to have the virtues traditionally expected of large businesses: cost-effectiveness, financial accountability, objectively measured efficiency, and even competition and the marketization of services (Davies & Thomas 2001; Murphy 2004; O’Malley & Hutchinson 2006; Vickers & Kouzmin 2001). As one scholar puts it:

Police executives are no longer managers of continuing organizational growth and service expansion, they are now confronted with inexorable political demands to find ways to cut costs, increase efficiency, improve productivity and demonstrate what is called “value for money”. Pressured to abandon traditional quasi-military, bureaucratic police management models for more contemporary and efficient private-sector service management philosophies and strategies, modern police executives must now provide business-based planning models, argue the cost efficiency of various policing strategies and promote radical organizational change (Murphy 2004:2).

Faced with these challenges, police leaders, particularly in English-speaking, established democracies, are increasingly voicing scepticism about traditional, paramilitary organizational structures in law enforcement. A new, “soft HR discourse” emphasizes “a more relaxed, informal, caring and supportive organisation” (Davis & Thomas 2001:8). A range of police services have introduced “team leadership programmes” in an effort to let employees share their experiences and exchange ideas for improving how their jobs are structured (O’Malley & Hutchinson 2007).

Australian police leaders, by way of example, have for some years now been declaring a “new era” in law enforcement management. At a recent police leadership conference, John Murray, the then Chief Police Officer of the Australian Federal Police (AFP), argued for “a more democratic style” of police management (2002:15). He explained that:

…police leaders across the developed world have been forced to examine the appropriateness and efficacy of [the] traditional model for at least two reasons. The first is its inflexibility and consequently inability to meet the demands of efficiency effectiveness in an environment described as volatile as any competitive market… The second is the experience of many police leaders that the autocratic style of leadership and the strict enforcement of rules associated with the traditional model is at odds with the expectations of a modern workforce (Ibid.).

The AFP has in fact “flatten[ed]” its organizational structure, in an effort to extend “the concept of empowerment … to all areas of the organization” and to “increase the authority and decision making power of members from the lowest level up” (Ibid.:17). Along similar lines, “corporate governance committees” in the Victoria Police now formulate policy, set performance targets and budget priorities, and monitor organisational behaviour (Victoria Police 2004/2005). And in the United Kingdom, recruitment, selection and training of senior police officers has been completely revamped in an effort to foster “transformational leadership,” marked by “participation, consultation and inclusion” (Sivestri 2007:39).

Old assumptions and new directions

All of these “developments” in policing management and organizational restructuring need to be taken with a grain of salt. Most of the evidence suggests that “traditional,” “hierarchical,” “authoritarian” styles of management persist in policing. (Silvestri 2007:54). Bureaucratic and even autocratic ways of doing things are “alive and well in police organizations” (Fleming & Rhodes 2005:194).

This is the case in both liberal democracies and within more authoritarian countries. It is plainly the case in South Africa, for example, where police leaders have reverted to extremely authoritarian management approaches. While a crucial component of the democratization of the South African Police in the mid 1990s was rank demilitarization, in recent years there has been a complete reversion to militarized ranking (and training) systems. At a symbolic level, the public police in South Africa have shifted from referring to themselves as a “service” to insisting that they be called the South African Police Force. The ranks of the police in South Africa today mirror those of the military, with the leader of the police taking on the title of “General” (see Marks and Wood 2010). All this has been defended in the name of enhancing discipline and effectiveness; the reformative programmes of community policing and more participatory management techniques which were viewed as crucial in the shift to “democratic policing” in South Africa have gone by the wayside.

Clifford Shearing provides an explanation for this easy slide into militarization within police organizations, even in police organizations that aspire to be innovative:

…resistance to change on the part of traditional police managers is not simply a blind, thoughtless clinging to the known and familiar…Rather it is a statement that the business of management must be concerned with enabling managers to control rank-and-file members at a distance by shaping the inner being of the officers who will be making discretionary decisions. Seen from this perspective, the resistance of traditional managers to the remedial approach is a claim that policing traditions require a style of management that focuses on the identities of rank-and-file officers as ‘regulatory regimes’ that can be used to control the existence of discretion (1992:22).

Rank-based authority is viewed by police managers as freeing them from the obstacles associated with “dissent, equivocation [and] debate” (Murray 2002:7), and there is a long tradition of thinking this kind of managerial freedom is especially important in policing.

Part of the explanation, particularly in the United States, is historical. At the very point in the twentieth century when interest in workplace democracy reached its zenith—the late 1960s and early 1970s—American police departments seemed peculiarly inhospitable places for experiments in participatory management. Police officers at that time were almost uniformly white, male, and politically reactionary. Rank-and-file organizing was in fact on the rise, but it took unappealing and often frightening forms. Especially in the United States, a surge in police unionism in the United States was closely linked with fierce opposition to outside oversight, open contempt for civilian authorities, orchestrated brutality against political protesters, vigilante attacks on Black militants, and active membership far-right organizations. As a result, the very scholars and community activists who might otherwise have been most sympathetic to calls for participatory management of law enforcement agencies instead concluded that democracy required tight, top-down control of the police (Sklansky 2008).

By the end of the 1970s, when policing was among the most heavily organized of all public occupations, police unions had joined “the mainstream of American trade unionism,” devoting the bulk of their attention to working conditions, job security, and the “bread-and-butter … issues that have been near and dear to the hearts of U.S. trade unionists for decades” (Delaney & Feuille 1987: 301). But by then the damage had been done. The frightening forms taken by police activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s had dulled the appetite of virtually all scholars and police reformers for bringing workplace democracy to law enforcement. Even after the close of the 1980s, when community policing replaced politically insulated, technocratic “professionalism” as the reigning orthodoxy of police executives and police reformers alike, the “dominant form of policing” continued “to view police officers as automatons” (Goldstein 1990: 27).

It still does today. Encouraging patrol officers to be thoughtful and creative about their work is often said to be part of community policing, and even more so of problem-solving policing, but too often this means little more than placing additional discretion in the hands of individual officers. And the victory of community policing over technocratic, top-down professionalism is itself less than fully secured: recent calls for “intelligence-led policing” and “predictive policing” are, to a considerable extent, calls for a return to something very like the old, much maligned “professional model” (Sklansky 2011). Policing managerial strategies meant to simultaneously build accountability, team work and efficiency such as Compstat have often proved to be extremely top-down in nature (Eterno & Silverman 2006).

Some of the renewed enthusiasm for the professional model has to do with the worldwide economic downturn and the consequent tightening of public service budgets. Those pressures have given additional impetus to preexisting concerns in policing circles for “performance,” “efficiency,” and “value for money” (Murphy 2004; Gascón & Fogelsong 2010)—concerns that often lead practitioners and scholars, for better or worse, to view traditional, authoritarian patterns of police management more sympathetically. And police unions themselves have had varying, sometimes even contradictory responses to efforts to bring participatory management and other forms of shared workplace decision-making to policing. For all of these reasons, traditional, authoritarian patterns of police management are today competing with a range of less centralized, less hierarchical managerial ideas. What is apparent, however, is that space has been cleared for formulating new workplace arrangements as police leaders along with police unions and other rank-and-file associations struggle to respond to the changes around them (Paoline, Myers & Worden 2000; Kiely & Peek 2002; Marks 2007).

This book grows out of an international, cross-disciplinary conference on “police reform from the bottom up,” hosted in 2006 by the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and co-sponsored by the Berkeley Center for Criminal Justice, the Center for the Study of Law and Society, and the Regulatory Institutions Network at Australian National University. Aimed at reexamining the role of rank-and-file officers and their representatives in police reform, the conference brought together a stellar collection of police scholars, police unionists, police executives, and representatives of identity-based police associations. The participants included well-established academics, justly famed for their path-breaking studies of policing, along with superb younger scholars, bringing fresh perspectives to old controversies.

The discussions in Berkeley were wide-ranging and spirited. There were many areas of disagreement—over the potential for police unions to adopt progressive agendas; over the ability of academics to fully grasp the daily realities of policing; over the degree to which police forces remain racist, sexist, and homophobic; and over the best ways to take advantage of the collective insights of rank-and-file officers.

The Berkeley conference was purposely comprised of academics and practitioners who shared at least some skepticism about the necessity and wisdom of rigid, top-down management in policing, but not all participants were equally resolute about increasing the individual and collective rights of the police. Nor were all the participants equally convinced about the possibility for reform from below or even from within police organizations. There was skepticism voiced, too, about the capacity for police unions to be forces for reform, rather than obstacles. For their part, some of the police unionists at the roundtable criticized existing policing scholarship as uninformed and simplistic. Nonetheless there was also striking consensus on a range of important points. Both the points of common agreement and the areas of disagreement are well illustrated in the contributions to this book.

The rank-and-file as change agents

The first and most important point of consensus is the extraordinary potential of bottom-up approaches to police reform. Outside of policing, three overlapping arguments are commonly made for involving employees in workplace decision-making: it heightens morale and commitment, it develops democratic skills and habits, and it makes for better decisions (see for example Wilms 1996). Each of these arguments can be applied to law enforcement and may, in fact, acquire special force in this context (Sklansky 2008) The morale of officers, and their commitment to the rule of law, are abiding problems in the policing of democratic societies, and the limited experience we have with participatory management in law enforcement suggests that here, as in other sectors, giving employees a say in the shaping of their work strongly increases their job satisfaction and their attachment to the organization’s mission.

These points are pursued, in different ways, by each of the chapters in the first part of this book, addressing the potential of police rank-and-file as change agents. In their separate chapters, David Bayley, David Thacher and Hans Toch each emphasize how police decision-making could be improved by securing what John Dewey (1927: 217) would have called the “diffused and seminal intelligence” of the police rank-and-file. Bayley calls it “craft knowledge,” Toch calls it “street knowledge,” and Thacher calls it “context-specific, situated knowledge.” It includes not only the kind of micro-level sociological understanding all good officers acquire about their beats, but also, as Bayley and Toch each make clear, a hands-on feel for best practices, innovative ideas for improving those practices, and a thorough, nuanced understanding of their fellow officers—who can be trusted, who shirks responsibility, who cuts corners, who is prone to violence. Thacher argues, moreover, that line officers can collectively offer not only richer and more nuanced answers to central problems of policing, but distinctive and important questions—questions different than, and complementary to, the ones typically posed by police executives and typically pursued by scholars.

Bayley notes a handful of successful experiments involving the rank-and-file in police policy-making, in communities that include Madison, Houston, Toronto, Newport News, and Oakland. Yet Bayley makes no bones about his belief that most police reform is initiated from the top or from the outside. Toch expands on the oldest of these experiments, the one in Oakland, in which he himself was involved (see Toch & Grant 2005), and he also discusses a similar, more recent initiative in Seattle. The best way to build on these efforts, and to pursue the broader possibilities suggested by Thacher, may be through cooperative ventures between police scholars and police practitioners—more systematic attempts to foster the kind of collaboration that Toch pursued in Oakland several decades ag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• 1. Introduction: The role of the ranks and file and police unions in police reform
• Part I: The rank-and-file as change agents
• Part II: Police unions and police reform
• Part III: Police culture, police organization and the possibilities of change
• Index