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Investigating Police Coordination
Introduction
Public police work creates boundaries and divisions as well as connections and networks. In their actions in and on a society, police are in one sense ‘people processing’ (Hasenfeld 1972), dividing law abiders from those in need of state control; filtering those in need of control between various punitive, restorative, or ameliorative avenues of justice and redress; and creating citizens, denizens, and criminals through their enforcement decisions, deployment patterns, and investigation tactics (Ericson 1981; Ericson 1982; Huey 2007; Skolnick 1994). Within the sphere of police organization, police activity is separated, if also interconnected, between national and sub-national jurisdictions and locally between sub-local districts or precincts. Within districts and precincts, police share work between units of various names, specializations, and sophistication, and within units, they divide work tasks between ranks and positions. It is this latter organizational dimension of boundary creation that motivates this text, especially insofar as the internal organization of police work influences the external tasks of dividing up groups and opportunities in a society.
The confluence of factors impacting on public police work, which have variously been described as late modernity (Garland 2001), post-modernity (Reiner 1992), risk society (Ericson and Haggerty 1997), and the security era (Murphy 2007), are characterized by a preoccupation with coordinating the actors involved or potentially involved in policing, among other things. Policing – long since revealed in the sociological literature as a process involving much more than the activities of the public police – is now a shared responsibility between state institutions, organized private security, less-organized community groups, and atomized individuals in this era (Bayley and Shearing 1996; Brodeur 2010; Ericson 2006; Loader and Walker 2007; McLaughlin 2007; Rigakos 2005). A great deal of ground-breaking scholarship in the past three decades of police studies have commensurately examined these new and emerging relationships between non-traditional partners in law enforcement and order maintenance (Ayling, Grabosky and Shearing 2009; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Huey, Ericson and Haggerty 2005; Marx 1987; Sampson et al. 1988; Skinns 2005).
However, surprisingly little work has been done to understand how the often multiple and sometimes profuse public police agencies in a given society are addressing the challenges of working with one another as physical, legal, and virtual distances shrink between police jurisdictions. This lack of sociological attention is understandable if all police are fundamentally doing the same job in the same way. Seen through such a lens, the networking of public police forces represents little more than a managerial effort to work around bureaucratic constraints and increase efficiency and effectiveness while maintaining the essential police mandate. Certainly, police practitioner-oriented literature on the matter supports this view (HMIC 2012; LeBeuf 2005; Plecas et al. 2011). However, such an approach misses the mark on a number of fronts.
Police work is a localized activity that, while possibly not politicized in the traditional sense that it is a tool of political parties or politicians (e.g., Reiner 2010), is nonetheless political in its application and outcomes (Manning 2010; Wood 2007). Police forces vary between jurisdictions not only in their size, structure, and technical sophistication but also and importantly in their guiding philosophies, organizational histories, and institutional cultures. These latter factors are particularly consequential in the ways in which police act for or against specified groups of citizens. In turn, two police forces, even those similarly organized or geographically proximal, cannot necessarily be harmonized or networked with one another without some significant push-and-pull over whose conception of police work will remain dominant in operational decision making.
Further, even on a sub-jurisdictional level, police teams and units differ in their approach to the problems of crime and disorder. At the most obvious level, different units will have differing priorities, such that a gang unit may be preoccupied with confrontational gang enforcement while a community policing section may prefer preventive interventions and maintaining the social health of a neighbourhood. Yet, even these disparate – if both necessary – aspects of police work are under pressure to work together as jurisdictional police organizations and national policing agencies alike seek greater control over local information (Deukmedjian and de Lint 2007; Murphy 2007). Among other things, the drive for what is commonly called ‘intelligence-led’ policing has obfuscated an otherwise healthy tension in public police work. In an ideal police organization, not all units should be seeking the same goal at all times.
If this last point seems controversial or even absurd, it is worth considering that the police as an organization should in some ways reflect the extant tensions about what constitutes good policing. This is a point that will be drawn out in subsequent chapters, and it will be reiterated regularly that a strictly managerial, unidirectional, efficacy-centred or goal-oriented view of public police work is inadequate for understanding police activity in a democratic society. The remainder of the book, in turn, cannot be understood properly outside the context of this central claim.
While remaining cognizant of the value of internal tension between police sections, the work of the public police is nonetheless in need of coordination to deal with emerging challenges. But the process of this coordination is also in need of in-depth examination. The ways in which police activity creates boundaries, coordinates priorities, and reorganizes actors to meet the dictates of this new era of policing and security will reshape the mandate of police work and the rules and norms guiding police organizations. While the networked aspects of policing today involve many non-police actors, public police still represent a central node in this picture. Comprehending the coordination between them must therefore be a foundational building block for a future police sociology.
Understanding Police Coordination Work
This text examines police coordination work. ‘Coordination work’ is a term that will feature significantly in the following chapters, and so it requires some brief elaboration here. ‘Coordination work’ refers to the work done by actors in police organizations to coordinate police activity between separate areas of police responsibility. The substance of that coordination – whether it involves tracking down a sexual predator in a nationwide search, harmonizing case files on a burglar who has been operating between districts, or determining reporting protocols between multiple units – is of less analytic importance here than the process by which the work is coordinated. Coordination work is about the determination of responsibilities, protocols, jurisdiction, and mandate between separate organizational components. Coordination work, in a sense, ultimately serves the goal of coordinated work. It is the foundation on which partnerships in policing are built and maintained or by which those partnerships disintegrate or fail to emerge.
The book progresses from three connected assertions regarding public police work in the 21st century. First, many public police organizations have recently adopted organizational initiatives specifically promoting inter-jurisdictional coordination and joint work between police. Yet, little is known about how and in what ways increased inter-organizational coordination represents change to police work and organization. Second, police officers work regularly with police officers from separate areas within their own organizations as well as with police from other organizations, yet there is only a limited sociological account of how this interactive work occurs. Finally, and arising out of these first two points, the coordination of police activities is relatively uncharted territory for police governance and accountability, yet the kinds of police activities that require complex coordination are often also the least visible and most threatening to liberal democratic values. Each of these assertions creates a concurrent research problem; these problems are addressed in stepwise fashion through the following chapters.
Police Coordination and Organizational Change
There are many competing claims regarding both what has (and has not) changed – and what is (and is not) changing – in public policing, and these will be examined in detail in Chapter 2. Owing to a longstanding if unofficial separation between organizational sociology and much police sociology, many of the extant claims in the police literature regarding what has changed in policing are not easily comparable. Chapter 2 thus introduces concepts that will make the subsequent findings comprehensible to both scholars of organization and of public police work. Chapter 2 will also outline the context and scope of efforts by police to coordinate with one another inter- and intra-nationally and will examine the basis for governance in these rearranged jurisdictions.
In Chapter 3, we will look at specific initiatives to coordinate police work in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia (BC), Canada. These initiatives will be examined in local historical and political contexts. The Lower Mainland provides the case study of police coordination work for this study. It was selected as an ideal site in which to study police coordination processes because it is a largely contiguous metropolitan population policed by at least 21 police agencies at any given time. Police at all levels within their organizations engage in intra- and inter-agency coordination on a daily basis in the Lower Mainland, providing multiple opportunities to witness and investigate coordination work for research. Police coordination is also a longstanding operational problem for police in the Lower Mainland in particular, which provided an informed and interested participant base.
Recent initiatives to improve coordination in BC – often characterized as ‘integration’ initiatives – have come about as a result of multiple external pressures, technological advances, failures in police work, and entrepreneurial police leaders. In Chapter 4, we will examine the narratives provided by senior participants in the study regarding why these integration initiatives have occurred and how the organization’s activities have recently changed both in response to pressures to integrate as well as broader aspects of changes in public police work. While this chapter will not be able to provide a definitive story that can satisfy the ongoing debates about what is changing in policing, it will provide insight into the views of organizational participants experiencing change. In turn, it will examine how these views can subsequently shape the possibilities for future change.
A Sociology of Police Coordination Work
The shape of organizational change surrounding coordination work arises from the line-level processes of coordination work. The degree to which police work is actually integrated or coordinated – in the Lower Mainland or elsewhere – is a matter for empirical inquiry. Certainly, the capacity for police to coordinate with one another has increased in recent years owing to technological advances and political incentives. However, the actual practice of police coordination is shaped by its acceptance and implementation on the front lines of police work.
Chapter 5 presents a typology of police organizational boundaries that emerged from the empirical findings in the Lower Mainland. It outlines a three-part typology of scarcity, proximity, and technical/systemic boundaries and further draws a distinction between physical and virtual boundaries. The typology provides a tool for understanding and describing police boundary work for future analysis and also provides a vocabulary for the remaining chapters. The chapter examines the police-work unit as its object of analysis and conceives of boundaries as sites of negotiation between units that occur when interstitial areas of police work arise. The central consequence of this view is that police officers at all levels within an organization may be thought of as boundary actors with both external and internal partners. As such, boundary negotiation among police organized into units relies much more on horizontal personal connections and informal1 activities than coherent hierarchical systems and clear responsibilities.
Chapter 6 moves to a more detailed examination of the dynamics of inter-unit negotiations, further unveiling a world of police activity that is often driven by asymmetric relations between internal units and between separate organizations. The scope of potential police activity is exceptionally wide even in democratic societies. The choice to organize this activity into units along these lines is among the primary factors that gives public police work the ability to be transparent, accountable, and coherent, insofar as organization through units limits discretion to specified areas of activities and identifies organizational priorities. This form of organization does not, however, guarantee transparency in operations nor accountability in distribution of resources. Not all police have the same power when negotiating with one another for resources, personnel, or information. Certain units must acquiesce while others may make demands in working to resolve police work files. The dynamics that guide police coordination are centrally important to understanding how increasing coordination of police work will affect the balance of future police activities.
A Governance Framework for Coordination
Integrated policing in Canada presents challenges for ‘developing effective forms of internal, public and political governance for this new type of distributed and de-centred policing operation’ (Murphy and McKenna 2007: 32), and this problem attends police-coordination work in other jurisdictions (ACPO 2010; Sheptycki 2002a). Police governance mechanisms are normally maintained at levels that accord with other jurisdictional governance mechanisms, such as local or national (or provincial or state) governments, yet integrated police work is neither local nor national in nature. Chapter 7 thus examines the problems integrated policing poses for governance, accountability, and transparency as police work becomes increasingly networked at all levels, beginning with the intra-national and trans-local. Many aspects of inter-unit work – its particular invisibility within and between organizations, its asymmetric nature, and its lack of meaningful legal and policy framework – present problems of governance over and control of police actors.
While control of police has never been uncomplicated or easy, the increasing trans-locality of police work can only serve to exacerbate issues of accountability, transparency, and legality in inter-unit and multi-jurisdictional police work. Chapter 7 develops an intellectual framework to which questions of governance can be posed. It is argued that while coordination work presents novel ethical problems for police under novel jurisdictional and administrative spaces, it also presents opportunities for positive developments in a contested field of activity. The book concludes with an outline for a research agenda examining inter-unit interactions within and between public police forces locally, nationally, and internationally.
This study will not provide guidelines for rearranging police work to make it somehow better. It is not a study about how to manage police coordination or minimize transaction costs between units in the name of efficiency alone. It will certainly imply some dos and don’ts along the way, but it will not provide a framework for solving police-coordination problems where they arise. The arrangement of police resources is ultimately a political question, and police organizations with imperfect coordination processes may be perfectly appropriate in a democratic system. The following evidence and analysis will provide a framework for understanding coordination problems sociologically, which is to say, as things arising out of complex social interaction. The book will thus provide some tools with which one may map and chart these interactions and considerations regarding the normative and practical issues that can arise out of various arrangements of police actors.
Researching Coordination
In many ways an examination of police coordination is a simple problem to identify in the literature and has been implicitly or explicitly noted as a research gap by recent significant works (e.g., Bowling and Sheptycki 2012; Brodeur 2010). However, it is rather hard to research empirically. While some police agencies are fundamentally inter-jurisdictional in nature and so would have represented continuous opportunities to investigate coordination work, it seemed more important as a foundational matter to develop an account of coordination work inside traditional public police organizations before looking at practices within, for example, federal police teams or INTERPOL. The research therefore targeted organizations that at minimum included uniform patrol and criminal investigation functions over a set sub-national geographic area.
While contemporary police sociology accepts that public police organizations are among a group of actors in a network of other public- and private-sector competitors and collaborators, most public police work remains fundamentally local in nature. However global the resource and information base of modern police work, public police activities remain largely – though not entirely – focused on individual geographic jurisdictions. Inter-jurisdictional coordination in policing, while certainly on the increase on a global scale, is still relatively rare in the day-to-day activities of public police officers. The project thus required identifying a research site that would provide practical opportunities to observe regular coordination work and where most research participants would have engaged in coordination with other police with enough regularity to offer thoughtful commentar...
