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Asking the Right Questions: What Are Police Officers For?
The semester has ended, and I have time to do some writing. For some time I’ve been pondering whether Americans generally, and conservatives in particular, are asking the right questions about life in the 21st century. In this series I’ll be looking at different policies and areas of life and asking -are we really thinking about these issues the right way? Today’s installment is about what we need the police for and how that should influence the way we think about police.
Nominally, this line of thought is provoked by the botched raid in Louisville, where Breonna Taylor – an EMT – was shot and killed by police officers searching the wrong house for drugs from a person who had already been arrested. Really, it’s a disaster, and the family is probably morally owed a huge amount of compensation for that screw-up (whatever the law actually says). However, the question is much larger than this particular case. Discussions of the police often bog down in the details of the use of force policies, opinions of drug prohibition, use of surplus military equipment, qualified immunity, and overall discussion of the “warrior cop” ethos. These are all, however, technical questions. The actual question is what we want the police to achieve so that we can answer the technical questions to suit that aim.
Police officers do a lot of things, and I imagine if you asked police officers what they do, you might get a lot of different answers that all fit under “police officer.” I’d like to suggest a few such goals:
Police enforce the law
Police keep the peace
Police protect the people
This is a non-exhaustive list, of course. A few moments’ consideration, though, should reveal that these tasks are hopelessly vague, and potentially even contradictory. Enforcement of the law doesn’t tell us what the best way to enforce the law is. Should police offer warnings to people who speed, or ticket everyone? Should they de-escalate domestic disputes or arrest a perpetrator? Who are the police protecting the people from? I’m not saying these questions don’t have answers, I am saying that the actual content of the goals awaits substance that is not contained in the uplifting language.
I’ve used the term “goals” advisedly -as James Q. Wilson argues that when members of a bureaucracy have unclear goals, they tend to define themselves by their task -the things they do that ostensibly achieve those goals. What are some tasks of the police?
Lots of paperwork, often for oversight purposes
Arrest criminals
Investigate crimes
Patrol neighborhoods
Some of these tasks may subdivide -serving a warrant for example may be part of investigating and arresting, and involves a lot of paperwork for oversight. The problem, as Wilson argues, is that once an agency or worker is defining themselves by the task, the larger goal of the organization may be lost. Looking at the case of Breonna Taylor, the proximate cause of her death was police officers shooting blindly into an apartment to protect themselves from gunfire coming from inside. The gunfire was coming from inside because the police officers didn’t announce themselves when they broke in the door with a battering ram. They didn’t announce themselves because, as the warrant helpfully stated “due to the nature of how these drug traffickers operate.”
No-knock warrants are issued in the belief that knock and announce would give drug traffickers time to destroy evidence, and so the otherwise violation of the 5th Amendment’s warrants requirement is waived to prevent the destruction of evidence. In fairness, preventing the destruction of evidence is one of the exigencies of 5th Amendment jurisprudence, though the case of the no-knock warrant is complicated by the fact the proximate cause of the evidence destruction hasn’t happened at the time the warrant is served.
Regardless, this analysis of the police department’s behavior is consistent with the department’s tasks – but its connection to the goals of protecting the people and keeping the peace are lacking. It is consistent with the goal of enforcing the law, but this then suggests we don’t really think the goal of the police is to keep the peace or to protect the people. The police are strictly the muscle at the end of government.
This analysis can be repeated for other cases, such as using enforcement of traffic laws to fund government but as a demonstration, it isn’t a wildly inaccurate characterization of how we, politically, think of police – I note the common line in conservative discussion that every law is ultimately backed up by the force of a gun-wielded by police officers.
So do we want the police to predominantly be enforcers of the law? It makes civilian/police relationships automatically fraught – because the police are enforcers, talking to the police is like talking to the enforcers of the local gang – or if you’d prefer a less friendly comparison: the IRS. A lot of police behavior is built around control and intimidation, which makes sense if we conceive of the goal primarily as enforcement. It slants the way we think of the tasks. Why does an enforcement agency patrol? To find crime. Why does an enforcement agency arrest? To punish criminals. Why does an enforcement agency investigate?
Thinking of the police as enforcers encourages us to write policies in certain ways. If the police are predominantly enforcers, then it makes sense to arm and equip officers like paramilitaries. After all, they are the enforcement arm, and need to be equipped that way. It affects the way we think of ancillary tasks -designing equipment and tactics around force protection and risk minimization. It also encourages a certain us-vs-them mentality in thinking about police, because we generally think of enforcement as being done for us on them, and so protecting and backing the police becomes a necessity for defending us from… whoever them is. And it probably explains the proliferation of SWAT teams to every federal agency that can justify it – including the Department of Education. After all, law enforcement is an enforcement agency.
Furthermore, it would affect the way we, as the political body, would try to control the police force. In the US, we see repeatedly that enforcement agencies are actually given very little discretion or authority, and are used as very blunt instruments. Wilson compared American OSHA inspectors to their Scandinavian equivalents – and American inspectors are treated as enforcement agents, have a generally adversarial relationship with business owners, and because of corruption and abuse concerns, the laws governing their behavior are written to minimize discretion and encourage what is admitted by all to be stupid enforcement decisions because the stupid behavior is easily visible, which makes oversight easier. We treat OSHA as an adjunct of the criminal justice system, with the emphasis on the enforcement being non-arbitrary, at the cost of it often being stupid. Scandinavian countries, by contrast, treat their inspectors more like Americans treat the housing inspectors they hire before purchasing a house. The inspector is a trusted professional who is going to make your business safer and see things you might not see.
There is evidence of this kind of “enforcement” thinking in law enforcement. For most of American history, laws were enforced by sheriffs, constables, and marshals -elected or directly appointed positions. By virtue of the appointment or election, these officials would have had great discretion and authority -which they used, for example, to resist the Fugitive Slave Act in Michigan. The check on their power was re-election. On paper, elected sheriffs still have a great deal of discretion in how the law is enforced. But in reality, day to day law enforcement is carried out not by officials, but by officers. Officers who are trained, and whose discretion is curtailed, by the training and the laws from which they derive their power. Here in Kentucky, we still have elected constables, but their power as elected law enforcement officials has been gradually whittled away unless they submit to the same limitations imposed on non-elected officers. And what followed that change in the 20th century was the gradual tightening of discretion. Officers have to fill out all the paperwork to make sure they don’t go beyond their authority. Officers have official or unofficial quotas of enforcement actions. Officers are not given discretion on whether to arrest when called to a domestic dispute, or when breaking up a fight at a bar. And because officers are not given that kind of discretion, when things go wrong, they can hardly be held accountable for it – whence rises qualified immunity.
These are characteristic of enforcement-first thinking.
But this is not the only way to think of police. Here I think criticisms like Rise of the Warrior Cop miss the point. If we got rid of the war on drugs tomorrow, warrior cops wouldn’t go anywhere, because the warrior cop is the result of an enforcement mindset (if I had to guess – probably anchored in the same place as the administrative state). Three Felonies A Day is closer to the mark in describing a world where everything is about a rule and enforcement. And if you are thinking about enforcement, eventually you pull out the “at the barrel of a gun” line.
And yet, for most of American history that isn’t how police operated. Keeping the peace and protecting the public did not require police to stringently enforce laws or go looking for crimes. The original purpose of patrolling was not to seek out crime or suppress crime -it was to have the police at specific places on a set timetable so that if people needed to talk to a police officer, they knew where to find them. Police officers were a local source of the local government’s authority, and could use that authority as they saw fit. This has a massive upside -it means police officers have a lot more tools available to them to solve problems in a way that keeps the peace. It also has downsides. There’s probably a limit to the number of people per officer that can be sustained. I sometimes wonder if the switch to suppression tactics wasn’t as much driven by population growth and urbanization as it was responding to the crime wave and judicial errors of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. We’d need a lot more police officers.
And that power could also be abused. I suspect, actually, that the police get a bad rap for this. I’d be very interested if there’s evidence that pre-1990s police abuse of power was actually in opposition to the will of the politicians they served. How many racist cops in the 1960s were actually acting against the orders – explicit or implicit – of the governments they served? How many coerced confessions from the poor or unpopular were really the result of personal biases, rather than the unspoken (or likely as not spoken) desires of the communities they served?
In theory, professionalization and shift to enforcement could have eliminated or reduced the scope of abuse. Again, in the US, there’s evidence that everyone involved in making policy knows that the way we do enforcement is blunt, ugly, inefficient, and downright stupid. We do it that way because we lack the social trust of Scandinavian countries, and therefore need to have enforcement be obvious and visible and copiously documented. Alas, the stupid has come to outweigh the benefits. And also, police enforcement still feels arbitrary because police -professional, bureaucratic, or elected – are all as likely to abuse people in an enforcement paradigm because that is what the public that supports them demands; so we aren’t even getting the primary benefit – consistency – of an enforcement model.
Now I don’t actually have a solution to this problem. But as I said at the top – it’s important we think about the right questions. What do we want police officers to do? Maybe in a country as large and diverse as the US, enforcement really is the only job we can give to the police. But I would like to suggest a few final thoughts:
1.) shifting police away from an enforcement framework and towards a peacekeeping framework will probably result in less abuse now than it did in the 1950s and 1960s. I suspect the issue then was that the people being enforced against were not politically included in their communities. Hence the importance in the period of cities like Atlanta having black police sergeants stems from having black community members integrated into the police force as a method of reducing police bias. Black police sergeants would not racistly come down on fellow African-Americans. In the enforcement environment, though, because officers’ discretion is much reduced, black, white and Hispanic police officers are all required to come down hard on anyone who is “them.” (This was, in fact, one of the potential reasons that the South professionalized its police forces so early: professional police were much better at enforcing Jim Crow.) I’ve heard it often said that more good work could be done by a police officer straightening out a young hoodlum than by arresting the same. In 1960, maybe a black police sergeant could do that. Today, I doubt a black officer of any rank could get away with it.
2.) good policing may be expensive policing. This is true many ways. A lot of policing in our current model is highly capital intensive -surveillance, patrol cars, 911 dispatch systems, and the like are expensive in their own right, but the most expensive part of policing is still the body in the uniform. In order to do more fine-grained policework, we’re going to need a lot more police officers. Paychecks are more expensive than computers.
3.) and my really controversial thought: if we conceive of the police officer more as a peacekeeper than an enforcer, we may have to accept more police being injured or killed in the line of duty. Part of moving away from enforcement means that police officers will actually need to interact with a lot of the public as partners and neighbors, not as police and suspects, or police and witnesses, or police and bystanders. By necessity, that means police will need to spend more time with their guards down. We should get better results from this – ranging from fewer officer-involved shootings to a more general trust of the police and more crimes and crime-like problems being reported. But the price is that a criminal will have more opportunity to get the drop on a police officer.
4.) Finally, given the work I do, I have a number of contacts on various police forces, and conversations with them inform a lot of these ideas. One of the things I note is a massive disconnect between how police officers see their job, and how we politically talk about the job. This idea of police as peacekeeper comes from talking to some officers in my classes talking about how their mentors thought about the job (these are usually the older students, so their mentors were police roughly 40 years ago). And the enforcement mentality comes from talking to other police officers who really did see themselves as armed bureaucrats (these are the younger students, often only just now going to the academy). At minimum, this disconnect between how older and younger police officers see their job, and how police officers generally see their job and the general public and political leadership see the job, is a serious problem in its own right.
Published in Policing
One of my closest friends was the division captain in charge of a drug SWAT team. One time, they actually did hit the wrong house and roused an elderly couple from their sleep. Nonetheless, the story had a happy ending. After my friend apologized profusely and explained what they were doing, the couple told him, “Yeah, we were hoping the police would get rid of those druggies.” They gave my friend the correct address and the raid went on as planned.
But I’m starting to have a negative view of raids. It’s bad enough when the wrong house is attacked and a tragedy occurs (I know I’d respond to loud noises downstairs with a firearm in my hand), but now they’re used for political purposes to put fear in the minds of politically incorrect people . . .
I can see why this might be controversial. The first thing that comes to mind: what if I’m not interested in having “partners”, especially ones chosen by someone else? I already have neighbors (many of them police officers actually), and I already interact with those I wish to interact with. That’s not to say I favor all antagonism all the time; CAPS or whatever local community policing programs are useful. Aside from what is already widely practiced, what do you have in mind? I understand letting your guard down at the monthly CAPS meeting, but letting your guard down on patrol is probably unwise and undesired. I want my neighbors to come home from this job.
The second thing that comes to mind: peace is easy. Surrender. I understand that not all approaches are appropriate for all communities. However, in many places peace isn’t exactly the default state. Where peace is the default state, is that the place where we see the bulk of encounters and errors? Much like the mistakes made in Iraq, a basic level of peace and safety is a prerequisite to trust and partnership.
The third thing that comes to mind: if you’re suggesting that encounters increase, and and not necessarily with some kind of predicate (especially with guards down), then indeed the price might be increased injury/death in the line of duty. Maybe we (society) can accept that as long as we also accept the other side of the tradeoff: increased instances of arbitrary exercise of authority. If keeping the peace is the primary goal then that often means imposing peace. Often that can work out justly, sometimes it will be capricious or malicious. Officer O’Reilly in the old days was basically a good guy who looked out for the neighborhood and was a good judge of character; sometimes that mean rousting or thumping some ner-do-wells. If we’re empowering police to keep the peace, sometimes that means telling partners to turn their music down or move along even if there’s not a law obliging them to because the peace might require it. If a partner declines the friendly suggestions of his partner and neighbor – then what? Personally, I prefer that the cops leave me be until it’s time to enforce a law or help me to resolve a complaint I couldn’t resolve on my own which is threatening to break the peace.
I’m thinking particularly of this story: “I Don’t Want to Shoot You, Brother.” A man going through a very bad breakup goes outside to attract the attention of the police, waive a gun at them, and get the police to kill him. The first officer to arrive recognizes that the person he’s dealing with is trying to commit suicide, and tries to talk him down. Two more officers arrive on the scene, see the gun, and shoot the man. The first officer is then fired. I’m thinking also of incidents like the Tamir Rice shooting -where officers rolled up and started shooting almost immediately at a person with a toy gun (with the orange safety lining removed). And other cases where multiple officers show up and shout confusing directions which result in the person being detained getting shot for -among other things trying not to trip over a belt when told to stand up.
I’m saying we should discuss officers being a lot less fast on the trigger in instances like these because the police should be a life-saving organization -but that also means that on occasion the police will come up on a person who really does want to shoot someone, mistake it for being a suicide by cop, and the result is that more cops -on the margin -will be shot. But if a third of all officer-involved shootings are suicide-by-cop, then this means that officers are shooting a lot more than they really ought to.
This is pretty much what I’m saying we should talk about.
I don’t disagree with this -but my conversations with police, and read of the police blotter is that there isn’t a whole lot of the “resolve a complaint I couldn’t resolve on my own which is threatening to break the peace” going on anymore. Everything is getting dragged into the “enforce the law” paradigm. And as I noted -there’s a generational divide here. I hear a lot more “resolve complaints” from the cops in their 40s than the cops in their 20s.
Shooting people is also easy. I’m saying we are looking for easy and cheap solutions -and the result is let some places go to hell and shoot up others. I’d like us to consider other options.
I don’t see that it has to be either or. Yes, don’t be so fast on the trigger; yes be willing to provide cover for an officer handling a situation and don’t just come in and start shooting regardless (assuming that’s a fair description of what happened); no don’t let your guard down in apparently dangerous situations.
However, I fundamentally disagree that an officer should be expected to trade his life for that of an unstable person looking to commit suicide. It would not keep the peace for a solid family man to trade his life for such a person – it would compound the misery.
For those committing suicide by cop: I feel for them, but I can’t fix them. Such people can be dangers to themselves and others, and I believe the cop’s bigger responsibility is to protect others (including the cop’s own life).
Expensive, indeed, especially when you factor in the extraordinarily generous pensions. A real success for the police unions.
Here is another police union success: Fired Parkland deputy to be reinstated with back pay
That is high compensation for hiding in the parking lot during a school shooting.
That is a way to think about it, but it is not obviously the right way. Why should we value the police officer’s life higher than the lives of the many more suicidal people police officers confront? I suspect more mentally unstable people are shot by police officers than police officers are shot by the mentally unstable -again, if the estimate of 1/3 of all officer involved shootings are actually suicide attempts. Why should we not expect people who put on the badge to accept that risk?
More to the point, the logic you are describing perfectly excuses the four officers who hid in their cars during the Stoneman shooting, unless we make a distinction between crazy people (them -people we are allowed to shoot) and students (us, people we aren’t allowed to shoot). And that kind of “us vs. them” policing is part of the problem I think we really need to talk about. The logic also justifies the “no, police do not have to save your life, or intervene to stop a crime happening…” court decisions, which again calls into question the idea that the police are anything other than armed revenue officers -since “peacekeeping” can’t be guaranteed to get them to do their jobs, but city revenue can.
And again, this is the question we need to really talk about: what is a police officer’s job? And what does it mean to do that job? Should police officers be expected to risk death and injury for suicidal people? Should they risk death and injury for children? And we should actually answer these questions, not just assume the answers.
I hear the same, except that I hear the “resolve complaints” bit more from retirees and short timers than rookies. Even they are jaded, though, and they understand perfectly well why that’s the case. Because police are often a mirror of the citizenry and political structure. Not necessarily in the sense of racial or gender quotas, but in the sense that police are mostly a reactionary force. Police are there when something is wrong, What is the attitude of citizenry to law, community, peace, and police in general? Do politicians and superior officers have the back of officers or will they get thrown under the bus faster than yesterday’s bus transfer slips (from back when they used paper slips)?
Police want to help people. They want to resolve complaints. More and more, though, police are getting squeezed at both ends. Where they’re not getting squeezed is where the citizenry already respects law, order, community and where the power structure stands by its officers and understands the nuance and distinctions involved.
Are there alternative options on the table? Are the places where those options might work also the places where there’s a police problem to be solved?
I meant to respond to this part earlier. That doesn’t follow. Just because someone primarily wants to commit suicide doesn’t mean they aren’t a threat to others. Cops should protect the community; cops have a right to self defense too.
If a third of all officer involved shootings are suicide by cop, that only means that there are some seriously troubled people out there. Perhaps what it means is that we need to readdress how we handle mental illness – was closing the county facilities always a good idea?
Hold on, I didn’t say that a police officer’s life has more value than anyone else’s. The lives of my police officer friends and neighbors have more value to me than some random mentally ill person, though. It’s not a general axiom.
Nor should we value police lives less than others by asking them to take unnecessary risk with themselves or others. Police officers do accept risk. Inherently. What is the benefit to whom in asking them to accept more risk than they already do?
I don’t know what you’re talking about here. My logic is not that the life of an officer is the highest priority.
In order:
To some reasonable extent. They should not be expected to take a self inflicted bullet. If no one else it at risk, the cop has a right to self defense too.
Yes.
Please comment on the police behavior at the Parkland school shootings.
Why?
Because it is relevant to the attitude that police are not responsible for helping others… and that it was done in a pernicious way by taking place in a location where the victims were forcibly unarmed by the government itself.
It absolutely is necessary, even as simply law enforcement officers, that they shield unarmed masses that their agents made unarmed.
To Sabr’s question, I think my idea of police is shepherd.
The Breonna Taylor case looks more complicated than that complaint indicated. As usual, it’s hard to tell how to believe. I’m not going to parse this one in extreme detail, but the details appear complicated.
I found a news report (USA Today, here) saying that the police had a no-knock warrant for the location, which named her boyfriend Kenneth Walker at this location, as well as two other men. A news report stated that the police claimed that they did knock-and-announce. I did find this strange, in the case of a no-knock warrant, but I don’t know police practice in this regard. News reports state that Walker both called 911 and fired on the intruders — the lawsuit seems to only state the former.
The sequence seems confused. The lawsuit claims that Taylor and Walker were asleep, and were awakened by their unannounced entry. But the USA Today article says that Walker shot one of the officers as he came through the door.
Crump appears to be a lawyer for either Walker or the Taylor family (not for the cops). It’s hard to see how a man who was peacefully sleeping in bed when the police broke down his door and stormed in — without knocking or announcing their presence — could have reacted quickly enough to shoot one of the officers as he was still coming through the door.
The USA Today article reports a claim that the police were at the scene for 3 minutes before one was shot by Walker. If it’s true that the officer was coming through the door, that creates more possibility for a knock-and-announce.
This looks like a gunfight, initiated by the target of a warrant.
I don’t yet know enough to determine who is telling the truth. I’m not prepared to get fully on board with the idea that the police can’t vigorously fight violent drug crime. In this case, it is possible that Walker was an innocent guy — but there was enough evidence to get a warrant against him. Most of the evidence seems related to association with a man named Jamarcus Glover — there were indications that a car owned by Walker was parked at a drug house run by Glover, and that Glover received mail and stashed drugs at Walker’s house.
The claim that police were looking for Glover, not Walker, is contradicted by the USA Today story. Both were on the warrant. It may be that Glover was the principal target of the investigation.
[Cont’d]
I’m sorry but that seems to me to be a bizarre response.
What is a police officer’s job?
To enforce minor violations, within reason.
To patrol and be a deterrent to crime.
To interdict a crime in progress.
And to make things right: to return things that have been stolen, and help prosecute the thief.
Civil asset forfeiture:
This violate three commands of God; Jesus was asked by soldiers, What about us? In other words, What must we do to be saved? Jesus said the the soldier: Don’t make false accusations; don’t take what is not yours; and be content with your wages. The Ten Commandments say the same: to not bear false witness; not not steal; and not to covet what is not yours.
1) The money taken by police is charged with a crime, even though the owner is not. This is legal ice skating. Money can’t commit a crime. And to accuse the money is, come on, really, to accuse the person who is possessing it, without technically accusing him and without giving him his day in court to defend himself.
This violates the commandments not to make a false accusation.
2) Money is taken regardless of the evidence or the facts. The money is taken, apart from any evidence that the money is not legitimately owned by the one from whom it is taken.
This violates the commandments not to steal, and not to take what is not yours.
3) Money taken by police is used to augment police budgets, including salaries.
This violates the commandments not to covet that which belongs to others, and to be content with your wages.
But civil asset forfeiture is the height of bureaucratic policing.
Who has that attitude?
Could be apt in some ways. Could be overstep in others.
From all of the reports, it appears to be a terrible tragedy that Breonna Taylor died in this incident.
I haven’t seen any indication that she, personally, did anything wrong, other than living with Walker (if he was a drug criminal) and previously dating Glover (if he was a drug criminal). There were warrants issued for 2 locations, and Glover was apparently arrested at the other location, at which the USA Today story reports that multiple types of drugs were found.
So this could be a terrible case of mistaken identity. It is apparently not a case of the police going to the wrong location — they had warrants for both locations.
Another possibility is that Breonna Taylor, while an honest EMT herself, was living with a boyfriend who was a drug dealer or at least an associate of drug dealers.
The cops who sat in their cars while kids were getting shot. And then got a couple year’s back pay.
And it’s not just Parkland — we saw the same thing twenty years ago with Columbine. The cops who respond think it’s more important to go home safe than to make sure the kids and teachers do so. They may not be representative of the average cop, but they definitely exist.
It seems to me to be a bizarre request.
Assuming that actually is the attitude of those cops, what does that have to do with me?
Because it appeared you were arguing that those cowards acted appropriately. You’ve since clarified that’s not what you meant, but it appears I wasn’t the only one who misunderstood what you.