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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
Thanks for looking into that Jerry. In my experience on this general topic, it always comes down to details. A case is used as an example of the countless cases that might support some conclusion. Problem is that the case is often not nearly as clear as framed: sometimes facts are in dispute, facts might be solid but conclusions diverge, or perhaps it’s just unclear. That’s before we get to teh problem of an anecdote not being data.
I never mentioned them. I never said cops shouldn’t protect people. I never said that cop safety was the highest priority. I’m not sure where the misunderstanding comes in.
The police have a duty to die to defend the citizens. They want to be warrior cops? Act like it, and do their duty.
I believe the police do not exist to protect the people at.
They are not used that way. All cops are not enemies of the people. More and more though seem to be moving that way.
This sounds very much like you think police are a superior class of people who are worth more than others. Now, maybe you don’t put them at the top of the status chart, and instead rank people as mentally ill < cops < kids. At the same time, the mindset of “a police officer’s life is not a fair trade for that of a mentally ill person” fits in neatly with the legal precedents that allow cops to not interfere with crimes they see committed and the union protection that safeguards the pay of cops who stood by while kids get shot, to suggest that cops really are a privileged class.
My take: with great power comes great responsibility. Police officers are given the right to use deadly force, and they face far more protection and fewer consequences when they do so. The flip side is that they are supposed to lay their lives on the line for the protection of others. Any cop not willing to do so is just a bully with a gun. That’s what my ex-cop dad taught me about an officer’s responsibility.
This X 1000
Wow, that’s crazy. All of those quotes were talking about either specific people (my neighbors) or specific circumstances (suicide by cop). Why would you generalize like that or think that encompassed hiding out while children die?
I’ll leave you all to the discussion. Good night
So, I don’t believe the cops, either. There have been too many CYA incidents where cops screw up and then race to cover up their mistakes by blaming the person they shot. But in this case it doesn’t even matter. There was no reason, other than the BS “you know these types” given to do a predawn no-knock raid. Arrest him on the street, or do the raid in daylight. The reason to do these raids isn’t to protect anyone other than the cops – and it has been known literally longer than the US has existed that it is far more dangerous to serve a warrant in darkness. So much so that there was a time it was explicitly not allowed, and if the suspect shot the sheriff, it was the sheriff’s own fault for going under cover of darkness like a burglar.
Police.
Breonna Taylor’s name was on the warrant, along with her boyfriend’s name, and another suspect. Two locations were involved in the warrant. The police did not go to the wrong address.
Like any other incident there are a specific set of circumstances that are unique to each incident. The best source of information is in a Grand Jury transcript, and the trial transcript. This is why you have an investigation, and avoid social media, as well as media accounts. Right now attorneys for Breonna Taylor’s family are pushing their own narrative.
I don’t know how the incident played out, and no one else really knows what exactly happened, to include why the warrant was obtained. I know that people want instant answers, and no one will read the actual transcripts, to include the media when a transcript of the investigation comes out. They can be hundreds of pages long, and there is a risk of disappointment for those that chose one side or the other before the investigation is complete.
It sounds like the police are on a continuum where ideally we have Sheriff Andy Taylor, and we worry about getting Judge Dredd. The key is to figure out how to get police more to the Andy Taylor end, but how does the population that must be dealt with can allow that.
Gang violence aside, addressing how we handle mental illness in this country could fix a lot of problems from suicide to gun violence.
As for gang violence, the only thing I can think of is a huge police presence in affected areas.
I want to be abundantly clear: I do not care.
The job of the police was to take both of them into custody alive and without incident. The method they chose is pretty much calculated to involve incidents, and has a high risk of someone not coming out of it alive. This is an abysmal failure, and if they followed the letter of the law that is a failure of the law and the policies. And this happens with sufficient frequency that it actually does call into question whether the police think of their job as protecting people, or if they think their job is collecting evidence for the administrative state and bodies don’t make that job harder, so why should we put effort into preventing deaths?
This reflects my sentiments. Everything police do now is designed to make their lives safer and easier. As someone who has a lifetime in behavioral healthcare, I cannot imagine that mindset. Everything we do is to make the patients safer even as we are at risk. And we sure don’t get paid as well, with fancy pensions and retire at 20 years. Now, we do it because we love it and there is a risk. None of us signed up to get shot at. The police did.
It is clear that in 2020, the police are more interested in what is safe and easy. Pulling over rich people for speeding for instance.
All you have to do is watch body can footage on the internet to see police using their power to bully others. Meanwhile, they don’t even bother to investigate a car broken into in my neighborhood. However, if I chased that theif down, I have no doubt I would be prosecuted.
This is not protecting the people. It is not even maintaining order. It is doing a job and going home. It is not public service, it is serving political masters.
Of all the police videos that stir up my ire, this is the one that I remember the most. Police are shining a light in his house at midnight. The homeowner is awakened and comes downstairs carrying a gun. And he’s shot. (The police lied at first about the man pointing his gun.) But the callous arrogance of the cop while the homeowner is pleading for an ambulance and asking why he shot him is unforgettable.
See the Youtube video “Bodycam video refutes police claim that a deputy shot a man who opened his door and aimed a gun”.
Yeah… so do I have the right to protect my home from intruders? Or not?
Not?
I’d love to hear @dougwatt and @edg answer.
In Canada, the police forced someone in a Storm Trooper outfit on May 4th to the ground. Clearly in Costume.
The list of stupid actions goes on and one. The police cannot be allowed to make mistakes without consequenses when they have all the power. They are allowed to shoot people and walk away. It is only rarely that they are actually sucessfully held accountable. Until that happens, “enforcement” is a means to bully. I don’t want to depend on individual cops to be good apples. The whole system, top to bottom, is broken.
This should be promoted! This will be promoted! Thanks for writing this Sabrdance, interesting to follow the conversation, too-
Presumably the laws they are enforcing are supposed to keep the peace and protect people – the police officers are merely the enforcement arm of that. If there’s a problem, maybe the fault is in the laws themselves and not the police.
That’s not exactly fair to the police at Columbine. Protocol at the time was to treat those types of things as a hostage situation – secure the scene, see what the perpetrators wanted.
It was in the wake of Columbine that it was realized that sometimes the perps just wanted to kill people, and you’d better get in there and put a stop to it, that protocols changed.
The guy that shot up the theater in Colorado some years ago was also in costume.
This applies not only to police officers but to the corruption of Western cultures in general.
In eagerness to “immanentize the escheton” (to make a heaven on earth), our increasingly materialist and whimsical societies, unmoored from history and tradition, seek to organize society by spreadsheet and flow chart. There is a shift from concepts like original sin (irreparable human nature) to attempted elimination of evils by legal structures and corporate rule making.
Culture has been overtaken by theorists who fail to respect the limited practicality of intricate prescriptions, the harsh reality of unpredictable dynamics and unsatisfying tradeoffs. They do not accept the relevance of local or anecdotal knowledge, nor the relevance of relationships, nor the centrality of free will; so they do not accept the necessity of individual discretion.
When you try to program human beings as if they were robots, the animal and the spiritual keep mucking things up. Subsidiarity doesn’t offer perfection — nothing does — but it is a key element of social prosperity.
The most fundamental function of government is common protection against predation. Aggression comes from without (conquerors, raiders) and from within (thieves, rapists, murderers, thugs, etc). Police were established to distinguish sanctioned violence against foreign predators from force against domestic predators.
Proliferation of niggling regulations is a primary cause of police misdirection. When every citizen is in danger of breaking laws by accident or without malice, then police are directed away from obvious and habitual predators toward the path of least resistance: submissive, considerate citizens.
When police do focus on actual predators, their victories are short-lived because of the soft, stupid tolerance of evils by affluent, impractical societies. Our penal system is more a time-out than a terror, more apt to house criminals than to end their criminality, etc.
Then there’s the sclerotic judicial system.
My point is that there are many simultaneous dilemmas that influence police priorities and policies. There is a general corruption in Western societies in this late stage of affluence which piles on reasons to act against our best interests.
Nice picture, but use care. The space in question is not one-dimensional. It would also be a mistake to assume it’s continuous everywhere.
Yep. Before 9/11/01, we had forty years of learning how to deal with airliner hijackings: sit back and expect a brief visit to Havana. Then it changed forever. Columbine changed the “secure the buildings” protocol.
The police most emphatically DO NOT protect the people, and there is very solid case law upholding that they have absolutely no obligation or responsibility to protect the people. So, take that one right off of your list.
That’s insanity. We do not expect anyone outside of the Secret Service to die for others. It is not even EMTs and firefighters duty to die to protect others. If a firefighter judges that he cannot save someone without dying in the process, he is not going to be punished for not sacrificing his life. There is a vast canyon of difference between being expected to risk your life in the course of your duties, and being expected to die so that another might live. It’s saying that your life is explicitly worth less than any other.
If you expect any police officers to sign up to a job where they have less self-defense rights than they did before agreeing to the job, and are expected to encounter armed criminals, you are horribly mistaken.
Okay, let’s talk about the question of the police. Police are the only people empowered to take criminals to jail. I can do a citizens arrest, but the police need to take them to jail. The primary focus of the police has to include law enforcement. Secondary to this, police should have an expectation to apprehend violent criminals that they are aware. You might let the kids smoking joints or the guy ran a red light off with a warning, but when bullets are flying, you are expected to run toward the gunfire and take action to stop the crime.
As far as keeping the peace, I do not see how that would work without much, much more trust in officers and common social norms. In my day job, we had to work hard to get trust as safety professionals. I think there is a mindset shift between reducing crime and enforcing the law. For example, if I call OSHA, and ask if X at my workplace in compliance, I may be told that it is a violation. However, I would not expect to be cited for it or have an inspector show up right away. I approached them in good faith, so I have a chance to correct the problem on my own. Imagine, being able to ask police simple legal questions safely, or be allowed to correct more technical / accidental violations of the law. I’d imagine if I approached @dougwatt or other Ricochetti police officers, they would already do this.
I think it’s important to step back and think about the law vs. professional standards. Legal duties are a big deal. They are things you can go to jail for breaking. On the other side, we have professional expectations. I think a lot of the elements of protecting the public and keeping the peace fall under professional expectations. (Skyler is 100% correct that the police do not have a duty to protect you unless you are in their custody.) So, I do not think the Broward Coward should have faced criminal punishment, but he should have lost his job and his pension after the investigation. Ideally, he should have been permanently stripped of his status as a sworn officer.
Something that I think you miss @sabrdance is the roles of the Constitution in all of this. It should be made clear that police officers have a duty to disobey orders that violate the Constitution, just like soldiers have the duty to disobey to unlawful orders. Fundamentally, police can only enforce the law if they obey the law. Also, do you have a reference on patrols not being a search for crime in progress?
I was with you until you got to this part. The case of the Broward officer at the school shooting is different (in my mind) because he was explicitly assigned to the school, presumably for just such an occasion. He wasn’t just a patrol officer called to the scene. There’s a higher level of culpability. I don’t know if it’s a legal difference, but it’s a moral difference. To fail to respond appropriately is similar to being a sentry who abandons his post.