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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
Boy you folks can really fog an issue. What do we want police to achieve? Is that really the question? The only thing you folks know is she’s dead. I suggest a much more narrow focus, much more thought and a little less showing each other how smart you are. As a patrol supervisor, my concern was police behavior and my being in the right place to influence that behavior.
Every police officer I’ve ever asked about why they do patrols. They’re fairly open about how suppression patrols work. They are “looking” for crime in the sense that if they see something suspicious they will investigate, but they don’t think the patrol “failed” if they don’t see suspicious activity. The point is to show the flag.
There is an academic literature on it -I think James Q. Wilson discussed it (possibly in the original Broken Windows article). It’s well enough known that the first hit on google scholar for “Police Crime Suppression Patrols” talks about it.
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A great deal of the professional respect given to firefighters and police is predicated on the expectation that they will risk death to save others. Some first responders are quite up front about this -leading to the Coast Guard’s famous “You have to go out. You don’t have to come back” informal motto. This expectation is also probably what undergirded Lyman Stone’s crack a few days ago about “putting police under military law,” if they want to be warriors; as doing so would -among other things -make cowardice an offense (more directly, it would make work slowdowns mutiny).
We don’t say a soldier’s life is worth less than a civilian -but we do expect soldiers to die in defense of them.
Have you had this experience? I ask because, my read of the Occupational Safety literature, and my one experience with dealing with OSHA (fire pole in the city fire department) is that I would not take this bet.
Yes. That is the question. What am I paying your officers to do? What do you mean “police behavior?”
It is the job of the military to fight the enemy and protect the citizen. Same for the police if they want to be paramilitary. Risk is part of the job. I expect that yes, the police put their lives on the line to protect citizens. And this is not insane.
Let’s look Waco. Here we could have arrested someone in the community he visited. Instead, they waited until he was inside a compound, with others innocents and had a big stand off. Why? A lot of innocent people died. All they had to do was nab the guy someplace else and they could have. No, they wanted the stand off. No knock warrants are the same way. They want to raid the man’s home so they can search the home, when they could not get a warrant for the home. Since this is the most dangerous possible type of confrontation, they go in like the military to maximize their safety. It is wrong and it is not protecting against citizens.
Let’s not even talk about shooting a woman who had called 911 for help.
My point is not that police do not have self defense rights. My point is, that the police have more power in every situation. It in incumbent upon them to protect the lives of citizens in their interactions more than for the citizens to protect the police. In most police/citizen encounters, the police start it. They have the power to keep the confrontation going. They have all the power including the power to shoot the person they are talking too. That power needs to come with responsibility that is greater than “My most important thing is to go home”
No they are not. See Parkland Shooting.
This is not even how OSHA works. I would never call them or any other regulatory agency this way. You call an expert lawyer.
I think there should be a legal duty to stop crime and protect me. That is their job. They have the monopoly on violence. Unless I am allowed to be armed at all times, in any way I see fit, and my use of force to defend myself is unquestioned except in clear circumstances, they should. When the police refuse to investigate a crime, I have no right and no power to follow up and do it myself. They police should be legally obligated to do this on my behalf if I demand it. Someone broke into my car, they darn well should investigate if I want them too, because I have given up my right to do so as part of the social contract.
The police don’t even know what the laws are. This has been demonstrated over and over.
I hope there is an answer forthcoming to both these questions.
. What am I paying your officers to do? What do you mean “police behavior?” That depends on the neighborhood. In a rich well connected neighborhood you expect baby sitters with guns. We don’t want the mayor’s son with a police record. In high crime areas you expect a finger in the dike. No one is achieving anything. I wanted behavior to match the environment. I think when a shot came out of that house it became a swat issue. Not a firing blind, mad minute issue. A supervisor in the right spot could have influenced the action.
The military protects the people. The police control the people.
If you said that out loud, I strongly suspect “defund the police” would suddenly get majority support. Hell, if that’s what the police are actually supposed to do, I support defunding the police. If our plan is for the rich to take care of themselves and the poor to slaughter each other so long as they do so out of sight of the rich, I see no reason to pay the pensions of men with badges.
Regarding the specific issue of Breonna Taylor, part of the whole point of this discussion is that the mistake was made when the warrant was granted at the absolute latest, not during the raid itself.
That should not be.