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What Police Are For: A Look Into Role Of The Police In Modern Society

NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with Barry Friedman, the director of New York University's Policing Project, about the role of the police in modern society.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

What are police really for in this country? What role do we expect them to play in our society? How do we expect them to do it? How do we measure if a police department is successful? Questions being debated across our country right now and questions we are going to put next to Barry Friedman. He's director of the Policing Project at New York University Law School.

Barry Friedman, welcome.

BARRY FRIEDMAN: Good to be here.

KELLY: Let's start there in America. What are the police for? It's such a simple question and yet such a complicated one.

FRIEDMAN: Very complicated. The answer is pretty much everything. What we've done in this country is adopted a one-size-fits-all way of dealing with any social problem that hits the streets. And we send basically armed people to deal with it.

KELLY: Do we ask too much of the police, throw them into situations they are not trained to handle, not equipped to handle?

FRIEDMAN: Many of them. You know, a raft of social problems from substance abuse, homelessness, mental illness, but even things like perhaps, you know, something obvious like taking a report after a traffic accident. There's just this huge range of things we ask police to do that, in many ways, are unsuited to their primary training as force - users of force and the law.

KELLY: All right. So how do we measure if they are successful? How do we measure the success of a police department? Are there agreed-upon metrics?

FRIEDMAN: The country is adrift on this very question right now. You know, I would've told you if you'd asked me 10 years ago that we were measuring enforcement actions, stops, frisks, arrests - and we've realized that that has a deleterious effect, though those things are still measured in some places. But then when you take that away and ask, you know, what should you measure? People are at a bit of a loss.

KELLY: What do you think we should be measuring for trying to look at a police department and ask, how are they doing?

FRIEDMAN: So I'll tell you sort of a interesting story in this regard. We run a project on the ground in Chicago trying to improve police community relations. And we were debating this entire question with members of the community. And people talked about waves, like how many - how often do people wave at the police or how often did the police wave back? So we're looking for some kind of measure about positive interactions, about working with the community to solve problems, attending community meetings, the things that would integrate them more into the community and solve the community's real issues instead of enforcing against the community.

KELLY: Does spending more money buy you a better police force?

FRIEDMAN: So that's a terrific question. There's a tiny bit of scholarship that suggests that if you spend too little money, you get into trouble, that a strained police force is a dangerous police force. But there's very little evidence that we have that you get better policing with more money.

KELLY: Does it buy a safer community? Can we measure that?

FRIEDMAN: So it's even difficult to measure safe communities. We can measure crime, though the crime statistics are notoriously unreliable. There's a new app that some police departments are using called Elucide (ph) that does an ongoing measure of community trust in the police or their feeling of safety in the neighborhood. And those are good measures, though hard to get a handle on. You know, I feel like I'm abandoning you all the way along the way, but this is representative of where we stand right now.

KELLY: I'm listening to you, and it sounds like we don't really know if the money that we are spending on policing as a country is being used effectively. And we don't really even have agreement on what the police are for. Those seem like two awfully huge open questions to have out there as we as a country consider what the role of police should be.

FRIEDMAN: I personally find it mind-boggling. And I've worked in this space for a long time. I think we need to have a very serious conversation in this country about what we mean by public safety and public safety for everybody, and then ask whether the police or the right folks to be achieving that in every instance. And as much as we are hearing from an angry street right now asking those sorts of questions, the thing I'll tell you is the police will not fight with those questions, either. They too would tell you they're being asked to do too many things and pushed into too many situations for which they are not apt.

KELLY: How much of this do you think is on police and the people running police forces, and how much is on the legislators and other people overseeing these departments?

FRIEDMAN: It is on us. We have completely failed to regulate the police in every area of government. We adopt rules and procedures and policies with democratic input and transparency. And then we have a set of metrics for those. And the police, we've basically said, keep the peace. Solve crime. Go forth and do it any way that you want. And there's just this vacuum of regulation that is absolutely stunning.

KELLY: Are you optimistic that things will get better?

FRIEDMAN: I wouldn't do the work that I did if I didn't manage to find optimism every day. But it's been a very depressing time at present. And all I can hope, as I think many people hope, is that we take this moment and make it really a moment where we start to turn the corner and do some hard work.

KELLY: Barry Friedman, thank you.

FRIEDMAN: My pleasure.

KELLY: He's professor of law and director of The Policing Project at NYU Law, also author of the book "Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission."

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

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Understanding Law Enforcement

The purpose of law enforcement is to protect communities, hold individuals accountable, and ensure justice. But how exactly do police carry out these duties, and what other responsibilities have they taken on? Who controls the police force at different levels of government and who holds them accountable? How can we bridge gaps between citizens and officers?

Introduction, putting it in context, the role of government, current challenges and areas for reform, thought leaders and resources, ways to get involved/what you can do.

Suggestions for Your Next Conversation

View the Executive Summary for this brief.

By nature, police and communities are intertwined, and both are essential stakeholders in debates surrounding police reform. Dr. Karen Bartuch, Sgt. Sofia Rosales-Scantena, and Toni McIlwain joined The Policy Circle to discuss the role of police and the role of community involvement, and how citizens can help bridge gaps between communities and police officers:

According to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing , the basic mission for which the police exist is “to prevent crime and disorder,” but it is also necessary to “recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of [police] existence, actions and behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.” This is because police officers are in a unique position , being “both part of the community they serve and the government protecting that community.” This position was the focus of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing , an endeavor to strengthen relations between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve, and it was at the heart of nationwide protests that erupted in May 2020 and sparked national debate over the role of police .

A May 2021 report from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice found that homicide rates declined from their 2020 peaks during the first quarter of 2021, but are still elevated compared to recent years. Aggravated and gun assault rates are also elevated. On the whole, 2021 saw homicide counts continue to climb , but at a slower pace than in 2020.

Crime maps indicate city centers, the sites of anti-police protests, did not experience these upticks; rather, the low-income neighborhoods outside of the city centers are seeing violence peak. These increases in criminality – and in some cases disregard for the law – have made life on the street for the average police officer much more difficult. Lockdowns and protests against the police sidelined the social institutions that tend to keep communities safe, leaving streets emptied “ of eyes and ears on their communities .”

Why it Matters

In colonial times, law enforcement was a localized endeavor , carried out voluntarily by citizen groups, or sometimes by part-time officers privately funded by local communities. The Texas Rangers that patrolled Texas settlements in the 1800s became the basis from which state law enforcement agencies grew. In 1838, Boston established the first municipal police department , and was quickly followed by New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.

There are over 660 law enforcement academies that train the officers who go on to work in almost 19,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The bulk of these agencies are at the state and local level; state and local police departments employ over 930,000 people, with roughly 718,000 officers with power of arrest. In total, there are about 2.2 officers for every 1000 individuals living in the U.S.

Spending on state and local police increased from $42 billion in 1977 to $115 billion in 2017 (adjusted for inflation), over 85% of which is local spending. Local spending on police “has outpaced the overall growth of city and county budget” over that time period, “rising faster than K-12 education, sanitation and parks and recreation.” Determining how much is spent on policing is difficult because funding comes from multiple sources; it is not enough to look at a city, county, or state budget alone for a full picture. In 2017, for example, Las Vegas spent less than 2% of its budget on police, but Clark County spent 15% of its budget on police; in Chicago that same year, the city spent almost 20% of its budget on policing, but Cook County only spent 2% of its budget.

Violent Crime & Deaths

Based on the FBI’s annual report of serious crime and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual crime survey , crime in the U.S. fell by 50%-70% between 1993 and 2018. Yet in 18 out of 22 surveys conducted between 1993 and 2018, at least 60% of respondents said they believed there was more crime in the U.S. compared to the year before. There are on average 8.25 million criminal offenses each year, resulting in about 10 million arrests.

As of mid-2022, the most recent statistics available are from 2020. Since 2015, law enforcement agencies have been transitioning to a detailed (but more complicated) format known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The new system involves financial and technical hurdles for many police departments across the country. Less than 60% of America’s local law enforcement agencies voluntarily submitted data in the new format, meaning national-level and state-level crime data is not universally available.

Crime statistics from the FBI for 2020 show that homicides rose 30% between 2019 and 2020, to 6.5 killings per 100,000 people. In the 1990s, this rate peaked at 9.8 per 100,000 people. Experts have pointed to the pandemic, fallout from social justice protests, and economic disruptions as possible causes, although overall crime fell by 6% between 2019 and 2020. Agencies across the country voluntarily submit data for these statistics. For 2020, 85% of eligible agencies submitted data ; some missing include agencies in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Crime Victimization Survey , through which U.S. residents self-report whether they have been victims of violent crime, reported 4.6 million total violent incidents in 2020, down from 5.8 million in 2019. In total, numbers have held relatively steady since 2010. It is important to note differences between self-reported crime and national statistics; based on comparisons to statistics from the FBI, about 40% of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2020.

According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database , 1,021 people were shot and killed by police in the U.S. in 2020. Of those civilians who lost their lives, 652 were reportedly in possession of a gun and 175 were reportedly in possession of a knife, while 60 were reported unarmed. An article published in The Lancet indicates deaths involving police may have been undercounted in the U.S. (by as many as 17,000 data back to 1980) due to discrepancies between independent tallies and government data of death certificates. Others note the independent tallies come from crowd-sourced databases, which may not be reliable based on specific criteria used in classification.

Although Black Americans made up 14% of the U.S. population in 2019, they accounted for 26.6% of arrests and 24% of individuals shot and killed by police . White Americans, at 60% of the population, accounted for 69.4% of arrests and 45% of individuals shot and killed by police . “A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or differences in suspect behavior.” In light of population proportions, some point to these figures as proof of systemic racism and that Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police than White Americans. Others look at violent crime statistics that indicate Black Americans are more frequently involved in criminal incidents, which could mean they are more likely to have encounters with police.

Diving deeper into these statistics, the FBI estimates Black Americans were 39% of offenders in murder incidents in 2019, almost three times greater than their share of the population. Still others point to statistics that indicate Black Americans are even more likely to be victims of violent crime than offenders; at 14% of the population, Black Americans were 54% of murder victims in 2019.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2019 Crime Victimization Survey , violent criminal incidents with Black offenders and Black victims accounted for 70% of violent incidents involving Black Americans in 2019, a share much greater than their share of the population. In comparison, violent crimes with white offenders and white victims, at 62% of criminal incidents involving White Americans, is approximately equivalent to the population of White Americans. According to the 2020 survey , this rate did not significantly change over the course of the next year.

The chart from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2019 Crime Victimization Survey examines the race and ethnicity of violent incident offenders and victims.

The U.S. Constitution “established a federal government of limited powers. A general police power is not among them .” Congress does, however, have legislative powers that allow it “to enact legislation that relates to law enforcement matters.” Federal laws , such as those related to immigration, bankruptcy, civil rights laws, and tax fraud, apply in every state. Data collection on crimes and law enforcement is mainly done at the federal level to compile national statistics. The federal government is also the largest provider of law enforcement training, primarily through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers under the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, the federal budget includes provisions for supporting state and local law enforcement via justice assistance grants and public safety programs.

Federal Agencies

The Department of Justice (the DOJ ) is the primary federal agency dedicated to public safety and controlling crime. The Attorney General (AG) supervises and directs the DOJ and its agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Bureau of Prisons; and the U.S. Marshals Service.

For FY2021, total funding for the DOJ amounted to $55.3 billion. Law enforcement operations totaled $18.7 billion.

In total, there are 65 federal agencies and 27 offices of inspector general that employ full time personnel authorized to make arrests and carry firearms. These include the DOJ offices mentioned above as well as U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); the Park Service Rangers under the Department of the Interior ; and lesser known security offices and details under the Departments of Commerce , Labor , and State , among others.

Congress can influence policing at the local level via the relationship between the DOJ and police throughout the country. Both the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary provide oversight of the DOJ and DHS. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism oversees the DOJ’s criminal division and most offices, including the FBI and DEA. In the House, the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations has jurisdiction over the Federal Criminal Code, sentencing, prisons, parole, and pardons.

State and Local

The Constitution gives authority over policing to the states . Each state and territory has its own legal and court system to handle criminal matters. State and local agencies make up the bulk of the almost 19,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and local police departments employ the vast majority of all law enforcement officers, employing approximately 650,000 officers.

Each state has an attorney general who acts as “ the chief legal officer of the state ” and oversees law enforcement and reform. The attorneys general of each state and Washington D.C., and the chief legal officers of Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands are all members of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).

At the local level there are municipal, county, tribal, and regional police departments that “uphold the laws of the jurisdiction, provide patrol, and investigate local crimes.” Sheriffs offices are granted authority by the state to enforce the state law at the local level in the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. Police chiefs , who oversee departments, report to local elected officials such as a mayor, a city manager, or a city council.

Local police department officers have the most interaction with their communities. City, county, and municipal officers are those who respond to 911 calls, and monitor roadways and enforce traffic laws . Traffic stops are the primary way most people interact with law enforcement personnel. Most importantly, local law enforcement, like hospitals, operate 24 hours, 7 days a week; people turn to police departments when they do not know who else to turn to.

A series of incidents of excessive use of force in 2020, including the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, sparked calls for more police oversight and reform. Mounting concern about violent crime in the U.S. has tempered some of these calls. In a July 2020 poll by Gallup , 58% of all Americans said that there were “major changes needed” for police reform. In mid-2021 , 61% of Black Americans, 41% of White Americans, and 30% of Hispanic Americans reported having very little or no confidence in the criminal justice system. By late 2021, the share of adults who want more funding for policing in their area increased to 47% , up from 31% in June 2020.

Accountability

Misconduct & excessive use of force.

Use of force is one of the greatest concerns for many Americans. A June 2020 PEW poll found that only 35% of Americans believe the police do a good or excellent job of “using the right amount of force.”

Finding data to verify these assumptions is difficult. A 2017 Harvard study on police use of force and racial bias found “[d]ata on lower level uses of force…are virtually non-existent,” and “the analysis of police behavior is fraught with difficulty including, but not limited to, the reliability of the data that does exist.” The study examined data from New York’s City’s Stop and Frisk policy, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey , and officer-involved shooting data reported voluntarily from twelve police departments across the country. The main findings ( p. 29-30 ) report:

“On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after controlling for a large set of control designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. As the intensity of force increases…the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases but the racial difference remains constant. On the most extreme uses of force, however – officer-involved shootings with a Taser or lethal weapon – there are no racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls.”

Mandating body cameras is a suggestion for ensuring reliable data and accountability. Live footage can guarantee police reports are accurate. It will also help target individual officers for wrongdoing as opposed to intense and lengthy investigations into entire police departments that may interfere in officers’ abilities to respond to community needs. As of mid-2022, seven states mandate body cameras for law enforcement personnel (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina). About half of local police departments have acquired body cameras as of 2018. Urban Institute further breaks down each state’s body camera laws and regulations.

While body cameras have generally received wide-spread support, other means of equipping police officers have been called into question. The 1033 program authorizes the transfer of U.S. military equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies. This includes necessary ammunition and medical supplies, but also sometimes armed assault vehicles and weapons reserved for military conflict. Equipping local law enforcement officers properly is essential to their protection and that of their communities, but excessive weaponization of police has been linked to more cases of excessive use of force, and “ exacerbates the gap between police and those they are supposed to serve.”

Unions & Collective Bargaining

Other barriers to holding police officers accountable for misconduct can sometimes be found in police contracts negotiated by unions. Police unions emerged alongside many other labor unions at the beginning of the 20th century. Although they initially enjoyed little public support, roughly two-thirds of American police officers are part of police labor unions today.

Police officers are government employees who require civil service protections in terms of demotions or transfers, layoffs or discharges, and pay and benefit determination. Additionally, due to the nature of police officers’ work, misconduct by officers can have more serious consequences than misconduct by other public employees. For this reason, state labor laws and Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBRs) “provide police officers with due process protections during disciplinary investigations that are not given to other classes of public employees.” Collective bargaining by unions ensures these laws are included in police department contracts to protect officers who use their discretion in dangerous situations.

The concern is how collective bargaining contracts can affect departmental policies and even entire disciplinary processes. A study of 178 police union contracts around the country found that many “contain provisions banning civilian oversight, obstructing brutality complaints, inhibiting investigations in police misconduct, and restricting the ability of officials to track and identify officers with a pattern of civilian abuse.” Most frequently, contracts:

Limit departments’ abilities to investigate civilian complaints, such as throwing out complaints that have been filed after a certain period of time following an incident;
Mandate the destruction of disciplinary records after a certain period of time, which means officers that have been fired or have resigned over misconduct can be hired elsewhere with an apparently clean record;
Limit the influence of a civilian oversight board, or prevent civilian oversight entirely;
Dictate the disciplinary process police commissioners must follow and give arbitrators instead of police supervisors the authority to make final disciplinary decisions.

Despite having the authority “to compel cities, under threat of litigation, to invest in costly reform measures aimed at curbing officer wrongdoing,” even the DOJ still needs to work around union contracts. This makes interventions at the national level difficult. Instead, states can mandate transparency in police union contract negotiations . According to the Empire Center’s Ken Girardin , collective bargaining agreements are usually negotiated in private between union representatives, some elected officials, and certain police department officers. One argument for making collective bargaining open to the public is that groups who are most affected by the police – those who live in the communities police serve, and therefore are at the greatest risk of police misconduct – would be present at the negotiating table.

Qualified Immunity

Another barrier to accountability is what is known as qualified immunity , “a judicial doctrine that shields public officials, like police officers, from liability when they break the law.” Section 1983 of the Enforcement Act of 1871 strictly states that any state actor (like a police officer, a government employee) is liable for “‘the deprivation of any rights’” of citizens. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court judicially amended Section 1983 with the qualified immunity doctrine so the new standard of liability was the deprivation of “‘clearly established’” rights rather than “‘any rights’.”

Under the new terminology, “‘clearly established’” refers to precedent. This is another protection for officers who use their discretion in dangerous situations, but it also creates “ a high and unnecessary bar ” for proving officer wrongdoing. For example, when deputies in Georgia accidentally shot a 10-year-old child when aiming for a dog, the lawsuit the family filed was thrown out because the court “could not find precedent declaring this type of conduct unconstitutional.”

Ending qualified immunity would require federal legislation , which has been just one piece of the contentious debates in Congress. As of mid-2022, lawmakers have been unable to reach an agreement on police reform; bills passed the House but not the Senate.

States can take matters into their own hands. For example, they can bypass qualified immunity through their own legislation. Colorado’s SB217 “essentially bars government actors from using qualified immunity in state courts.” At a department level, liability insurance for law enforcement personnel, much like medical malpractice insurance for doctors, could offer police officers protection without shielding them from discipline. At the individual level, body cameras can protect officers from dubious claims while still holding them accountable for wrongdoing.

Reimagining the Police & Communities

Police culture.

In addition to the inherent dangers of their profession, police officers “experience job-related stressors that can range from interpersonal conflicts to extremely traumatic events, such as vehicle crashes, homicide, and suicide.” Congress passed the Law Enforcement Mental Health and Wellness Act of 2017 in acknowledgement of the need for mental health resources for police officers, but whether this has made a significant difference is unclear; according to Blue H.E.L.P. , officer suicides increased from 149 in 2016 to 239 in 2019, then fell to 174 in 2020 and 177 in 2021.

The FBI reported 89 officers were killed in line of duty in 2019 , 93 were killed in 2020 , and 129 were killed in 2021 .This means more officers die by suicide annually than in the line of duty , and that is already considering suicide deaths are likely undercounted since there is no database that collects suicide-related data specific to law enforcement.

Low-risk encounters can inadvertently escalate when officers face heightened pressure, stressors, and trauma while on the job. Feeling overburdened, ill-equipped, and misunderstood creates a scenario in which officers can feel alienated from the communities they serve. Resources dedicated to helping officers develop techniques such as stress-coping skills, crisis management, and emotional intelligence training is one step towards addressing the “‘ police warrior ’” mindset and bridging gaps in community-police relations.

One method may be to redistribute officers across districts; a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found more experienced officers use less force and make fewer arrests, but due to seniority-based process, districts with the most violent crime are staffed with less experienced cops that may be less effective at reducing that crime. Based on the assumption that senior officers are more effective at deterring crime, resolving situations, and exercising judgment due to experience, researchers determined crime would be reduced by almost 5% if senior officers were distributed across districts .

Sergeant Fred Jones notes that while “there will always be those that will not comply with the laws of society, and they will do anything not to be taken into custody,” emotional intelligence training plays an important role in police officers’ behavior, affecting how they treat others and themselves as they face these challenges on a daily basis (15 min):

Police Department Budgets

Spending on police has outpaced spending on education and community services in the past few decades. The premise behind the movement to defund the police “is that government budgets and ‘public safety’ spending should prioritize housing, employment, community health, education and other vital programs, instead of police officers.” Those who advocate defunding the police seek to redistribute a portion of funds that previously went to policing operations and correctional facilities. Instead of calling the police “to handle every societal failure,” funds and resources would instead be redirected to “supports for housing, mental health, addiction and employment” that could be more effective than arrests and jail time in solving underlying problems.

All of this makes cuts difficult, and the jobs of police chiefs to work within these constraints is made more difficult as well. In fact, by October 2020, 18 police chiefs from the U.S.’s 69 largest cities had “ resigned, retired, been pushed out or fired ,” citing protests for police reform and calls for budget cuts. On the whole, however, reporting from late 2021 indicates law enforcement staffing as a whole has been fairly stable.

Across the country from New York to Los Angeles , elected officials approved plans to cut police budgets, although “many of the cuts are cosmetic, temporary or represent a relatively small part of budgets.” Bloomberg CityLab data reports that 50 of the largest U.S. cities reduced their 2021 police budgets by about 5%, but that most of this was part of “broader pandemic cost-cutting initiatives,” and law enforcement as a share of expenditures was practically unchanged and even increased slightly in these cities. Cities including Minneapolis and Seattle paused these changes, and many more proposed funding increases for 2022 after rises in crime over the course of 2020. In New York City, current mayor Eric Adams ran on a platform that kept police funding stable .

Even with intentions to redistribute funds elsewhere, defunding the police could backfire. “When police command staff are presented with a reduced budget,” explains former FBI special agent Errol G. Southers , “[t]hey will cut the costs of the many programs police departments provide that are outside of day-to-day law enforcement,” mainly those that engage young people and police officers. This leaves few interactions between the community and the police, and therefore few opportunities to increase levels of trust.

A compounding issue is that drops in police-civilian contact are often followed by increases in crime, particularly in minority communities, according to Harvard economist Roland Fryer . In these communities and many others, response infrastructure and regular patrols mean that police officers are often the quickest to respond to 911 calls.

Public concern about violent crime in the U.S. has shifted attitudes about police funding, with decreasing support for defunding the police and increasing support for more local police funding .

Another possibility could be, instead of defunding the police, ensuring police first responders have the funds to equip them with the training and resources necessary to respond appropriately to all calls for help.

Others “are skeptical that existing police departments can ever be reformed” and believe “demolishing what is currently in place and starting from scratch” is the best option for transforming policing in America. They call not only to defund but to abolish the police . What this looks like is unclear. In June 2020, Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood closed down precincts in response to mass demonstrations, and police did not respond to calls coming from the neighborhood. A group of local business owners sued the city , claiming, “‘Seattle’s unprecedented decision to abandon and close off an entire city neighborhood, leaving it unchecked by the police, unserved by fire and emergency health services, and inaccessible to the public’ resulted in enormous property damage and lost revenue.”

On the opposite side of the country, Camden, New Jersey embarked on a campaign that actually did abolish the police department in 2013, but the city had a clear plan in place that “set about rebuilding the police force with an entirely new one under county control.” Prior to 2013, “the police were despised by residents for being ineffective at best and corrupt at worst,” and in one case five officers were charged with evidence planting, fabrication, and perjury. The transition took time and involved dismantling police union contracts and overhauling the system for rating officers’ performance. Today, the force still faces issues with transparency and high turnover rates, but the homicide rate and rates of excessive use of force have dropped considerably. For more on Camden’s transition, see this feature (5 min):

Community Policing

Community policing is “a police strategy that utilizes local partnerships and greater decision-making authority among street-level officers in an effort to solve community problems.” Focusing on partnerships between police and communities directly addresses the conditions that result in public safety issues, and has been found to reduce crime as well as fear of crime and increase public satisfaction and positivity towards police. The Department of Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Service saw an increase in funding for FY2022.

Implementing community policing does not always result in a department-wide mindset shift; instead, many departments treat “this model of policing as a one-sided transaction carried out by a few officers in a special unit or through sporadic events or meetings.” Such departments may sustain the “‘ police warrior ’” culture with tactics such as suppression style policing, which “casts a wide net over a high crime area” by flooding it with law enforcement personnel. In doing so, explains Josh Crawford of Pegasus Institute , “you catch the big fish that are committing the overwhelming majority of violent crime in that area. The problem is, you catch a whole lot of small fish and you catch a whole lot of things that aren’t fish at all.”

This tactic presents a challenge for police-community relations . While it may be effective in catching criminals and deterring crime, there is “a growing body of research that suggests that citizen evaluations of the police are more connected to the way the police interact with the public than to the effectiveness of policing on crime.” If a community does not trust the police, they may not be willing to cooperate and it may be more difficult for police to solve crimes. If police have low crime resolution rates, the community may be even less trusting, creating a cycle of police-community alienation. Captain Chip Huth explains how these tactics affected the Kansas City Police Department, and what happened when officers changed their systems and mindsets (10 min):

Within individual cities and communities, changing training priorities may help police officers and citizens find middle ground. Of the 700 hours of average training for police recruits, about 60 hours are dedicated to firearms training and 50 hours to self-defense training. In contrast, fewer than 30 hours are dedicated to community policing, which includes mediation skills, conflict management, and human relations. The New Haven Police Department incorporated community policing as a training requirement for recruits. Recruits completed community projects in the city, such as organizing after-school activities or playing sports with kids at local parks. After the projects, recruits noted their time “substantially altered their perception of the neighborhoods” they would be serving.

Social worker Derrick Jackson of the Washtenaw County, Michigan Police Department explains how problem-oriented policing works , and how even former convicted criminals can make positive changes in their communities when the opportunities exist (9 min):

Increasing communications is an important step police departments can take. Although studies suggest citizens do not frequently access police department websites , the ones who do have positive views of police effectiveness and legitimacy. This provides police departments with an opportunity to create user-friendly websites and engaging social media accounts that support community-police collaborations by disseminating information to the public as well as inviting the public to share information.

Communities in Action

Eugene, Oregon: CAHOOTS

When calls to the Eugene Police Department do not involve legal issues or risk of violence, dispatch operators will forward those calls to the medics and crisis workers that are part of the White Bird Clinic’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program . CAHOOTS, a collaboration between community social workers and police, has served as an alternative to police intervention since 1989. After receiving a call, a medic and crisis worker “ go out and respond to the call , assess the situation, assist the individual if possible, and then help that individual to a higher level of care or necessary service if that’s what’s really needed.” On average, the clinic’s teams answer between 15% and 20% of the calls that come to the police, and have needed to call for police backup on less than 1% of calls. The estimated savings for the city of Eugene are around $8.5 million annually.

See more about CAHOOTS in this feature (5 min)

Greater Syracuse, New York: 211

The city of Syracuse and surrounding suburbs have struggled with high levels of poverty since the 1970s, but the area’s plan to end unsheltered homelessness has been fairly successful. Instead of calling 911, a “robust 211 provider coordinates outreach response and shelter referrals and provides diversion assistance on a 24/7 basis” under the Continuum of Care system. Through the process, “City and County staff, who are charged with addressing homelessness, pro-actively engage with police, fire/EMS, and other first responders, as well as the local healthcare, criminal justice, and child welfare system.”

Volunteers in Police Service

Volunteer programs can also help law enforcement agencies “fulfill their primary functions and provide services that may not otherwise be offered,” such as social media outreach, community meetings, surveys, and civilian oversight boards. In Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Memphis, Tennessee, faith-based institutions have partnered with local police departments for specialized academies that train clergy members on police activity, allowing them to serve as ambassadors that can help build trust and communication among the congregation, community, and police.

The Volunteers in Police Service (VIPS) program, managed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police and the Bureau of Justice Assistance under the DOJ, is a support system for police departments seeking to develop or expand citizen volunteer programs, or citizens looking to be more involved with their local law enforcement agencies.

Research is another integral component in helping law enforcement. Programs, volunteers, and community organizations are essential, but indications as to which services and systems are having the greatest impact is not always clear. This is where the University of Chicago’s Crime Lab saw an opportunity to assist. See what they’re doing (7 min):

The role of the police is to ensure the safety and security of those who uphold the law, and to protect and help communities from those who do not. But they need to do so without using tactics that disrespect civil liberties or generate animosity in the neighborhoods they serve. Policies and practices that focus on transparency and accountability can help bridge gaps between law enforcement personnel and communities. Individuals and communities that take responsibility for their safety can also foster mutual trust and understanding with law enforcement. Collaboration and opportunities to work together can make officers’ roles easier and make communities safer for everyone.

The Policy Circle would like to thank the following contributors for their assistance during the creation of this brief:

Brianna (Walden) Nuhfer, Stand Together Associate Director of Criminal Justice

Greg Glod, Americans for Prosperity Criminal Justice Fellow

Phil Andrew, Principal of PAX Group consultancy and former FBI agent and crisis negotiator

Quentella Enty, Director of Strategic Sourcing & Sustainability at KFA, Inc.

NCSL: Law Enforcement Overview

Body-Worn Camera Interactive Map
Legislative Responses for Policing – State Bill Tracking Database

George Mason University Center for Evidence-Based Crime Policy

NYU Policing Project

Police Data Initiative

Participating Agencies

University of Chicago Crime Lab

National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice

Top Priority Podcast on Qualified Immunity with Greg Glod of Americans for Prosperity and Casey Mattox of Charles Koch Institute.

Measure : Find out what your state and district are doing about policing.

Start by investigating the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer or the DOJ’s Uniform Crime Reporting Statistics .
USA Today breaks down police department budgets in the 50 most populous cities in the U.S. – be mindful that some departments’ budgets are also funded by the county.
What are your state’s policies regarding reforms such as body cameras or use of force definitions ?
How does your state or local law enforcement agency report data? Are they part of the Police Data Initiative ?
Has your city or state enacted community policing legislation ?
Do you know how law enforcement officers are trained in your state or community?

Identify: Who are the influencers in your state, county, or community? Learn about their priorities and consider how to contact them, including elected officials , attorneys general, law enforcement, boards of education, city councils, journalists, media outlets, community organizations, and local businesses.

Are you familiar with your local law enforcement officers and their day-to-day roles?
Who is your state attorney general ?
Do you know the role of police unions in your state?
Are there organizations or programs in your community, such as faith-based organizations or after-school programs, that engage with law enforcement?

Reach out: You are a catalyst. Finding a common cause is a great opportunity to develop relationships with people who may be outside of your immediate network. All it takes is a small team of two or three people to set a path for real improvement. The Policy Circle is your platform to convene with experts you want to hear from.

Find allies in your community or in nearby towns and elsewhere in the state.
Foster collaborative relationships with law enforcement officers, first responders, faith-based organizations, local hospitals, community organizations, school boards, local businesses, and academic institutions.

Plan: Set some milestones based on your state’s legislative calendar .

Don’t hesitate to contact The Policy Circle team, [email protected] , for connections to the broader network, advice, insights on how to build rapport with policy makers and establish yourself as a civic leader.

Execute: Give it your best shot. You can:

Volunteer with your police department or ask to participate in a ride-along to better understand police responsibilities.
Ask your local officials to review local and county budgets, and ask them to invite public comment on budgeting to identify resources and funding gaps as well as understand what police obligations contribute to funding levels.
Consider if there is an opportunity to bring a police-mental health collaboration to your community.
Consider assessing the components that are integral to the function of police departments

Working with others, you may create something great for your community. Here are some tools to learn how to contact your representatives and write an op-ed .

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Policing and Law Enforcement

Introduction, general overviews.

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Policing and Law Enforcement by James J. Willis LAST REVIEWED: 14 December 2009 LAST MODIFIED: 14 December 2009 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195396607-0034

Because modern law enforcement agencies do many different things, it is impossible to define policing in terms of its ends. While it is true that one of the purposes of the police is to enforce the law, frequently they do not. Moreover, the police are expected to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as preventing crime, providing services, and maintaining order, which are not accurately described as law enforcement. Unlike in many other industrialized countries, the organization of American law enforcement is fragmented among different agencies at the local, state, and federal levels of government. This has several general implications: (1) there is no such thing as a “typical” police department; (2) interagency coordination is possible but not a structural feature of law enforcement organization; and (3) it is possible only to estimate the number of law enforcement agencies and personnel in the United States. According to the latest figures from the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), in 2004 there were over seventeen thousand public law enforcement agencies in the United States. The majority (12,766) were local police departments operating at the municipal level, employing 731,903 full-time sworn law enforcement officers. Because these general-purpose law enforcement agencies are the most visible to the public and the source of the majority of police-citizen contacts, they are the focus of this online entry. Other public law enforcement agencies include sheriff’s departments organized at the local county level, state police, federal law enforcement agencies, and special law enforcement organizations with specialized jurisdictions (most importantly tribal police). This does not include the private security industry, which is another essential component of American law enforcement.

Most, but not all, police scholars favor Egon Bittner’s means-based definition of the police, which defines the police in terms of their capacity to use nonnegotiable coercive force in any situation that appears to require a prompt and decisive response ( Bittner 1970 ). Bittner’s definition can be criticized for overlooking similarities between the police and other organizations ( Reiss 1992 ) and for excluding other core functions of the police, such as processing and distributing information ( Ericson and Haggerty 2002 ). Still, Bittner’s definition is superior to ends-based definitions, and helps capture the complexity of the police role and the breadth of the police mandate. Policing is a popular course in criminal justice programs, and there is a host of general texts available. Walker and Katz 2007 is a succinct and well-organized introduction to policing, and the material it covers is the basis for raising analytical questions about the role and function of the police. If an anthology is preferred, Brandl and Barlow 2004 is timely and includes a fairly extensive list of articles on police theory and practice. Klockars and Mastrofski 1991 is somewhat dated, but its organization of readings around core themes and the editors’ comments are excellent tools for encouraging undergraduate students to think critically about the complexities of policing. Any of these books could be an anchor text in a specialized course on policing. For graduate students and new researchers to the area, Newburn 2005 is probably the most comprehensive anthology, with forty-five articles. The final report of the National Research Council’s Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices ( National Research Council 2004 ) provides an indispensable review of the current state of empirical research on police and identifies important gaps in existing knowledge. Lastly, a useful source for assessing the size and scope of law enforcement in the United States is the Census of State and Local Law Enforcement Agencies, conducted regularly by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (see Reaves and Hickman 2007 for the most recent bulletin).

Bittner, Egon. 1970. The functions of the police in modern society . Chevy Chase, MD: U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, Center for Studies of Crime and Delinquency.

Foundational text examining the role and function of the police in modern society. Provides a frank critique of popular conceptions of police work, including public ambivalence toward police power, and uses a sociological and historical framework to explain the police capacity to use coercive force.

Brandl, Steven G., and David E. Barlow, eds. 2004. The police in America: Classic and contemporary readings . Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning.

Collection of major theoretical and empirical works designed to provide upper-level undergraduate students with a strong scholarly foundation in police research, theory, and practice. One strength of this collection is its juxtaposition of classic and contemporary readings in police history, discretion, and strategies to demonstrate developments in the field and to promote an informed dialogue on police policies and their empirical bases.

Ericson, Richard V., and Kevin D. Haggerty. 2002. The policing of risk. In Embracing risk: The changing culture of insurance and responsibility . Edited by Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon, 238–272. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Problematizes the conventional definition of the police as a mechanism for the distribution of nonnegotiable coercive force. The authors define the role of the police in modern society as that of information broker. As such, the police produce and distribute knowledge as a part of a larger risk-communication system.

Klockars, Carl B., and Stephen D. Mastrofski, eds. 1991. Thinking about police: Contemporary readings . 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Challenging ensemble of articles suitable for upper-level undergraduate courses. Topics covered include images and expectations, police discretion, the police and serious crime, policing everyday life, the moral hazards of police work, and prospects for change. Still relevant, but should be supplemented with more recent scholarship.

National Research Council. 2004. Fairness and effectiveness in policing: The evidence . Committee to Review Research on Police Policy and Practices. Edited by Wesley Skogan and Kathleen Frydl. Committee on Law and Justice, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.

Authoritative review by an expert panel of research on the nature of policing in the United States. Excellent use of key themes and developments to organize a great deal of information.

Newburn, Tim, ed. 2005. Policing: Key readings . Cullompton, UK and Portland, OR: Willan.

Large number of articles covering a wide range of topics. Suitable for graduate courses on policing. Readings are on: emergence and development of police; role and function of the police; police culture; policing strategies; deviance, ethics, and control; and the emerging pattern of policing. The last of these provides a useful introduction to policing in the context of postmodernity.

Reaves, Brian and Matthew Hickman. 2007. Census of state and local law enforcement agencies, 2004 . Washington, DC: Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Summary statistics of a national survey of U.S. local and state police agencies conducted in 2004. Topics covered include number of police agencies and agency size.

Reiss, Albert J. Jr. 1992. Police organization in the twentieth century. In Crime and justice: An annual review of research . Vol. 14, Modern policing . Edited by Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, 51–97. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Sophisticated article that grounds its understanding of police work, organizations, and reform within broader theories of social organization and formal organizations.

Walker, Samuel, and Charles M. Katz. 2007. The police in America: An introduction . 6th ed. Boston: McGraw Hill.

This textbook is well organized, easy to read, and excellent for identifying important issues in policing. Recommended for undergraduates enrolled in introductory policing courses.

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Solving racial disparities in policing

Colleen Walsh

Harvard Staff Writer

Experts say approach must be comprehensive as roots are embedded in culture

“ Unequal ” is a multipart series highlighting the work of Harvard faculty, staff, students, alumni, and researchers on issues of race and inequality across the U.S. The first part explores the experience of people of color with the criminal justice legal system in America.

It seems there’s no end to them. They are the recent videos and reports of Black and brown people beaten or killed by law enforcement officers, and they have fueled a national outcry over the disproportionate use of excessive, and often lethal, force against people of color, and galvanized demands for police reform.

This is not the first time in recent decades that high-profile police violence — from the 1991 beating of Rodney King to the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in 2014 — ignited calls for change. But this time appears different. The police killings of Breonna Taylor in March, George Floyd in May, and a string of others triggered historic, widespread marches and rallies across the nation, from small towns to major cities, drawing protesters of unprecedented diversity in race, gender, and age.

According to historians and other scholars, the problem is embedded in the story of the nation and its culture. Rooted in slavery, racial disparities in policing and police violence, they say, are sustained by systemic exclusion and discrimination, and fueled by implicit and explicit bias. Any solution clearly will require myriad new approaches to law enforcement, courts, and community involvement, and comprehensive social change driven from the bottom up and the top down.

While police reform has become a major focus, the current moment of national reckoning has widened the lens on systemic racism for many Americans. The range of issues, though less familiar to some, is well known to scholars and activists. Across Harvard, for instance, faculty members have long explored the ways inequality permeates every aspect of American life. Their research and scholarship sits at the heart of a new Gazette series starting today aimed at finding ways forward in the areas of democracy; wealth and opportunity; environment and health; and education. It begins with this first on policing.

Harvard Kennedy School Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people.

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The history of racialized policing

Like many scholars, Khalil Gibran Muhammad , professor of history, race, and public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School , traces the history of policing in America to “slave patrols” in the antebellum South, in which white citizens were expected to help supervise the movements of enslaved Black people. This legacy, he believes, can still be seen in policing today. “The surveillance, the deputization essentially of all white men to be police officers or, in this case, slave patrollers, and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene are all baked in from the very beginning,” he told NPR last year.

Slave patrols, and the slave codes they enforced, ended after the Civil War and the passage of the 13th amendment, which formally ended slavery “except as a punishment for crime.” But Muhammad notes that former Confederate states quickly used that exception to justify new restrictions. Known as the Black codes, the various rules limited the kinds of jobs African Americans could hold, their rights to buy and own property, and even their movements.

“The genius of the former Confederate states was to say, ‘Oh, well, if all we need to do is make them criminals and they can be put back in slavery, well, then that’s what we’ll do.’ And that’s exactly what the Black codes set out to do. The Black codes, for all intents and purposes, criminalized every form of African American freedom and mobility, political power, economic power, except the one thing it didn’t criminalize was the right to work for a white man on a white man’s terms.” In particular, he said the Ku Klux Klan “took about the business of terrorizing, policing, surveilling, and controlling Black people. … The Klan totally dominates the machinery of justice in the South.”

When, during what became known as the Great Migration, millions of African Americans fled the still largely agrarian South for opportunities in the thriving manufacturing centers of the North, they discovered that metropolitan police departments tended to enforce the law along racial and ethnic lines, with newcomers overseen by those who came before. “There was an early emphasis on people whose status was just a tiny notch better than the folks whom they were focused on policing,” Muhammad said. “And so the Anglo-Saxons are policing the Irish or the Germans are policing the Irish. The Irish are policing the Poles.” And then arrived a wave of Black Southerners looking for a better life.

In his groundbreaking work, “ The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America ,” Muhammad argues that an essential turning point came in the early 1900s amid efforts to professionalize police forces across the nation, in part by using crime statistics to guide law enforcement efforts. For the first time, Americans with European roots were grouped into one broad category, white, and set apart from the other category, Black.

Citing Muhammad’s research, Harvard historian Jill Lepore has summarized the consequences this way : “Police patrolled Black neighborhoods and arrested Black people disproportionately; prosecutors indicted Black people disproportionately; juries found Black people guilty disproportionately; judges gave Black people disproportionately long sentences; and, then, after all this, social scientists, observing the number of Black people in jail, decided that, as a matter of biology, Black people were disproportionately inclined to criminality.”

“History shows that crime data was never objective in any meaningful sense,” Muhammad wrote. Instead, crime statistics were “weaponized” to justify racial profiling, police brutality, and ever more policing of Black people.

This phenomenon, he believes, has continued well into this century and is exemplified by William J. Bratton, one of the most famous police leaders in recent America history. Known as “America’s Top Cop,” Bratton led police departments in his native Boston, Los Angeles, and twice in New York, finally retiring in 2016.

Bratton rejected notions that crime was a result of social and economic forces, such as poverty, unemployment, police practices, and racism. Instead, he said in a 2017 speech, “It is about behavior.” Through most of his career, he was a proponent of statistically-based “predictive” policing — essentially placing forces in areas where crime numbers were highest, focused on the groups found there.

Bratton argued that the technology eliminated the problem of prejudice in policing, without ever questioning potential bias in the data or algorithms themselves — a significant issue given the fact that Black Americans are arrested and convicted of crimes at disproportionately higher rates than whites. This approach has led to widely discredited practices such as racial profiling and “stop-and-frisk.” And, Muhammad notes, “There is no research consensus on whether or how much violence dropped in cities due to policing.”

Gathering numbers

In 2015 The Washington Post began tracking every fatal shooting by an on-duty officer, using news stories, social media posts, and police reports in the wake of the fatal police shooting of Brown, a Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo. According to the newspaper, Black Americans are killed by police at twice the rate of white Americans, and Hispanic Americans are also killed by police at a disproportionate rate.

Such efforts have proved useful for researchers such as economist Rajiv Sethi .

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute , Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers, a difficult task given that data from such encounters is largely unavailable from police departments. Instead, Sethi and his team of researchers have turned to information collected by websites and news organizations including The Washington Post and The Guardian, merged with data from other sources such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Census, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A Joy Foundation Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Rajiv Sethi is investigating the use of lethal force by law enforcement officers,

Courtesy photo

They have found that exposure to deadly force is highest in the Mountain West and Pacific regions relative to the mid-Atlantic and northeastern states, and that racial disparities in relation to deadly force are even greater than the national numbers imply. “In the country as a whole, you’re about two to three times more likely to face deadly force if you’re Black than if you are white” said Sethi. “But if you look at individual cities separately, disparities in exposure are much higher.”

Examining the characteristics associated with police departments that experience high numbers of lethal encounters is one way to better understand and address racial disparities in policing and the use of violence, Sethi said, but it’s a massive undertaking given the decentralized nature of policing in America. There are roughly 18,000 police departments in the country, and more than 3,000 sheriff’s offices, each with its own approaches to training and selection.

“They behave in very different ways, and what we’re finding in our current research is that they are very different in the degree to which they use deadly force,” said Sethi. To make real change, “You really need to focus on the agency level where organizational culture lies, where selection and training protocols have an effect, and where leadership can make a difference.”

Sethi pointed to the example of Camden, N.J., which disbanded and replaced its police force in 2013, initially in response to a budget crisis, but eventually resulting in an effort to fundamentally change the way the police engaged with the community. While there have been improvements, including greater witness cooperation, lower crime, and fewer abuse complaints, the Camden case doesn’t fit any particular narrative, said Sethi, noting that the number of officers actually increased as part of the reform. While the city is still faced with its share of problems, Sethi called its efforts to rethink policing “important models from which we can learn.”

Fighting vs. preventing crime

For many analysts, the real problem with policing in America is the fact that there is simply too much of it. “We’ve seen since the mid-1970s a dramatic increase in expenditures that are associated with expanding the criminal legal system, including personnel and the tasks we ask police to do,” said Sandra Susan Smith , Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice at HKS, and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute. “And at the same time we see dramatic declines in resources devoted to social welfare programs.”

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson, but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work,” said Brandon Terry, assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies.

Kris Snibble/Harvard file photo

Smith’s comment highlights a key argument embraced by many activists and experts calling for dramatic police reform: diverting resources from the police to better support community services including health care, housing, and education, and stronger economic and job opportunities. They argue that broader support for such measures will decrease the need for policing, and in turn reduce violent confrontations, particularly in over-policed, economically disadvantaged communities, and communities of color.

For Brandon Terry , that tension took the form of an ice container during his Baltimore high school chemistry final. The frozen cubes were placed in the middle of the classroom to help keep the students cool as a heat wave sent temperatures soaring. “That was their solution to the building’s lack of air conditioning,” said Terry, a Harvard assistant professor of African and African American Studies and social studies. “Just grab an ice cube.”

Terry’s story is the kind many researchers cite to show the negative impact of underinvesting in children who will make up the future population, and instead devoting resources toward policing tactics that embrace armored vehicles, automatic weapons, and spy planes. Terry’s is also the kind of tale promoted by activists eager to defund the police, a movement begun in the late 1960s that has again gained momentum as the death toll from violent encounters mounts. A scholar of Martin Luther King Jr., Terry said the Civil Rights leader’s views on the Vietnam War are echoed in the calls of activists today who are pressing to redistribute police resources.

“King thought that the idea of spending many orders of magnitude more for an unjust war than we did for the abolition of poverty and the abolition of ghettoization was a moral travesty, and it reflected a kind of sickness at the core of our society,” said Terry. “And part of what the defund model is based upon is a similar moral criticism, that these budgets reflect priorities that we have, and our priorities are broken.”

Terry also thinks the policing debate needs to be expanded to embrace a fuller understanding of what it means for people to feel truly safe in their communities. He highlights the work of sociologist Chris Muller and Harvard’s Robert Sampson, who have studied racial disparities in exposures to lead and the connections between a child’s early exposure to the toxic metal and antisocial behavior. Various studies have shown that lead exposure in children can contribute to cognitive impairment and behavioral problems, including heightened aggression.

“You can have all the armored personnel carriers you want in Ferguson,” said Terry, “but public safety is more likely to come from redressing environmental pollution, poor education, and unfair work.”

Policing and criminal justice system

Alexandra Natapoff , Lee S. Kreindler Professor of Law, sees policing as inexorably linked to the country’s criminal justice system and its long ties to racism.

“Policing does not stand alone or apart from how we charge people with crimes, or how we convict them, or how we treat them once they’ve been convicted,” she said. “That entire bundle of official practices is a central part of how we govern, and in particular, how we have historically governed Black people and other people of color, and economically and socially disadvantaged populations.”

Unpacking such a complicated issue requires voices from a variety of different backgrounds, experiences, and fields of expertise who can shine light on the problem and possible solutions, said Natapoff, who co-founded a new lecture series with HLS Professor Andrew Crespo titled “ Policing in America .”

In recent weeks the pair have hosted Zoom discussions on topics ranging from qualified immunity to the Black Lives Matter movement to police unions to the broad contours of the American penal system. The series reflects the important work being done around the country, said Natapoff, and offers people the chance to further “engage in dialogue over these over these rich, complicated, controversial issues around race and policing, and governance and democracy.”

Courts and mass incarceration

Much of Natapoff’s recent work emphasizes the hidden dangers of the nation’s misdemeanor system. In her book “ Punishment Without Crime: How Our Massive Misdemeanor System Traps the Innocent and Makes America More Unequal ,” Natapoff shows how the practice of stopping, arresting, and charging people with low-level offenses often sends them down a devastating path.

“This is how most people encounter the criminal apparatus, and it’s the first step of mass incarceration, the initial net that sweeps people of color disproportionately into the criminal system,” said Natapoff. “It is also the locus that overexposes Black people to police violence. The implications of this enormous net of police and prosecutorial authority around minor conduct is central to understanding many of the worst dysfunctions of our criminal system.”

One consequence is that Black and brown people are incarcerated at much higher rates than white people. America has approximately 2.3 million people in federal, state, and local prisons and jails, according to a 2020 report from the nonprofit the Prison Policy Initiative. According to a 2018 report from the Sentencing Project, Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely.

Reducing mass incarceration requires shrinking the misdemeanor net “along all of its axes” said Natapoff, who supports a range of reforms including training police officers to both confront and arrest people less for low-level offenses, and the policies of forward-thinking prosecutors willing to “charge fewer of those offenses when police do make arrests.”

She praises the efforts of Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins in Massachusetts and George Gascón, the district attorney in Los Angeles County, Calif., who have pledged to stop prosecuting a range of misdemeanor crimes such as resisting arrest, loitering, trespassing, and drug possession. “If cities and towns across the country committed to that kind of reform, that would be a profoundly meaningful change,” said Natapoff, “and it would be a big step toward shrinking our entire criminal apparatus.”

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner cites the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons.

Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard file photo

Sentencing reform

Another contributing factor in mass incarceration is sentencing disparities.

A recent Harvard Law School study found that, as is true nationally, people of color are “drastically overrepresented in Massachusetts state prisons.” But the report also noted that Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation — a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.

Retired U.S. Judge Nancy Gertner also notes the need to reform federal sentencing guidelines, arguing that all too often they have been proven to be biased and to result in packing the nation’s jails and prisons. She points to the way the 1994 Crime Bill (legislation sponsored by then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware) ushered in much harsher drug penalties for crack than for powder cocaine. This tied the hands of judges issuing sentences and disproportionately punished people of color in the process. “The disparity in the treatment of crack and cocaine really was backed up by anecdote and stereotype, not by data,” said Gertner, a lecturer at HLS. “There was no data suggesting that crack was infinitely more dangerous than cocaine. It was the young Black predator narrative.”

The First Step Act, a bipartisan prison reform bill aimed at reducing racial disparities in drug sentencing and signed into law by President Donald Trump in 2018, is just what its name implies, said Gertner.

“It reduces sentences to the merely inhumane rather than the grotesque. We still throw people in jail more than anybody else. We still resort to imprisonment, rather than thinking of other alternatives. We still resort to punishment rather than other models. None of that has really changed. I don’t deny the significance of somebody getting out of prison a year or two early, but no one should think that that’s reform.”

Not just bad apples

Reform has long been a goal for federal leaders. Many heralded Obama-era changes aimed at eliminating racial disparities in policing and outlined in the report by The President’s Task Force on 21st Century policing. But HKS’s Smith saw them as largely symbolic. “It’s a nod to reform. But most of the reforms that are implemented in this country tend to be reforms that nibble around the edges and don’t really make much of a difference.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Smith, who cites studies suggesting a majority of Americans hold negative biases against Black and brown people, and that unconscious prejudices and stereotypes are difficult to erase.

“Experiments show that you can, in the context of a day, get people to think about race differently, and maybe even behave differently. But if you follow up, say, a week, or two weeks later, those effects are gone. We don’t know how to produce effects that are long-lasting. We invest huge amounts to implement such police reforms, but most often there’s no empirical evidence to support their efficacy.”

Even the early studies around the effectiveness of body cameras suggest the devices do little to change “officers’ patterns of behavior,” said Smith, though she cautions that researchers are still in the early stages of collecting and analyzing the data.

And though police body cameras have caught officers in unjust violence, much of the general public views the problem as anomalous.

“Despite what many people in low-income communities of color think about police officers, the broader society has a lot of respect for police and thinks if you just get rid of the bad apples, everything will be fine,” Smith added. “The problem, of course, is this is not just an issue of bad apples.”

Efforts such as diversifying police forces and implicit bias training do little to change behaviors and reduce violent conduct against people of color, said Sandra Susan Smith, a professor of criminal justice Harvard Kennedy School.

Community-based ways forward

Still Smith sees reason for hope and possible ways forward involving a range of community-based approaches. As part of the effort to explore meaningful change, Smith, along with Christopher Winship , Diker-Tishman Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and a member of the senior faculty at HKS, have organized “ Reimagining Community Safety: A Program in Criminal Justice Speaker Series ” to better understand the perspectives of practitioners, policymakers, community leaders, activists, and academics engaged in public safety reform.

Some community-based safety models have yielded important results. Smith singles out the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets program (known as CAHOOTS ) in Eugene, Ore., which supplements police with a community-based public safety program. When callers dial 911 they are often diverted to teams of workers trained in crisis resolution, mental health, and emergency medicine, who are better equipped to handle non-life-threatening situations. The numbers support her case. In 2017 the program received 25,000 calls, only 250 of which required police assistance. Training similar teams of specialists who don’t carry weapons to handle all traffic stops could go a long way toward ending violent police encounters, she said.

“Imagine you have those kinds of services in play,” said Smith, paired with community-based anti-violence program such as Cure Violence , which aims to stop violence in targeted neighborhoods by using approaches health experts take to control disease, such as identifying and treating individuals and changing social norms. Together, she said, these programs “could make a huge difference.”

At Harvard Law School, students have been studying how an alternate 911-response team might function in Boston. “We were trying to move from thinking about a 911-response system as an opportunity to intervene in an acute moment, to thinking about what it would look like to have a system that is trying to help reweave some of the threads of community, a system that is more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” said HLS Professor Rachel Viscomi, who directs the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program and oversaw the research.

The forthcoming report, compiled by two students in the HLS clinic, Billy Roberts and Anna Vande Velde, will offer officials a range of ideas for how to think about community safety that builds on existing efforts in Boston and other cities, said Viscomi.

But Smith, like others, knows community-based interventions are only part of the solution. She applauds the Justice Department’s investigation into the Ferguson Police Department after the shooting of Brown. The 102-page report shed light on the department’s discriminatory policing practices, including the ways police disproportionately targeted Black residents for tickets and fines to help balance the city’s budget. To fix such entrenched problems, state governments need to rethink their spending priorities and tax systems so they can provide cities and towns the financial support they need to remain debt-free, said Smith.

Rethinking the 911-response system to being one that is “more focused on healing than just on stopping harm” is part of the student-led research under the direction of Law School Professor Rachel Viscomi, who heads up the Harvard Negotiation and Mediation Clinical Program.

Jon Chase/Harvard file photo

“Part of the solution has to be a discussion about how government is funded and how a city like Ferguson got to a place where government had so few resources that they resorted to extortion of their residents, in particular residents of color, in order to make ends meet,” she said. “We’ve learned since that Ferguson is hardly the only municipality that has struggled with funding issues and sought to address them through the oppression and repression of their politically, socially, and economically marginalized Black and Latino residents.”

Police contracts, she said, also need to be reexamined. The daughter of a “union man,” Smith said she firmly supports officers’ rights to union representation to secure fair wages, health care, and safe working conditions. But the power unions hold to structure police contracts in ways that protect officers from being disciplined for “illegal and unethical behavior” needs to be challenged, she said.

“I think it’s incredibly important for individuals to be held accountable and for those institutions in which they are embedded to hold them to account. But we routinely find that union contracts buffer individual officers from having to be accountable. We see this at the level of the Supreme Court as well, whose rulings around qualified immunity have protected law enforcement from civil suits. That needs to change.”

Other Harvard experts agree. In an opinion piece in The Boston Globe last June, Tomiko Brown-Nagin , dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at HLS, pointed out the Court’s “expansive interpretation of qualified immunity” and called for reform that would “promote accountability.”

“This nation is devoted to freedom, to combating racial discrimination, and to making government accountable to the people,” wrote Brown-Nagin. “Legislators today, like those who passed landmark Civil Rights legislation more than 50 years ago, must take a stand for equal justice under law. Shielding police misconduct offends our fundamental values and cannot be tolerated.”

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10 things we know about race and policing in the U.S.

Days of protests across the United States in the wake of George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police have brought new attention to questions about police officers’ attitudes toward black Americans, protesters and others. The public’s views of the police, in turn, are also in the spotlight. Here’s a roundup of Pew Research Center survey findings from the past few years about the intersection of race and law enforcement.

How we did this

Most of the findings in this post were drawn from two previous Pew Research Center reports: one on police officers and policing issues published in January 2017, and one on the state of race relations in the United States published in April 2019. We also drew from a September 2016 report on how black and white Americans view police in their communities. (The questions asked for these reports, as well as their responses, can be found in the reports’ accompanying “topline” file or files.)

The 2017 police report was based on two surveys. One was of 7,917 law enforcement officers from 54 police and sheriff’s departments across the U.S., designed and weighted to represent the population of officers who work in agencies that employ at least 100 full-time sworn law enforcement officers with general arrest powers, and conducted between May and August 2016. The other survey, of the general public, was conducted via the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP) in August and September 2016 among 4,538 respondents. (The 2016 report on how blacks and whites view police in their communities also was based on that survey.) More information on methodology is available here .

The 2019 race report was based on a survey conducted in January and February 2019. A total of 6,637 people responded, out of 9,402 who were sampled, for a response rate of 71%. The respondents included 5,599 from the ATP and oversamples of 530 non-Hispanic black and 508 Hispanic respondents sampled from Ipsos’ KnowledgePanel. More information on methodology is available here .

Majorities of both black and white Americans say black people are treated less fairly than whites in dealing with the police and by the criminal justice system as a whole. In a 2019 Center survey , 84% of black adults said that, in dealing with police, blacks are generally treated less fairly than whites; 63% of whites said the same. Similarly, 87% of blacks and 61% of whites said the U.S. criminal justice system treats black people less fairly.

More than eight-in-ten black adults say blacks are treated less fairly than whites by police, criminal justice system

Black adults are about five times as likely as whites to say they’ve been unfairly stopped by police because of their race or ethnicity (44% vs. 9%), according to the same survey. Black men are especially likely to say this : 59% say they’ve been unfairly stopped, versus 31% of black women.

Black men are far more likely than black women to say they've been unfairly stopped by the police

White Democrats and white Republicans have vastly different views of how black people are treated by police and the wider justice system. Overwhelming majorities of white Democrats say black people are treated less fairly than whites by the police (88%) and the criminal justice system (86%), according to the 2019 poll. About four-in-ten white Republicans agree (43% and 39%, respectively).

Vast gaps between white Republicans, Democrats on views of treatment of blacks

Nearly two-thirds of black adults (65%) say they’ve been in situations where people acted as if they were suspicious of them because of their race or ethnicity, while only a quarter of white adults say that’s happened to them. Roughly a third of both Asian and Hispanic adults (34% and 37%, respectively) say they’ve been in such situations, the 2019 survey found.

Most blacks say someone has acted suspicious of them or as if they weren't smart

Black Americans are far less likely than whites to give police high marks for the way they do their jobs . In a 2016 survey, only about a third of black adults said that police in their community did an “excellent” or “good” job in using the right amount of force (33%, compared with 75% of whites), treating racial and ethnic groups equally (35% vs. 75%), and holding officers accountable for misconduct (31% vs. 70%).

Blacks are about half as likely as whites to have a positive view of police treatment of racial and ethnic groups or officers' use of force

In the past, police officers and the general public have tended to view fatal encounters between black people and police very differently. In a 2016 survey of nearly 8,000 policemen and women from departments with at least 100 officers, two-thirds said most such encounters are isolated incidents and not signs of broader problems between police and the black community. In a companion survey of more than 4,500 U.S. adults, 60% of the public called such incidents signs of broader problems between police and black people. But the views given by police themselves were sharply differentiated by race: A majority of black officers (57%) said that such incidents were evidence of a broader problem, but only 27% of white officers and 26% of Hispanic officers said so.

Most white, Latino officers say encounters between blacks and police are isolated incidents; majority of black officers disagree

Around two-thirds of police officers (68%) said in 2016 that the demonstrations over the deaths of black people during encounters with law enforcement were motivated to a great extent by anti-police bias; only 10% said (in a separate question) that protesters were primarily motivated by a genuine desire to hold police accountable for their actions. Here as elsewhere, police officers’ views differed by race: Only about a quarter of white officers (27%) but around six-in-ten of their black colleagues (57%) said such protests were motivated at least to some extent by a genuine desire to hold police accountable.

Most officers say protests mainly motivated by bias toward police

White police officers and their black colleagues have starkly different views on fundamental questions regarding the situation of blacks in American society, the 2016 survey found. For example, nearly all white officers (92%) – but only 29% of their black colleagues – said the U.S. had made the changes needed to assure equal rights for blacks.

Police, public divided by race over whether attaining equality requires more changes

A majority of officers said in 2016 that relations between the police in their department and black people in the community they serve were “excellent” (8%) or “good” (47%). However, far higher shares saw excellent or good community relations with whites (91%), Asians (88%) and Hispanics (70%). About a quarter of police officers (26%) said relations between police and black people in their community were “only fair,” while nearly one-in-five (18%) said they were “poor” – with black officers far more likely than others to say so. (These percentages are based on only those officers who offered a rating.)

About half or more officers say police have positive relations with the racial, ethnic groups in their communities

An overwhelming majority of police officers (86%) said in 2016 that high-profile fatal encounters between black people and police officers had made their jobs harder . Sizable majorities also said such incidents had made their colleagues more worried about safety (93%), heightened tensions between police and blacks (75%), and left many officers reluctant to use force when appropriate (76%) or to question people who seemed suspicious (72%).

Officers say fatal encounters between police and blacks have made policing harder

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Drew DeSilver is a senior writer at Pew Research Center

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Law Enforcement’s “Warrior” Problem

Seth Stoughton
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Within law enforcement, few things are more venerated than the concept of the Warrior. Officers are trained to cultivate a “warrior mindset,” the virtues of which are extolled in books, articles, 1 interviews, 2 and seminars 3 intended for a law enforcement audience. An article in Police Magazine opens with a sentence that demonstrates with notable nonchalance just how ubiquitous the concept is: “[Officers] probably hear about needing to have a warrior mindset almost daily.” 4 Modern policing has so thoroughly assimilated the warrior mythos that, at some law enforcement agencies, it has become a point of professional pride to refer to the “police warrior.” 5 This is more than a relatively minor change in terminology. Though adopted with the best of intentions, the warrior concept has created substantial obstacles to improving police/community relations. In short, law enforcement has developed a “warrior” problem.

In this Commentary, I first describe how law enforcement training and tactics reflect the warrior concept, identifying aspects of modern policing that, if not addressed, will continue to prevent or undermine efforts to improve public perceptions of police legitimacy. I join a growing chorus of voices contending that it is the Guardian, not the Warrior, that offers the appropriate metaphor for modern officers. 6 Drawing on that principle, I offer two practical changes to police training that have the potential to advance the ultimate police mission — promoting public security — in a way that fosters, rather than thwarts, public trust: requiring non-enforcement contacts and emphasizing tactical restraint.

What is the warrior mindset? In its most restrictive sense, it refers to the mental tenacity and attitude that officers, like soldiers, are taught to adopt in the face of a life-threatening struggle. In this context, the warrior mindset refers to a bone-deep commitment to survive a bad situation no matter the odds or difficulty, to not give up even when it is mentally and physically easier to do so. 7 So narrowly defined, the concept is difficult for anyone to criticize. Unfortunately, the homage paid to the Warrior has expanded that uncontroversial definition beyond all recognition.

The warrior mindset has mutated into the warrior mentality. Like the restrictive version, the broad definition is motivated by the undeniable importance of officer safety. But where the restrictive version represents an attitude that officers should display in the most physically dangerous and psychologically precarious situations, the broad definition instructs officers on how to approach every aspect of their job. From their earliest days in the academy, would-be officers are told that their prime objective, the proverbial “first rule of law enforcement,” 8 is to go home at the end of every shift. 9 But they are taught that they live in an intensely hostile world. A world that is, quite literally, gunning for them. As early as the first day of the police academy, the dangers officers face are depicted in graphic and heart-wrenching recordings that capture a fallen officer’s last moments. 10 Death, they are told, is constantly a single, small misstep away. A recent article written by an officer for Police Magazine opens with this description: “The dangers we expose ourselves to every time we go [on duty] are almost immeasurable. We know this the day we sign up and the academy certainly does a good job of hammering the point home.” 11 For example, training materials at the New Mexico Police Academy hammer that point quite explicitly, informing recruits that the suspects they will be dealing with “are mentally prepared to react violently.” 12 Each recruit is told, in these words, “[Y]ou could die today, tomorrow, or next Friday.” 13

Under this warrior worldview, officers are locked in intermittent and unpredictable combat with unknown but highly lethal enemies. As a result, officers learn to be afraid. That isn’t the word used in law enforcement circles, of course. Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But make no mistake, officers don’t learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant just because it’s fun. They do so because they are afraid. Fear is ubiquitous in law enforcement. As I’ve written elsewhere, officers are:

constantly barraged with the message that that they should be afraid, that their survival depends on it. Not only do officers hear it in formal training, they also hear it informally from supervisors and older officers. They talk about it with their peers. They see it on police forums and law enforcement publications. 14

For Warriors, hypervigilance offers the best chance for survival. 15 Officers learn to treat every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making. 16 Every individual, every situation — no exceptions. Because the enemies’ identities are unknown, everyone is a threat until conclusively proven otherwise. A popular police training text offers this advice: “As you approach any situation, you want to be in the habit of looking for cover[] so you can react automatically to reach it should trouble erupt.” 17 A more recent article puts it even more bluntly: “Remain humble and compassionate; be professional and courteous — and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.” 18 That plan is necessary, officers are told, because everyone they meet may have a plan to kill them .

This approach inevitably affects the way that officers interact with civilians. First, it creates a substantial, if invisible, barrier to true community policing. Although now a painfully nebulous phrase — the victim of expansive overuse 19 — community policing is, at its core, a strategy that relies on building “[c]ollaborative partnerships” between police agencies and communities so as to better identify problems and “develop and evaluate effective responses.” 20 To fulfill the promises of community policing, officers must establish meaningful short- and long-term relationships with individual community members. To see the friction between relationship building and the warrior mentality, with its hypervigilant focus on preserving officer safety at all costs, consider this thought experiment: Imagine that you are a rookie police officer driving down the street, windows down, 21 and looking for people in the community with whom you can begin building positive relationships. But you have been told (repeatedly) that your survival depends on believing that everyone you see — literally everyone — is capable of, and may very well be interested in, killing you. Put in that position, would you actually get out of your car and approach someone? And if you did, would you stroll up to start a casual conversation or would you advance cautiously, ask for identification, run a criminal background check, and request consent to search . . . and then, maybe, try to start that casual conversation? The latter, of course, is what many officers are taught to do. It is what I was taught to do as a rookie officer. My first ever “consensual encounter,” only hours into my first day of field training, followed exactly that pattern. It takes no great imagination to recognize how badly that approach, repeated over hundreds or thousands of police/civilian interactions in any given jurisdiction, hinders the creation of meaningful, collaborative relationships.

Counterintuitively, the warrior mentality also makes policing less safe for both officers and civilians. Either through formal training or informal example, officers learn to both verbally and physically control the space they operate in. 22 It is essential to set the proper tone for an encounter, 23 and the tone that best preserves officer safety is widely thought to be one of “unquestioned command.” 24 Even acting friendly, officers may be told, can make them a target. 25 But like the use of physical force, 26 the assertive manner in which officers set the tone of encounter can also set the stage for a negative response or a violent interaction that was, from the start, avoidable. From the warrior perspective, the solution is simple: the people with whom officers interact must accede, respecting officers’ authority by doing what they are told. The failure to comply is confirmation that the individual is an enemy for the Warrior to vanquish, physically if necessary. And this creates avoidable violence. Sue Rahr, a former sheriff and currently both the Director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission and a member of President Obama’s Task Force on Twenty-First Century Policing, put it this way: “We do our recruits no favor if we train them to approach every situation as a war. To do so sets them up to create unnecessary resistance and risk of injury.” 27

Admittedly, violence is relatively uncommon in police/civilian encounters and most uses of physical force involve relatively low-level violence, with injuries to both officers and civilians being correspondingly uncommon, 28 but an officer who needlessly aggravates a situation doesn’t just increase the risk he faces in that encounter. He also increases the risk that other officers face in other encounters. Consider that of the ten most destructive and violent riots in United States history, fully half were responses to perceived police abuses. 29 An aggressive approach in individual interactions can exacerbate underlying social tensions in a way that fuels a dangerous fire. This is not a new observation. The Wickersham Commission, which investigated the failures of Prohibition enforcement, made exactly this point in its 1931 report: “High-handed methods, shootings and killings, even where justified , alienate[] thoughtful citizens, believers in law and order. Unfortunate public expressions . . . approving killings and promiscuous shootings and lawless raids and seizures and deprecating the constitutional guarantees involved[] aggravate[] this effect.” 30 The expansive version of the warrior mentality promotes the use of tactics that needlessly create use of force situations, and the fierce rhetoric that follows further fans the flames.

The Warrior has created problems for law enforcement, but the Guardian may offer some solutions that enhance both officer and civilian safety in ways that increase public trust in the police. This has not gone entirely unrecognized in law enforcement circles, and I add my voice to others that have called for precisely this change. 31 Of course, the guardian concept is no more inherently self defining than “warrior mindset” or “community policing,” raising questions about what exactly it entails. Both Warriors and Guardians seek to protect the communities they serve, of course, but the guardian mindset takes both a broader view and a longer view of how to achieve that goal. Put simply, the guardian mindset prioritizes service over crimefighting, and it values the dynamics of short-term encounters as a way to create long-term relationships. As a result, it instructs officers that their interactions with community members must be more than legally justified, they must also be empowering, fair, respectful, and considerate. 32 The guardian mindset emphasizes communication over commands, cooperation over compliance, and legitimacy over authority. And in the use-of-force context, the Guardian emphasizes patience and restraint over control, stability over action.

To flesh out the changes that could promote guardian policing, I offer two practical suggestions for police training. 33 The first can be addressed very quickly. To encourage officers to connect with community members, law enforcement agencies should require would-be officers to initiate non-enforcement contacts with members of their community. Both early in field training and near its conclusion, rookie officers should have to spend a certain set amount of time — perhaps one day a week, perhaps a block of two weeks or longer — approaching civilians just to have meaningful conversations. Building on the “Good Strangers” and “Tact, Tactics and Trust” training that grew out of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Strategic Social Interaction Modules training, 34 a “non-enforcement contact” requirement means officers would have to interact with their constituents while being prohibited from taking enforcement actions: no asking for identification, no running criminal history checks, no issuing tickets, and no making arrests. 35 Further, the law enforcement agency should emphasize that officers are expected to continue making regular non-enforcement contacts even after completing field training. The purpose is threefold: giving officers and community members the chance to get to know each other as individuals, emphasizing the agencies’ commitment to community policing for both internal and external audiences, and teaching officers the valuable communication skills that they will use countless times over the course of their careers.

The second suggestion is to emphasize tactical restraint through both training and after-action review of use-of-force incidents. Tactical restraint has received significant attention and criticism recently, and so requires slightly more explanation. Simply put, tactical restraint instructs officers to avoid avoidable risks when doing so is consistent with the police mission. Tactical restraint doesn’t teach officers to run away from violent confrontations; it teaches them to approach every situation in a way that minimizes the threat of having it turn violent in the first place. To be clear, not all violence is avoidable. The use of force, including deadly force, will sometimes be necessary. But when violence is avoidable and when avoiding it doesn’t sacrifice the police mission, officers should be required to use tactical restraint even when that means holding their position or temporarily withdrawing. 36 From the guardian perspective, the value of this approach is that it minimizes the risk to civilians by reducing the chances that the officer will find himself in a situation that requires a high level of force. In short, because officers are safer, civilians are safer.

Nothing that I’ve suggested is entirely new to policing, and tactical restraint is no exception. Officers are already taught to use tactical restraint in certain situations. For example, many agencies instruct officers not to make an arrest without a second officer present. Why not? Why not allow an officer, working alone, to loudly issue verbal commands (perhaps even emphasizing the seriousness of commands with profanity) or charge in and go hands on? Because having backup on scene reduces the chance the suspect will resist and, in the event the suspect does resist, it gives officers an advantage. When officers are in a tactically superior position — here, having the advantage of numbers — it is easier for them to overcome resistance with less force. And using less force is ultimately more protective of the suspect that the officers are called upon to arrest.

Foot pursuits offer another example of how officers and agencies already employ tactical restraint. Most departments instruct officers, through policies or training, to keep a fleeing suspect in sight but to not physically engage until backup is on scene. 37 Why? Because a suspect who runs is more likely to be a suspect who fights. A fight is more dangerous for a single officer than it is for multiple officers, which means that a single officer might need to use more force than two officers would need to use to deal with the situation. That means that by waiting for other officers to arrive, the chasing officer reduces the amount of force that may be necessary to take the suspect into custody. By delaying, the officer can reduce the risk to both himself and the suspect. Some officers take a slightly different approach to tactical restraint. An officer I worked with used to encourage fleeing suspects to keep running. He’d stay behind them and shout, “Keep going! I’ve almost got you!” He did so because he didn’t want to have to fight the suspect — which would have endangered both of them — so he made sure that the suspect was physically exhausted. From a crime-fighting standpoint, this approach had costs: the suspect could not be charged with resisting because he had never ordered the suspect to stop (in fact, the suspect was doing exactly what he had been told to do!). But avoiding violence was well worth it. In some cases, it can be safer and just as effective to not pursue. As Chuck Wexler, Executive Director of the Police Executive Research Forum, wrote, “If the suspect’s identity is known, it may be safer if police arrest the person later, rather than engaging in a foot pursuit.” 38 The Denver Police Chief adopted a similar approach in the context of a recent protest, ordering his officers to not immediately arrest two protestors who defaced a police memorial by pouring red paint on it. 39 Rather than move in right then and there, which might have sparked a confrontation between officers and the crowd of protestors, Denver officers waited to arrest the two vandals, safely apprehending them after the protest and away from the crowds. 40 What all of those approaches have in common is a commitment to not rushing in recklessly when officers can use a safer option to accomplish the mission. That’s tactical restraint.

Tactical restraint is a valuable concept precisely because it offers a principled way to broadly apply the lessons that officers have already learned in some contexts. Using restraint doesn’t give suspects any more of an opportunity to resist than they already have. It gives officers a way to reduce both the probability of resistance and the amount of force that may be necessary to overcome that resistance. It encourages officers to work smarter, not harder, by relying more on good tactics and communication than on violence. It protects officers and civilians alike, which is exactly what so many of our officers already do and exactly why all of our officers should be expected to exercise tactical restraint.

It will take more than a couple of isolated changes to heal the longstanding divide between law enforcement agencies and the communities they police, particularly communities of color. Earning public trust will take decades and require rethinking how officers are trained as well as the legal and administrative standards used to review police violence. It will require changing the very culture of policing by reaffirming that policing must be done with a community, not to a community. There is deep tension between community policing and the warrior identity that has become so prevalent in modern law enforcement. We can resolve that tension and improve policing, in part, by replacing the concept of the police warrior with that of the guardian officer.

* Assistant Professor of Law, University of South Carolina School of Law. I am grateful to Geoff Alpert, Walter Katz, Mel Tucker, Hal Williamson, and Scott Wolfe for their helpful suggestions during the drafting process. In addition, I appreciate the questions and comments from the audiences at The Thin Blue Line: Policing Post-Ferguson symposium at the St. Louis University School of Law and the Police Use of Force: Investigation and Best Practices training seminar hosted by the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, as well as the many emails I’ve received from law enforcement officers, instructors, and executives around the country over the past few months, all of which have helped refine my thinking. I also appreciate the excellent editorial work of the Harvard Law Review . As always, I am deeply grateful for the support of Alisa Stoughton.

^ E.g ., Amaury Murgado, Developing a Warrior Mindset , Police Mag ., May 24 , 2012 , http://www.policemag.com/channel/patrol/articles/2012/05/warrior-mindset.aspx [ http://perma.cc/CK6Q-VNLR ]; Charles Remsberg, Warrior Mindset: 8 Elements of Tactical Performance , PoliceOne.com ( June 5, 2013), http://perma.cc/R6CK-PRPP ].

^ Hank Hayes: Warrior Mindset , PoliceOne.com (Mar. 14, 2011), http://www.policeone.com/hank-hayes/videos/5955798-Hank-Hayes-Warrior-Mindset [ http://perma.cc/5JKL-JPK8 ].

^ The 2015 International Law Enforcement Educator and Trainers Association Conference, for example, will feature two sessions each on “Becoming Knights – Teaching Warrior Mindset to the Non-Warrior” and “Building Warrior Women Trainers.” See 2015 ILEETA Conference Schedule , Int’l Law Enforcement Educator & Trainers Ass’n , http://ileeta.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2015-ILLETA-CONFERENCE-3_2_151.pdf (last visited Mar. 21, 2015) [ http://perma.cc/WXD8-R55G ]. Prior years offered additional training sessions with titles like “The Path of the Warrior Mentor,” “Filling the Tank – Warriors and Leaders,” “Always the Warrior at Every Age,” and “Emotional Warrior Training: Combating Stress.” Valerie Van Brocklin, Where Have All the Warriors Gone? , LawOfficer.com (Mar. 8, 2012), http://www.lawofficer.com/article/training/where-have-all-warriors-gone [ http://perma.cc/XX79-QLEC ].

^ Murgado, supra note 2.

^ E.g ., Loren W. Christensen, Defensive Tactics: Modern Arrest & Control Techniques for Today’s Police Warrior (2008). Similarly, a wide variety of sources identify police officers as warriors. See, e.g. , Helen Barnett , Urban Warrior (1999) ; Loren W. Christensen, Warriors: On Living with Courage, Discipline, and Honor (2004); Larry F. Jetmore, The Path of the Warrior: An Ethical Guide to Personal & Professional Development in the Field of Criminal Justice (2005) ; Lux Jameson , On the Job: A Black Warrior in Blue (2000); Bernard Schaffer, Way of the Warrior: Law Enforcement Philosophy (2013); Bruce K. Siddle, Sharpening the Warrior’s Edge: The Psychology & Science of Training (1995); Brian Voncannon, Living Behind the Shield: A Modern Warrior’s Path to Bravehood (2000).

^ See, e.g. , U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Who is Guarding the Guardians?: A Report on Police Practices (1981).

^ Charles Dahlinger, Law Enforcement Combat Thinking , Law Enforcement Today (May 21, 2014), http://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/2014/05/21/law-enforcement-combat-thinking [ http://perma.cc/Z54W-9CAU ].

^ Seth Stoughton, How Police Training Contributes to Avoidable Deaths , The Atlantic (Dec. 12, 2014), http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/12/police-gun-shooting-training-ferguson/383681 [ http://perma.cc/7T6L-PP24 ].

^ Seth W. Stoughton, Policing Facts , 88 Tul. L. Rev. 847, 865–66 (2014); see also Scott Fielden , The Mind of a Cop: What They Do, and Why They Do It 21 (2009); David J. Thomas, Understanding Violent Criminals: Insights from the Front Lines of Law Enforcement 191 (2014). For a critique of this “first rule of law enforcement,” see Jack Colwell et al., No “Officer Safety” Exception to the Constitution , Law & Order , Jan. 2015, at 10, http://www.hendonpub.com/law_and_order/articles/2015/01/no_officer_safety_exception_to_the_constitution [ http://perma.cc/DN22-STU8 ].

^ Fielden , supra note 10, at 20.

^ A.J. George, Winning a Knife Fight , Police Mag . (Feb. 11, 2015), http://www.policemag.com/channel/weapons/articles/2015/02/winning-a-knife-fight.aspx [ ].

^ Uriel J. Garcia, Experts Say Strongly Worded Police Curriculum Is Risky with Cadets , Santa Fe New Mexican (Mar. 25, 2014), http://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/experts-say-strongly-worded-police-curriculum-is-risky-with-cadets/article_6fcb7d45-436c-5e48-aa06-2fc6fdcc35a1.html [ http://perma.cc/FBQ2-LYTP ].

^ Stoughton, supra note 9.

^ Thomas C. Knowles, Cops Aren’t Your Enemy , Politico Mag . (Dec. 23, 2014), http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/cops-arent-your-enemy-113794.html [ http://perma.cc/B5UL-JB3A ] (“From the start of any police academy, we are taught as cops to be ever vigilant — to apply laser-like attention to our surroundings at all times.”).

^ Richard Fairburn, Cooper’s Colors: A Simple System for Situational Awareness , PoliceOne.com (Aug. 9, 2010), http://www.policeone.com/police-trainers/articles/2188253-Coopers-colors-A-simple-system-for-situational-awareness [ http://perma.cc/5PU5-5957 ].

^ Ronald J. Adams et al., Street Survival 155 (1980).

^ John Bennett, How Command Presence Affects Your Survival , PoliceOne.com (Oct. 7, 2010), http://www.policeone.com/Officer-Safety/articles/2748139-How-command-presence-affects-your-survival [ http://perma.cc/CKF3-Y8C6 ].

^ “One reason for its popularity is that community policing is a plastic concept, meaning different things to different people.” John E. Eck & Dennis P. Rosenbaum, The New Police Order: Effectiveness, Equity, and Efficiency in Community Policing , in The Challenge of Community Policing: Testing the Promises 3, 3 (Dennis P. Rosenbaum ed., 1994). Because it is so variable, “[c]ommunity policing has become the new orthodoxy for cops.” Id . In this way, community policing offers a sad parallel to the original, limited meaning of the warrior mindset.

^ Cmty. Oriented Policing Servs., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Community Policing Defined 1 (2014), http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/vets-to-cops/e030917193-CP-Defined.pdf [ http://perma.cc/7JG2-AMMC ].

^ One of the classic criticisms that community police advocates level against contemporary policing is the tendency for officers to drive around their assigned patrol zone with their windows up, effectively shutting themselves away from the public.

^ Bennett, supra note 19.

^ Lawrence N. Blum & Joseph M. Polisar, Why Things Go Wrong in Police Work , 71 Police Chief , July 2004, at 49, http://www.policechiefmagazine.org/magazine/index.cfm?fuseaction=display_arch&article_id=336&issue_id=72004 [ http://perma.cc/4DDR-Y4XZ ]. Officers may establish this authority more firmly in some interactions than others. See Christopher Cooper, Mediation in Black and White: Unequal Distribution of Empowerment by Police , in Not Guilty 125, 125–26 (Jabari Asim ed., 2001).

^ Michigan v. Summers, 452 U.S. 692, 702–03 (1981) (stating that, in the context of a traffic stop, “[t]he risk of harm to both the police and the [vehicle] occupants is minimized if the officers routinely exercise unquestioned command of the situation”).

^ Anthony J. Pinizzotto et al., U.S. Dep’t of Justice , Violent Encounters: A Study of Felonious Assaults on Our Nation’s Law Enforcement Officers 19 (2006) , http://www.secondcalldefense.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/Violent-Encounters.pdf [ http://perma.cc/4UJB-69XK ].

^ Cf . Geoffrey P. Alpert & Roger G. Dunham, Understanding Police Use of Force 88–91 (2004) (presenting data on officer/suspect interactions and the impacts of the use of force).

^ John S. Dempsey & Linda S. Forst, An Introduction to Policing 127 (8th ed. 2014) (quoting Sue Rahr) (internal quotation marks omitted).

^ Stoughton, supra note 9, at 867–68.

^ The five riots in response to perceived police abuses were a 2001 Cincinnati riot, the 1992 Rodney King riots, 1967 riots in Detroit and Newark, and the 1965 Watts riot in Los Angeles. Daniel Bukszpan, America’s Most Destructive Riots of All Time , CNBC.com (Feb. 1, 2011), http://www.cnbc.com/id/41372364 [ http://perma.cc/ET8E-LGZZ ]. That does not include the 1973 riot in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, which was at least partially attributable to abuses within the corrections system, and the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization riot, which was, by many accounts, exacerbated by police tactics. Id .

^ Nat’l Comm’n on Law Observance and Enforcement, Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States 82 (1931) (emphasis added).

^ See President’s Task Force on 21 st Century Policing, Interim Report of the President’s Task Force on 21 st Century Policing 9–10 (2015), http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/Interim_TF_Report.pdf [ http://perma.cc/L9JX-KS96 ]. The Task Force’s Interim Report is the most prominent call for such a transition to date, but it was hardly the first such call. As the deputy director of the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission explained late last year, recruit training must be “guided by the underlying goal of producing officers who are guardians as opposed to warriors .” Christopher Moraff, Can Different Training Make Police Officers Guardians, Not Warriors? , Next City (Dec. 4, 2014), http://nextcity.org/daily/entry/change-police-training-task-force-empathy-policing [ http://perma.cc/YC5M-QWKM ].

^ One approach, referred to as “Justice Based Policing,” instructs officers to “Listen and Explain with Equity and Dignity.” Sue Rahr et al., The Four Pillars of Justice Based Policing 1 (2011), http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/index.cfm?a=368336&c=56523 [ http://perma.cc/ZN62-GGB6 ]. It explains that officers should: Listen — Allow people to give their side of the story; give them voice, and let them vent. Explain — Explain what you’re doing, what they can do, and what’s going to happen. Equity — Tell them why you are taking action. The reason must be fair and free of bias, and show their input was taken into consideration. Dignity — Act with dignity and leave them with their dignity. Id . at 2 (emphasis omitted).

^ Changing two aspects of police training is just the tip of the iceberg, of course, and I have spoken publicly and privately about other suggestions. See, e.g. , Seth Stoughton, Reflections on Policing Police at the 2015 Saint Louis University Public Law Review Symposium (Feb. 20, 2015), http://law.slu.edu/event/thin-blue-line-policing-post-ferguson [ http://perma.cc/2QLJ-RP7U ]. I limit myself here to two particularly important suggestions so as not to exceed the boundaries of a single essay.

^ Jon Schuppe, Science of Strangers: Military Research Could Boost Cops’ People Skills , NBC News (Oct. 22, 2014, 4:58 AM), http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/science-strangers-military-research-could-boost-cops-people-skills-n230951 [ http://perma.cc/53U6-J5H9?type=image ].

^ In some cases, of course, emergency situations will require an enforcement-oriented response.

^ Influential police scholar Carl Klockars went as far as suggesting that excessive force be defined as “the use of more force than a highly skilled police officer would find necessary to use in that particular situation,” taking into consideration the tactical choices that an officer made when approaching the situation. Carl B. Klockars, A Theory of Excessive Force and Its Control , in Police Violence: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force 1, 8–10 (William A. Geller & Hans Toch eds., 1996).

^ Stoughton, supra note 9, at 868.

^ Chuck Wexler, Op-Ed., Police Curb Use of Lethal Force: Another View , USA Today , Nov. 25, 2014, http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/11/25/ferguson-grand-jury-police-lethal-force-editorials-debates/19516001 [ http://perma.cc/P5JX-44QT ].

^ Denver Police Upset After Memorial Vandalized During Protest , N.Y. Times (Feb . 15, 2015), http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2015/02/15/us/ap-us-police-protest-vandalism.html .

^ Id . It should be noted that this approach was not universally popular. Some officers found the vandalism, as I do, deeply reprehensible, and undoubtedly some intensely disliked not being able to intervene at the time. Id . This is an excellent example of the Warrior and the Guardian in microcosm — a Warrior may very well have moved to immediately apprehend the two vandals. Such a move might have led protestors to attempt to resist, of course, but such interference would have been unlawful. So if the other protestors had interfered, they, too, would have been subject to both immediate arrest and, had they resisted, however much force was necessary to overcome their resistance. Although certainly lawfully justified, that approach creates obvious and substantial risks to both officers and civilians. The guardian approach, in contrast, certainly resulted in psychological distress to some number of officers, but that distress is one of the sacrifices required of officers as they protect and serve their communities.

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Home — Essay Samples — Law, Crime & Punishment — Law Enforcement — The sociology of law enforcement culture

The Sociology of Law Enforcement Culture

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Introduction, defining law enforcement culture, norms and values, subcultures within law enforcement, socialization and professionalization, impact on officer behavior.

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Crime and punishment in early modern England, c.1500-c.1700 - Edexcel Methods of law enforcement in early modern England

Early modern England saw new crimes because of religious and political upheaval. Law enforcement continued to be the responsibility of the local community and new punishments were introduced.

Part of History Crime and punishment in Britain, c.1000 to the present day

Methods of law enforcement in early modern England

Some changes were made to improve law enforcement between c.1500 and c.1700. However, mostly there was continuity from the system used in medieval England.

Policing still largely relied on the local community and so varied across towns:

The hue and cry close hue and cry A method of raising the alarm to the rest of the village after a crime had been committed, usually by shouting loudly. continued to be used. Members of the local community, led by the constable, were expected to search for criminals. Witnesses were required to step in to stop suspects and/or report them to the authorities.
A local posse close posse A group of men, over the age of 21, summoned by a sheriff to assist in preserving the public peace and called upon in an emergency. was used to catch criminals.
Parish constables were still used to protect citizens from crime. However, this was a part-time role without weapons or a uniform. Parish constables could arrest and punish criminals, including vagrants, close vagrant Homeless, unemployed person who wandered the streets. who were often whipped. Constables were also responsible for offenders held in prison before their trial.

Watchman' wearing a hat and long coat, carrying a lantern and spear.

There were also some changes to policing in early modern England. These were largely made because the growth of towns brought with it new opportunities for criminals:

Larger towns employed watchmen to patrol the streets between 22:00 and dawn. Watchmen carried a lamp and rang a bell to warn people to go home or risk being identified as criminals. They were also expected to arrest vagabonds and drunks. All watchmen were volunteers and unpaid.
The town constable was appointed and employed by the town authorities. The constable was expected to turn serious criminals over to the courts, break up fights, round up vagrants, and collect community payments for road maintenance and cleaning.
Ordinary people were given the power to deal with crime themselves. They could obtain an arrest warrant close warrant A certificate authorising an action. from a Justice of the Peace close Justice of the Peace Someone responsible for maintaining law and order in a county. Often abbreviated to JP. (JPs) to catch the criminal and deliver them to the constable.
Rewards were given for the arrest of criminals, often in the form of money.
Wealthier householders joined together to hire armed guards to protect them and their families and property. These were early steps towards a paid police service.
Constables and watchmen had limited success and lacked motivation to hunt down criminals effectively. Therefore, many people turned to professional thief takers to reclaim their stolen property. Thief takers were paid a percentage of their recovered ‘booty’ and delivered criminals to the authorities. This system was open to corruption as criminals were sometimes thief takers too.

Jonathan Wild

The most well-known watchman was Jonathan Wild, who worked in London. In 1718 he called himself the Thief-Taker General. However, his own criminal activities were discovered in 1725 and he was executed for his deception.

Some features of trials continued from medieval England. Most trials still took place at a local level:

Although JPs had been introduced in medieval England, they took on a greater role in early modern England. JPs were helped by the constable and judged manor court cases for crimes that had been committed on the land of the lord of the manor. This enabled them to hand out community punishments, such as fines, stocks, close stocks A wooden frame with holes to hold the feet of someone convicted of a crime. pillory close pillory A wooden frame with holes to hold the head and hands of someone convicted of a crime. and whipping.
Manor courts continued to deal with local and minor crimes such as drunkenness.
Royal judges still visited each county twice a year to judge the most serious offences. These became known as county assizes.
Church courts continued to be used to judge churchmen and those who could claim benefit of the clergy.

However, there were some changes that improved the system:

Four times a year, JPs would meet with other JPs from across England at quarter sessions. Here they would judge more serious cases of crime and had the power to sentence an offender to death.
By 1600, more people could read and were able to claim benefit of the clergy using the ‘neck verse’ - where a verse from the Bible was read to prove their connection to the Church. This led to a change in the law preventing anyone from using benefit of the clergy for serious crimes.
The Habeas Corpus Act was passed in 1679. This prevented the authorities from imprisoning anyone indefinitely without charging them with a crime. Those who were arrested had to appear in court, within a certain time, to stand trial or be released. Habeas corpus is still in effect today.