Police Reforms
Read the attached article by scholar Wes Skogan.
Write a reflection focusing on the main questions- why DO reforms fail?
What role do police leaders play in reform? What does Skogan recommend?
Why reforms fail
Wesley G. Skogan*
Institute for Policy Research, Northwestern University, Evanston, USA
Police reform is risky and hard, and efforts to innovate in policing often fall short of expectations. This chapter examines sources of resistance to change in policing.
Some are internal, including opposition to reform at virtually all levels of the organization and among special units. The position of unions vis-a-vis change is highly variable, particularly if proposals do not threaten working conditions and officer safety. Politicians and other potential opponents of change lurk in the vicinity of policing, and reformers need to bring them into the process as well.
The public must understand how the investment they have in policing will be enhanced, and not threatened, by reform. If new strategies require the
cooperation of other service agencies (as, for example, for problem-solving policing) the heads of those bureaucracies must understand they are partners in their city’s program, not victims of empire building by the police. At the top, city
leaders must match the commitment of chiefs and other police executives to change, if reforms are to survive leadership transition.
Keywords: Innovation; Reform; Resistance; Misconduct; Leadership
It is necessary to be clear-eyed about the difficulties of innovating in police
organizations. Because of widespread enthusiasm for innovations, such as community
and problem-oriented policing, third-party policing, ‘lever-pulling’ policing, and
evidence-based policing among academics and the informed public, it could appear
that reform comes easily.1 In fact, it is hard, the political risks involved are
considerable, and efforts to change the police often fall far short or fail.
This chapter outlines some sources of resistance to innovation in policing. It is
not just focused on bottom-up reform, or the role of police unions. In fact, the article
by Bayley in this issue concludes that most innovations in policing have come from
the outside. Usually the plan has been crafted by academics or consultants, and often
the proposed programs come with the support of politicians who are trying to deal
with one or another public outrage over police affairs. I summarize what I have
gleaned about obstacles to change in police organizations in 11 categories. Many of
them reflect processes internal to police agencies. These I mostly attribute to the
career and bureaucratic interests and managerial outlook of the parties involved. At
the top, executives worry about keeping their jobs and the rank-and-file working
hard and out of trouble. Sergeants may not want to stray from what they know how
to do in order to keep out of trouble. Street officers do not want to be plagued by
out-of-touch programs that add to their workload and give them tasks that lie
outside their comfort zone. Elite units such as detectives frequently are able to avoid
getting involved, while union leaders keep a careful eye on their strategic situation
*Corresponding author. Email: skogan@northwestern.edu
ISSN 1043-9463 print/ISSN 1477-2728 online
# 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/10439460701718534
http://www.informaworld.com
Policing & Society,
Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2008, 2334
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vis-a-vis management. Others obstacles are probably endemic to public sector organizations: these include problems of interagency coordination, the competing
demands of differing constituencies, and the inability of the police to measure their success in the absence of a profit-and-loss statement. External to the police are community and political forces that can stymie change as well.
I do not know the relative frequency with which these obstacles loom large, but I have run across numerous examples of each of them without looking too
exhaustively. I have learned about them in my own research on community-oriented and problem-solving projects, plus studies of narcotics operations. This article also incorporates what I have read and gleaned in conversations with police and researchers in hotel bars around the world. Any reform agenda will face formidable obstacles, for the length of the list*it is a long one*is testimony to the difficulty of
managing change in police agencies.
Resistance by mid-level and top managers
Resistance does not just come from the bottom of police organizations; revolts by mid-level managers have defeated community-policing projects in several cities.
Managers near the middle of the organizational hierarchy saw authority being taken from them and pushed to lower levels in the organization, as part of decentralization schemes. Opportunities for promotion for middle managers may be limited by
shrinking management layers and the flattening of the formal rank structure that sometimes goes along with efforts to decentralize for neighborhood-oriented policing. When Chicago abolished its highest civil-service police rank*captain*a lieutenant (the next level below) told me that he felt as if he had been ‘kicked in the teeth.’ Police managers typically are command-and-control oriented and feel most
comfortable when everything is done by the book. When it was broached that foot officers might carry cell phones rather than rely on their portable radios, so that they could remain in contact with citizen patrols, local merchants and others on their
beat, Chicago’s chief of patrol killed the idea. ‘How will we know when they screw up?’ was his rhetorical question. Instead, he wanted all communications with officers in the field go through the 911 Center, when they were tape-recorded for future
investigation.
Discussions of policing reform also often feature modern management terms, such as ‘employee empowerment.’ This also makes senior managers very nervous.
They worry about laziness, corruption, racial profiling, and excessive force, and they do not trust rank-and-file officers on any of those dimensions. Departments struggle to keep control of their field force. Most police officers work alone or with a partner, and the top brass know little about what they do out there except what they report on pieces of paper that they sometimes fill out to document their activities. Police routinely encounter opportunities to engage in a laundry list of problematic activities, and the usual way that executives respond is to tighten the management screws to rein in officer discretion. However, the reforms of choice today*including
problem solving and community policing*celebrate the exercise of discretion, administrative decentralization, reducing hierarchy, granting officers more independence, and trusting in their professionalism. At the same time, it is revelations of
misconduct, not rising crime rates, that are likely to cost police executives their jobs, so they remain risk averse.
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Resistance by managers and even other top executives often results in innovative
policing units being run from the chief’s office. Or, to avoid the entrenched
bureaucracy, they may be housed in a special new bureau. In one large city, a new
chief who was brought from out of town to initiate community policing found that
he was unable to get the uniformed patrol division of the department to do anything
about it, from the top down. They were there before he came, and they expected to
be there when he left. Hence, he created an entirely new chain of command in the
department. A special community-policing bureau was set up with a parallel
hierarchy. It controlled teams of neighborhood officers, who worked outside the
supervision of the rest of the department. It was headed by a director he recruited
from another city, so that she would be free of the entrenched politics of the
department.
Forming separate units, often staffed by volunteers, may be an attractive change
strategy because reforms can be put into the field quickly, seemingly without the
necessity of confronting resistance by established units. A risk of this strategy is that
officers who serve in these units may not be seen as ‘real police.’ Officers with
community assignments can easily appear to have easy lives. They are frequently
interviewed on television, and they are invited to attend conferences in other cities.
Sometimes they are free to choose their own work hours, and too often they decide
that they are really needed on their beat 95, Mondays through Fridays. This was the
shift time of choice for New York City’s C-POP officers (e.g., McElroy et al. 1993).
What they do gets labeled ‘social work’ by other officers. They become known as
‘empty holster guys.’ Morale flounders, and some of the best officers will try to
transfer out. Where I was doing field work in Texas, community officers had flexible
shift schedules, they were given a cell phone, and they took a patrol car home with
them every night. When I quizzed a community officer what the rest of the
department thought of them, she replied, ‘They really hate us.’
Resistance by front-line supervisors
In the first experimental year, when the program was still fragile, I often overheard
Chicago’s community policing manager warn his team, ‘We’re not going to let the
sergeants kill this!’ Sergeants have direct control over what street officers do on a
day-to-day basis. One observer identified sergeants as most officers’ ‘real employer’
(Muir 1977). Herman Goldstein (1990: 57) notes, ‘However strongly the head of an
agency may elicit a different style of policing, the quality of an officer’s daily life is
heavily dependent on how well the officer satisfies the expectations and demands of
his or her immediate supervisor.’ Sergeants interpret the operational meaning of
official policies at the street level, so when roles and rules are up for grabs, they have
to have a clear vision they can support if change is really going to occur there.
Sergeants present problems. First, when programs are new, sergeants are new to it
as well. They do not know from their own experience how the job should be done, or
what works. Like others in the department, they have to learn skills and new roles
from the ground up. Because they are the ‘transmission belt’ that translates the
policies of higher-ups into action, it is important that they represent organizational
policies. If they actually believe in them that would help too. This matters even in
traditional command-and-control organizations, but many contemporary innovations
in policing call for significant decentralization, pushing both authority and
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responsibility for decision making deeper into the organization. There, sergeants are
the facilitating management layer. What Chicago’s change manager sensed was what
our survey data revealed: at that layer of management, support for community
policing was very thin. On questions gauging their support for collaborating with the
public and engaging in problem solving, sergeants scored very close to the rank-andfile,
and both groups were largely convinced that it could never work (Skogan and
Hartnett 1997).
Resistance by rank-and-file officers
Efforts to implement policing reforms have sometimes failed in the face of resistance
by ordinary officers as well. Enthusiasm by public officials and community activists
for innovations in policing encourages its detractors within the force to dismiss
reforms as ‘just politics.’ They see them as passing fads, something dreamed up by
civilians for the police to do. Police are skeptical about programs invented by
civilians. This is partly a matter of police culture. American policing is dominated by
a ‘we versus they,’ or ‘insider versus outsider’ orientation that assumes that the
academics, politicians, and community activists who plan policing programs cannot
possibly understand their job. Police are particularly hostile to programs that
threaten to involve civilians in defining their work or evaluating their performance.
They do not like civilians influencing their operational priorities, or deciding if they
are effective. Police on the street grouse about ‘loud mouths’ in the community who
are active because they want police to provide them personal service, and groups and
organizations that want police to support or defend their economic and social
interests. Outsiders must be ‘gimmie guys,’ for why else would they be taking such an
interest?
There is also resistance to change when*and because*it requires that officers
do many of their old jobs in new ways, and that they take on tasks that they never
imagined would come their way. Reforms of the day ask them to identify and solve a
broad range of problems, reach out to elements of the community that were
previously outside their orbit, and put their careers at risk by taking on unfamiliar
and challenging responsibilities. A difficulty with these expectations is that they
frequently lie outside the traditional roles for which they were selected and trained,
which they have honed through years of practical experience. Police would prefer ‘to
do what they signed up for’*usually a combination of crime fighting and emergency
service. As Thacher indicates in this issue, police claims to professionalism are based
on their experience and judgment rather than to the abstract and technical skills of
many occupational groups, and as a result they are loath to enter uncharted waters.
Street cops also rightly fear being assigned additional duties and paperwork while
still being held responsible for handling their old workload.
In my experience, translating the ‘fundamental principles’ of initiatives like
problem solving and community policing into actual practice is another difficulty.
Abstract concepts must be turned into lists of practical, day-to-day activities and
then enshrined in enforceable orders to which officers in the field can fairly be held
accountable. To a degree many outsiders find hard to fathom, little is supposed to
happen in police departments without General Orders detailing how it is to be done.
Of course, the troops have actually to go along with those orders, and the emphasis
should always be on the ‘para’ in these ‘paramilitary’ organizations. As Hans Toch
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points out in his contribution to this issue, the view that police departments are
efficiently hierarchical and bureaucratic does not reflect how the daily work gets
done. This is why sergeants are so important. From their perspective, officers
typically hear about new programs when they are announced at city hall press
conferences, and they feel that most initiatives are adopted without their input. They
are resentful when ‘the community’ is consulted about internal police business and
they are not. Officers who have survived previous policing reforms often derisively
recall the acronyms that designated those projects and can recount the forces that
inevitably led to their failure.
Voluntary overtime programs are obviously attractive in this environment. For
years, many departments paid volunteer officers some extra money for conducting
community-oriented projects. They were to do community policing after their day of
‘real’ police work is done. No one had to do it, but there was extra money in it.
However, not only may officers be tired by the end of the day, but it seems unlikely
that they would really do things differently during that extra two or three hours.
I once studied a narcotics team paid to do ‘community-oriented narcotics policing’
for an extra three hours, four days each week. There was a great deal of federal
money for the program, but I found that the officers did not have the slightest idea
how to do ‘community-oriented narcotics policing.’ It was not just that they received
no training. They all worked undercover out of a secret office, dressed in rough
clothing, and believed they could not reveal themselves to the community. The whole
program was a good example of a bad idea dreamed up by civilians, in this case from
Washington, DC (Skogan and Annan 1993).
Resistance by special units
Specialized units such as detectives are often threatened by department-wide
programs that require them to change their ways. For example, detectives may be
required actually to exchange information with uniformed officers, and not just suck
it into their ‘black hole,’ and they might find debate opening about their
effectiveness. I often describe Chicago’s detectives as ‘the biggest, toughest and
best-armed gang in town,’ although in truth there are several bigger and betterarmed
street gangs. Often special units have special relationships with politicians that
protect them. It can take political connections as well as the active support of friends
and relatives on the force to become a detective, and politicians will move to protect
them if they are threatened with unwanted change. What the politicians get in return
goes unstated.
In my experience, detectives have used their elite status in the organization to
avoid getting involved in programs like community policing. In Chicago, a succession
of chief detectives has pursued the same avoidance strategy, which is to smile warmly
at the mention of community policing and suggest that detectives are planning to get
involved soon. There are many other nooks and niches in the organization where
police who did not like the city’s program could also hide out and get ahead,
including the organized crime division, the narcotics unit, and various roving squads
of plainclothes tactical officers. Their anonymity and disconnection from any
community contact helped them ‘take heads’ and ‘kick ass’ with relative impunity, in
the name of good, aggressive policing. Because the ultimate measures of good police
work remains making arrests and seizing guns and drugs (see ‘Measuring What
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Matters’ below), those are the jobs that everyone wants. Vacant positions in the
department are always in the uniformed patrol division, where community policing
has been effectively sequestered.
Resistance by police unions
The extent to which resistance by police unions is an issue varies highly from city to
city in the United States. The states vary in the extent to which police can be
represented by unions and can effectively threaten job action, but in many big cities
they are a force to be reckoned with. In Chicago, the major police union endorsed
community policing, and stayed focused on wages, benefits, working conditions, and
officer safety. In the mid-1990s, the union even formed a community-policing
committee whose members started showing up national conferences. However, in
other places unions decided to attack the program. In a West Coast city the union
protested strongly against the idea. They charged that it was just ‘social work,’ and
that the planned training program was intended to instill ‘political correctness’ in
police officers. They threatened to keep officers from appearing at community policing
training. As a compromise, they agreed to tolerate one day of training, in
place of the three-day training sessions that had been planned. At the time they were
hoping to move to a four-day workweek, which they later achieved. In the East, the
head of one police union stormed into a meeting of police commanders to announce
that a new policing experiment they were about to launch would ‘never happen.’
Having national level unionization might not help. In one European country, the
chief of the second largest city told me there would never be anything like
‘community policing’ anywhere, because the national union simply would not
allow it.
A crucial issue can be the match between the demands of a new program and
rules stipulated in the contract between the union and the city. These contracts bind
the parties to work rules, performance standards, and personnel policies that can run
counter to organizational change. Almost everywhere contracts between cities and
police unions affect the ability of department managers to make decisions about
staffing. Frequently they grant officers the right to choose assignments based on
seniority. This can limit the ability of department managers to determine which*and
even how many*officers work in a district, what shift they will be assigned to, and
perhaps their specific job assignments. For example, in Chicago officer’s district
assignments are decided almost completely by seniority. It can be impossible to put
them where managers want them (based on their ability to speak an immigrant
language, for example) or to keep officers assigned to a beat if they want to work
somewhere else.
Along with their many friends and family members, organized police groups can
also be a formidable force in local electoral politics. This inhibits politicians from
pushing them too hard in directions they do not choose to go. In Chicago, all officers
are required to live in the city itself, where their political strength and cohesion have
neutralized the local prosecutor, county sheriff, and others who might delve
independently into their affairs. Their families, friends and fund-raising efforts
have also captured the support of several state legislators from suburbs that are close
in but outside the mayor’s sphere of influence. State senators and representatives can
be counted on to make an end run around city legislation and administrative actions
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at the capital. There, downstate legislators who care little about the details of
Chicago government and its budgetary problems are happy to go along with efforts
to negate the city’s attempts to control staffing and spending.
Competing demands and expectations
Police managers and city executives also have to find the officers required to staff
new programs. Community policing is particularly labor intensive, and may require
more officers. Finding the money to hire more officers is hard, so departments may
try to scavenge them from existing units. This can bring conflict with other powerful
police executives and politicians who support the current arrangement. Police also
face ‘the 911 problem,’ for their commitment to respond to calls as quickly as
possible dominates the resources of most departments. Chicago, for example,
receives more than five million 911 calls each year, and sends a patrol car in
response to 3.1 million of them. In some cities, community policing encountered
heavy political resistance when the perception arose (encouraged by its opponents)
that officers previously devoted to responding to 911 calls were being diverted to this
social experiment, leaving (it was claimed) the community at risk. Houston’s first
attempt to do community policing was defeated by this claim (Skogan and Hartnett
1997).
Hence, police executives try to look for ways to implement new programs more
cheaply. One important organizational function that often gets shortchanged is
training. Training is expensive and officers have to be removed from duty*or paid
overtime*to attend. During the early 1980s, one Western city tried to run a
neighborhood-oriented program with no training at all; they hoped that officers
(who were doing it as an overtime assignment) would guess what to do from the
name of the project. More recently, officers in another large city received one day of
training; in another major agency it was two days of training. This for a project that
is supposed to revolutionize policing.
Inability to ‘measure what matters’
One problem facing both community and problem-solving policing is that it is hard
to document what officers are doing or if they are being effective. The problemsolving
component of community policing shifts the unit of work from individual
incidents to clusters of problems, and those are harder to count. It is also hard to
evaluate whether problem solving is effective, and to determine whether individual
officers are doing a good or a bad job at it. The public often wants action on things
that department information systems do not count at all. As a result, both individual
and unit performance is hard to measure and to reward. However, the thrust of New
York City’s CompStat and other new ‘accountability processes’ in police departments
is that measured activities get attention and unmeasured accomplishments do
not get much attention, even if the unmeasured activities matter very much. Topdown
management and their relentless focus on recorded crime statistics almost
inevitably reinforces the most traditional conceptions of policing (Weisburd et al.
2003). CompStat may be the most important obstacle to reform in contemporary
policing.
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Like many American cities, Chicago has adopted a CompStat system of its own.
In a new book I call this ‘CompStat, Chicago Style’ (Skogan 2006). As in New York,
the process focuses on traditional measures: the number of crimes, arrests, guns
seized, and calls for service answered. The focus on reducing crime inevitably presses
the organization toward reliance on those numbers. Away from police headquarters,
managers think that the accountability process undervalues the ‘intangibles’ that are
community policing’s hallmark, including community satisfaction, public involvement
in crime prevention projects, and the formation of policecommunity
partnerships. They lament that the city’s CompStat system forces them to stray
from community policing. One told me, ‘When [community policing] started, it
wasn’t supposed to be this numbers thing, and now it’s totally a numbers thing.’
Another critic noted, ‘This is mission-oriented policing, more traditional … This is
top-down management, stats driven.’ At the public meetings held every month all
over the city, residents complain about teen loitering, graffiti, noise, and loose
garbage in the alleys (Skogan 2006: Table 4.3), but action on these is not prized in
accountability sessions. In Chicago, as elsewhere, important things that are not being
measured elude the accountability process, which is driven principally by objectives
that can be measured by the department’s information systems. Over time,
organizations almost inevitably shift their attention to what they can measure, and
this pressures them to revert to traditional policing practices.
Failure of interagency cooperation
Adopting community and problem-solving policing inevitably means accepting an
expanded definition of police responsibilities. When the public becomes involved in
setting priorities, a new set of issues that previously fell outside the police mandate
will be high on their list. In Chicago, the public is concerned about burglary and
robbery, to be sure. However, at the meetings described above they also express a
great deal of concern about abandoned cars, rats running loose in the alleyways,
dilapidated buildings, homeless people sleeping in the parks, missing street signs,
burned-out street lights, and runaway youths squatting in abandoned buildings.
Although police can note that abandoned cars are a high-priority problem, they have
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develop lists of individual contacts in other city service agencies whom they feel they
can call on if they really need help. A neighborhood officer I interviewed in Texas
relied on his brother-in-law, who worked for the appropriate city agency, to get cars
towed in his zone. There and elsewhere, newcomers to the job have difficulty getting
anything done. To make a formal request in some places requires the police chief to
write a memo to another agency head. Before Chicago’s program began, police
officers predicted that the coordination of city services with their problem-solving
efforts would not work. Based on bitter experience, they expected that other agencies
would continue to be as unresponsive as in the past, and they complained about it
loudly. But soon the mayor made his expectations about the new program forcefully
clear to his agency heads; if they did not cooperate, they would lose their jobs. City
hall staff members developed a computerized management system for coordinating
responses to beat officers’ service requests and monitoring how responsive the service
agencies were. Service delivery turned out to be one of the most successful
components of the program during its early years, but it was not easy (cf. Skogan
et al. 1999).
Public unresponsiveness
Ironically, sustaining public involvement in policing matters is difficult. The two
groups may not have a history of getting along. Especially in disadvantaged
neighborhoods, police may be perceived as arrogant and brutal rather than as
potential partners. Residents may fear that more personal attention from the police
could result in harassment and indiscriminate searches. Nothing in the past has
prepared the public for new approaches to policing, and they are unlikely to
understand the goals or tactics associated with new modes of policing. When they do
hear about it, there may be no reason for residents to believe it. In poor
neighborhoods the past is too often strewn with broken promises. Residents are
accustomed to seeing programs come and go in response to political and budgetary
cycles that are out of their control, and they can rightly be skeptical that community
policing or any other promised reform will be any different. Organizations
representing the interests of community members may not have a tradition of
cooperating with police. Because their constituents often fear the police, groups
representing low-income and minority areas may be more interested in monitoring
police misconduct and pressing for greater police accountability to civilians than in
becoming closely identified with them.
Civic participation is also generally difficult to sustain in worse-off places. Poor
and high-crime areas are often not well endowed with an infrastructure of
organizations ready to get involved in civic projects. Crime and fear stimulate
withdrawal from community life. Residents easily view each other with suspicion
rather than with neighborliness, and this undermines their capacity to forge
collective responses to local problems. Because they fear retaliation by drug dealers
and neighborhood gangs, programs requiring public meetings or organized
cooperation may be less successful (Skogan 1988). In Chicago, there was discussion
of potential retaliation for cooperating with police or attending beat meetings at 22
per cent of the meetings we observed (Skogan 2006). As a result, areas that need the
most help usually find it hardest to get people involved.
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In the case of community policing, police executives have learned that if the
public is going to take a significant role they will need educating. Civilians will not
know what they can newly expect from the police, nor what they themselves can
contribute to solving neighborhood problems. Like police themselves, uninformed
citizens are likely to define their expectations of policing in traditional terms,
expecting more patrols, fast response times, and arrests to solve their problems for
them. It will be their instinct to demand more of the same in response to almost
every issue. At Chicago’s community meetings, the most common complaint lodged
against the police (at 31 per cent of meetings) concerned the speed with which they
answered calls, and the second (21 per cent) was that there were not enough of them
on patrol (Skogan 2006: Table 45.3). Sophisticated concepts and a new set of jargon
are involved, so police reform requires aggressive marketing before many voters and
taxpayers will understand what is being accomplished.
Nasty misconduct diverting public and leadership attention
Investments that police make in innovation are always at risk. In the United States,
community policing is a legitimacy building strategy. Everyone is aware of the deep
division in the country around policing issues. Whites are highly satisfied while
African-Americans are dissatisfied, and the gap between the races has not changed
much over the past 40 years. There is evidence that the seemingly endless recurrence
of highly publicized acts of police violence affects public attitudes, reversing
occasionally improvements in public opinion. Community policing promises that
police will accommodate the public and not just the other way around. However,
when use of excessive force or killings by police becomes a public issue, years of
progress in policecommunity relations can disappear. The same is true of
revelations of widespread or deep police corruption.
Nasty misconduct can also undermine reform efforts because department and
city leaders lose their focus on managing innovation. The mayor of Chicago once
remarked to me that he has to think about his police department every day. He hates
that, because he has many other things to worry about. However, he knows that
managing change in large organizations requires his focused attention. Nasty
misconduct causes city and department leaders to lose their focus, and it diverts
the attention of the media from the unnewsworthy aspects of police reform.
Reform may not survive leadership transition
Police everywhere spend a great deal of time (a lot of it on-the-job time) debating
what the tea leaves tell them is going on amid the shifting power alliances downtown.
How long is the chief going to hang on? Who are the heirs apparent, and do their
views differ from the incumbent’s? Whose stock is rising and falling, and whose views
must to be attended to or can safely be ignored? The difficulty is that divisions
downtown are almost inevitable in transitioning organizations. This slows everything
down, as uncertainty over the future course of the department will be read by many
as a rationale for cautious inaction until the situation is clarified.
Uncertainty is multiplied when a new chief or even mayor arrives, for they may
have even more new ideas. When leaders come to office, they want to do new things.
They want to make their own mark, and can have little interest in picking up the
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unfinished projects of the people they replaced. The old police chief in one mid-sized
city I know struggled for more than a decade to build a new community policing
program. However, when he retired, his replacement (who came from another city)
had no interest in it at all, and the program was disbanded virtually overnight.
Another city elected a new mayor in 1999, one who ran on a tough ‘law and order’
platform. His predecessor had committed the city to community policing, and had
selected a new police chief from out of town to inaugurate the program. The new
mayor fired the chief at their first meeting. A deputy chief who was present at the
meeting stood and promised to push a ‘zero tolerance’ strategy that the mayor found
more appealing. The mayor promoted him to chief of police on the spot. He also
instituted a ‘New York style’ management system in every city agency, to drive
progress against the measures that mattered to him.
If reforms are to persist, the astute change manager has to ensure that they are
the department’s and even the city’s project, not just their own. If they can build
public and political support for reform, its budget may survive when money is tight
and resources are hard to come by. Political support, and deep support from the
community, is also a tool for beating back dissidents within the department when
necessary. If it is the city’s and the community’s program, perhaps their potential
successors will also think reform is a good idea, or at least one that candidates must
promise to support in order to get the job.
This was the situation in Chicago in late 2006, after 14 years of community
policing. In 2003, the city’s major newspaper created a crime scare during a period
when the mayor was choosing a new chief of police. Politically, the cheapest and most
immediate response he could make was to anoint a candidate from the detective
squad committed to tough enforcement. The new chief in turn reorganized and
refocused the department on guns, gangs, and homicides. Soon commitment to the
department’s community policing program withered. Most districts lost their
community-policing managers, lieutenants who were instead put in charge of flying
squads. All of the department’s slack resources were rounded up to staff them. Police
hoping to get ahead organizationally gravitated toward crackdown units, for they are
the focus of the top brass. Headquarters accountability reviews, which used to
include community-policing activities and goals, were scaled back dramatically
to make time for discussion of homicide patterns. Activities that better fit a
recentralized management structure driven by recorded crime have become what
matters. The only thing that protects the shell of the program that remains is that it
was politically infeasible to shut it down, so deeply are the beat-oriented parts of
community policing woven into the political and organizational life of the city’s
neighborhoods. There it lurks, waiting perhaps to be resurrected when a crisis of
legitimacy again haunts the police, and they have to rediscover community policing
in order to rebuild again their credibility with the community.
Note
1. For a discussion of the potential and pitfalls in these and other recent innovations in
policing, see the chapters in Weisburd and Braga (2006).
Policing & Society 33
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