Police Misconduct

Police Misconduct

Introduction

The role of police is much more than an interesting problem in government since this is a direct reflection of society's heart. Policing addresses one of the most fundamental problems of social living -- how to deal with those who violate group customs, norms, rules, and laws that enable cooperation. Cooperating together in large groups enables us to take advantage of one another's strengths and to compensate for individual weaknesses (Morris and Vila, 1999). The resulting sum can be much greater than the parts and, all else being equal, the larger the social group, the larger the potential benefit. But social living also provides opportunities for people to cheat. Instead of cooperating to produce a shared benefit, people can use force, fraud, or stealth to obtain valued resources. Once again, generally speaking, the larger the social group, the greater the opportunities for cheating. Cheaters weaken the cooperative bonds that enable productive social living and, like parasites in an animal, too many cheaters can kill or cripple a society.

The history of humanity is dominated by our struggle to maximize the benefits of social living and to control its liabilities. A great deal of social control is informal. Most often, children are taught and adults are sanctioned by a frown, a negative word, or the chilly response of others to undesirable behavior (Morris and Vila, 1999). But as misbehaviors become more serious, the potential consequences of being the person who provides sanctions increase as well. For example, shushing a child who is talking in a theater or speaking up when someone breaks a queue at the market is much less hazardous than trying to stop a bank robbery or intervening when a man is striking his wife. Larger societies, those with more than a few hundred people, develop cooperative solutions to this dilemma. Instead of individuals shouldering the burden for challenging more serious breaches of the social contract, the responsibility is delegated to people who specialize in formal social control. In most contemporary societies, these people include police, prosecutors, judges, and prison workers.

Police Misconduct

To the extent that a society values individual liberty, formal social control is limited to behaviors that tangibly threaten productive social living -- all productive societies must control interpersonal violence and protect property rights. But societies vary a great deal with regard to whether, and how much, they attempt to control more private behaviors such as prostitution, gambling, and drug use. There also is a great deal of variation in how tightly different societies attempt to control the behavior of social control agents themselves. Policemen specialize in, among other things, managing the most serious and dangerous breaches of social behavior, and they are provided with the authority to use force, weapons, and other tools not available to the average citizen (Kenney and McNamara, 1999). The power delegated to police -- as well as the prestige that accompanies the special trust placed in them enables them to fulfill their responsibilities, as well as makes it easier for corrupt officers to take advantage of people who possess less power and prestige. Thus, if providing formal social control is a fundamental problem of living in large productive social groups, so too is controlling the police.

When it comes to minimizing misbehavior, local police departments have two large advantages. First, they are democratic. Second, they operate under severe resource constraints. The first characteristic means that local police are not likely to abuse people in ways most of the citizenry finds objectionable. (It also means they are likely to abuse people in ways most of the citizenry finds attractive). The second means that local police do not have time to harass people for fun or out of spite -- these things can of course happen, but they are not likely to happen often. The FBI has neither characteristic and hence neither advantage. Shifting power to the FBI, while leaving the rest of the system untouched, might make law enforcement both less accountable and more prone to go off on abusive larks. But antiterrorism work has several features that may cut against these tendencies. If so, this particular change in the federal local allocation of power may raise the level of accountability and responsibility in law enforcement, not lower it.

The Ambiguity of Police Use of Force

Police use of force is often highly controversial because it raises questions about a government's use of coercion against its citizens. In a democratic society that prides itself on ideals of civility and equality before the law, police use of force is often an inherently troubling phenomenon. As one scholar has observed, "Justifying police and what they do has always been problematic in democracies, and this has been particularly true in the United States, where ambivalence about government authority is a persistent force" (Mastrofski, 1988, 61). Yet whether police brutality constitutes a public problem is a question whose answer depends largely upon who is asked.

Of course, the nature of policing requires police at times to use physical coercion against civilians; indeed, "police are sometimes morally obliged to employ force" to accomplish legitimate ends of controlling crime and maintaining order (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993, 238). Yet police use of force is often highly controversial precisely because it is nearly always ambiguous. s legal scholar Paul Chevigny (1995, 139) observes, while "the power to use force is a defining characteristic of the police officer's job, the line between excessive and justifiable force is difficult to draw. " Indeed, he suggests, "Much of the problem in understanding the work of the police lies in the fact that what they do, and what they should do, when they are 'doing their job,' is always contested" (ibid., 9).

Police and criminologists draw conceptual distinctions among the terms "use of force, " "unnecessary force, " and "brutality. " The use of force, according to experts, is a necessary and legitimate tool of the police officer's job. In contrast, "brutality" is "a conscious and venal act by officers who usually take great pains to conceal their misconduct, " while unnecessary use of force "is usually a training problem, the result of ineptitude or insensitivity, as, for instance, when well-meaning officers unwisely charge into situations from which they can then extricate themselves only by using force" (Skolnick and Fyfe, 1993, 19-20). "Excessive