Blog 4: Let’s Talk About the Police Volume I
Let’s talk about the police. There’s a lot to say, and many great scholars have studied policing, publishing books, articles, and recommendations. We have listed some names on the “Names” page and some books on the “Recommended books” page.
In this post I will share some thoughts about how the police have been “emboldened.” First, it is common that the police department operates fairly independently. Second, scholars and police tell us that police departments tend to develop a very tight group mentality. In most big cities, they have effectively banded together and accrued a fair bit of political power. For example, it is very difficult to win a mayoral election without the endorsement of the police union. None of this, on its own, is necessarily bad.
We pay the police with our tax dollars, and it is fair that we insist that they should be highly trained, professional, and scrupulously law-abiding. They are employed by us. It is fair to ask that their mistakes are reviewed carefully. It is fair that they are asked to retire bad policies, to try out promising new techniques, to implement evidence-based programs, and not to be jerks about it.
Evidently, the tight mentality, and the years of independence in policing themselves, and the political power of their unions have had some ill-effects. I would argue that it is likely that these have emboldened the police to take some curious stands. Although few scholars have written about this issue, journalists have done.
Through the media, we have regularly heard that police departments have resisted reforms. Even commonsense reforms. It seems like every time there is a news story where something like body-worn cameras are proposed, there is a quote from a police chief of union either rejecting the idea outright, or hinting that something bad will happen—like the police won’t protect the public from bad guys if the camera is on. Over the years we have heard this about foot patrol (even though so many officers have come to prefer it to car patrol), the acquisition of military equipment, asset seizure, reverse sting operations, stop and frisk, etc. Repeatedly, we have seen that big city police departments are so emboldened that they feel free to refuse to consider meaningful reforms, even when it has been established that a department has a pattern of misconduct.
This very day, I was curious about the Chicago police department. I was looking for the official report about Laquan McDonald. This took me to reports from the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the City of Chicago, many of which are related to police reforms. The OIG reports generally read like legal documents prepared in hopes that you will give up after a few paragraphs. I have a PhD so I’m not going to give up. In most reports, the OIG forwards their findings after an investigation and recommendations in a rather tepid way, and respectfully. If I were the IG, I would not be so nice. For example, in one report, the OIG was trying to evaluate whether the police department could use litigation data as part of a risk management strategy. The City spent over $250 million on judgements and settlements in a four year period. However, the OIG finalized their report without having access to data from individual lawsuits because the police department wouldn’t turn them over. I will say this again simply — the police department refused to provide a detailed budget, clearly showing the money they paid due to lawsuits against them, to the office of the Inspector General of the city of Chicago—and they got away with this. The nerve. Another report shows me that their budget increased by 27% over a 4-year period, but the police department does not specify in their budget how much money they paid specifically for judgments against them. For example, they use a common dodge of combining categories to make it impossible to figure out the exact amounts. In one example, spent $105 million on “Financial Purposes as Specified”. The report says that this category includes tort and non-tort judgments, outside counsel, and costs of experts — so, lawsuits— but also monies paid to employees for injuries not covered by worker’s comp. Why are those combined in one category? How much was that? Another category,“Purposes as specified,” includes expenditures related to the federal consent decree (a cost that only exists because of the bad behavior of the department) but also physical exams. I don’t know about you, but even with my simple household budget I can distinguish between medical costs and the money I spent defending lawsuits or implementing federal consent decrees which was $0 by the way. When I tried to find the famous report about the killing of Laquan McDonald, which was referred to in a number of newspaper articles, I found that the report was no longer posted and I was unable to find a copy online, though I looked for it all over the place.
Most of the time, when criminologists discuss such issues, they talk about the importance of “transparency”. Transparency is needed because when people do not have to open their books, or tell the public how they are handling misconduct, shit gets swept under a dirty rug. Like the torture that was carried out for years by Chicago police officers and covered up by many others. What I am seeing, as I look into some of the resistance by police to reforms is their boldness. As a member of the public, I find myself asking, “How dare you?”
Having educated many would-be police officers, I remind myself that almost all of them seem to have good intentions. Some of my favorite students have gone on to work in law enforcement. I have to hypothesize that this phenomenon—stubborn resistance to change, emboldened by a history of self-policing and independence, and political power—is something that may not really be supported by line officers. When they do “force” departments to implement reforms, we commonly see that the police come to embrace them. I have heard some heartwarming stories about foot patrol, for example. And the vast majority of interactions with body-worn cameras are to the advantage of the officer.
