Title: Measuring What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing Research
Institute Meetings (151-227).
Series: Research Report 
Author(s): NIJ 
Published: National Institute of Justice, July 1999
Subject(s): Community policing, problem-oriented policing, and police
planning and management
122 pages
300, 000 bytes

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The Police as an Agency of Municipal Government: Implications for
Measuring Police Effectiveness

Mark H. Moore and Margaret Poethig

The changing paradigm of policing: from "first step in the criminal justice
system" to "agency of municipal government"

Since the publication of The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society: Report
of the President's Crime Commission, citizens, practitioners, and scholars
have viewed police, prosecutors, courts, and correctional agencies as
constituent parts of a criminal justice system.[1] What joins these
separately administered agencies in a "system" is that their operations are
linked in a specific process: the handling of criminal cases. The process
begins with the allegation of a criminal offense, proceeds through an
investigation to the arrest of suspects, progresses to the formal charging
and prosecution of those arrested, and ultimately concludes with the
adjudication and disposition of the cases. Viewed from this vantage point,
the police play an obvious and important role: They begin the process of
criminal justice adjudication by initiating cases with an arrest and a
charge.[2] 

This view of the police as the crucial first step in criminal justice system
processing meshes seamlessly with a particular view of the overall role of
the police in society: the "professional law enforcement model" of
policing.[3] In this conception, the fundamental goal of the police is to
reduce crime by enforcing the criminal law. They do so largely by
arresting (or threatening to arrest) criminal offenders. To create the threat
of arrest and actually produce arrests, they rely on three key operations:
(1) patrolling public spaces, (2) responding to calls from citizens, and (3)
investigating crimes.

This view of policing is also perfectly reflected in the measures
conventionally used to evaluate police performance:

o The focus on levels of reported crime reflects the view that the most
important result the police seek is reduced criminal victimization.

o The focus on numbers of arrests reflects the view that the most
important thing the police can do to accomplish the goal of reducing crime
is to arrest offenders to produce deterrence, incapacitation, and whatever
opportunity for rehabilitation exists.

o The focus on response times, clearance rates, and numbers of sworn
officers reflects (more or less precisely) our understanding about the ways
in which the police can produce arrests (e.g., through rapid response,
retrospective investigation, and--less perfectly--police presence).

What citizens expect is what police departments measure; what gets
measured, in turn, profoundly shapes what the police do.

The problem is that this conception of what the police should do differs
from what they actually do and what they could do to enrich the quality of
urban life.[4] By viewing the police as the first step in criminal justice
processing, we miss the important role that private institutions--such as
families, community organizations, churches, and businesses--play in
preventing, identifying, and responding to criminal conduct and the role
that the police might play in supporting these efforts. Similarly, by
focusing exclusively on reducing serious crime, we miss the important
role that the police play in managing disorder in public spaces, reducing
fear, controlling traffic and crowds, and providing various emergency
services. By focusing attention on arrests, clearance rates, and the speed of
response to calls for service, we ignore the important contribution that
other kinds of police problem-solving efforts can make to prevent crime,
reduce fear, and improve the quality of community life. Thus, our limited
expectations of the police, and our limited methods of measuring their
performance, result in our failure to recognize the important contributions
that police make to the quality of urban life beyond these boundaries and
to manage police departments to achieve these valuable results.[5]

The purposes of this paper are essentially four:

o To establish a justification for viewing the police differently, as an
"agency of municipal government" rather than as the "first step in the
criminal justice system."

o To imagine (from this different vantage point) the varied contributions
the police could and do make to the overall performance of municipal
government and the quality of urban life beyond reduction of crime and
enforcement of the criminal law.

o To develop ideas about how these contributions outside the boundaries
of crime control, law enforcement, and criminal justice processing could
be "recognized" (in an accounting sense) through measurement systems
that could accurately capture the full public value contributed by police
departments to the quality of life in their cities.

o To look at an example of a police organization that appears to be doing
in practice what we recommend in theory.

The police as an agency of municipal government

Consider first why it might be appropriate to view the police as an agency
of municipal government rather than only an element of the criminal
justice system. The most obvious and important reason is that municipal
government supplies the resources the police need to do their work. The
resources are of two kinds.[6] One resource is the money the police
receive to pay salaries, provide for future pensions, and purchase the guns
and computers they need to do their work. That money is raised through
local tax levies and appropriated to the police through the processes of
local government.[7]

The other resource that police rely on is less tangible: the legal authority
to oblige citizens to behave in ways that allow them to live together with
some degree of security and order. As the Philadelphia Police Study Task
Force explained:

The police are entrusted with important public resources. The most
obvious is money. . . . Far more important, the public grants the police
another resource--the use of force and authority. These are deployed when
a citizen is arrested or handcuffed, when an officer fires his weapon at a
citizen, and when an officer claims exclusive use of the streets with his
siren.[8]

The police need authority not only to arrest people for serious crimes such
as robbery, rape, and murder but also to require citizens to refrain from
driving while drinking, to park in places that do not interfere with traffic
flow, and to desist from carrying guns in public spaces without a license.
They also can require citizens demonstrating against government not to
inflict too many costs on other citizens who want to use public spaces for
their own purposes.

Much of the authority the police need to do their job comes from sources
other than local government. The criminal laws they are charged with
enforcing are passed, for example, at the State level or have been
developed from the common law. Many of the powers they are granted to
enforce the laws (such as the power to stop and search) are granted and
conditioned by the U.S. Constitution. But some of the laws they enforce,
and some of the powers they are granted to achieve this objective, are
created at local levels. Thus, local police are charged with enforcing many
municipal ordinances against such acts as spitting, disorderly conduct, or
taverns being too loud and open too late.[9] Many policies regulating
police behavior in such areas as use of deadly force or high-speed chases
also are established locally.[10]

These observations seem important for this simple reason: If local
government provides the money and (at least some of) the authority for
the police to do their work, then it seems reasonable to conclude that local
government "owns" the police. If local government owns the police, it
seems reasonable to imagine that local government could direct the police
toward whatever valuable purposes it has in mind.

A second reason for viewing the police as an agency of municipal
government is closely related to (and partially qualifies) the first: If local
government provides the resources to municipal police departments, then
it seems plausible to assume that the police are accountable, in the first
instance, to local government. Of course, the police also are accountable
to "the rule of law." Indeed, that commitment is so strong that it would
morally and legally oblige the police to resist or challenge local political
requests to take "illegal" or "unfair" action against citizens. If they did not
resist these demands, the police might well become vulnerable to
prosecution for political corruption or civil rights violations. Moreover,
due to their functional dependency on their fellow agencies in the criminal
justice system, the police are at least powerfully influenced by the
expectations of prosecutors, courts, and other State and Federal
enforcement agencies, if not directly accountable to them. Thus, the
elected officials of municipal government are not the only ones who can
hold the police accountable or expect to influence them. Nevertheless,
since local government supports the police with local tax levies and local
ordinances grant them (conditional) powers, then arguably local
government should be able to use the police for whatever (lawful)
purposes it chooses.

A third reason is that the police both can and do take actions that affect
many aspects of community life beyond controlling serious crime.[11] For
example, police reduce signs of disorder that undermine a sense of
security, regulate festering disputes that if left unattended might escalate
into crimes, and protect the rights of individuals who might easily become 
the targets of racial prejudice. In doing so, the police enhance security and
liberty and enrich the overall quality of life. Moreover, they accomplish
both crime control and other valuable purposes through means other than
making arrests.[12] In short, the police have capabilities that go beyond
their ability to threaten and make arrests; further, these capabilities turn
out to be valuable for more purposes than simply reducing crimes. If we
conceive of the police as nothing more than "the first step in the criminal
justice system," then we might easily miss the contributions that they
make "outside the box" of crime control, law enforcement, and arresting
people. On the other hand, if we conceive of the police as an agency of
municipal government that shares with other agencies the broad
responsibility for strengthening the quality of urban life, then we are in a
better position to notice that the police contribute much more to those
goals than is captured by the simple idea of reducing crime. We also
notice that the police have capabilities that go far beyond their ability to
make arrests and that these capabilities are valuable to the enterprise of
city government. In short, the police are a more valuable asset when
viewed from the vantage point of trying to strengthen urban life than they
are when viewed from the narrower perspective of reducing crime through
making arrests.

The reason that this last point is both important and difficult to grasp has
to do with the way that we think about organizations in the public
sector.[13] In the public sector, an organization typically is viewed as an
efficient machine for achieving a set of narrowly defined purposes set out
in the organization's authorizing legislation. In essence, in the public
sector, management begins with a specific set of objectives and then
builds an organization designed to achieve them as efficiently and
effectively as possible. In that way, society as a whole maintains effective
control over public-sector organizations. If an organization spends money
or exerts authority outside the boundaries of its authorization or for
purposes that were not included in its initial mission, it is guilty of either
"fraud, waste, or abuse" (in the case of misuse of funds) or "abuse of
authority" and "malfeasance" (in the case of improper use of authority).

Three difficulties arise from this way of thinking, however. One is that, in
building an organization to meet a specific set of objectives, we
sometimes build a set of capabilities that are valuable not only for the
specified purpose but for other purposes as well. Thus, for example, a
library can be useful in providing afterschool programs to latchkey
children as well as in providing library services to adults;[14] a registry of
motor vehicles can be valuable in collecting unpaid parking tickets for
local government as well as in distributing licenses and registrations;[15]
and the U.S. military can contribute to reducing the supply of illicit drugs
reaching U.S. cities as well as providing for the defense of the Nation.[16]
The question facing the public and the managers of these organizations,
then, is whether the organizations ought to be used for these other
purposes as well as for the purposes for which they were originally
established. If they have the capabilities, why not use them for valuable 
purposes?

A second difficulty is that, because organizational leaders in the public
sector are supposed to think of themselves as operating machines that have
been designed to achieve specific purposes in the most efficient way, they
often think that the specific things they now do represent the best way to
accomplish their mission. After all, if their specific, current activities were
not the most efficient means for accomplishing their mission, they would
be guilty of fraud, waste, and abuse and undermining their own claims of
professional competence. Since that is too horrible to contemplate, it must
be true both that the current mission is the right one and that the specific
means they have developed to achieve the mission are the only ways to
achieve it.

A third problem is that, while the world often changes around public
organizations, the changes are not always incorporated into a redefinition
of their mandates. Sometimes the piece of the world that changes is the
"task environment." Certainly that happened to the police when the crack
epidemic hit America's cities. When street drug markets, violent youths,
and child abuse and neglect all challenged police departments'
enforcement methods, the police were forced to shift the balance of their
efforts and develop new methods to meet the challenges. At other times,
the world around public organizations changes through the development
of new operational procedures that are considered more effective than the
old or the development of new technologies. For example, the police have
changed their approaches to domestic violence[17] and begun to explore
"problem solving" as an alternative to "rapid response."[18] Still other
times, citizens' aspirations for the police, and how they would like to use
the police, change. For example, many citizens want the police to shift to
a strategy of "community policing," in which the police are more
responsive to the needs of particular neighborhoods and deploy
themselves in ways that make them more accessible to and familiar with
local communities.

At some level of abstraction, of course, the overall mission of the police
never changes.[19] It continues to be "to serve and to protect," "to ensure
law and order," and "to enforce the law fully and fairly." But within the
spaces created by these broad concepts, many significantly different ideas-
-of what the police do each day, what they are rewarded for, and how their
resources are allocated--exist. There may be no particular reason for the
current constellation of activities and purposes to be seen as the only ones
that are either consistent with these broad concepts or capable of
achieving these lofty ends. Thus, there may be more room for innovation
of all kinds than is commonly assumed by either the police or those who
oversee them.

The point of these observations is that it is too easy for both the police and
those who oversee them to imagine that they are already living in the best
of all possible worlds--one in which the purposes of the police (at both
abstract and concrete levels) are the right ones, and the means being relied
upon (both organizationwide and in response to particular kinds of
problems) are the most efficient and effective. The reality, however, may
be different. There may be valuable purposes to which the police can
contribute that are not recognized or adequately emphasized in the current
understanding of the police mission. There also may be valuable new
means that could be adopted to achieve either old or new goals. Such a
situation could have occurred simply because the world around police
departments changed. Thus, it might be important for them to change their
operations (at a programmatic or strategic level); yet, they are held back
by a rigid conception of their mission and the most efficient means for
achieving their goals.

The problems of adapting and using organizations are less severe in the
private sector because private-sector supervisors and managers think about
their organizations differently from those in the public sector. Instead of
thinking about an organization as an intricate machine that has been
engineered to achieve a specific, well-defined purpose as efficiently and 
effectively as possible, private-sector supervisors and managers think of it
as an asset whose value is contained in its "distinctive competencies"; that
is, in the things the organization knows how to do well. Typically, their
conception of distinctive competence is relatively abstract. For example,
they might think of a police organization as one that comprises a large
number of well-trained, highly motivated, and resourceful people--linked
to citizens through telephones and radios, and able to get to most places in
a city quickly and to form into different-sized operational groups--who are
carrying out the authority of the State. What they ask themselves, then,
about such an organization is not whether it is achieving a narrow purpose
efficiently and effectively; instead, they ask: What valuable things could I
produce with this organization? If one thinks about policing in this way,
one sees a remarkably different set of possibilities than if one thinks: (1)
that the mission of the police is to control crime; (2) that the best way to
do that is to make arrests; and (3) that the best way to make arrests is
through (a) patrol, (b) rapid response, and (c) retrospective investigation.
Thinking about the police as an agency of municipal government
facilitates and to some degree justifies this fundamental paradigm shift
toward the private-sector model.

How the police contribute to the quality of urban life and improve the
performance of municipal government

Given that it is at least plausibly appropriate and useful to think of the
police as an agency of municipal government, what other roles could the
police play? What additional responsibilities might they assume? What
activities would support these different responsibilities? These questions
can be analyzed in three different categories:

o How, in the context of a wider conception of the police mission that
focuses on enhancing the overall quality of life in a city, police operations
can contribute directly to these broader goals.

o How, in either the old or new vision of the police mission, the police can
contribute to more effective operations of other agencies of municipal
government or the government as a whole.

o How the police, in their new and expanded mission, might contribute to
the development and operation of private institutions such as families,
communities, and commerce that cities need to succeed.

Police roles in supporting the quality of urban life

Pioneering work on the roles of the police was done by Herman Goldstein
several years after the President's Crime Commission issued its report.[20]
It is somewhat ironic that at precisely the time society was getting the
benefit of Goldstein's accurate and broad vision of what the police do and
what they contribute to community life, the Commission was defining a
relatively narrow vision of policing. In Policing a Free Society, Goldstein
succinctly listed the functions of the police:

o To prevent and control conduct widely recognized as threatening to life
and property (serious crime).

o To aid individuals who are in danger of physical harm, such as the
victim of a criminal attack.

o To protect constitutional guarantees such as the right of free speech and
assembly.

o To facilitate the movement of people and vehicles.

o To assist those who cannot care for themselves: the intoxicated, the
addicted, the mentally ill, the physically disabled, the old, and the young.

o To resolve conflict, whether between individuals, groups of individuals,
or individuals and their government.

o To identify problems that have the potential to become more serious
problems for the individual citizen, the police, or the government.

o To create and maintain a feeling of security in the community.[21]

This was a much broader conception of the police role than the one
endorsed by citizens, realized in police operations, or reliably captured
through the measurement systems then (and now) being used to measure
police performance. More recently, scholars have focused attention on
three broad purposes that the police could (and often do) serve that are
extremely valuable to communities, but that nonetheless go unrecognized,
unsupported, and unmeasured.

Crime prevention. One such purpose is to prevent as well as react to
crime. A traditionalist could argue that a great deal of crime is prevented
by reacting (and threatening to react) quickly and aggressively to criminal
offending. Such actions could deter crime or, by generating arrests and
successful prosecutions, allow for the incapacitation and/or rehabilitation
of offenders. These mechanisms would prevent future crimes from being
committed. Yet, crime prevention emphasizes that there may be other
things the police could do to keep offenses from being committed in the
first place and if there are such activities, that they would be valuable to
undertake.

Initial thoughts about crime prevention tend to focus on what might be
considered "primary prevention": efforts directed toward the broad social
conditions that seem to spawn both criminal offenders and crimes.[22]
These may be further divided into efforts designed to either: (1) ensure the
healthy development of children to reduce the likelihood that they will be
inclined to commit crimes, or (2) promote the social and economic
development of poor communities to create environments that produce not
only fewer criminals but also fewer opportunities and occasions for
committing crime. Such work often seems like "social" or "community
development" work, which is well beyond the capacities and
responsibilities of the police.

Many tend to agree with this position. Yet, the police may be able to make
important contributions to even these broad prevention objectives. For
example, concern for the healthy development of children has long been
expressed through police activities. In the past, this was manifested
through the (largely, but not entirely) volunteer efforts associated with
Police Athletic Leagues.[23] More recently, it has been expressed in the
enthusiasm for the D.A.R.E.[Registered Trademark] program.[24] Even
more important contributions to the healthy development of children may
be made by police operations that do not have the development of children
as a specific objective. For example, by enforcing laws against domestic
violence and child abuse and neglect, by helping to keep routes to schools
free from drug dealing, and by reducing the power and stature of gangs,
the police may contribute to establishing conditions within which children
have a better chance of navigating the difficult course to responsible
citizenship.[25]

Moreover, the police also may contribute to community social and
economic development by making themselves available for partnerships
with communities that want to develop themselves. Police can be
particularly valuable by dramatically improving the level of security in
these neighborhoods so that hope is kindled and local residents have
reasons for making investments in themselves, their children, and their
property.[26]

Still, many of the most valuable contributions the police can make to
crime prevention are the results of activities that often are considered
more superficial than these primary preventive efforts. For instance,
police engage in a wide variety of efforts focused on controlling the
situational factors that seem to contribute to crime. Ron Clarke has both
developed the theory of "situational crime prevention" and presented
many examples of its success.[27] His colleague, Marcus Felson, has
demonstrated the role that "routine activities" play in shaping the observed
patterns of crime.[28] Presumably, if the routine activities that contribute
to crime could be disrupted, some crime could be prevented. Lawrence
Sherman has added to these ideas both by investigating the methods that
would be most effective in preventing future domestic violence and by
showing the possibilities of identifying and responding to "hot spots" and
reducing the incidence of gun possession and carrying.[29] William
Bratton, guided by a theory developed by James Q. Wilson and George
Kelling,[30] has shown that it is possible to reduce serious criminal
offending by focusing on less serious criminal offenses.[31] All this
suggests that controlling serious crime through means other than arrest is a
plausible and important police activity.

Fear reduction and order maintenance. In addition to crime prevention,
scholars have focused on the police capacity to reduce fear and enhance
security. This line of work began with two findings: (1) levels of fear
seem to be curiously independent of the objective risks of criminal
victimization and are influenced more by signs of disorder than by
changes in the real risks of criminal victimization;[32] and (2) some
police activities, such as foot patrol, reduce fear but not necessarily
victimization.[33]

These findings create an interesting strategic problem for police leaders
and those who oversee their operations: Should they expend resources to
reduce fear even if the actions they take leave actual victimization rates
unchanged? On one hand, such efforts may seem insubstantial--a cheap
public relations effort that produces a subjective rather than a real effect.
Even worse, such actions might tempt citizens to behave in ways that
would expose them to real criminal victimization. On the other hand,
promoting security in the general population clearly is a police
responsibility, and at least some portion of the fear that citizens
experience is exaggerated--for example, they react more to fear of
criminal attack than to other risks in their lives, such as the risk of traffic
accidents.[34]

Although the issue is still being debated, the argument for police
acceptance of responsibility for reducing fear is growing stronger. This
movement is partly a recognition that fear is an important and costly
problem in its own right. However, citizens' reactions when they are afraid
also exacerbate the real crime problem.[35] When they abandon the streets
or arm themselves, the streets may become more dangerous. Thus,
managing citizens' responses to fear may make an important contribution
to enhancing security and controlling crime.

Emergencies and calls for service. Finally, partly because the police
department is the only agency that works 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,
and makes house calls, police will continue to be the "first responders" to
a wide variety of emergencies. These emergencies can be medical
(although ambulance services increasingly take care of these) or they can 
be social, such as deranged people threatening themselves or others,
homeless children found wandering the streets with no parents to care for
them, or drunks at risk of freezing to death after falling asleep on a park
bench.

At various times, it has been declared that such problems should be
viewed as social problems rather than law enforcement problems and that
social work agencies, rather than the police, should respond to them.
Generally, the police would not disagree. This work is dangerous, dirty,
and sometimes heartbreaking. The police would be happy to be rid of it.

The difficulty, however, is that emergencies happen on the streets late at
night. Even though social work agencies have tried to build up their
emergency response capabilities, many of their resources still are
expended on people who work in offices from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. rather than
on the streets at night. As a result, much of this work falls into the hands
of the police.

In addition to handling emergencies, the police must immediately be
available and accessible to citizens for rapid responses to serious crime
calls. Therefore, they also are available for a wide variety of other less
urgent and perhaps less important purposes. It has been estimated that less
than 5 percent of calls coming into 911 systems of city police departments
are for serious crimes that could be interrupted by a rapid response.[36]
The vast majority of calls are for crimes that were committed several
hours earlier and for problems that citizens feel are urgent or important
but do not necessarily involve crimes. Many citizens want someone to
hold their hands, listen to their stories, mediate their minor disputes, help
them deal with troublesome friends and associates, and find a way to get
into their locked apartments and cars.

When one views the police primarily as a component of the criminal
justice system--focused on arresting people for serious crimes and starting
the process of sending them off to prison--such calls seem like an
enormous waste of police resources. Thus, the task becomes minimizing
the occurrence of nuisance calls and finding ways to make the minimum
response.

When one views the police as an agency of municipal government--with
responsibilities for preventing crime and reducing fear as well as for
arresting criminal offenders and achieving other purposes that local
government considers important--the status of nuisance calls changes.
Such calls may represent real opportunities for crime prevention. For
example, loud noise in an apartment may be a prelude to a domestic
homicide; if reports of the noise are heeded, a preventive intervention
could occur. Similarly, reports of gangs of rowdy youths could
foreshadow serious gang violence. Courteous responses to these calls
could build relationships with individuals in the community that would
increase the likelihood that they would trust the police enough to call
when serious offenses occur and serious offenders threaten them.

These are reasons to take nuisance calls seriously, even if the police are
focused only on crime control and crime prevention. So if we think about
the more general purposes of local government and recall that the police
are among the most visible representatives of it, then we might conclude
that the police should take citizens' nuisance calls seriously simply
because the police are the most frequently encountered representatives of
local government. Just as citizens form their general views about State
government through their experiences with the Department of Motor
Vehicles, they may form their views about local government through the
activities of the police. If the police are responsive, courteous, and helpful,
citizens will have a favorable view of government in general. If the police
are indifferent or rude and dismiss their concerns, citizens will form the
opposite view. They might conclude not only that less government is
better than more but that private security is better than public policing,
which has important consequences for the quality of our collective
lives.[37]

So far, we have observed that if the police rightly understand their own
mission and the operations that contribute to it, they will make
contributions to the quality of urban life that are far broader than reacting
to crime with arrests. The importance of their contributions becomes even
more evident when we think about the role they play in supporting the
operations of other government agencies and the work of private
institutions such as families, communities, and commercial enterprises.

Police roles in supporting other government agencies

In addition to the police, many other government agencies and their
workers contribute to the quality of urban life: for example, garbage
collectors, firefighters, teachers, recreation staff, and social workers. The
police contribute to overall government effectiveness and the quality of
urban life by making the world a bit safer for these people to do their
work and by creating an environment in which their efforts can be more
efficacious and last longer than they would without the police.

In the past, we took it for granted that these workers would be safe and
their contributions could endure; firefighters and social workers would be
willing to visit all areas of the city, schools would be violence free, and
playgrounds would deteriorate only from hard use rather than from
vandalism. Now it seems that we have to work harder to ensure the
conditions that we used to take for granted. The police play an important
role in helping to create the conditions under which these agencies can be
effective.

Much of the work the police need to do to support the work of these
organizations is simply more of what was described above: more effective
responses to serious crime, more imaginative efforts to prevent crime by
working on situational factors, more attention to the conditions that
produce fear, and greater willingness to respond to calls for emergency
social services of various kinds and deliver quality services to citizens.
Insofar as the police do this, they will make contributions to the
performance of other city agencies.

Another part of police work is supporting other agencies' work without
interfering with it. This is particularly important in dealing with school
security, but it might also be important in dealing with child protective
services and recreational activities. In all these cases, the "face" of
government should be a primarily civil face: students should see the
teacher, desperate parents should see the social worker, young athletes
should see the coach; they should not need to see the police. Yet, it might
be important to both city workers and their clients to have a sense of the
police being there in the background--to guarantee their security and
remind them of their responsibilities. Constructing a presence that is
reassuring and authoritative probably requires extensive discussions
between the police and the other agencies. It is not easy to learn how to
"buttress" and "backstop" without entirely usurping the function of
another agency; yet, supporting without taking over is required when the
police operate as an agency of municipal government.

Another important role of the police as an agency of local government is
helping the government as a whole identify and respond to problems.
Because the police are on the streets and in close touch with citizens, they
are in a position to identify some of the key problems facing a local
community and have a sense of their importance to the community. The
Washington, D.C., Police Department has sought to institutionalize and
exploit this capability by developing a form that the police fill out when
they see a neighborhood problem that is threatening the quality of life in a
local area. The completed form is forwarded to the relevant city
department for action, and a copy is sent to the Mayor's Office of
Operations.[38] This system takes advantage of the police as problem
finders and creates the organizational conditions across the agencies of
government that allow them to work collaboratively to solve local
problems. Baltimore County, Maryland, saw the potential of a
county-based "problem-solving government" after the police became
involved in problem-solving activities that went beyond the usual police
interests in preventing crime and reducing fear.[39] Once other agencies
were brought into the system, the police could do a little less of the
organization of problem-solving initiatives and more problem
identification and assessment. Wesley Skogan has reported on the
significance of this kind of work for the success of community policing in
Chicago.[40]

For the police to become effective problem solvers or problem identifiers,
some kind of capacity must be created for the central government to
mobilize other government agencies in response to problems identified by
the police as needing attention. Otherwise, the problem-solving efforts
eventually fall flat. Thus, an effective local government is critical to the
success of problem-solving policing, as well as the other way around.

Police roles in supporting private institutions

Finally, the police make important contributions to the quality of life and
local governance by supporting the work of private institutions as well as
other public agencies. This is crucial for achieving some of the primary
preventive effects described above. For example, when the police act to
prevent domestic violence and the abuse and neglect of children, they
support a key private institution in its important function of raising
children. When the police reduce burglaries, they give families a reason to
invest and save. When they reduce fear, they create the conditions under
which local merchants can succeed economically.[41]

As in the case of the support the police can give to public institutions,
much of the success of the police in supporting private institutions may
depend on learning how to work effectively with them, not only in general
but on a case-by-case basis. The police capacity to help develop and
sustain local community organizations may be particularly important.[42]
The police have an advantage in their efforts to support community
organization development because their line of work is of intense interest
to most citizens. Controlling crime and enhancing security is often one of
the best organizing issues for communities. The police also have an
advantage because they have access to resources--including people,
vehicles, and an authoritative and reassuring presence--citizens need to
accomplish their goals. With these capabilities, the police often are in a
strong position to help struggling communities build "social capital" in the
form of explicit understandings about the responsibilities and
commitments citizens have to one another.[43] In this respect, the police
can play an important role in accomplishing a purpose that U.S. Attorney
General Janet Reno seems to have constantly in mind: "reweaving the
fabric of community."[44]

A case example: the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police Department
demonstrates an understanding of what the role of the police as an agency
of municipal government should be. In Charlotte, both the police and city
government as a whole recognize that what the police do not only affects
crime but also contributes to the economic vitality and overall quality of
life in the city's neighborhoods. The police and other agencies are
convinced of the connection between environmental decay and crime--and
find in this connection further motive for pooling resources in the
planning and implementation of problem-solving strategies at all levels
across all city agencies. This is the philosophy of the 1990s in Charlotte.

To implement this philosophy, municipal government changed its
structure. In 1993, the municipal government streamlined 29 departments
into 9 "key businesses" and 4 "support businesses." The consolidation of
the city and county police departments coincided with this
reorganization.[45] In addition to reducing costs, the reorganization was
intended to enable a more customer-focused delivery of services to both
individual citizens and neighborhood groups in the Charlotte area.

Charlotte also has adopted an ambitious neighborhood revitalization plan.
In 1990, a group of influential leaders from business and government
toured the city and found, just beyond the robust downtown center (called
Uptown), neighborhoods in serious decay. In response, the city adopted
the City Within A City (CWAC) initiative. CWAC is composed of 73
neighborhoods within a 4-mile radius around Uptown. Within CWAC,
selected neighborhoods are targeted by local government for integrated
service delivery and neighborhood capacity building.[46] In this
reorganization for neighborhood improvement, the police play a critical
role.

An agency of municipal government in action

How does the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department realize its
self-concept as an agency of municipal government in its day-to-day
operations? It starts at the top of the organization. Shortly after the
municipal reorganization, city managers sought new leadership for the
police agency that could fit within their program. In 1994, they hired
Dennis Nowicki to serve as agency head. Since Chief Nowicki's 
appointment, the police department has pushed forward with Charlotte's
Community/Problem-Oriented Policing (CPOP) strategy and worked
closely with the Neighborhood Development Key Business[47] and other
city agencies to ensure a coordinated approach to solving problems of
economic vitality and safety in Charlotte's distressed neighborhoods.

Initially, Chief Nowicki found himself in charge of an agency that
perceived itself, and was perceived by others, as existing outside of the
municipal government structure. Rarely, if ever, had the police chief
participated in the twice-a-month executive meetings between the city
manager and the heads of the city departments. Early on, Nowicki made
clear his willingness and desire to be included in municipal
decisionmaking processes. As one manager in city government observed:

Chief Nowicki clearly sees himself as an agent of city government. He
articulates an expansive definition of what police can do for
neighborhoods. He understands the links between economic conditions
and crime. And he has been an advocate in City Council of investment in
nonpolice resources that impact safety and community vitality. That's an
unusual position for a police chief to take in this zero-sum game of
resource allocation--and in the current political dynamic around the issue
of police resources.[48]

Under Nowicki, members of the police department are realizing the
advantages of participating in the city's team-based approach to
neighborhood revitalization. Consider, for example, Officer Michelle
Preston, a community coordinator in the Baker One district. Officer
Preston is a member of one of the city's four experimental Code
Enforcement Teams. (Each of the four teams is assigned to one CWAC
neighborhood.) The Code Enforcement Teams include city housing and
litter code inspectors, job training and community empowerment field
workers, and inspectors from the county's zoning and social services
departments. Officer Preston's team includes a representative from a
nonprofit mental health agency and three community residents. Working
with the combined resources of this team, Officer Preston is able to
quickly and easily bring the enforcement resources of the city to bear on
the problems on her beat.

Officer Preston's Code Enforcement Team is targeting Grier Heights, a
neighborhood in need of better housing and programs and strategies to
address drug abuse and teen pregnancy. After a child fell through the floor
of a house into the kitchen below, the team got the owners of the housing
complex--dubbed "the hole" by officers--to agree to an inspection of all 
vacated units before new tenants move in. The team also hopes to push
through a change in the city's litter ordinance that would require property
owners to trim trees and clear up the brush in empty lots, which are
frequently used as dumping grounds and also pose a safety hazard for
police and residents. On her own, Officer Preston sought support from the
Alcohol Beverage Control Board to revoke the liquor license of a
neighborhood store that had been the source of numerous nuisance
complaints.

The Code Enforcement Teams are clearly an effective way to clean up
neighborhoods. They facilitate relationships and communication among
agency workers (thereby enhancing accountability) and enable
coordination of activities. Since only a few neighborhoods at a time can
receive the benefit of these Code Enforcement Teams, perhaps their most
important contribution is the heightened awareness they engender about
the connection between the physical conditions in a neighborhood and
crime. The police, in addressing chronic crime problems in other
neighborhoods, are exhibiting higher levels of attentiveness to visible
signs of neighborhood disorder and a willingness to act as the catalyst for
a concerted municipal cleanup strategy.

Using measurement systems to guide operations and recognize their value

To maximize efficiency in resource allocation and service delivery, more
than structural changes and interpersonal teamwork are required.
Measurement systems that can support analysis and decision making and
record the contributions of police operations also are key. In Charlotte,
several tools and systems have recently been developed to support the
government's coordinated neighborhood revitalization strategy. The
Quality of Life Index serves as a tool to measure neighborhood "wellness"
and guide the allocation of resources. A citywide problem-tracking system
ensures that no complaint gets lost in the maze of city agencies and that
city resources are not wasted through lack of planning and analysis. A
third system developed by the police department helps the police identify
the physical conditions that foster crime. Each of these tools also
contributes to the conception and functioning of the police as an agency of
municipal government.

The Quality of Life Index. A few years into the CWAC initiative, city
leaders began to ask about the impact of the resources being poured into
targeted neighborhoods. Were the neighborhoods becoming better places
to live? The city contracted with the Urban Institute of the University of
North Carolina at Charlotte (UNCC), the university's primary public
service outreach arm, to develop an index to measure neighborhood
wellness. They wanted the index to serve as a performance assessment
tool for the team of city agencies involved in neighborhood revitalization
and as a diagnostic tool to help the team determine where the city's
resources were most needed.

With input from all the key city and county agencies, UNCC created the
Quality of Life Index, which provides indicators of a neighborhood's
stability and sustainability along four dimensions--social, economic,
physical, and crime. The index is based on measures of the health of a
neighborhood's population; performance of youths in school; cultural and
recreational opportunities; economic growth and opportunities; condition
of the infrastructure; housing quality; accessibility to parks, commerce,
and transportation; environmental quality; levels of crime; and other
variables. Because U.S. census data are soon outdated, the developers of
the index collected most of the data from city, county, and State agencies
and selected private organizations.

The crime dimension includes data on juvenile delinquency, violent crime,
and property crime. Each variable is a comparison between the rate of
crime in the neighborhood and the citywide crime rate. The number of hot
spots, or clusters of crime incidents, in a neighborhood is another
component of the crime dimension. Finally, data on the number of
open-air drug markets are incorporated.

The Quality of Life Index does more than serve as a guide for resource
allocation and a baseline for measuring progress. It also contributes to the
conception and function of the police as an agency of municipal
government in Charlotte-Mecklenburg. For example, by identifying the
specific components used to measure the quality of life in a neighborhood,
it encourages the police to think about what they can do--independently or
in concert with other agencies--to affect each of those components. If
school performance matters for the measure of a neighborhood's quality of
life, then the police may be encouraged to think about what they can do to
help improve the learning environment for children. The police might
want to consider what they can do to motivate neighborhood institutions
such as churches, schools, and libraries to offer more youth programs.
Finally, the police may decide to be more attentive to conditions they
observe that affect the health of residents, once they understand the
importance of those factors to the overall stability of the neighborhood.

However, the Quality of Life Index does little to identify or motivate
specific community- or problem-oriented policing activities. Only the hot
spot and drug market variables provide some guidance for the police on
where to focus their activities. If the Quality of Life Index included
variables that measured actual police activity, it could serve both as an
effective motivator for the police and as a research tool for exploring
whether selected police activities are linked to desired outcomes. In its
current form, the index represents only the potential for measuring what
matters in Charlotte.

Problem assignment and tracking. Another mechanism for improving the
response and coordination of city agencies in the delivery of services to
neighborhoods is a citywide electronic problem-tracking system currently
being implemented by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission.
The system was designed by a team of representatives from each key
business. The goal of the system is to ensure accountability, efficient
problem solving, and regular feedback to citizens.

In this new system, any city department that receives a complaint from a
citizen becomes responsible for ensuring that the problem is addressed.
So, even if a complaint received by the Transportation Department is a
Solid Waste Department responsibility, Transportation is required to take
the lead role in coordinating the response. The receiving department enters
the complaint into the citywide electronic database, searches the database
for similar problems or complaint patterns, ensures that a team is
assembled to address complex problems, and contacts and regularly
updates the complainant about the city's service delivery plan. The system
is supported and maintained by the Planning Commission's new
Neighborhood Problem-Solving Office.

Once the problem-tracking system is fully operational, it is likely that the
police will take responsibility for a wide range of complaints. It also is
likely that these complaints will not be much different from the
complaints that police already handle. However, the electronic record,
easily retrievable and analyzable, will be a valuable source of information
about the level and range of contributions the police make to the quality of
life in the city and to other agencies.

Geographic Information System. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police
Department's Research and Planning Division has developed a Geographic
Information System (GIS) to support officers' analyses of problems. GIS
is based on the idea that disorder--the physical conditions in a
neighborhood--is associated with the level and concentration of crime
incidents. The system, once it becomes accessible to officers through their
laptop computers, will permit the visual identification of possible
environmental reasons for the high incidence of crime or complaints in a
specific area. Based on their analysis, officers can begin planning
strategies and organizing municipal resources to address the problem.

GIS provides several layers of information. It shows the location of crime
incidents as well as ordinance violations. Through windshield surveys, the
system's developers plotted the location of pay phones, bus stops, trails,
abandoned buildings, and other neighborhood features. GIS provides
information about property ownership, owner occupancy, zoning,
demolition orders, and the condition of curbs, gutters, and sidewalks.
Finally, the developers, with information from the power company about
the lumination value of the street lights, approximated the lighted areas on
the streets and sidewalks. The developers are waiting for the completion
of a planimetric database, which will provide a layer of information for
the entire county, including the outlines of buildings, pavement, footpaths,
tree lines, and all other physical features that can be digitized from an
aerial photograph.

Though still in its pilot stages, GIS already has served as a problem
analysis tool in selected neighborhoods. The police in some districts,
unwilling to wait for the automated citywide expansion of the system, are
building the database for specific neighborhoods manually, based on an
address-by-address survey. The enthusiasm for the system among officers
is further evidence of the broad concept police have of their
responsibilities and scope of activity.

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg police and measuring what matters

In addition to the measures that have been developed at the city level to
support the overall strategy of improving the performance of municipal
government and that have been used to understand and shape the police
contribution to this broader goal, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police
Department has developed its own systems for measuring its impact on
the lives of citizens in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg area. These include (1)
surveys of citizens to determine levels of victimization and attitudes
toward the police, and (2) evaluations of district-level efforts to reduce
crime and solve public order problems.

Surveys. Surveying residents to assess their perceptions of safety and
police services is a frequent, though not yet routine, activity of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department. Starting in 1995, a general
public opinion survey, a survey to measure public perceptions of safety in
Uptown, a survey of burglary victims, and a survey of domestic violence
victims were administered. The surveys were developed and administered
for the city by the Department of Criminal Justice at UNCC or by the
police department's own Research and Planning Division.

The general survey measured residents' opinions about their
neighborhoods and their problems; priorities for the police; perceptions of
safety in their own neighborhoods and in other parts of the city; levels of
victimization; and perceptions of police performance and satisfaction with
police service, including traffic enforcement, visibility, community
policing activity, and courteousness of police officers. The Uptown survey
was designed to help identify the factors that led residents to feel safe or
unsafe in Uptown.

The surveys of burglary and domestic violence victims assessed their
experiences with police handling of their cases, including how frequently
the officers arrived in the amount of time the telephone operator told the
victim it would take; whether the victim felt the responding officers
gathered all of the available information relevant to the case; and whether
victims felt the telephone operators, responding officers, and followup
investigators were courteous and helpful. For the burglary victim survey,
respondents were asked whether they thought the burglary incident could
have been avoided through some action of their own or by the police.

Individual districts also developed and implemented customer satisfaction
surveys of their own. One district conducted a telephone survey of
individuals who had contacted the police. Another distributed postcards to
citizens who had contacted the police that were designed to be mailed
back to the district. Both of these district-level surveys focused on the
respondents' perceptions of the courteousness, professionalism, and
helpfulness of the police officers who responded to the call for service.

An ideal package of surveys, according to Richard Lumb, Director of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department's Research and Planning
Division, would include surveys of four individual districts a year on a
3-year rotation cycle. Before the police department makes such an
extensive investment, however, more results are needed from the surveys
that already have been conducted. Problems identified in the surveys
should be addressed and the strategies implemented to address them
should be evaluated, Lumb says.

District evaluation. Evaluating problem-solving activities is as much a
challenge for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department as it is for
every other police department. The department's goal, however, is to
develop a system not only to measure the results of past activities but also
to stimulate further problem-solving efforts. To this end, the department
has institutionalized a district evaluation that is submitted monthly to the
chief. This evaluation is used not to compare one district's progress to
another but to measure the progress in each district over time.

Originally, the district evaluation report was to include a broad collection
of factors measuring safety conditions, citizen fear of victimization, social
well-being, crime trends and patterns, and police staffing and performance
levels. However, most of the proposed elements were dropped due to
difficulties in collecting the data, both internally and from other agencies.
The final district evaluation form focuses on staffing and personnel data,
including the number of letters of appreciation and use-of-force and other
complaints received by officers; workload data, such as calls for service
and the number of community meetings attended; and data related to
problem solving, such as the number of problems identified and solved
(by type), volunteer hours, and open-air drug markets identified and
closed.

Deputy Chief Bob Schurmeier, who heads the department's strategic
planning group, believes that a truly relevant and workable district
evaluation system will depend on automation of data collection and
recordkeeping and the willingness of officers to observe and record
information. "We have to sell the officers on the value of collecting,
tracking, interpreting, and using the data to the benefit of the city," he
says. "If they don't understand the usefulness of the data, they won't
collect it properly or they'll make it up." According to Captain Jackie
Maxwell of the Baker One district, the real successes of
Community/Problem-Oriented Policing are "small wins" that usually go
undocumented. "They're passed on verbally, if at all," she adds. "No one
yet has come up with an adequate way to quantify qualitative things."

Summary and conclusion

In sum, it seems appropriate to view the police as an agency of city
government as well as an important part of the criminal justice system. By
doing so, however, the vision of how the police can contribute to city life
is enlarged, thereby expanding the conception of the police mission. Since
measures of police effectiveness must be designed to match the mission
(i.e., the understanding of how the police might make important
contributions to their cities), it follows then that the measures now used
must be complemented by others. No one wants to relieve the police of
responding to crime. Thus, all current police performance measures
should be retained. The important question is what new measures should
be added both to remind the police that these other contributions are
important and to properly account for the full value they contribute to
their cities.

We are convinced that the police should add two new capabilities to their
current measurement efforts. The first is a large, continuing capacity to
survey citizens. A set of surveys should focus on different populations,
ask different questions, and be designed to serve different purposes. For
example, a general population survey should capture information about
criminal victimization, reasons for not reporting crimes to the police,
general attitudes toward the police, levels of fear, and types of
self-defense citizens rely on to supplement the protection they get from
the police. Such a survey is important, partly to develop a more accurate
picture than we now have about the real level of criminal victimization,
partly to measure levels of fear as well as victimization, partly to measure
citizen satisfaction with the quality of police service, and partly to
discover the level and type of self-defense that is being used to
complement police efforts.

A customer survey should be administered to a sample of individuals who
call the police (or ask officers on the streets or in station houses) for
assistance. This survey would focus primarily on the quality of the service
they received as well as the type of service they requested. This is most
useful in gauging the performance of the police as representatives of city
government. Perhaps this survey could be extended to include other
government agencies and private institutions with whom the police work.

Finally, serious consideration should be given to conducting regular
surveys of people stopped or arrested by the police. It might be important
to learn what citizens who encounter the police as enforcers think of their
experience. For example, such surveys occasionally have revealed
evidence that some police were systematically victimizing citizens
through extortion. Conversely, in some places where this technique has
been used, the police have been surprised to discover that many people
they arrest give them high marks for their professionalism and courtesy.
Such surveys could provide a sense of how economically and carefully the
police use the authority they are granted to do their job. This is at least as
important as knowing how well they use the money entrusted to them.

The second capability the police should develop is a continuing process
for evaluating their own proactive problem-solving efforts. In 1987, John
Eck and William Spelman offered a vision of this process in Problem
Solving: Problem-Oriented Policing in Newport News, in which they
describe the Newport News Police Department's overall problem-solving
initiative: how many projects were initiated, what motivated them, and
what resources were committed. All the efforts were at least informally
evaluated through reports on whether the problem was solved and through
letters from citizens who were satisfied. In addition, a few of the
initiatives (those that were relatively large and seemed to have more
general significance) were evaluated more formally through the use of
statistics and other measures.[49]

The Newport News report was produced as a research document designed
to show whether problem-solving policing could be implemented and, if
implemented, would be effective. Ideally, however, such a document
would become part of a police department's regular reporting system.
Indeed, it is only through a document of this type that proactive
problem-solving efforts of the police can be measured accurately.
Furthermore, these are the kinds of efforts that are likely to be important
as the police turn their attention to preventing crime, reacting to it, and
working cooperatively with other agencies to help solve a variety of city
problems.

In addition to institutionalizing these kinds of reports, police agencies
could join with other municipal agencies to develop measures of overall
community well-being, much as Charlotte-Mecklenburg has done. If the
police believe they control crime not only to ensure justice and enhance
citizen security but also to contribute to the broader goal of improving the
quality of community life, then they must find ways to measure factors
such as levels of citizen satisfaction, confidence in the future and
government, and the economic and social health of the city. It is no
accident that the word "police" comes from the root word polis (the Greek
word for a city or state, especially when characterized by a sense of
community), for the police make important contributions to the quality of
life in the polis. That is what they can and should do. Therefore, the value
of the police should be recognized through their contributions to the
quality of life, both politically and in the measurement systems the polity
constructs to hold its agents accountable.

Notes

1. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of
Justice, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967.

2. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of
Justice, Task Force Report: The Police, Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, 1967.

3. Moore, Mark H., "Problem-Solving and Community Policing," in
Modern Policing, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1992: 99-158.

4. The classic view of what police actually do is offered by Goldstein,
Herman, Policing a Free Society, Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1977.

5. Alpert, Geoffrey P., and Mark H. Moore, "Measuring Police
Performance in the New Paradigm of Policing," in Performance Measures
for the Criminal Justice System: Discussion Papers from the
BJS-Princeton Project, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice,
Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1993: 109-141.

6. Philadelphia Police Study Task Force, Philadelphia and Its Police:
Toward a New Partnership, Philadelphia: Philadelphia Police Department,
1987.

7. Some localities have voted special taxes to support police operations.
See Trojanowicz, Robert C., An Evaluation of the Neighborhood Foot
Patrol Program in Flint, Michigan, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State 
University, 1982. For a case describing this process, see Kennedy, David,
and Mark H. Moore, "Patrol Allocation in Portland, Oregon," John F.
Kennedy School of Government, Case Numbers C15-88-818.0 and C15-
88-819.0, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1988.

8. Philadelphia Police Study Task Force, Philadelphia and Its Police, 129.

9. On historical trends in the adoption and enforcement of local
ordinances, see Monkkonen, Eric H., "History of Urban Police," in
Modern Policing, 547-580. See also Kelling, George L., and Catherine M.
Coles, Fixing Broken Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in
Our Communities, New York: Free Press, 1997.

10. On use of force, see Geller, William A., and Hans Toch, eds., And
Justice for All: Understanding and Controlling Police Abuse of Force,
Washington, DC: Police Executive Research Forum, 1995. On high-speed
auto chases, see Alpert, Geoffrey P., and Roger G. Dunham, "Policing Hot
Pursuits: The Discovery of Aleatory Elements," Journal of Criminal Law
and Criminology 80 (2) (Summer 1989): 521-539.

11. The classic formulation of the myriad tasks of the police is in
Goldstein, Policing a Free Society.

12. This statement also belongs to Herman Goldstein. See Goldstein,
Herman, Problem-Oriented Policing, Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1990.

13. For a more general discussion of how we think about the use of
organizations in the public sector and how that contrasts with the way we
think about organizations in the private sector, see Moore, Mark H.,
Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government, Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995.

14. Ibid.

15. Scott, Esther, and Robert Leone, "Registry of Motor Vehicles:
Watertown Branch," John F. Kennedy School of Government, Case
Number C16-84-580, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1984.

16. Dickert, Jillian, and Mark H. Moore, "Pentagon and the Drug Wars,"
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Case Number C16-92-1149,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1992.

17. Sherman, Lawrence W., and Richard A. Berk, "The Minneapolis
Domestic Violence Experiment," in Police Foundation Reports,
Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 1984.

18. Eck, John E., and William Spelman, Problem-Solving:
Problem-Oriented Policing in Newport News, Washington, DC: Police
Executive Research Forum, 1987.

19. Moore, Mark H., Creating Public Value, chap. 3.

20. Goldstein, Herman, Policing a Free Society.

21. Ibid., p. 35.

22. For a discussion of the strengths and limitations of looking at crime
from a public health perspective, see Moore, Mark H., Deborah
Prothrow-Stith, Bernard Guyer, and Howard Spivak, "Violence and
Intentional Injuries: Criminal Justice and Public Health Perspectives on an
Urgent National Problem," in Understanding and Preventing Violence,
Vol. 4: Consequences and Control, ed. Albert J. Reiss, Jr., and Jeffrey A.
Roth, Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1994.

23. Kelling, George L., "Juveniles and Police: The End of the Nightstick,"
in From Children to Citizens, Vol. II: The Role of the Juvenile Court, ed.
Francis X. Hartmann, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987.

24. Kennedy, David, and Alan Altshuler, "Spreading the Gospel: The
Origin and Growth of the D.A.R.E.[Registered Trademark] Program,"
John F. Kennedy School of Government, Case Number C16-91-1029,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1991.

25. On the importance of controlling domestic violence, abuse, and
neglect as a way of fostering the healthy development of children, see
Widom, Cathy Spatz, The Cycle of Violence, Research in Brief,
Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice,
1992, NCJ 136607.

26. Moore, Mark H., "Security and Community Development," in The
Future of Community Development: A Social Science Synthesis, ed.
Ronald F. Ferguson and William T. Dickens, Washington, DC: Brookings
Institution, forthcoming.


27. Clarke, Ronald V., "Situational Crime Prevention: Its Theoretical
Basis and Practical Scope," in Crime and Justice: An Annual Review of
Research, vol. 4, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris, Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983.

28. Felson, Marcus, "Routine Activities and Crime Prevention in the
Developing Metropolis," Criminology 25 (November 1987): 911-931.

29. Sherman and Berk, "The Minneapolis Domestic Violence
Experiment"; and Sherman, Lawrence W., P.R. Gartin, and M.E. Buerger,
"Hot Spots of Predatory Crime: Routine Activities and the Criminology of
Place," Criminology 27 (1) (February 1989): 27-55.

30. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling, "Broken Windows: The
Police and Neighborhood Safety," The Atlantic Monthly 249 (3) (March
1982): 29-38.

31. See Kelling and Coles, Fixing Broken Windows, chaps. 4 and 5.

32. Merry, Sally Engle, Urban Danger: Life in a Neighborhood of
Strangers, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.

33. Police Foundation, The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment, Washington,
DC: Police Foundation, 1981.

34. See "Images of Fear: On the Perception and Reality of Crime," Forum
with Claude Brown et al., Harper's (May 1985): 39-47; and "Found: The
Cure for Fear Itself," The Observer (June 2, 1996): 15.

35. Skogan, Wesley G., Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of
Decay in American Neighborhoods, New York: Free Press, 1990.

36. McEwen, J. Thomas, E.F. Connors, and M.I. Cohen, Evaluation of the
Differential Police Response Field Test: Final Report, Washington, DC:
U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1984.

37. Cunningham, William C., and Todd H. Taylor, The Hallcrest Report:
Private Security and Police in America, Portland, OR: Chancellor, 1985.
See also Shearing, Clifford D., and Philip C. Stenning, "Modern Private
Security: Its Growth and Implications," in Crime and Justice: An Annual
Review of Research, vol. 3, ed. Michael Tonry and Norval Morris,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.

38. Based on interviews with the Washington, D.C., police in March
1991.

39. Kennedy, David M., and Malcolm K. Sparrow, "Fighting Fear in
Baltimore County," John F. Kennedy School of Government, Case
Number C16-90-938.0, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1990.

40. Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium, Community
Policing in Chicago, Year 1: An Interim Report, Chicago: Illinois
Criminal Justice Information Authority, 1994.

41. Stewart, James K., "The Urban Strangler: How Crime Causes Poverty
in the Inner City," Policy Review (Summer 1986): 6-10.

42. Weingart, Saul N., Francis X. Hartmann, and David Osborne, Case
Studies of Community Anti-Drug Efforts, Research in Brief, Washington,
DC: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1994, NCJ
149316. See also Rosenbaum, Dennis P., ed., Community Crime
Prevention: Does It Work?, Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.,
1986; and Rosenbaum, Dennis P., ed., The Challenge of Community
Policing: Testing the Promises, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications,
Inc., 1994.

43. Putnam, Robert, "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social
Capital," Journal of Democracy 6 (1) (January 1995): 65-78; and Putnam,
Robert, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy,
Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

44. Moore, "Security and Community Development."

45. Although a consolidated city-county agency, the police department is
under the authority of the city manager. The combined
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department has 1,600 members, 1,300 of
whom are sworn officers.

46. Since the start of the CWAC initiative, the city also has identified,
through a Neighborhood Statistical Area Assessment, clusters of
neighborhoods outside CWAC that show signs of distress.

47. Neighborhood Development Key Business is a consolidation of the
former community development, community relations, employment and
training, eco-nomic development, and neighborhood services departments.
The Community Empowerment Division is charged with building
neighborhood capacity and, in so doing, provides auxiliary support for
community policing. The division provides leadership and conflict
resolution training for neighborhood residents and leaders, supports
neighborhood problem solving, and finds ways to increase citizen
participation in government.

48. Personal interview with Lynne Jones Doblin, Neighborhood
Development Manager, January 29, 1997.

49. Eck and Spelman, Problem Solving.

-------------------------------

The Police, the Media, and Public Attitudes

Aric Press and Andrew Benson

They work in dreary, overcrowded offices, with the music of police radios
droning in the background. At crime scenes, they mask their emotions. At
the homes of victims, they are all sincerity and condolence, wheedling to
get someone talking. They are, in a phrase, action junkies, who idle
between bouts of mayhem, waiting for their next big chance. Are these the
ghouls from homicide, the jaded from the sergeants benevolent
association, the cynical from internal affairs? Nah. These are police
reporters, the men and women who take the crime reports of the day and
convert them into the news and entertainment that fills tonight's
broadcasts and tomorrow's papers.

Although no party to the relationship much likes to talk about it, the
police and the press share a remarkable number of characteristics. They
are professional skeptics and professionally self-righteous. Their job is to
ask questions that in any normal circumstance would be regarded as
impertinent at best. They seek the cold comfort of facts. They come upon
situations of horrific chaos and narrow them into stories, into arrests, into
a version of reality that is explainable and therefore comforting. They
serve institutions that have outsized roles in their communities--and
sometimes forget that the power and respect they enjoy is only on loan.
They like to think of themselves as different, a caste apart, beset by
unworthy critics in a nasty world. They tend to work out of the same
building, and, of course, they distrust each other even as they breathe life
into the word symbiotic.

With that kinship in mind, we meet to discuss, among other things, how
the media influence the perception of the police held by that most
innocent of bystanders, the public. As with many of our topics, this is a
broad one. It is on our agenda because it presumably contributes to the
meta-topic at hand: how the performance of police is and should be
assessed. With that in mind, this paper divided fairly neatly into a
complementary package. Benson did the hard work, reviewing the
relevant academic literature and analyzing its conclusions. Press sought to
describe the work of the press in relation to the police, figuring that to
understand how the view of the police is shaped, it would be helpful first
to understand the work of the shapers. This paper then is divided into two
parts. First is a discussion of the press and its work; second is a discussion
of the academic literature and its lessons.

Part one

We begin with a few simple truths that are not so simple. What does the
press want? It wants stories. Ideally, reporters want exclusives; better yet,
exclusives that expose wrongdoing. At an irreducible minimum, reporters
assigned to the police want crime stories--the television people need
pictures, too--delivered quickly by a reliable official spokesman. With the
outlines of a story in hand, the reporters can then supplement--if they've
the time and inclination--by visiting a crime scene or seeking out someone
with real or imagined knowledge. The prize here is the telling detail--the
turn of irony, the extra dollop of tragedy, the larger pattern into which this
crime fits--that can turn a police blotter item into an event of drama or
wider significance. 

The press is not a monolith, as some conspiracy theorists would have it,
but it is a food chain. Television now supplies a majority of the news that
most people get. (This includes the "news" provided by talk shows and
other "information-providers" such as Sally Jesse Raphael, Oprah, and
Jerry Springer.) But television still looks to print for leads, for subjects,
and for its agenda.

So who are these not-so-hidden persuaders? They come in several
different categories. Broadly speaking, they tend to be young and
inexperienced, sent out to learn their craft before they're trusted with 
such exotic species as city council members and G-18s. "The police beat
is an intake job," says David Anderson, the former editor of Police
magazine and a long-time editorial page writer at the New York Times.
"A young person comes on the paper and he's sent to go cover crimes. It's
sort of an emergency room internship to toughen up the kid. So what
happens? He does as good a job as he can and gets to the point where he's
interested in more important issues. How is the department structured?
What is its operating philosophy? Where does its budget go? And at the
point he's transferred to Washington or overseas."

They are not all kids, of course. When they can afford it, city editors
assign two or more reporters to the police beat. The junior person still
chases squad cars; the other is assigned to do big-picture stories--trends,
headquarters jockeying, or what they insist upon calling "investigations."
Sometimes, the senior man--and in these cases it's always a man--is a
burnt-out case, a reporter who has been around so long at headquarters
that he is regarded by all parties as a fellow traveler. He can be valuable to
both sides, but he dates from an age that was not as adversarial, an age
that is unlikely to return anytime soon.

Even at papers that cannot afford to double-team the police, there is an
ethic that more than the daily crime stories need coverage. But editors'
talk can be cheap. When Bruce Cory was hired by one of the Houston
papers (there was once more than one) to cover police, he was told to
cover the department as an institution. Coming out of a niche publication
that specialized in criminal justice, he had a surfeit of ideas. In the event,
however, his first responsibility was to cover every homicide in town.
After a while he stopped pursuing anything else, and then he resigned.

The third category in this taxonomy is the columnist. For these purposes,
we focus on the subgroup that has played a disproportionate role in
northeastern cities. These are men, typically Irish, typically with friends
and relatives on the police force, who no matter how free they are to roam
across subject areas, will inevitably return to local police stories. They
have excellent sources and can generally be relied upon to report, in
dramatic fashion, the views of a case as seen by one of the lead detectives.
Occasionally they break important news--Jimmy Breslin's reports on the
use of stun guns in a precinct house won a Pulitzer Prize. But these men
are very important not so much for the information they impart--which is
sometimes of dubious value--but because their writing is given
prominence, and they set a tone and style for younger reporters who are
aiming not for Afghanistan but for a high local profile. The exception to
this approach is Leonard Levitt of the late and much-lamented New York
Newsday. At that paper, and now in its shrunken successor, the Queens
edition of Newsday, Levitt writes a column specifically about police
headquarters. Unlike the others who still seek to emulate Damon Runyon
and Breslin, Levitt serves as the department's Liz Smith/David Broder.

Finally, and of considerable importance, is the investigator. These are
reporters with the freedom to roam across their territory looking for
mischief to expose. They are very good at what they do, they set police
chiefs' teeth on edge, and their work, however rarely it appears, can be
found on the front page. Two classic examples are Selwyn Rabb of the
New York Times, whose work on a 1960s bungled murder case was the
basis for "Kojak," and Brian Donovan of Newsday, whose last expose of a
police pension scandal won a Pulitzer Prize.

In all this, crime news is paramount. In a distant second is news of the
headquarters bureaucracy--who is up or down, what are the chances of
labor unrest, etc. This coverage is often not detailed enough to be of much
help or interest to anyone except the participants or their family members.
Third is coverage of program initiatives. For quick reference, review the
files of the Sunday New York Times Magazine for one breathless story
after another describing in great detail the favorite idea of the resident
police commissioner. Typically, these stories are told through the eyes of
one officer or unit. And last are the special projects. For the most part,
these are distinguished efforts that allow editors and publishers to
demonstrate their public spirit. Readers often turn the page, but they have
great influence on prize juries and policymakers. Among many examples,
consider the Boston Globe on the abject disorganization of Boston's police
department; the Washington Post on recruiting failures by the D.C.
Metropolitan Police Department, and New York Newsday on
precinct-level corruption. 

The last is a particularly good example of how the world works. In 1991,
Newsday ran a multipart series alleging failures in the New York Police
Department's (NYPD's) internal affairs operation. Leonard Levitt was
disappointed that the other papers didn't follow these stories; the PD's
press office was furious that there were so many unnamed sources
involved that it could not fight back against Newsday. After a time, Mike
McAlary, a columnist on another paper, began writing about one cop's
corruption complaints. Newsday sought to reclaim the story. It had a tip
that the U.S. Attorney's Office was beginning to sniff around the subject.
Levitt wrote that story, but he says that an editor changed the wording to
make it into a full-fledged "investigation." That was a flat error. But
before Levitt or anyone else could correct it, Mayor David Dinkins had
created a blue ribbon commission to probe corruption in the NYPD.

Police stories

Now, what do the police want in all this? The police want "good" press.
By that they mean favorable reports that emphasize bravery in the field
and wisdom at headquarters. Good press is also the absence of bad press.
Bad press in this context describes abuse, corruption, and other mistakes.
Sometimes officials have difficulty discerning the difference. "The holy
grail that every public relations person is in search of is positive press,"
says Suzanne Trazoff, a former NYPD deputy commissioner for public
information. "When I got to the PD, I heard that the beat reporters were
all negative. But it just wasn't true. I had come from [the city's welfare
department] where there was never a good story. At the PD, reporters
liked doing good stories about cops."

But they could never do enough to satisfy some members of the
department. Cops, like reporters, see the world as divided into two parts--
Us and Them. Rather than leading to a mature understanding of each
other's roles, these attitudes can lead to hostility. "The overwhelming
majority of police officers, from commanders on down through the ranks,
felt the media were not on their side," says Vin LaPorchio, a former
director of communications for the Boston Police Department. "It was
always adversarial." He said that some officers made exceptions for
"reporters they liked. They were the ones regarded as 'most-balanced' or
most 'pro-cop,' depending on how you looked at it."

Despite such attitudes, departments are in the business of feeding the
mouths that occasionally bite them. (The old saw has truth: Reporters are
either at your neck or at your feet.) Crime reports and arrests are matters
of public record and as such are distributed by headquarters' staff. Partly
this is a matter of convenience, partly it is a desire to seek out witnesses
and evidence from the public, and partly it's a self-protective need to put
the information out before someone else, such as an unhappy civilian,
does. The second category of story, according to Trazoff, is the one that's
important to headquarters and to City Hall. "Policy stories," she says, "are
not big news the way the crime of the day is, and they're harder to get
coverage for. But they are important to City Hall and to each agency.
They want to let the public know what's happening." The third category of
story relates to the second. It's the police commissioner's story. According
to Jeremy Travis, our host and a former senior aide to three New York
police commissioners, "Commissioners need to show their personal
stamps; the public likes that. It's an effective way to communicate to the
troops. And it lets you dominate the field. You want to put it out there, so
critics have less playing room."

So, from all this, what is the impression left on the public of the police? It
is an agency that announces crimes, makes arrests, has a few ideas,
struggles with labor-management issues, suffers from some corruption,
employs a few brutal officers who may or may not live within the
jurisdiction, and appears to be led by a succession of well-meaning
administrators who do not seem to last very long. These may be false or
misleading impressions, but they are the ones that both the press and
police cooperate to put forward.

Is there an issue missing here? Not in the era known as B.B. (Before
[former commissioner William] Bratton). But in this A.B. period (we'll
save the designation A.D. for the mayor of New York), the conversation is
changing. The agenda now includes public safety and the police
department's role in guaranteeing it. This is a topic that traditionalists
approach with great care. "In '93, we had the lowest crime stats in 20
years," LaPorchio recalls. "They were just excellent numbers. But we only
issued measured statements. We never gave the impression that our efforts
made them go down because we always feared that next year they'd go
back up. Police officers are a little cautious about their impact on crime
reductions." Not anymore, not A.B.

The remarkable drop in crime reports in New York (and across the
Nation) and the ensuing remarkable press coverage is well known. The
implications on the press-police relationship of this change in the public
conversation are still being thought through. John Linder is a
management/organization/public relations consultant who has worked
closely with Bratton over the years. Consider his view: "The press has an
enormous role in influencing the way in which police have been managed
in virtually every city in the country. The press is concerned with
corruption and the appearance of corruption. No one managed toward a
goal of reducing crime. No one thought the police could do it. Now they
can. The press could perform a valuable role by trying to monitor the
performance of government, the actual performance of government
instead of the appearance."

The police commissioner's role

What would it mean to the press and the police to live in a world in which
the police pledge to reduce crime and ensure safety? Already, the press
influences decisionmaking at the highest levels. Everywhere, except
perhaps Los Angeles, it seems to be an accepted rule that if a case merits
press attention it is apt to get extra police resources. And most senior
police executives acknowledge that once having reached a decision they
will attempt to have it portrayed as positively as possible in the news
media. But, says Paul Browne, a former reporter who became a key aide
to former New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, "There's
always been an understanding that the mayor runs a reelection campaign
while the PC [police commissioner] runs a paramilitary organization.
Those are supposed to be different operations."

Managing public safety, which of course is more a matter of perception
than reality, is a campaign unto itself. If the police commissioner is
determined to be the public's paladin, then he or she has to take on a
different and enlarged role, particularly with respect to the press. This is
not a game for amateurs, and there are plenty of pros around to help
manage it. Here are, at a minimum, the things a police commissioner will
have to consider doing to succeed in this new world:

o Stick to a message. Safety has to be sold, daily and aggressively. It will
not do to run a safer city and not have everyone know it. What would be
the point? This is really analogous to running a political campaign, with
one serious difference: Nearly every day, there are gruesome events taking
place that can step on even the most artfully constructed message.

o Rent a medium. Selling a campaign requires positive appeals, and the
press is not a good vehicle for that. The other option, as Linder notes, is
paid media. He did it with Bratton when Bratton was chief of the New
York Transit Police and helped build public confidence in the safety of the
trains. He thought similar work was possible with the New York Police
Department but had neither the time nor the budget to try. 

o Information control. You can't convince civilians that their city is safe if
they are listening to a steady drumbeat of reports describing crime. And
where do those reports come from? They come from the police. Once
started down the message road, how long before a police commissioner or
a mayor is tempted to limit information? Not long, as the New York
Times reported on July 2, 1995:

Headline: Crime Coverage Mellows, and Answers Are Not at All Simple 

Byline: By William Glaberson 

Body: The New York City news media, usually packed with chilling
accounts of urban mayhem, have been presenting a mellower portrait of
crime in the city lately. 

Although there are always especially horrifying crimes that force their
way into the headlines, like the murder spree of Darnell Collins last
month, a review of recent crime coverage indicates there has been sharply
less of it--less than half the number of articles in the city's newspapers
than in a comparable period last year. 

Is the decline just a reflection of the well-documented slide in New York's
crime rate? Is it, perhaps, a result of the media obsession with the O.J.
Simpson trial? 

Or is it, as some reporters and editors suggest, the product of shrewd
management of crime news by a mayor who won election pledging to
crack down on crime? 

In their view, the cutbacks that Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani ordered at
police headquarters last February have made it so difficult to find out
basic information about crimes in New York that--whatever his intentions-
-the effect has been to reduce crime coverage. 

Jerry Schmetterer, who oversees police coverage as deputy metropolitan
editor at the Daily News, said of the Giuliani administration's moves at
police headquarters, "They are creating a perception that they don't want
bad news reported." 

Although Giuliani aides say there is no attempt at manipulation, the
criticism that Mr. Schmetterer and his colleagues voice is at the center of a
debate over how much information the government owes news
organizations. And some experts on journalism and criminal justice
suggest that a strategy aimed at easing people's sometimes exaggerated
fears of crime might not be so bad.

The dispute began last winter when Mayor Giuliani said the police
department's public information office was "out of control" and ordered its
staff cut by more than two-thirds--28 officers in February to 8 newly
assigned officers and 1 civilian. The mayor also forced the resignation of
the Deputy Commissioner for Public Information, John Miller. 

At the time, the widely reported interpretation was that Mr. Giuliani was
jealous of the press attention that Police Commissioner William J. Bratton
had attracted and wanted to take more of the credit for the city's declining
crime rate. 

But as time has passed, an additional consequence has appeared: The
smaller public information unit made up of officers without public
relations experience has simply been less able to supply information.

o Running the numbers. The whole strategy depends on the city getting
safer. What happens if the numbers turn up and the safe-city plan goes
south? There might be a temptation to fix the numbers. "The danger to the
department of letting yourself be driven by how your numbers play in the
press," says Paul Browne, "is that you are in danger of corrupting the
reporting system." Blanket denials don't work here. The Uniform Crime
Reports used to be a play thing in some cities. And numbers given
outsized importance--look at school test scores--sometimes have a way of
being tampered with. This only has to happen once for a departmental
message to lose credibility with the public.

o A hiding place. Every public figure needs one. Another way of putting it
is officials must have the ability to define an issue so that its mere
presence is not crippling. Crime does not lend itself nicely to such
treatment. "S--t happens every day," says Browne, pungently, "and our
defense is we didn't do it. We have to clean it up. If your career can be
ended because somebody else did something atrocious, you and everyone
around you is put in a crazy position."

In this new world, there might be some changes in the press, too. At the
beginning of a successful public safety campaign, artful leaking to a
reporter from the most important outlet in town will serve a police
commissioner extremely well. The reporter will be happy--he gets an easy
exclusive. But reporters change assignments almost as rapidly as police
commissioners and the next guy may not be so pliable. Or even worse, the
standards may change. The press thrives on failure, thrives on it so much
that it defines it so it can find it. Reducing homicides from 2,400 to 1,200
is dandy. But how long before someone starts asking why 1,200 is an
acceptable number? In this game, the headline does not have to read "Do
Something Dave!" There's a nice ring to "Do Something Howie!," too.

But I digress. What follows is Benson's careful exegesis, and I have
delayed you too long. But one last thought: We should talk sometime
about the power of the entertainment media to influence opinion. As
surely as commercial advertising moves products, so too do fictional
portrayals influence our views of crime, cops, and safety. Consider it the
Sipowicz Effect, named for the gruff detective on "NYPD Blue." This
show reaches more Americans than any news program. Its message: Cops
are flawed good guys who always get the bad guys. (I mention also the
show called "The Commish." He doesn't chase headlines. He chases bad
guys, gets them too.) Those are powerful, positive messages, whatever
their attenuated connection to reality. No department is likely to top them.
So, as we all move into the A.B. era, police executives would be well
advised to remember the advice another television cop used to offer: "Be
careful out there." It can always get worse.

Media-created reality 

Shortly after the turn of the century, journalist Lincoln Steffens picked a
brief newspaper fight with his friend and crime-beat competitor, Jacob
Riis, in New York City. Steffens scooped the competition on a peculiar
burglary, which set off a flurry of crime reporting by the city's crime-beat
reporters.

"It was one of the worst crime waves I ever witnessed," Steffens
recounted later, "and the explanations were embarrassing to the reform
police board . . . ."

The "crime wave" ended when President Teddy Roosevelt interceded in
the newspaper war, urging his friends, Steffens and Riis, to ease up on the
crime news because it undermined the Progressive reforms of New York's
corrupt city government. Decades later in his autobiography, Steffens
seemed to chuckle when recounting the incident.

"I enjoy crime waves. I made one once . . ." he wrote in a chapter entitled,
"I Make a Crime Wave." "I feel that I know something the wise men do
not know about crime waves and so I get a certain sense of happy
superiority out of reading editorials, sermons, speeches, and learned theses
on my specialty" (Steffens, 1931: 285).

Decades later, one media critic remarked, "For all the fear they inspired, it
wasn't that more crimes were being committed--only that more of them
were getting into the paper" (Snyder, 1992: 201-2).

Some say that the news media are like a mirror, merely reflecting the
day's activities. But that notion is simplistic and perhaps a bit naive. If
Steffens were still alive today, no doubt he would also chuckle at the
legacy he has left in the news media:

o In 1976, New York City experienced a major crime wave of brutal
attacks on the elderly. The city's news media publicized a rising tide of
crime, and the public outcry prompted a government response to help
protect the elderly. Yet, at the same time, official police statistics showed
an actual decrease in those types of crime compared to the previous year.
"New York's crime wave was a public event produced through newswork.
. . . A crime wave is a 'thing' in public consciousness which organizes
people's perceptions of an aspect of their community. It was this 'thing'
that the media created," wrote sociologist Mark Fishman, who studied the
phenomenon (Fishman, 1980).

o In 1986, the Nation's major newsmagazines and network news were in a
year-long frenzy about drug abuse, particularly the use of crack cocaine.
"The Nation's No. 1 menace," declared U.S. News and World Report in
July. The problem, as described by one observer, was that the statistics did
not show that more people were abusing drugs. Drug abuse, according to
the National Institute on Drug Abuse, was hovering at about 16 percent
among high school seniors for the previous 7 years. "Nobody, but nobody,
was going to defend drug abuse in America, least of all the people who
use drugs every day. In a way, it was the perfect cover story: sensational,
colorful, gruesome, alarmist, with a veneer of social responsibility.
Unfortunately, it wasn't true" (Weisman, 1986: 15).

o In a study of news coverage in Chicago, murder ranked as the No. 1
reported crime in the Tribune, accounting for 26.2 percent of all crime
covered by the newspaper. In actuality, according to the Chicago Police
Department, murder accounted for only 0.2 percent of all crimes during
that same period. Theft was the most frequently occurring crime,
accounting for 36 percent of all crimes. But Tribune stories only
mentioned theft crimes 3.4 percent of the time (Graber, 1980: 40). "In
every category--crimes, criminals, crimefighters, the investigation of
crime, arrests, case processing, and case disposition--the media present a
world of crime and justice that is not found in reality" (Surette, 1992: 245-
6).

For most Americans, the reality of crime is what they see on television or
at the movies and what they read in the newspaper or in a magazine. An
overwhelming majority of citizens report they have not been a crime
victim in the past year nor do they know anyone who has been a crime
victim (see, for example, Gallup Poll Monthly, February 1993: 33). So
they learn about crime and the police from entertainment shows like "Top
Cops," from the police news roundup in their local newspaper, and from
the lead news stories on the local TV station. "People today live in two
worlds: a real world and a media world. The first is limited by direct
experience; the second is bounded only by the decisions of editors and
producers" (Zucker, 1978: 239, quoted in Surette, 1992: 81).

All in all, the media give their audience a lot of crime news. In her 1976
study, Doris Graber found that crime and justice topics averaged 25
percent of all news in the newspapers, 20 percent on local television, and
13 percent on national television. Stories that focused on individual crimes
were 9 percent of news coverage in the newspapers, 8 percent on local
television, and 4 percent on national television (Graber, 1980).

In the Chicago Tribune, the coverage of individual crimes just about
matched election coverage and was topped by only two other topics:
foreign affairs and domestic policy. Individual crime coverage received
nearly three times as much attention as the presidency or the Congress or
the state of the economy and nearly four times as much coverage as State
or city government.

A more recent study, conducted in 1991, found that news that focuses on
crime, law, and justice accounts for just under one-half of all news
coverage in newspapers, about half of all coverage on television, and well
over one-half of all news coverage on radio (Ericson et al., 1991).

All that attention seems to be fueling the public's appetite for crime news.
According to research studies, TV news audiences are most interested in
flames, blood, and sex and least interested in ethnic news and labor news
(Bagdikian, 1978: 272).

Early on, newspapers recognized the public's interest in crime news. In
1836, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald reported in a series
of articles "one of the most foul and premeditated murders that ever fell to
our lot to record." His stories described the hatchet murder of a New York
prostitute by one of her "admirers," then later cast doubt that the police
had the right suspect after conducting his own investigation. As a result,
the suspect was acquitted, and the circulation of the Herald tripled
(Pickett, 1977: 93-94, quoted in Bates, 1989).

By the late 19th century, crime news had become a staple of the
mass-circulation newspapers of America's big cities. As Snyder writes of
New York's newspapers, "The penny press became the guides for a
readership confounded by the city's diversity--and alternately fascinated
and repelled by the crime, vice, and poverty at its core" (Snyder, 1992:
198).

Today, as many as 95 percent of the general population say the mass
media are their primary source of information about crime, surveys report
(Graber, 1979).

But, as Steffens observes, this media-created perception differs from
reality. And whether it is an intentional crime wave or an unintended
effect of news reporting routines, the news media have an effect on the
attitudes and perceptions of their audiences. That effect can alter their
perception of crime and criminal justice, raising their level of fear or
causing them to act in a different manner than they normally would.

The news media's portrayal of crime news can affect the public, as
outlined below, and it may in turn, affect the public's attitude toward
police and other criminal justice practitioners. Likewise, the attitudes
toward criminal justice can make a difference in how policymakers pursue
strategies to address crime.

Three of the major news media effects are outlined below, followed by a
discussion of the effects of crime news specifically and how those effects
relate to public attitudes toward police.

Agenda setting

Numerous studies have shown that people attach greater importance to a
problem when the problem has been highlighted by the news media. The
media, by emphasizing or ignoring topics, may influence the list of issues
that are important to the public--what the public thinks about, even if it is
not what the public thinks (see, for example, Cohen, 1963, quoted in
Surette, 1992). At some point, the media agenda becomes the public
agenda, the theory goes.

Under the agenda-setting theory, these guiding principles emerged
(O'Keefe, 1971: 243, quoted in Surette, 1992):

1. The mass media may help form attitudes toward new subjects when
little prior opinion exists.

2. The mass media may influence attitudes that are weakly held.

3. The mass media may strengthen one attitude at the expense of a series
of others when the strength of the several attitudes is evenly balanced.

4. The mass media can change even strongly held attitudes when they are
able to report new facts.

5. The mass media may suggest new courses of action that appear to better
satisfy wants and needs.

6. The mass media's strongest and most universally recognized effect
remains the reinforcement or strengthening of predispositions.

The influence of the news media, however, is subtle and is itself affected
by personal characteristics of the public and the personal interactions
among people. For instance, people with direct, real-world experiences on
a topic are less likely to be influenced by news media depictions of that
same topic. Not all types of news media have the same influence, nor do
they have the same influence on different topics.

"In essence, the research indicates that media effects are variable, are
more common for television than for newspapers, appear to increase with
exposure, are more significant the less direct experience people have with
an issue, are more significant for newer issues but diminish quickly, and
are nonlinear, sometimes reciprocal, and highly interactive with other
social and individual processes" (Surette, 1992: 88).

A refinement of the agenda-setting theory takes into account how the
news media agenda may or may not influence the agenda held by
policymakers. Those policymakers may act on their own without the
public's urging, or they may act counter to the public agenda. The
agenda-building theory looks at how the policymaker agenda is influenced
by the importance the news media place on given topics. For example,
research into the effects of investigative reporting has shown that the most
consistent factor in determining the impact of the media on policy is the
relationship that forms between the media and local policymakers (Protess
et al., 1991). In that case, the largely passive public can apparently be
circumvented.

Priming

This media-effects theory refers to the ability that news stories have to
summon forth bits and pieces of memory from a person's mind on a given
topic.

Conducting experiments using local television broadcasts, researchers
Shanto Iyengar and Donald Kinder found that when people evaluate
complex political phenomena, they do not use all the political knowledge
they have. They can consider only what comes to mind at the moment,
and television news, it turns out, is a powerful determinant of what springs
to mind and what is forgotten. By drawing attention to some aspects of
political life at the expense of others, television news helps to set the
terms by which political judgments are reached and political choices are
made (Iyengar and Kinder, 1987).

When primed by television news stories that focused on national defense,
people judged the President largely by how well he has provided, as they
see it, for the Nation's defense. When primed with stories about inflation,
people assessed the President's performance largely on whether they
believed he has handled inflation well.

Although the experiments used political issues and the presidency, it
seems likely that the same effect would occur when focusing on other
issues, like crime, and other leaders, like mayors and police chiefs.

Framing

Again looking at television news, Iyengar shows unintended effects of the
news format on public opinion (Iyengar, 1991). The research looked at the
two primary news formats, episodic and thematic, that provide frames for
news presentations. The episodic newsframe focuses on specific events or
particular cases, while the thematic newsframe places political issues and
events in some general context. Television presents news almost
exclusively in an episodic format, Iyengar writes, which colors the
presentation of issues and eliminates others from the newscast entirely.
For instance, during the 1980s, network newscasts showed hundreds of
reports of particular acts of terrorism but virtually no reports on the
socioeconomic or political antecedents of terrorism. Global warming, on
the other hand, was hardly covered at all because it cannot be readily
reduced to a specific event or occurrence.

Through a series of experiments, the researcher found that the episodic
news format affects the public's attributions of responsibility for political
issues, so that viewers are "less likely to hold public officials accountable
for the existence of some problem and also less likely to hold them
responsible for alleviating it. By discouraging viewers from attributing
responsibility for national issues to political actors, television decreases
the public's control over their elected representatives and the policies they
pursue" (Iyengar, 1991: 2-3). Likewise, viewers are less likely to attribute
societal causes to problems.

Crime story: public views of crime

As noted earlier, the news media emphasize the most violent and the least
frequent crimes at the expense of other more frequent crimes--and at the
expense of other less visual issues. So murders grab the headlines, even if
they are rare occurrences.

The public, however, apparently does not pick up that distinction. When
asked whether they thought coverage of crime by television exaggerates
the amount of crime, the public overwhelmingly said they did not think it
did (Gallup Poll Monthly, December 1993).

The public has a fear of crime that in most cases is out of proportion to the
actual incidence or risk of crime, and as criminologists have noted, that
fear can lead to actions that make neighborhoods less safe.

What does this fear come from? Researchers have found that repeated
exposure to television news can alter people's perceptions of reality,
especially in the absence of direct experience, such that they adopt a view
of the world characterized by suspicion, fear, alienation, distrust,
cynicism, and a belief that the world is a violent, crime-ridden, dangerous
place (see Surette, 1992).

This so-called "mean-world view" leads to a set of attitudes and beliefs
about crime and crimefighting, although some of those views are
tempered by direct experience with crime. As Surette notes, "At the least,
heavy consumers of television do share certain beliefs about high societal
crime and victimization levels. For Gerbner and his associates, a
mean-world view translates into attitudes regarding who can employ
violence against whom, who are appropriate victims of crime, and who
are likely criminals. It posits a world in which it is appropriate for some to
have power and some to not" (Surette, 1992: 91).

Other researchers have found that a reliance on television news was
associated with antiestablishment attitudes that included social distrust,
political cynicism, and powerlessness--a set of attitudes described as
"videomalaise" (M. Robinson, 1976).

The impact of crime news on the public's fear of crime appears to hold
true for newspaper readers as well. Heath (1984) found that readers report 
fearing crime more if a newspaper publishes a high proportion of local
crime news in a random or sensationalistic manner.

Yet it is television that is thought to contribute more to the public's
heightened level of fear. "Newspaper exposure tends to be associated with
beliefs about the distribution and frequency of crime, whereas television
exposure is associated with attitudes, such as fear of crime and
victimization," notes Surette (1992: 93).

Just how the news media influence an individual's view of crime is hard to
pin down because of individual differences in personal experiences and
social interactions. But the overall presentation of crime in the news
media tends to lead the public to support more punitive criminal justice
policies over social welfare policies to reduce crime.

In a recent Gallup poll, 51 percent agreed that additional money and effort
should go to attacking the social and economic problems that lead to
crime through better education and training, while 42 percent agreed that
money and effort should go to deterring crime by improving law
enforcement with more prisons, police, and judges (Gallup Poll Monthly,
August 1994: 12).

But over the past 5 years of Gallup polling, that support for social
programs dropped from 61 percent in 1989 and a 5-year high of 67
percent in 1992 to just barely 50 percent. Likewise, the support for
enforcement programs increased from 32 percent in 1989 and a 5-year
low of 25 percent in 1992 to 42 percent.

In the same poll, crime and violence were cited as the most important
problem first mentioned by 21 percent of the respondents, beating out
health care at 12 percent and the economy at 9 percent.

"The repetitiveness and pervasiveness of the media's general crime and
justice content increase the possibility that the media may have significant
unplanned effects on attitudes, particularly in the area of crime and justice
and especially for persons with limited alternative sources of information.
And because of the media's emphasis on law enforcement and crime
control, we can expect that any media effects would tend to promote
crime control more than due process policies" (Surette, 1992: 87).

Graber, though, found that the public, while favoring crime control
policies, had stronger support for social programs to reduce crime than the
media portrayals would lead one to believe. The news media largely
ignored social causes of crime and failed to stress socioeconomic reform
as a way of coping with escalating crime. Instead, news stories placed an
emphasis on the criminal justice process and on individual lawbreakers.
"Curable deficiencies in the existing criminal justice system and
personality defects in individuals are depicted by the media as the main
causes of rampant crime. Social causes play a subordinate, though by no
means nonexistent, role. Suggested remedies are sparse and do not
generally include social reforms" (Graber, 1980: 74).

That differed from the public's view, as Graber notes, "Social and
economic factors were regularly mentioned by panel members as causes
of crime, and social and economic reforms were advocated, albeit within
the existing political structures. . . . These views were heavily attributed to
personal experiences and evaluations, as well as conversations with lay
and professional sources."

Iyengar found that people who viewed episodic coverage of crime tended
to produce fewer societal attributions for crime, a circumstance that exists 
because television news fails to make the connection between crime and
the social causes of crime for the public. "Americans' failure to see
interconnections between issues may be a side effect of episodic news
coverage. Most would agree that social problems such as poverty, racial
inequality, drug usage, and crime are related in cause and treatment. Yet,
television typically depicts these recurring political problems as discrete
instances and events. This tendency may obscure the 'big picture' and
impede the process of generalization . . ." (1991: 137).

Public support for specific crime programs, it stands to reason, would lead
to those programs being funded and implemented by policymakers.
Surette makes these tentative conclusions: "The media emphasis on crime
has frequently been credited with raising the public's fear of being
victimized to disproportionate levels and hence giving crime an
inappropriately high ranking on the public agenda (Gordon and Heath,
1981: 228-229). The high ranking encourages the development of
media-directed 'moral crusades' against specific crime issues, heightens
public anxiety about crime, and pushes or blocks other serious social
problems such as hunger from the public agenda" (Cohen and Young,
1981).

Views of crimefighting

Given the public's view of crime, one could expect the public to have a
negative view of the police.

The news media present the public with a torrent of gruesome and violent
crimes, raising the level of fear. These crimes appear in the media as a
series of unconnected violent acts, and the police seem powerless to stop
them. When the news media focus on causes of crimes, they look to
deficiencies in the criminal justice system as much as anything as the
reason for crime. Societal causes of crime--poverty, unemployment, lack
of education--are rarely cited.

But despite the media's constructed reality of crime, there is evidence of
considerable support for the police. In fact, the public does not appear to
blame the police for what they perceive is a rise in crime. In 1972 and
1975, the National Crime Survey asked respondents in 13 American cities
to rate their local police. 

"When we consider that fully 81 percent of the 1975 respondents said that
police performance was either good or fair, it is apparent that a large
amount of favorable opinion toward the police exists in the public mind,"
the study concludes (Garofalo, 1977: 10). Other surveys at the time
reported similar findings. Although most of the respondents indicated that
their local police could improve (68 percent), the improvements most
often cited were the need for more police officers or more officers
directed to specific areas or duties (such as foot patrols).

However, when race and age were considered, the performance of police
slipped among some groups. African Americans and younger respondents
gave police lower ratings, although even among young African-Americans
(ages 16-29), 71 percent rated the performance of police as good or
average (Garofalo, 1977: 13).

The survey also found that respondents who rated their neighborhoods as
much more dangerous compared with other neighborhoods in the
metropolitan area were four times as likely to give the police a very
negative rating than were respondents in neighborhoods they thought were
much less dangerous (Garofalo, 1977: 18). However, those who felt safe
at night in their neighborhoods rated police performance only slightly
better than those who felt unsafe.

The author comments, "The extent to which people feel personally safe
about being out alone in their neighborhoods at night does not have much
effect on their ratings of the local police, but when people evaluate the
safety of their neighborhoods relative to other neighborhoods, their
evaluations are related to their perceptions of the adequacy of local police
performance" (Garofalo, 1977: 18).

Likewise, those who reported they were crime victims in the previous
year, especially victims of more serious crime, were more likely to rate
police performance negatively than those who were not crime victims
(Garofalo, 1977: 21). However, police ratings do not strongly influence
whether or not a victim reports a crime to the police (Garofalo, 1977: 36).

So, even with an increase in crime or a perceived increase in crime, the
public does not appear to blame the police for it. "Apparently, respondents
did not think that the crime problem was attributable to any deficiencies in
the job being done by their local police," the author concludes (Garofalo,
1977: 36).

Graber, in her 1976 study of crime news, found that 57 percent of her
panel members gave police a "good rating," although whites gave more
positive assessments than African-Americans. That positive rating, she
notes, continued the favorable ratings police officers had received
throughout the previous decade. When asked for responses for the "fair"
ratings, the panelists noted the difficulty of the problems faced by police,
including insufficient manpower, lack of public cooperation, lack of skills
and dedication, and the poor caliber of police personnel. She observes that
a typical comment often was prefaced by "considering the tough problems
they face" or "given community attitudes" followed by a favorable
evaluation.

She notes, "This leaves the impression that a large proportion of those
who gave the police less than top ratings put the blame on the criminal
justice system in general and the difficulty of its mission rather than the
particular institution" (Graber, 1980: 78).

Other parts of the criminal justice system did not receive as good an
evaluation as police in the Graber study, a finding confirmed by later
surveys of the public. Both the court and corrections systems were deemed
deficient, a circumstance Graber pegs to the public's relative unfamiliarity
with them. "Unlike the courts and correctional institutions, which seem
remote, forbidding, and unpredictable, many people regard the police as a
source of aid in various emergencies, including catching and safekeeping
of criminals. People can understand and relate to the job performed by
police. By contrast, they are mystified by the ways of the courts and
correctional system and hold them responsible for returning unreformed
criminals to society" (p. 78).

In a 1991 national survey conducted by the National Victim Center (Warr,
1995), the public rated the performance of the police above that of
prosecutors, judges, prisons, and parole boards.

In her study, Graber asked the panelists to rate the success of the police in
catching criminals, because she surmised that apprehending criminals is
widely considered to be the most important function of the police. She
found that 48 percent of the panel saw the police as very successful, 14
percent saw police as unsuccessful, and the remainder gave answers
qualified to various crimes.

Nearly two decades later, the public still regards the police highly.
Respondents were asked in 1993 to rate how well the police in their city
were dealing with crime; 71 percent rated the police as doing an excellent
or good job. However, that assessment was much lower for
African-Americans, only 48 percent of whom gave an excellent or good
rating to police in their cities (Gallup Poll Monthly, February 1993: 31).
And both whites and African-Americans agreed with the statement that
police treat criminal suspects differently in low-income neighborhoods
than in middle- or high-income neighborhoods.

As Warr (1995) notes, the police receive consistently higher ratings from
the public in honesty and ethical standards than many other professions
and that ranking has increased since the 1970s. Roughly half of
respondents in 1993 and 1994 Gallup surveys rated the honesty and
ethical standards of the police as very high or high, up from 37 percent in
1977. That gave police a ranking as high as medical doctors and teachers
and placed them higher than lawyers (16 percent in 1993) and U.S.
senators (18 percent). On another question, a large majority of Americans
had a great deal of respect for the police, even during the 1991 Rodney
King incident. Gallup surveys from 1973 to 1995 show that the public has
the highest confidence rating in police over the past 20 years than any
other institution, except for the military and organized religion (Gallup
Poll Monthly, October 1991 and August 1994).

Similar to Graber's observations, Reiss (1967, quoted in Warr, 1995),
notes that the lofty police evaluations by the public probably have more to
do with sympathy for the difficult job police have to handle than with an
objective evaluation of police performance. Graber reports that panelists
believed economic and social causes deter efficient crimefighting, and
they believed strongly that citizens can best aid the fight against crime by
correcting these societal causes. For instance, 85 percent of the
recommendations from panelists suggested that citizens should work for
programs designed to reduce economic and educational deficiencies
among the crime-prone population. Fourteen percent called for better
crime reporting by citizens and for more participation in stopping illegal
activities. Overall, 86 percent believed that citizens are lax in aiding in the
fight against crime (Graber, 1980).

The generally positive assessment of police came in recent years even as
the public believed crime was higher in the United States than it was a
year previously and reported that they worried about being sexually
assaulted or murdered more than they did a decade ago (Gallup Poll
Monthly, December 1993: 21).

Trends in public opinion appear to show that the general fear of crime,
although disproportionately higher than actual incidence of crime, has
remained generally stable since the 1970s and 1980s (Niemi et al., 1988:
134-135). In a 1993 Gallup poll, respondents reported that crime in their
neighborhoods had not increased over last year, and neither they nor
anyone they knew were victims of crime in the previous year, although
again, responses by African-Americans differed (Gallup Poll Monthly,
February 1993: 27).

A year later, however, the proportion of Americans who rated crime as the
most important problem in the country soared to 37 percent in a January
1994 Gallup survey (Warr, 1995). Alderman (1994) attributed the increase
to a series of highly publicized crimes and trials that were under way
beginning in the fall of 1993, including the murder of Polly Klaas, the
assault on Nancy Kerrigan, the Long Island commuter train shooting
rampage, the murder trial of the Menendez brothers, and the court
proceedings surrounding the assault on Reginald Denny.

Conclusions and recommendations

The research seems clear that the news media have pervasive, unintended,
and unpredictable influences on public opinion. For instance, the news
media can influence the importance the public attaches to a particular
problem, the factors by which it evaluates its leaders, and the extent to
which it makes connections between problems and causes.

The evidence also strongly suggests that the steady stream of crime news
from the media affects the public, so that they are more fearful about the
risks of crime than they need be and are more likely to demand punitive
criminal justice policies to control crime. That is true even though the
public generally understands the societal causes of crime and supports
programs to counteract them, despite the news media's avoidance of that
portrayal of crime.

The demand by the public for a specific response to crime is likely to lead
policymakers to heed the public or, at the very least, to make it more
difficult for policymakers to get support for responses that are counter to
public opinion. Along those lines, Fishman notes that the media crime
frenzy over elderly crimes in New York swiftly led to police and criminal
justice reforms.

"Even though one cannot be mugged by a crime wave, one can be
frightened. And on the basis of this fear, one can put more police on the
streets, enact new laws, and move away to the suburbs. Crime waves may
be 'things of the mind' but they are real in their consequences" (Fishman,
1980: 11).

These attitudes about crime, however, do not appear to bring down the
public's generally high rating of the police. Instead, they may have a
positive effect on public attitudes toward police in that the public views
the police as having a difficult job, being at the forefront of crime.

As a way to address the negative effects of news media accounts,
criminologists and journalists have called for more context in crime
stories (see, for example, Edmonson, 1994; Tozer, 1993; Bishop, 1993).
By tying in the trends, patterns, and causes of crimes, the public would get
a better picture of what crime is occurring, where it is occurring, and how
often it is occurring. That gives them information by which they can make
informed decisions about their personal safety.

This should lead criminologists and police administrators to provide more
of the statistics and research data to the public through the news media.
Police departments are virtually the exclusive source of information for
crime news. It makes sense that the crime news be accompanied by
statistical data or inferences from administrators that bring context and
order to the seemingly unconnected series of crimes and violent acts
emanating from television and newspapers.

Criminal justice policymakers must pay heed to the reports of the news
media. This notion was espoused in 1921 by Felix Frankfurter, then a
professor of administrative law at Harvard Law School, in a study he
helped lead of the Cleveland criminal justice system (Fosdick et al.,
1922). Frankfurter contributed a chapter outlining how the Cleveland
newspapers affected criminal justice in the city. He called on the
newspapers to take a more high-minded approach to crime coverage,
recognizing the strong effect they had on public opinion.

"The public derives its opinions about the administration of criminal
justice from the kind, the quality, and the volume of newspaper matter
affecting criminal justice [and] the influence exerted by public opinion on
the system of criminal justice is largely dependent upon the extent of
informed opinion in the community . . . . The whole scheme of criminal
justice, particularly under an elective system with short tenures, is
pervasively affected . . . by the views which are gradually deposited in the
minds of the electors through the more vivid and persistent, and therefore
more potent, influence of the daily news columns . . ." (Fosdick et al.,
1922: 518).

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-------------------------------

Constituent Expectations of the Police and Police Expectations of
Constituents

Stuart A. Scheingold

Let me begin this paper by taking a close look at its assigned title. I want
to suggest that this title implies--misleadingly, in my judgment--a dyadic
relationship and symmetrical expectations between police and
"constituents": two roughly equivalent parties trying to understand each
other to work out mutually satisfying ways of interacting. As I see it, this
title conveys an idealized sense of the way the police and the public
perceive and deal with each other. There is, of course, nothing wrong with
having ideals, but in deciding what matters and, therefore, what ought to
be measured, it is important not to confuse the ideal with the typical
day-to-day circumstances of policing in the United States.

Until relatively recently, the police were by and large free to act as if the
ideal and the real were pretty much the same. That is, the police have had
significant leeway to project and impose their expectations on the public--
presuming, in other words, dyadic and symmetrical relationships. In
recent years, however, the leeway accorded the police has been
dramatically curtailed--at least in urban America. Social, political, cultural,
and legal changes have made it more and more difficult to ignore the
increasingly assertive and influential multiplicity of parties and the diverse
expectations that now impinge insistently on the police. Still, we know
relatively little about this diversity of expectations. To complicate things
still further, the police themselves seem divided--both among and within
departments--about how much things have changed and the extent to
which it is appropriate, or even feasible, to respond to altered patterns of 
expectations.

I think I detected some of these divisions, as well as a reluctance to
confront them, at our initial meeting. Thus, continual mention was made
of the core functions of policing as if there was general agreement on this
contested issue. Similarly, and this was more implicit than explicit, there
seemed to be a taken-for-granted belief that reducing crime is, in itself, a
goal that transcends divisions and reliably draws the police and the public
together. Finally, community policing was invoked with approval as an
enterprise that all right-thinking academics and practitioners accept and
agree on. However, some things were said during the course of our session
that suggested, at least to me, that community policing did not mean the
same thing to all of us. This should, of course, come as no surprise,
because community policing has no commonly accepted meaning.

I would like this paper to be seen, in part, as an invitation to open up these
issues, because each of them bears directly on the police mandate. While
there is, in all likelihood, agreement that the police mandate has been
broadened, only if some agreement can be reached on the new parameters
of policing does it seem possible to decide what matters and, therefore,
what ought to be measured. Similarly, I want to argue that the available
evidence strongly suggests there are indeed a multiplicity of public
expectations and, more to the point, that some of these expectations tend
to put the police at odds with elements of the public. The evidence,
however, is largely anecdotal and spotty, and there is, consequently, a
need for reliable data to determine whether the police and the public are on
the same page and, if not, what can be done to make things better and how
we will know when things are moving in the right direction.

Crime control: solution or problem

"A conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." This aphorism (which
I associate, perhaps incorrectly, with James Q. Wilson) readily captures
the notion that opposition to crime does, at the end of the day, provide a
theme that unifies all of the law-abiding, nondelusional members of the
public. The contemporary case for this position has been particularly well-
developed by the distinguished social scientist Ralf Dahrendorf in a
splendid little book entitled Law and Order (1985). But Dahrendorf
acknowledges throughout this slim volume that he is largely updating--
albeit with references to such current issues as "no go areas"--the ideas of
Thomas Hobbes, who argued that without law and order, life is "nasty,
solitary, brutish, and short."

In the abstract, this position is unassailable, but in practice it is under
constant assault--and not just from naive and deluded liberals. There are
constant indications of the deep ambivalence of afflicted minorities toward
the wars that have been declared against crime and drugs. Indeed, the
strongest supporters of these wars are frequently to be found among those
who are least at risk from street crime (Scheingold, 1995). They may be
insulated by rural and suburban living or by a variety of security measures
that keep them relatively safe, even when in close proximity to crime and
criminals. To suggest ambivalence among the most victimized of
Americans is not to suggest that they are oblivious or hardened to their
victimization, but rather that--as is the case for most Americans--law and
order is one value among many and that--unlike most Americans--they
worry that their neighborhoods will be the battlefields of the wars against
crime and drugs, with all of the attendant risks. 

Can law and order be the value of values--the definitive solution to social
conflict? There are at least three basic reasons to believe that this question
should be answered in the negative.

o In the first place, law and order is not a dichotomous variable. The
choice, at least in the typical American urban setting, is not between the
Hobbesian war of each against all and a harmonious and crime-free
society. It seems more appropriate, as I see it, to think in terms of
multidimensional continua of more or less law, more or less order, more or
less crime.

o Second, crime is not an entirely uncontested category. Charles
Silberman made this point almost two decades ago in an eloquent
elaboration of Robert Merton's distinction between legitimate and
illegitimate opportunity structures among marginalized elements of the
society (Silberman, 1978: 87-116). The mixture of despair and ambition
that drive criminal acts may make it more difficult for minorities to
dismiss those who break the law as the criminal other--in much the same
way that Americans at all levels find it difficult to turn their backs on
friends and relatives who commit crimes.

o Third, the criminal justice system is often understood in minority areas
as, at best, an untrustworthy and unpredictable ally in the struggle against
victimization. To the extent that police, prosecutors, and judges are
perceived as biased, corrupt, or even as victimizers, it stands to reason that
the call to join with law enforcement officials in the fight against crime
will ring hollow.

I submit these three caveats not because I am convinced that they reflect
the overall climate of opinion in minority communities. The available
evidence, admittedly spotty, does, however, provide cause for concern. I
have in mind the many indicia of African-American mistrust of the
criminal justice system in general and of the police in particular. This
mistrust, moreover, does not seem to have been confined to young
African-American males--who are traditionally in conflict with police--
nor to their families and friends. Consider, for example, the frequent
reports of humiliations visited by the police upon African-Americans from
the "respectable classes"--including African-American police officers.
Similarly, Sasson reports in a recently published article that working-class
blacks are inclined to adopt conspiracy theories, for example: "A
conspiracy of powerful whites is the real cause of crime, drug dealing, and
violence in black neighborhoods" (1995: 265).[1]

More broadly, there were racially defined reactions to the verdicts in two
notorious California trials--the prosecution of the Los Angeles Police
Department officers in the Rodney King case and the murder trial of O.J.
Simpson. The Bernard Goetz case in New York resonated in the same
racially charged and divisive fashion (Rubin, 1988). Similarly, Cullen and
his associates have found that while both blacks and whites approved of
the use of deadly force against fleeing and manifestly dangerous felons,
African-Americans were less likely than whites to support the illegal use
of deadly force (Cullen et al., 1996: 454-456). My research also revealed
significant black-white differences on police shooting policy (Scheingold,
1991: 50-55).

The sharply contrasting reactions of blacks and whites cast further doubt
on the proposition that the fight against crime brings Americans together.
Instead, there is reason to believe that white trust in the police may be
inversely proportional to African-American distrust. This may be partly
because, as I wrote a number of years ago, whites are likely to see the best
police officers on their best behavior, while African-Americans and other
marginalized groups are likely to see the worst police officers at their
worst (Scheingold, 1984: 126). It may also be because whites expect the
police to treat "the dangerous classes" in just the ways that antagonize
minorities. If so, then Andrew Hacker's (1992) ominous admonition that
we are "two nations: black and white, separate, hostile, and unequal" may
apply at least as much to the fight against crime as to other areas of
American life.

Of course, high-profile cases and issues may conceal more than they
reveal about the true feelings of both minorities and whites toward crime
and criminal justice. As Jennifer Hochschild has written, there is reason to
believe that African-Americans feel they "must defend all blacks in
trouble with white society, no matter what they have done to call down
this trouble" (1995: 128). Beneath this public show of solidarity, there
may well be sufficient concern about the increasingly violent character of
criminal activity to make opposition to crime the unifying force that
brings the police and minority communities together. There is, moreover,
reason to believe that the views of both minorities and whites are more
conflicted and contingent than is conveyed by the fragmentary and
tendentious evidence that is available. Formally incompatible views may
coexist within both minority and white communities and families; indeed,
individuals may be equally torn.

My underlying point is that it is inappropriate to assume that the fight
against crime will bring Americans together and that a reduction in the
crime rate is, therefore, a sufficient gauge of successful policing. Given
the complexity, the fundamental importance, and the paucity of
information on public expectations, it follows that research--measurement,
if you will--is in order. In short, the first step in deciding what to measure
is figuring out what matters to the consumers of police services.

The core concerns of policing

It might well be argued that the previous discussion is gratuitous--that it
amounts to little more than preaching to the choir. Was there not, after all,
implicit in our initial discussion a recognition that crime control is not a
sufficient, although it may be a necessary, indicator of successful policing?
Perhaps so. But to begin with, we certainly seemed to dodge the issue of
just how far and in what directions the police mandate had expanded
beyond crime control. Indeed, it was not clear to me that there was general
agreement that such an expansion was called for. More fundamentally, at
times I found the case for expanding the mandate expressed in ways that
privileged crime control while seeming to move beyond it. Indeed, as I
suggest below, the practices associated with this new discourse of crime
control seem likely to feed mistrust of the police among minorities and
marginalized Americans more generally.

A truism in law enforcement literature is that there is tension between two
intrinsic elements of policing: order maintenance and law enforcement
(Wilson, 1968). Traditional beat policing tends to emphasize the former,
while professional policing emphasizes the latter. Law enforcement
depends on the impersonal authority of the law and is typified by the
formal procedures of arrest and prosecution. Order maintenance, in
contrast, depends on the personal authority of individual police officers
and is typified by informal persuasion, admonition, and intimidation.
Accordingly, the two approaches call for contrasting forms of police
organization, training, skills, and temperament. Of course, neither
departments nor individual officers can confine themselves exclusively to
law enforcement or to order maintenance; they must therefore find ways
to reconcile the tensions between the two.

There are both internal and external elements of the problems of
reconciling law enforcement and order maintenance. Internally, law
enforcement imposes a variety of constitutional and legal constraints on 
police officers. Order maintenance, on the other hand, frees up police
officers: So long as they do not contemplate prosecution, there is no need
to worry much about legal niceties. A basic tradeoff occurs between
bureaucratic control that is facilitated by the procedural regularities of law
enforcement and rank-and-file morale that tends to be enhanced by the
freedom associated with order maintenance. From the external perspective,
police-community relations can be jeopardized by the relative freedom
that police officers have, insofar as the mandate is defined primarily in
terms of order maintenance and a law enforcement approach that imposes
externally measurable standards of civility on police interactions with the
public.[2]

As the police mandate has expanded in recent years, the distinction
between law enforcement and order maintenance has tended to blur.
Although it might appear that this blurring would ease the tension, that
does not seem to be the case. Indeed, my own view is that as the mandate
has expanded, just the opposite has been happening. The internal and
external problems of reconciling law enforcement and order maintenance
have grown ever more burdensome. Either way, if what matters is to be
measured, there are two basic reasons to pay attention to the expansion of
the police mandate. It will be necessary, on the one hand, to work out
ways of measuring whether and to what extent the police are meeting these
new expectations and, on the other, to determine whether the expanded
mandate is generating unintended and unwelcome costs.

It seems reasonable (at least in terms of the criminology literature) to trace
the current expansion of the police mandate to Wilson and Kelling's
seminal "broken windows" argument (Wilson, 1985: 75-89). They claim
that there is an intrinsic relationship between disorder and crime and,
accordingly, between order maintenance and crime control. Broken
windows is about the physical indicia of neighborhood
decline--abandoned automobiles, boarded-up houses, untended trash, etc.
Such circumstances, according to Kelling and Wilson, are taken by
criminals as invitations to locate their criminal activities in these neglected
venues. As Kelling and Wilson see things, this is all part of a spiral of
decline that can be arrested and reversed if law-abiding citizens can
reclaim the streets. More broadly, this kind of thinking is linked to the idea
that fighting crime can serve as bait--that crime reduction will attract a
newly empowered public to the kind of civic activism required to rebuild
community institutions. These institutions will then take on a meaningful
share of the responsibility for dealing with broken windows and other
signs of decline.

I want to suggest that this expansion of the police mandate shifts the
balance of policing activities further along the law enforcement-order
maintenance continuum (in the direction of order). If this process works as
intended, the result will be increasingly intense and harmonious
relationships between police officers and neighborhood residents. If not,
just the opposite is likely to happen.

In its narrowest and most problematic reading, the broken windows
argument leads to what is sometimes referred to as a zero-tolerance policy.
Zero tolerance means, for example, that the police act forcefully against
people and behavior they deem suspicious but not necessarily illegal or
criminal. Similarly, former Commissioner William Bratton argued at our
last meeting that the reduction in crime in New York City could be
attributed to putting "hyper law enforcement" (my term) at the service of
order maintenance. Would-be lawbreakers are put on notice that the most
trivial infraction will lead to police intervention if they are suspected of
gang, drug, or other kinds of illegal activity. Knowing that they are subject
to surveillance and intervention, these would-be criminals will, for
example, be less likely to carry guns and, thus, be less dangerous and,
presumably, less able to conduct their criminal activities.

I see these zero-tolerance and hyper law enforcement policies as
problematic for three reasons. In the first place, the available research
suggests that for a variety of daunting reasons, anticrime campaigns are
not effective agents of community reconstruction (Skogan, 1990). Second,
in this formulation, broken windows assumes just what I sought to call
into question in the previous section of this paper--namely, the primacy
and consensus-building power of crime control. Finally, and most
significantly, the kinds of police practices associated with zero-tolerance
and hyper law enforcement seem likely to increase the mistrust of the
police that robs crime control of its consensus-building capacity. As
Skogan points out: 

[R]esidents of poor and minority neighborhoods with serious disorder
problems often have antagonistic relations with the police. They regard
the police as another of their problems, frequently perceiving them to be
arrogant, brutal, racist, and corrupt. (p. 172)

The intrusive and preemptive practices associated with zero-tolerance and
hyper law enforcement are likely to increase this resentment and mistrust.

Even if they are conducted in a strictly legal fashion, aggressive tactics
such as saturating areas with police, stopping cars frequently, conducting
extensive field interrogations and searches, and bursting into apartments
suspected of harboring gambling or drugs can undermine
police-community relations in black and Hispanic neighborhoods.
(Skogan, 1990: 166)

Is it reasonable to assume a strictly legal modus operandi? Working as
much on the basis of probabilities as specific knowledge, police officers
will make mistakes or become overzealous--thus antagonizing law-abiding
residents while seeking to intimidate lawbreakers. The result may well be
to reinforce the sense that the police cannot be trusted to distinguish the
violent and incorrigibles (who must be put away to maintain a tolerable
level of public safety) from the unruly but redeemable (who ought to be
empowered rather than overpowered).

Goldstein's problem-oriented policing expands the police mandate in a
more promising and symmetrical fashion (1990). The assumption of
problem-oriented policing is that if police officers take seriously
neighborhood grievances against landlords and merchants or about the
shortage of drug treatment programs, for example, the police can
effectively intercede as advocates--either directly in the disputes or by
mobilizing responsible city officials. In so doing, the police will be
alleviating some of the conditions that lead to disorder and decline. Thus,
there are crucial differences between the broken windows and
problem-oriented policing strategies. In the former case, the police assume
that crime and incipient crime are at the heart of the matter and, in effect,
impose that assumption on the public. Problem-oriented policing is, by
definition, meant to be more of a two-way street, with the police being
attentive to a broader range of public discontent. In this way,
problem-oriented policing addresses itself to some of the underlying
forces of disorder and crime. Although problem-oriented policing does not
deal with "root causes"--for example, the structural forces that generate
unemployment--it does go beyond the purely symptomatic in ways that
broaden the range of expectations to which the police are attentive.

Community policing

Community policing is currently represented as the magic bullet that will
lay to rest the concerns that have been developed in this paper. Thus,
community policing is seen as a way to elicit the following:

o Agreements between the police and the public on law enforcement
priorities.

o Mutual confidence in each other's good intentions.

o Sufficient energy to arrest neighborhood disorder and decline.

I want to suggest, however, that community policing can be, and is,
implemented in divergent ways--not all of which are conducive to
increasing confidence between the police and neighborhood residents or to
generating energy on behalf of community reconstruction. Moreover, even
at its problem-oriented, participatory best, partnership may be a
problematically apolitical solution to a serious political problem.

A number of years ago, one the first books on community policing was
subtitled "Rhetoric or Reality" (Greene and Mastrofski, 1988). Now,
almost a decade later, it seems abundantly clear that community policing
is both rhetoric and reality. There is evidence in Seattle and Chicago, two
examples with which I am somewhat familiar, of concerted efforts to take
community policing seriously. To me, this means taking community
seriously, not simply enlisting the law- abiding elements of society in a
fight against crime mounted in and by the police department.[3] The
police take community seriously insofar as they encourage mobilization
of, and are accountable to, a broadly representative cross-section of the
neighborhoods they serve. The goal is, in other words, to engage ordinary
citizens in the processes of establishing police priorities and gauging
police performance.

But there are other visions of community policing. Community policing is
sometimes taken to mean little more than a return to traditional beat
policing--getting officers out of the car and into the street, where they
become as well acquainted as possible with their neighborhoods. Then
there is the proactive, or "crime attack," vision (Wilson, 1985: 69) that 
deploys nontraditional practices--from zero-tolerance policies to
neighborhood watch programs--to reduce crime. Or, as was suggested
previously, community policing is understood primarily in terms of block
watch programs and other efforts to elicit information that law
enforcement officials deem useful. Often, the more authentically
communitarian practices coexist with one or more of these top-down
approaches within the same the department--or, for that matter, within the 
same program, as could be the case with Operation Weed and Seed.

Departments are likely to be sharply divided on matters that impinge
directly on the values and interests of rank-and-file officers, midlevel
managers, and police leadership.[4] Chiefs and their immediate coterie are
ordinarily appointed by, and hold office at the pleasure of, elected
officials, and--as Mastrofski pointed out at our last meeting--their job
security tends to be more caught up with matters like corruption or major
rioting than with rates of crime or levels of fear (Brady, 1996: 9). Midlevel
police managers, like midlevel managers everywhere, are caught between
the upper echelons and rank-and-file officers. As such, they are likely to
be more concerned with keeping the wheels of the department turning
smoothly. The rank and file are, of course, in the front lines--that is, in the
streets--and are deeply influenced by those experiences and are more
caught up with crime and everyday public order problems. All of this
brings to mind the often-heard description of the division of labor among
the finders, the minders, and the grinders in corporate law firms. But,
unlike corporate law firms, this police division of labor is reinforced by
formal and often assertive organizations that articulate and work on behalf
of the interests of rank-and-file officers, and sometimes midlevel
managers as well. Adding to the current complexity are minorities and
women within the police ranks who often feel sufficiently distinct to have
their own organizations. In short, police organizations are increasingly
unwieldy, and it is no mean feat to get them to work smoothly--much less
to introduce reforms that run counter to the prevailing inertial forces.

Insofar as community policing follows the line of least resistance, the path
seems likely to lead in familiar directions--that is, toward a return to
traditional policing or a vigorous and enterprising pursuit of proactive
efforts to control crime. If so, it is relatively easy to identify and measure
what matters. When the crime rate is going down, the police are
successful; otherwise, they are not. Accordingly, the paper presented by
then-Commissioner Bratton of the New York Police Department at our
first session makes, as was apparently his intention, an arguably
convincing case for a successful community policing program. Similarly,
if a return to beat policing is what community policing is all about, the
challenge would be to devise tests of the familiarity of officers with the
people and places that comprise their beats (Rubenstein, 1973). An
immensely sympathetic and subtle portrait of this kind of policing is to be
found in Muir's book, Police: Streetcorner Politicians--in particular, in the
person of the pseudonymous professional, Jay Justice (Muir, 1977: 15-
21).

The point is that both traditional and proactive policing represent familiar
and largely top-down understandings of policing. Although street officers
in recent decades may have become more comfortable with impersonal
policing and may have to be coaxed out of their cars, the traditional and
proactive approaches to community policing are not likely to be a tough
sell internally. Beat policing is normally done on the officers' terms and
can entail, at least by implication, a warrant to "kick ass" among perceived
troublemakers. The proactive, or crime attack, approach gives street
officers less individual discretion. It does, however, empower them to
adopt the long-cherished role of crimefighter and may also entail the kind
of heavy-handed tactics that Skogan and others have warned against.

To take community seriously is a much more daunting task, whether in
terms of altering police practices or measuring what matters. In the first
place, taking community seriously entails treating the public as
"constituents"--that is, viewing people and police in ways analogous to the
relationship between elected officials and the electorate. Officers and
managers may, however, continue to be tempted, irrespective of the
rhetoric of community policing, to view the public as split, primarily
between law-abiding citizens on one side and criminals and other kinds of
troublemakers on the other side. Of course, as I have already argued, that
vision of society is problematic because it tends to ignore racial, class, and
gender divisions that, for better or worse, seem to influence expectations
of the police. And insofar as community policing calls for mobilizing
neighborhoods and encouraging them to participate in policymaking,
community policing will inevitably be seen as introducing politics into 
policing. But rank-and-file officers are inclined to attribute to politics
virtually all of the ills of policing. More specifically, the struggle over
civilian review boards certainly suggests a deep-seated reluctance to think
of the public as constituents to whom the police are answerable and who
therefore ought to be given a voice in the policing process. In short, while
some advocates of community policing do seem to cherish a
police-constituent vision, this vision is contested in the theory of
community policing and even more so in its practice.

No doubt some progress has been made on these matters. I recall my late
colleague, Ezra Stotland, recounting his amazement at attending a public
meeting in which community residents and police officials negotiated
police priorities.[5] Similarly, I remember Ezra telling me of the gradual
transformation of the community advisory group from all-white, antiblack
militancy to a genuinely, if somewhat precariously, integrated advisory
body (Fleissner et al., 1991). In Chicago, too, some success seems to have
been achieved by incorporating district advisory committees into the
policing process. (Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium,
1995: 63-74).

While there is reason to believe that community policing, at least in some
places, has been somewhat successful in transcending racial divisions, it is
less clear that other gaps have been bridged. Thus, the police may make
common cause with those elements of the public--both white and
minority--who share police understandings and concerns. If community
policing is about reconstructing "disordered" and "declining"
communities, it is presumably necessary to reach out beyond the
respectable elements to those who are at risk and on the margins. (The
term "at risk" here is meant to imply at risk of becoming victimizers, not at
risk of victimization.) For these purposes, a zero-tolerance policy may well
be counterproductive, giving rise to organizations such as Seattle's
"Mothers Against Police Harassment." The broader vision of community
policing neither validates nor rejects the claims of such organizations.
Instead, it acknowledges a complex understanding of the composition of
neighborhoods, one that transcends the easy divisions of good and bad, the
manageable and the intractable, and that charges police with the onerous
responsibility of taking a broader view of communities.

But to acknowledge this complexity is not to resolve its attendant
dilemmas. Consider the issue of teenagers, especially minority teenagers,
hanging out. They may well challenge accepted notions of proper
behavior and drive their parents as well as their neighbors and the police
crazy. But they are not necessarily irredeemable, nor are they necessarily
thought to be so by their family and their neighbors. Traditionally, police
have dealt with these disputes about the "legitimate use of public space . .
. by imposing an unnegotiated order that adversely affects the interests of
the young people concerned, and significantly undermines police-youth
relations" (Loader, 1994: 524; see also Werthem and Piliavin, 1967:
57-62; Reiss, 1971: 150). Community policing calls for a different
approach that takes account of the legitimate expectations of both youths
and other neighborhood residents:

The issue needs to be reconstituted outside of a "law and order" paradigm
and subject to processes of mediation in which all interested parties can
endeavor to produce resolutions that do not constantly threaten to
criminalize the social practices of young people. (Loader, 1994: 524)

At the very least, it would seem incumbent upon the police to take their
cues from the community and to work toward reintegration of these
youths back into their communities, as they often do in middle-class
neighborhoods.

Of course, in middle-class neighborhoods there are more likely to be the
stable family settings and favorable job prospects that reassure the police
of the prognosis for successful reintegration. In neighborhoods in decline,
it is necessary to construct the conditions conducive to reintegration. This
means a problem-oriented approach to community policing--an approach
that "recognizes the secondary nature of the criminal justice system in
sustaining social order"-- without suggesting that the police do not have an 
important, albeit a demanding and unfamiliar, role to play (Loader, 1994:
525). Needless to say, this vision of community policing taxes the
resources, the energy, and the goodwill of police officers and asks them to
step outside their conventional conceptions of themselves--indeed, to act
in a manner that is contrary to these conventional conceptions.

The problematic implications of following the line of least resistance
toward the traditional beat policing or crime attack versions of community
policing seem reasonably predictable. Most broadly, the result is likely to
be a continued inclination to take for granted a dyadic and symmetrical
pattern of relationships between the police and the public. In other words,
the top-down bias of this approach will enable the police to project and
impose their expectations on the public. More specifically, the police may
well be tempted to make their peace with those groups in the
neighborhood with whom they tend to agree. Marginalized groups will
continue to be excluded, misperceived, and, in all likelihood, antagonized
by some of the heavy-handed tactics associated with these
anticrime-centered policing strategies. If so, the result is likely to be an
intensification, rather than a diminution, of cleavages between police and
marginalized elements of the public.

The aspirations of community policing imply two different kinds of
measurements that are only indirectly related to crime. On the one hand,
there is a need to have process measures--indicators of community 
mobilization, police participation in this mobilization, and mechanisms
that promote police accountability to their constituents. Moreover, it is
important to be attentive to how broad a cross-section of the community is
involved or represented in these processes. On the other hand, there is also
a need to develop product measures, which assess the extent to which
community reconstruction is taking place. Crime rates may reasonably be
seen as one relevant indicator--but only one, and not necessarily the most
important. Thus, other indicia of constituent satisfaction and a healthy
community life must be identified and measured. Included in this latter
and rather amorphous category might be such things as the vitality of
community organizations, the physical condition of the neighborhoods,
and educational matters such as truancy and graduation rates.

To list such things is, by implication, to reveal one of the limitations
inherent in attempting to measure what matters in terms of even the most
enlightened understanding of policing. As has already been suggested, the
conditions that lead to crime, disorder, and decline may well be rooted in
structural problems that are beyond the reach of the most well-intentioned
and inventive efforts of law enforcement officials--even when acting in
concert with local officials and the private sector. Crawford warns of one
of the pitfalls of the "multiagency approach to community crime
prevention," an approach of the sort associated with problem-oriented
policing (1994: 498). Among his concerns is the way in which the
multiagency approach emphasizes unity.

There exists a distinct ideology among agency personnel and participants
in multiagency crime prevention work [that] is rooted in the very existence
of multiagency forums. It is an ideology of "unity," which claims the
capacity to reduce conflict through cooperation of diverse professional and
interest groups in a homogeneous body with collective aims . . . . Conflict
and competition are perceived to be the enemies of effective multiagency
work. (p. 504)

The result, according to Crawford, is that "fundamental public issues are
being marginalized except insofar as they are defined in terms of their
criminogenic qualities" (p. 508). In short, even at its best, community
policing is per force biased toward symptomatic reactions to what may
well be underlying structural problems. In directing attention away from
causes and from conflicts engendered by these causes, community
policing can be seen as a strategy for evading problems rather than for
solving them. What this suggests with respect to measurement is the
importance of being attentive to indicators of social and economic
well-being, especially those relating to employment and income. These
problems cannot be solved, or even addressed, by the police. But neither
should the police, according to Crawford, contribute to a process that
represses the expression of these grievances.

Conclusions

If this paper seems to be more about what is already known than about
what we must find out, it is misleading, not only as to the state of the
available research but also as to my own state of mind. I have, of course,
argued over and over again that if we are to measure what really matters, it
is important to go beyond crime, fear of crime, and the indicia of disorder.
But despite a rather assertive tone and repeated invocation of this
admonition, I actually mean to offer only a plausible proposition that must
be tested and for which, therefore, data need to be gathered. 

Moreover, insofar as I suggest that crime is not a sufficient indicator of
public expectations, I surely do not mean to suggest that it is not a
necessary indicator. Indeed, as Carl Klockars reminded us at our initial
gathering:

I've heard discussion about how we get the community involved. . . .
There is another way to ask that question . . . namely, the community
asking in what do we want to get the police involved. (Brady, 1996: 8).

Finally, while I call attention to diversity of race, class, gender, and
circumstance, the extent and relevance of this diversity is also a matter for
empirical inquiry--another matter in need of measurement rather than of a
priori conclusions.

My impression is that at our last meeting, for whatever reasons, the issues
of divergence and diversity were marginalized. As the summary of our
session indicates, when these matters upon occasion crept into the
discussion, the issue was seldom joined (Brady, 1996: 4, 6). Some
participants did register their objections to what was thereby being
excluded (p. 12). Perhaps the explanation is simple and without any deeper
meaning: What was being marginalized was in fact marginal to a meeting
that focused primarily on the "hows" rather than on the "whats" of
measurement. And surely it is no accident that those of us who were most
concerned have been asked to prepare papers for this second meeting. In
any case, irrespective of where a discussion of divergence and diversity
might lead and the controversy it may generate, addressing these matters
is, to my way of thinking, an unequivocally necessary step on the road to
"measuring what matters." 

Notes 

1. Sasson's explanation for this admittedly preliminary research finding is
that the absence of any public discourse that acknowledges the
contribution of white racism to crime and violence "increases feelings of
marginality among blacks . . . and the credibility of conspiratorial
interpretations of social reality (as in, What are they trying to hide?)," 281.

 2. Proponents of community policing have pointed out that the impersonal
style associated with law enforcement and the "professional" model of
policing in general inhibits building relationships of mutual trust and real
understanding. This matter will be taken up in the following section.

 3. The idea of taking community seriously comes from a Ph.D.
dissertation by William Lyons, Taking Community Seriously: Policing
Reform in Southeast Seattle. Although the interpretations and conclusions
are my own, this section of the paper draws heavily on Lyons' work and
insights.

4. The nature, complexity, and significance of intradepartmental cleavages
are currently being explored by Manning in his study "Culture as Control
in Police Careers" (undated).

5. Ezra Stotland's comments were made to the author during a private
conversation.

References

Brady, T. Measuring What Matters, Part One: Measures of Crime, Fear,
and Disorder. Research in Action. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of
Justice, National Institute of Justice and Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services, 1996, NCJ 162205.

Chicago Community Policing Evaluation Consortium. Community
Policing in Chicago, Year Two: An Interim Report. Chicago: Illinois
Criminal Justice Information Authority, 1995.

Crawford, Adam. "The Partnership Approach to Community Crime
Prevention: Corporatism at the Local Level." Social and Legal Studies 3
(1994): 497-519.

Cullen, Francis T., Liqun Cao, James Frank, Robert H. Langworthy,
Sandra Lee Browning, Renee Kopache, and Thomas J. Stevenson. "Stop
or I'll Shoot: Racial Differences in Support for Police Use of Deadly
Force." American Behavioral Scientist 39 (1996): 449-460.

Dahrendorf, Ralf. Law and Order. London, England: Stevens, 1985: 85.

Fleissner, Dan, Nicolas Fedan, Ezra Stotland, and David Klinger.
"Community Policing in Seattle: A Descriptive Study of the South Seattle
Crime Reduction Project." Unpublished paper, 1991. 

Goldstein, Herman. Problem-Oriented Policing. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1990. 

Greene, Jack R., and Stephen D. Mastrofski, eds. Community Policing:
Rhetoric or Reality. New York: Praeger, 1988.

Hacker, Andrew. Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile and
Unequal. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class,
and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1995.

Loader, Ian. "Democracy, Justice and the Limits of Policing: Rethinking
Police Accountability." Social and Legal Studies 3 (1994): 521-544.

Lyons, William, Jr. Taking Community Seriously: Policing Reform in
Southeast Seattle. Ph.D. dissertation. University of Washington, 1995. 

Manning, P.K. "Culture as Control in Police Careers." Unpublished paper,
undated.

Muir, William K., Jr. Police: Streetcorner Politicians. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1977. 

Reiss, Albert J. The Police and the Public. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1971. 

Rubenstein, Jonathan. City Police. New York: Ballantine Books, 1973.

Rubin, Lillian B. Quiet Rage: Bernie Goetz in a Time of Madness.
Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988.

Sasson, Theodore. "African American Conspiracy Theories and the Social
Construction of Crime." Sociological Inquiry 65 (1995): 265-285.

Scheingold, Stuart A. "The Politics of Street Crime and Criminal Justice."
In Crime, Communities and Public Policy, A Chicago Assembly Book,
ed. Lawrence B. Joseph. Chicago: Center for Urban Research and Policy
Studies, University of Chicago, 1995: 265-293.

Scheingold, Stuart A. The Politics of Street Crime: Criminal Process and
Cultural Obsession. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991.

Scheingold, Stuart A. The Politics of Law and Order: Street Crime and
Public Policy. New York: Longman, 1984.

Silberman, Charles. Criminal Violence, Criminal Justice. New York:
Random House, 1978.

Skogan, Wesley G. Disorder and Decline: Crime and the Spiral of Decay
in American Neighborhoods. New York: The Free Press, 1990.

Werthem, Carl, and Irving Piliavin. "Gang Members and the Police." In
The Police: Six Sociological Essays, ed. David J. Bordua. New York:
Wiley, 1967: 56-98.

Wilson, James Q. Thinking About Crime, rev. ed. New York: Vintage,
1985.

Wilson, James Q. Varieties of Police Behavior: The Management of Law
and Order in Eight Communities. New York: Atheneum, 1968.

-------------------------------

Meeting Three: December 4, 1996

Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters

Carl B. Klockars

Had I been asked to script and cast a symposium on "Measuring What
Matters" in contemporary policing, I cannot imagine how I might have
done better than the National Institute of Justice and COPS. The cast is
equally composed of world-class academic experts at measuring important
things and police and all-star police leaders who, if anyone, should know
what really matters in the real world of policing. To spice up that already
potent mix, NIJ and COPS wisely added some top-drawer journalists
(whose job is to report what matters), some articulate advocates for those
who should or would like to be more involved in deciding what matters,
and, for good measure, a few agent provocateurs.

For the most part, the prepared papers and the discussions at the first two
meetings were quite sensible. At both meetings, the measurement people
explained that serious measurement was difficult, complicated,
time-consuming, and expensive, and that inference from even the best
measurements must be made with the greatest caution, particularly when
causal claims are being advanced. In counterpoint, the police leaders
emphasized that the public, the press, and other interested parties demand
fairly simple measures of their agencies' performance. The chiefs also
added that they need such information for management purposes and, less
than perfect though such measures might be, they should be produced in a
timely manner and at modest cost.

These fundamental truths about measuring and about what matters are by
no means new in general nor are they new with respect to the two
particular issues--crime and community--on which the discussions in the
previous two sessions of this symposium dwelled. It has been known for
more than 30 years that, in general, police statistics are poor measures of
true levels of crime. This is in part because citizens exercise an
extraordinary degree of discretion in deciding what crimes to report to
police, and police exercise an extraordinary degree of discretion in
deciding what to report as crimes. Moreover, some unknown proportion of
perpetrators are actively engaged in committing crimes in ways that make
it unlikely that their crimes will ever be discovered. In addition, both
crime and crime clearance rates can be manipulated dramatically by any
police agency with a will to do so. It is also absolutely axiomatic that for
certain types of crime (drug offenses, prostitution, corruption, illegal
gambling, receiving stolen property, driving under the influence, etc.),
police statistics are in no way reflective of the level of that type of crime
or of the rise and fall of it, but they are reflective of the level of police
agency resources dedicated to its detection. Is there a police chief
anywhere in this country who does not believe that he or she could double
or half the drug crimes his or her agency reports by doubling or halving
the number of officers assigned to drug enforcement?

This is not to say that there are no types of crime for which police statistics
are not excellent, true-level measures. If I had to select a single type of
crime for which its true level--the level at which it is reported--and the
police statistics that record it were virtually identical, it would be bank
robbery. Those figures are likely to be identical because banks are geared
in all sorts of ways (hidden and exposed cameras, exploding dyepacks,
silent alarms, tellers trained to fill out forms describing the perpetrators,
etc.) to aid in the reporting and recording of robberies and the
identification of robbers. And, because most everyone takes bank robbery
seriously, both Federal and local police are highly motivated to record
such events.

Homicide, in the forms of murder and nonnegligent homicide, is also
often spoken of as a crime for which the true level and the level reported
in police statistics are likely to be very close. I know of no research to
support this contention, but I doubt very seriously that the congruence
between the true level of that crime and the level reported by police even
begins to approach the identity that exists for bank robbery. 

Suicide and accidental deaths surely serve as masks for some murders. For
example, it is possible that we may never know whether the 230 deaths
that occurred on July 17, 1996, when TWA Flight 800 exploded and
crashed into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, New York, were
murders or accidental deaths. However, the number of murders and
nonnegligent homicides that are classified as suicides or accidental deaths
are probably minuscule in proportion to the number that are classified as
unresolved cases of missing persons. Particularly vulnerable to having
their murders misclassified this way are transients, street people, illegal
aliens, and others who, if missed at all, are not missed for long.

Because police reports of crime are subject to citizen discretion in
reporting, to perpetrator efforts at concealment, and to police discretion in
recording, criminologists have long viewed police crime statistics with
great skepticism. This is particularly true whenever these statistics are
offered as evidence of the consequences of police performance. The reason
for this skepticism goes well beyond the measurement problems noted
above. It springs as well from the axiomatic belief of social scientists that
all social behavior, including crime, has multiple causes, most of which
police can neither influence nor control.

I cannot imagine that anything I have said so far comes as news to or
offends anyone in attendance at our seminar. (If so, please write.) For that
reason I would like to use some of the previous topics to clarify three
concepts that are central to our seminar and are found in the title of this
paper: measuring, cheap, and what really matters. This is more than an
academic exercise. These terms conceal much of what has been unspoken
or glossed over in our previous meetings. It is therefore critical to spend
some time thinking about them because our conversations will not move
much beyond the pedestrian observations I have made above unless we
come to specific and explicit grips with what each of these core terms
means.

Measuring

You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable
of the watch, therefore bear you the lantern.

Dogberry to the First Watchman Much Ado About Nothing, act 3, scene 3 
William Shakespeare

In general, measuring is the assignment of numbers to things according to
some rules. There is some controversy in the philosophy of science over
whether all things are measurable (e.g., the twinkle in an eye, the sincerity
of a smile), but such issues are beyond consideration here. It may be said,
however, that the act of measuring in and of itself implies at least three
articles of some faith.

The first is that there is value in the standardization of whatever one is
measuring. For example, theft can be committed in an infinite variety of
ways under an infinite variety of circumstances. Most anything can be
stolen; most anyone can be a victim; and most anyone can steal. Despite
this limitless variety of the things that theft can mean and be, the act of
measuring manages, by one rule or another, to ignore that complexity and
reduce a complex occasion to a single unit--a theft--so that it may be
defined as one of them.

This first article of faith of measurement may seem simple enough, but it
is a very subtle point and one of immense consequences. Line police
officers, in chronicling calls for service and describing crimes, arrests, and
other activities, do not see themselves as engaged in measurement. They
understand what they do as recording. It is only when those records are 
cumulated and enumerated by others who seek to draw inferences from
them that their acts of recording and describing become measurements.

Herman Goldstein, in his classic article "Improving Policing: A
Problem-Oriented Approach," (Goldstein, 1979) was, I believe, the first to
call attention to this issue and the difficulties it creates with respect to
police measurements of crime. Goldstein points out that the classification
of the problems that police deal with into categories of the criminal code
is not adequate for a variety of reasons. Chief among Goldstein's
criticisms is that doing so masks diverse forms of behavior that police
must respond to differently. He offers the example of events classified as
"arson."

Incidents classified as "arson" might include fires set by teenagers as a
form of vandalism, fires set by persons with severe psychological
problems, fires set for the purpose of destroying evidence of a crime, fires
set by persons (or their hired agents) for the purpose of collecting
insurance, and fires set by organized criminal interests to intimidate. Each
type of incident poses a radically different type of problem for police.

Goldstein also warns that the classification of police problems into
categories of the criminal code inclines people to believe that unless police
define events as crime they will not be taken seriously. There is no more
poignant contemporary example of this misperception and its unfortunate
consequences than the trend over the past decade toward mandatory arrest
policies in cases of domestic violence. Spurred by well-meaning interests,
the message they communicate to victims is that they should not call for
police assistance unless they are prepared to have their problem classified
as a crime and their domestic partner arrested for it. No longer can victims
call police merely to request advice, counseling, or assistance in securing a
temporary separation.

The second article of faith that marks measurement is the aspiration to
increasingly subtle description and precise discrimination through the
power of mathematics. It is not by accident that measuring seeks to
connect things by rule to numbers. Numbers liberate mathematics, making
it possible, among other things, to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and
thus recognize and specify differences in exceptionally precise terms. It is
this power of mathematics that makes it possible to recognize and specify,
for example, that some type of crime has increased or decreased by some
exact percentage.

Most criminal events lend themselves readily to measurement. To stay
with the theft example mentioned above, not only can the amount of the
theft be measured, but the identity, race, ethnicity, gender, age,
occupation, and complaint or criminal history of victims, suspects,
witnesses, and offenders can be connected to numbers as well. The same is
true of the location of the offense, the relationship between victim and
offender, the time and duration of the police response, the arrest or lack of
it, and at least a dozen other data points that record features and events in
the judicial and correctional process.

In a free society, this ability to describe the components of events police
attend to with mathematical precision invites those with an interest in any
of those components to make whatever use of those precise descriptions
they deem appropriate. Their uses may range from providing support for
allegations of discriminatory police responses based on age, race,
ethnicity, gender, income, or neighborhood, to commercial ventures
advising prospective home buyers how to locate in safe neighborhoods, to
documenting police claims of success at fighting crime. The capacity to
describe with mathematical precision may have commercial or political
value and may be used correctly or incorrectly, responsibly or
irresponsibly, fairly or unfairly. Because the power to describe with
precision may be used for good or ill by anyone with access to it, three
real-world questions are usually attendant when one proposes
measurement:

o Should measurement be performed at all?

o Who is likely to profit from it?

o Who should have access to it?

These are all political questions, and no serious social measurement ought
to be done without consideration of them.

The third article of faith of measurement is that what is measured (i.e.,
attached to numbers by some rule) is worth measuring. Admittedly, there
are exceptions to this rule. Surely it is possible to envision an occasion in
which measurement may be done out of curiosity or for frivolous
purposes. Serendipitous discovery sometimes results from such activity,
so a modest value might be assigned to it. Far more common is the case in
which measurement is continued out of habit when no rational reason for
continuing to measure remains. It is precisely the faith that what is
measured should be worth measuring that advises discontinuing
measuring on such occasions.

Having said this much about measuring, it is now possible to turn to the
topic of its costs. Before doing so, it may be helpful to emphasize the
three articles of faith in measurement. They are:

o In every instance of measurement, the conversion of a thing, event, or
occasion to a number requires ignoring or discarding all other meaning
that thing, event, or occasion might have. The easy way to appreciate this
very hard point in all its paradox and irony is to remember this: a kiss is
just a kiss, a sigh is just a sigh, and a crime is just a crime, as time goes
by. (Which, of course, anyone who has kissed, sighed, or committed,
investigated, or been the victim of a crime knows is not true.)

o Every human event or occasion offers many opportunities to measure
and to bring the truly awesome power of mathematics to its description
and discrimination. (The easy way to remember this important point is to
remember that measurement creates power. Whether that power is used or
not, by whom, and for what purpose are separate but ever-attendant
questions.)

o Measure only what is worth measuring and stop measuring it when it is
no longer worth it. (This is the easy way to remember this simple but
easily forgotten point.)

One more note on measurement before proceeding. Although I have tried
to deal gingerly with measuring, the fact is that measuring in the social
sciences is a very sad affair. It is an activity so fraught with mind- and
soul-wrenching difficulties that only grossly ignorant beginning students
and the least capable or least virtuous of social scientists engage in it with
good humor. A warning is in order to any police practitioner who is
approached by a quantitative criminologist with a smile on his or her face:
Listen very, very carefully, keeping one hand on your wallet and the other
on your gun.

Cheap

I can think of five popular meanings of the word cheap. The fact that four
of them are distinctly pejorative should not go unnoticed. In attempting to
achieve the singular meaning that is laudatory, we invariably risk the four
that are not.

o Inexpensive: a cheap meal.

o Of little value: talk is cheap.

o Of poor quality: a cheap suit.

o Easy to obtain: a cheap laugh.

o Unworthy of respect: a cheap shot.

Much of what I have said and will say supports the four
less-than-laudatory meanings of cheap as applied to police measures of
crime. They need not be repeated here. What merits elaboration is the
sense in which police measures of crime are inexpensive and genuine
bargains, despite the fact that to criminologists they may be of little value
of poor quality, easy to obtain, and unworthy of respect.

What explains this apparent contradiction is that police do not intend for
their records to be measures of crime or of the effectiveness or efficiency
of police in fighting it. Records' principal purpose is the documentation of
events and specific features of events police may be required to account
for at a later time, of which only one (and probably the least important) is
their contribution to the general crime rate. Whether it is a field
interrogation, a lunch break, a response to a call for service, the discharge
of a weapon, the investigation of a complaint about a barking dog, or an
arrest for murder, police document such events to the degree and with such
detail (or lack of it) as may serve their purposes.

This difference and multiplicity of purpose make police records, despite
their tremendous shortcomings and defects, extraordinary and irresistible
bargains as measures of crime. The fact is that, because records serve these
other organizational, occupational, and institutional purposes, police are
obliged to collect them no matter how defective criminologists may find
them to be as measures of crime. In this sense--as measures of
crime--police statistics are free.

Criminologists should not be chastened for looking this gift horse in the
mouth. That, among other things, is their job. Their job is also to point out
that the very costly business of measurement can be made very
inexpensive when it serves some other crucial purpose. The trick is not to
cheapen either purpose in the process.

What really matters

A philosopher, if he has a toothache, is more likely to be interested in
dentistry than in mathematical symbolism.

We interest a man by dealing with his interests.

Permanence and Change
Kenneth Burke

I know of only three ways to discover what really matters: to ask others
what really matters; to observe how others, despite what they say, behave
when something really matters, and to reflect on the subject, examining
both my own and others' ideas and behaviors. None of these methods of
discovering what really matters is terribly reliable, and anyone who has
ever tried to deal with this problem seriously is almost always struck not
only by how difficult finding out what really matters is, but by how often
each approach--asking, watching, and thinking--leads to contradictory
answers and conclusions.

To illustrate this point, permit me to pose a problem and ask that, should
you find the time, you pose it to a few other people:

Suppose the house next door to yours came up for sale. To the delight of
your neighbor, three buyers put in bids at the asking price. However, none
of them will offer a penny more. Your good neighbor comes to you and
says that, as he will get the same amount of money from the sale no matter
who he sells to, he'd like to know the order in which you would prefer he
offer the house to the three prospective buyers. He will ask the neighbors
on the other side of his house for their preferences as well. The prospective
buyers are Rodney King, O.J. Simpson, and Mark Fuhrman. In what order
would you prefer them as your new neighbors?

Over the past year, I have posed this question to about 30 people, most of
whom are criminologists or police administrators. (It makes for interesting
chat at conferences and meetings.) All of them, I believe, thought Simpson
was guilty. They also thought Fuhrman had at least perjured himself and
possibly tampered with evidence in order to frame a guilty man. Without 
exception, they believed that King was the victim of police use of
excessive force, although they differed in their opinions on what
punishment the police officers involved in the incident deserved. Be that
as it may, with two exceptions,[1] every one of them placed Simpson or
Fuhrman first and King last. Of those who placed Simpson second,
virtually all explained they did so only because the press and tourists
hanging around his house would constitute an annoyance.

The answers I received (and, I suspect, those that you will receive if you
pose this question to yourself and others) are similar to what many police
agencies discover when they hold community meetings focusing on
neighborhood problems. Even in neighborhoods with disproportionately
high levels of felony crime, residents typically express their greatest
concern with public order problems--litter, vandalism, graffiti, loitering,
noise, traffic, illegal parking, abandoned buildings and autos, etc.

Thinking about this problem and the answers it generates is helpful in
understanding the difference between what matters and what really
matters. This is because it juxtaposes the two ideas and in so doing helps
clarify both. Typically, "What matters?" is a question that invites answers
about the position or the meaning of something in a general or abstract
hierarchy. In the problem above, Simpson, Fuhrman, and King stand for
the categories of crime each represents. We ask about what matters when
we ask questions such as "What are the most important problems in
America today?" or "How much do you worry about. . . ?" Social
scientists as well as pollsters often ask such questions. There are, for
example, long histories of social science research that have sought to
establish not only a hierarchy of the seriousness of crimes but also an
order of punishment appropriate to them.

The difficulty with measuring what matters is that, in order to achieve the
comparisons such measures intend, they must be ungrounded and removed
from context. How else could it be asked whether crime is more or less
important or serious than unemployment, illness, pollution, racism,
terrorism, drug addiction, poverty, or divorce? All can be devastating in
their effects on individuals, families, and communities, but they also can
be of little consequence to those who are personally unaffected by them.

While questions of what matters always enjoy a relative freedom from
circumstances and context, questions of what really matters are typically
locked to individuals who are located in specific roles or institutions at
particular times. In a general sense, crime, unemployment, illness,
pollution, and family breakdown matter, but they really matter if it is you
that is victimized, fired, sick, poisoned, or divorced. The problem of
measuring what really matters is that, because it is so closely tied to
specific individuals, events, roles, times, and places, generalizations of the
kind that can be made about what matters are usually very difficult.

These what-matters and what-really-matters distinctions bear on police,
crime, and measurement in a number of critical ways. First, for police and
particularly for police leaders, crime not only matters but, to a degree, it
really matters, in that public attitudes toward police may influence how
police can and do work and whether police leaders keep their jobs. The
extent to which it does depends in part on the degree to which police are
believed to be responsible for crime. Although police cannot control the
extent to which they are believed to be responsible for crime, they can
influence that perception. In recent years, police leaders have begun to
differ on whether to encourage that belief. Most police leaders have
continued the longstanding strategy of claiming credit when crime
decreases and warning that increases in crime are the product of
insufficient police resources. They claim that if police resources are
increased, crime will be reduced or, if not reduced, at least grow more
slowly than it would have had those resources not been provided. The
rhetoric of this position is tried and true, and it is hard to imagine that a
police chief exists in the United States who does not know the script.[2]

In contrast, an alternative voice, one heard most often from police leaders
committed to some form of community- or problem-oriented policing,
seeks to weaken the perception that police are primarily or directly
responsible for crime. That voice claims only modest police credit
when crime goes down. It credits instead individual, neighborhood, and
community efforts for success. When crime rises, that same modest voice
speaks of the need for individuals, neighborhoods, and communities to
take steps to bring it under control.[3]

This what-matters versus what-really-matters distinction is by no means
limited to, nor even most importantly, a matter of crime. Although a
police agency or chief may suffer some difficulties or enjoy some favor in
the wake of general trends in crime, it is far more common that things that
really matter happen to them on other occasions. Favor follows public
demonstrations of exemplary achievement. Undesirable things that really
matter happen when an inadequate police response is publicly linked to
some other type of undesirable situation. Such occasions include, but are
not limited to, scandalous instances of police incompetence, brutality, and
corruption.

The measurement-relevant point of this observation is that while police
routinely offer crime statistics as (often defective) public measures of what
matters and what, to a far more limited degree, really matters, they offer
few if any measurements of most of the things they do that invariably
really matter. Put differently, and by way of introduction to the sections
that follow, what are the measurements that police can routinely produce
that measure the competence, skill, and integrity with which they do their
work and for which they should rightly be held accountable?

Some really cheap measures of three things that really matter

Police competence, police skill, police integrity

What follows are three specific and highly limited solutions to three
general problems of measuring things that really matter in policing. Each
solution meets the criteria developed in the above discussion of what
really matters and of what ought to be considered before measuring. Each
is also inexpensive. All are offered here merely as examples, and as such
are meant to encourage both similar and competing efforts.

Problem I--measuring police competence: the consequences of a good
definition

In 1974, Egon Bittner described the role of the police as attending to
"situations which ought not to be happening and about which something
ought to be done now" (Bittner, 1974). Bittner offered this definition in
direct challenge to those who understood the police role as simply
enforcing the law and making arrests. In contrast, his definition
emphasizes the wide range of things police are obliged to attend to
("situations which ought not to be happening"), the variety of things that
they may do in attending to them ("something ought to be done"), and the
unique capacity their ability to use force gives them to handle situations
that could not await a later resolution ("now"). If Bittner's definition of the
role of police is correct (and I know of no other that is better), it is possible
to derive two general axioms about police competence from it:

o A competent police agency should be able to describe with great
precision what ought not to be happening and what it ought to be doing
something about now.

o A competent police agency should be able to describe with great
precision what it is doing about things that ought not to be happening and
that it ought to be doing something about now.

It may be helpful to think of routine measures of police competence as
falling into one of these areas.

Measuring what ought not to be happening--the systematic and
standardized use and distribution of calls for service and dispatch data

I know of no police agency that does not record many things that ought
not to be happening. In very small police agencies, these records may be
handwritten, but even in some very small departments and virtually all
larger ones, they are computerized and often provide a level of detail that
is truly extraordinary. It is not uncommon, for example, for the average
computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system to classify calls for service and
police inservice records into dozens of different categories. These records
can specify to the second the amount of time police officers report having
spent at a particular place or area as well as the nature of the problems they
attended to there.

Admittedly, records of this type can and will be manipulated and distorted
by both police and citizens. Police can report doing things they do not do.
They can also do things without reporting them. They can "milk" calls,
taking more time than is necessary before reporting themselves available
to handle another call. In many cities, citizens have likewise learned that
describing an event as more serious than it is may provoke a more rapid
response by police. They learn, for example, to "add a gun" to a report of
a disturbance. But because citizens have a substantial stake in getting
police to respond to their requests for service and police officers have a
substantial stake in such records as a means of recording the work they do
and as lines of safety and assistance, calls for service are relatively reliable
accounts of what really matters--what citizens tell police they ought to be
attending to and what police on their own initiative decide merits their
attention. Defects and distortions fully conceded, they are infinitely
superior to crime records as descriptions of what ought not to be
happening.

To turn such accounts into measurements and report those measurements
in a form that makes them meaningful and usable has become
progressively easier with the advent of computerized calls for service and
dispatch records. As is the case with all things that really matter, as
opposed to those things that matter only in the abstract, how this ought to
be done is a question of the specific roles and purposes such measurements
are expected to serve.

At the general level of police organization, an accounting of what ought
not to be happening in the entire jurisdiction for which the agency is
responsible might be designed to augment, if not compete with, annual
crime statistics. It may be given the same prominence and provide
approximately the same level of detail as crime statistics. Although this
document may be a general description of what really matters to police, it
most surely will be, as are crime statistics, merely one more thing that
matters for almost everyone else.

It may be useful to think of this general description, based on calls for
service and dispatch records, as data collection in support of an extended
answer a police executive would offer in response to the question, "What
happened in the _________ [State, county, city] of [_________], about
which your agency should have done something during the past year?"
There will, of course, be those who are not satisfied with a general annual
accounting of what ought not to be happening. They will want to be
informed of how much police know about what is happening to them.

For this reason, at all other levels within a police organization these data
should be organized in such a way as to make it possible for anyone with
responsibility for policing in any given area to answer the same question
as it pertains to that area. The detail of their answers should, of course, be
finer, the time periods they are able to describe should be shorter, and the
frequency with which they should be expected to answer that question
should be far greater. Modern systems make generating this type of
information so easy and inexpensive that any CAD system that cannot do
it should be replaced. Likewise, the detail with which each person at each
level is capable of answering that question should be regarded as a direct
measure of his or her competence.

Measuring what you are doing about what ought not to be happening--
surveying consumers

Imagine a police leader, administrator, supervisor, or line officer who is
asked of his or her area of responsibility, "What is happening that ought
not to be happening and that you ought to be doing something about
now?," and who cannot anticipate the question that will inevitably follow?
(What did you do about it?) The inability to anticipate this question should
be grounds for immediate termination of employment.

To know the question is one thing; to know the answer and provide cheap
measures of it is quite another.

One answer is that we need to go where what ought not to be happening is
happening to see what needs to be done now. This answer has been much
criticized of late, disparaged as "Dial-a-Cop" policing, and deemphasized
as we are urged to move beyond 911. I am supportive of many efforts to
move policing beyond 911, but because most people believe that
responding promptly to calls for help is the single most important thing
police do, it is crucial to get 911 right before moving beyond it.

Again, measures of both the timeliness of and time consumed in police
responses are cheap and easy to produce from almost any CAD system. In
systems employing differential response protocols, they can be sorted and
reported by level of response urgency. They may also form the basis for
developing efficient patrol deployment strategies and equitable patrol
workload distribution.

The problem with such measures is that, while they can describe in fine
detail how long it takes police to respond to a request for help and how
much time officers report doing something in response to that request,
they are of little value in describing what was done and of practically no
value in determining whether it was done competently. To make this
determination, police agencies usually rely on two mechanisms. One is
supervisory review of reports of their activities that officers generate; the
other is complaints received from citizens about poor service.

Both of these mechanisms are important for quality control, but both are
also so subject to distortion, manipulation, and error that even if their
results are combined and quantified, they will not constitute adequate
measures of competent police responses. As a measure of competence, the
major defect in supervisory review is that it relies on the supervisor's
review of the responding officer's written account of what happened. The
main defect in citizen complaints is that the service rendered must fall to
such a level that citizens are motivated to take the time and effort
necessary to come forward to complain. Moreover, as both efforts are
appreciated within police agencies as attempts to detect deficiencies,
shortcomings, and misconduct, all sorts of defensive responses tend to
arise.

It is possible to both remedy shortcomings and thwart the natural
tendencies toward defensive responses by viewing the problem not as one
of detecting deficiency but of creating measures of good service. It has
been my experience that, even in police agencies with serious problems,
the overwhelming majority of calls for service are handled competently
and excellent officers in those agencies are rarely recognized for their
good work.

Exhibit 1 is a device that one agency with which I was affiliated attempted
to address the problem of measuring competent service delivery to victims
of serious crimes in a positive way.

One month after a victimization, the head of the agency wrote a brief
letter to the victim asking him or her to evaluate how well the case had
been handled. When a problem was reported, it was taken seriously.
Typically, the evaluation was followed with a contact, often in person, by
the captain of the agency's patrol division. The agency was a 200-officer
sheriff's department, and the sheriff appreciated the effort not only as a
mechanism for detecting and correcting problems but also as a device for
generating a record of competent service at the same time he advertised
his commitment to quality to potential voters. It was this multiplicity of
purposes that in the sheriff's view made this effort, at a cost of
approximately $0.70 per survey, very cheap. Ironically, the county
executive, a political opponent of the sheriff, attempted to curtail this
effort, dismissing it as merely a campaign device.

Problem II--measuring police skill: good policing yields good
measurement

In the same pioneering essay in which Egon Bittner defined the role of the
police as attending to "situations which ought not to be happening and
about which something ought to be done now," he offered an equally
groundbreaking definition of police skill. Bittner wrote, "While force is
the core of the police role, the skill of policing consists in finding ways to
avoid its use," (Bittner, 1974).

It is this advice from Bittner that suggests the key to solving the problem
of measuring police skill. If Bittner is correct, and I believe he is, five
police agency obligations follow logically from his claim. The first is a
matter of agency policy--in every police agency, the commitment of that
agency to skilled policing requires, by definition, the adoption of a
use-of-force policy that obligates officers to work in ways that minimize
the need to use force. The second is that the agency monitor the use of
force by its officers. The third is that the agency evaluate officers when
they find it necessary to use force. The fourth is that the agency teach
officers how to work in ways that minimize the use of force. The fifth is
that the agency correct officers when they fail to do so.

To the extent that police agencies accept these obligations and
responsibilities, they should, in the course of doing so, generate excellent
measures of police skill. The measurement problem in the case of police
skill is not one of deciding whether or how to measure, it is one of
assisting police agencies in overcoming obstacles that impede them in
doing what a commitment to skilled policing logically obliges them to do.

Impeded they are, indeed. The fact is that most police agencies do not
have formal policies that explicitly require officers to work in ways that
minimize their need to use force; have only the most limited and primitive
capacity to monitor the use of force by their officers; have no idea whether
the use of force by their officers is increasing, decreasing, or remaining the
same; do not know if or why their officers tend to use force more or less
frequently than officers in similar agencies; rarely evaluate their officers'
skills in avoiding the use of force; are incapable of determining whether
specific police practices minimize the need to use force; and are severely
compromised by all these shortcomings in their capacity to learn about and
teach skilled policing. 

I have given this problem extensive and detailed consideration in other
writings and invite anyone with an interest in implementing practical
changes in enhancing police skills to consult them. Here, for the limited
purpose of considering it as a problem of measuring what matters, a brief
summary of obstacles standing in the way of measuring police skills and
ways to overcome them will suffice.

Obstacle 1--misconception of the problem. The chief obstacle to
measurement of police skills is a fundamentally flawed conception of the
problem. To understand the problem of excessive use of force by police,
one must begin by appreciating what defines police and distinguishes
them from other citizens--that we give them the general right to use force
as they see the situations they attend to call for it. They are in this respect
like other professionals (e.g., doctors) to whom we give special rights to
do things (e.g., cut people open, dispense dangerous drugs, examine their
private parts, etc.) that we permit no one else to do.

At present, there are three major mechanisms that control police abuses of
use of force:

o Criminal law--an officer's use of force shall not be so excessive as to
constitute a crime.

o Civil liability--an officer's use of force shall not be so unreasonable
that the person on whom it is used should be awarded compensation for
the officer's behavior.

o Fear of scandal--an officer's behavior shall not be of such nature to
bring embarrassment to himself or herself or the agency that employs him
or her.

The excessive use of force is at present defined in terms of a violation of
one or more of the above standards. In consequence of that understanding,
the apparatus most police agencies currently employ to control the use of
excessive force is a mechanism designed to detect and punish behavior
that violates one of these standards.

The problem is that none of these standards is sufficiently high for the
kind of policing we expect and want to encourage in a modern democratic
society. Consider an analogy. Suppose you were looking for a physician to
treat you, and you sought a friend who knew many area physicians to
obtain a recommendation. Your friend suggests Dr. Jones with the
following observations: Dr. Jones has never used his physician's powers
criminally, he has never lost a malpractice suit, and he has never been
discovered to have engaged in scandalous medical behavior. Satisfied?
Hardly. I know of no one who would regard that as an adequate standard
for medical conduct. Obviously, any prospective patient would want and
would have a right to expect far more.

At present, meeting these three standards--avoiding punishment under
criminal law, escaping the costs of civil liability, and averting public
scandal--is all we expect of police and all that police, in practice, expect
of themselves.

The conclusion is simple, straightforward, and unavoidable. If one wants
to encourage good, professional policing (not merely to settle for policing
that is not criminal, civilly liable, or potentially scandalous), one has to
establish far higher expectations for the skilled police use of force than
either criminal or civil law or public expectations currently permit. Only
by setting standards for police conduct at that elevated level will we keep
it from the levels that flirt with criminal and civil liability and scandal. In
fact, until we do just that, we will make no progress whatsoever on solving
the problem of excessive use of force.

The way to do so follows Bittner's lead. It is to define the problem of
controlling excessive force as an issue of enhancing police skill. The first
task in getting police agencies to accurately and systematically measure
their use of force is to change the conception of the problem of excessive
force from one of detecting and prosecuting misconduct to developing and 
encouraging skilled policing.

If one wants to raise the minimal standards for police use of force from
the minimal standards currently set by criminal and civil law and the fear
of scandal, where should one go to find these new standards? As is the
case in medicine, law, engineering, and any other profession, they can be
found in only one place: within the craft itself, as exemplified in the work
of the kind of police officers whom police themselves regard as highly
skilled practitioners. In any police agency there are officers who are well
known for their ability to walk into an out-of-control situation and
stabilize it peacefully. (There are others, of course, who can turn any
situation into a riot.) The skill of such officers is knowing how to work in
ways that minimize the use of force.

Historically, U.S. police have resisted external reviews of police conduct
on the grounds that "civilians" could not understand what police work
requires. They are right, in the same way a physician would be right in
insisting that a layperson would not have the knowledge to properly
evaluate skilled medical practices. The problem with outsider reviews of
either police or medical practices is not that laypersons would demand too
much of police or physicians, but that they do not possess the kind of
knowledge of options and alternatives that would permit them to demand
more. The only ones who have the detailed knowledge necessary to
distinguish good policing from that which is merely not criminal, civilly
liable, or scandalous are experienced, skilled police officers.

The practical problems, then, for any police agency that wants to make
real progress in controlling the excessive use of force by police are to
establish an agency policy that calls for police to work in ways that
minimize the use of force and to create conditions under which
experienced, skilled police officers will be willing and able to teach other
officers how to comply with that policy.

Solving the first part of the problem is easy. Create a use-of-force policy
that opens with the following words: "Officers in this agency shall work in
ways that minimize the need to use force." 

Obstacle 2--mobilizing the proficiency of skilled police officers. Solving
the second part of the problem, getting skilled officers to teach other
officers to comply with such a policy, runs into three major difficulties.
The first is the Code--the usually unspoken agreement among police
officers that calls upon them to go to extreme lengths to protect one
another from punishment. The second is the CYA syndrome. Endemic in
police agencies, it tells all police to constantly "cover your ass"--behave in
ways that will not expose you to criticism. The third is the widely held
view among line officers and many supervisors that the "good" supervisor
is the one who will back up an officer when he or she makes a mistake.

Each of these obstacles springs from a single source: the fundamentally
punitive orientation of the apparatus currently employed in police
agencies to control officers' behavior. From the point of view of working
police officers, the administrative structure of the agencies that employ
them is little more than a collection of hundreds, and in some cases
thousands, of rules and regulations, the violation of which can lead to their
punishment. Under such conditions, it is inevitable that the Code and
CYA flourish. It is also inevitable that under such conditions supervisors
do not supervise. Rather they discipline or, if they are "good" supervisors,
gain the loyalty and support of those who work for them by covering for
them when they run afoul of those rules.

Thus, the problem of getting skilled police officers to teach other officers
to work in ways that minimize the use of force requires that such teaching
be done under conditions in which the normal punitive and disciplinary
orientation of police administration is suspended. Only under such
conditions will officers be prepared to assume a reasonably receptive,
nondefensive posture, and only then will experienced, skilled supervisors
be capable of offering constructive criticism of officer conduct. To
encourage such behavior on the part of skilled supervisors, police agencies
must do five things.

First, the agency must commit itself to recording every use of force by its
officers. While many use-of-force incidents, such as those that cause death
or bodily injury or involve the use of police equipment such as firearms,
batons, chemical irritants, stun devices, and canines, should obviously be
reported, the overwhelming majority of occasions of police use of force
inflict little or no physical injury on the person on whom they are used.
Police use low levels of force in almost every custodial arrest. Grasping a
person by the arm or shoulder, grabbing a shirt or a belt to hold a suspect,
twisting arms to apply handcuffs, tightening handcuffs until they fit, and
pressing an arrestee's head down to protect it in the course of sitting the
arrestee in the back seat of a vehicle all constitute uses of force. The same
is true of the use of force in accident and rescue situations--restraining
friends and family of victims; steadying and transporting the sick, the
injured, the infirm, and the delirious; and controlling crowds. Although on
all of these occasions police use force, it is simply impractical to require a
report of such uses.

At the same time, every one of the above-mentioned, low-level uses of
force can be done in a manner or under circumstances that a skilled police
officer would find excessive. It is possible to choke a person with a
twisted shirt, strain a back or break a rib with a hard enough pull on a belt,
twist arms into a handcuff position in a manner that dislocates shoulders,
tighten handcuffs to severely painful, punitive levels, and force heads
down so firmly that they hit knees. Most occasions when police use
excessive force are likely to be instances of low levels of use, if for no
other reason than the vast majority of all police uses of force are of low
levels.

I know of no wholly satisfactory way to solve the problem of requiring the
report of potentially excessive uses of low-level force without paralyzing
police by requiring the report of all such uses. Tentatively, and fully
subject to revision based on research, I would propose two rules to govern
when a low-level use of force that does not produce injury should be
reported: whenever anyone gives any indication or suggestion of any
dissatisfaction with the officer's use of force or any occasion when an
officer involved in the incident believes for any reason that a use-of-force
report would be desirable. Both rules are admittedly imperfect but
certainly extend the scope of force monitoring beyond monitoring limited
to instances causing injury.

Second, police must make writing reports of the use of force the
responsibility of supervisors, not line officers. This in and of itself will
provide an inducement to supervisors to encourage officers to work in
ways that minimize the use of force, if only to save supervisors the work
of preparing such reports more often than necessary.

Third, upon completion of the report, which should require interviews
with witnesses, the officer or officers involved, and collection of
appropriate physical evidence, the supervisor must be obligated to
evaluate the use of force by the officer. In making that evaluation, the
supervisor should be forced to reach one of three conclusions: the use of
force was necessary and appropriate; the use of force was legitimate, but
an alternative approach might have made it unnecessary; or the use of
force may constitute a violation of agency policy--refer to internal affairs.

The key evaluation is the second. It is an evaluation of police conduct
made by a senior, experienced police officer, not a civilian, lawyer, or
internal affairs investigator. What makes it key is that to reach it a
supervisor must call upon his knowledge and skill as a police officer and
use them to explain how the situation might have been handled in a way
that would have avoided use of force.

Fourth, after the first-line supervisor completes the use-of-force report, it
should be passed up the chain of command. For example, if a sergeant
prepares the use-of-force evaluation, the report should be reviewed by a
lieutenant and, after that, a captain. Both of them, in order, should also be
required to reach one of the evaluative conclusions. In reaching their
evaluations, each should not only evaluate the conduct of the officer
involved in the use of force, but the evaluation of the previous supervisor.
A supervisor can fail to reprimand an officer for working in a manner that
does not serve to minimize the use of force, but he or she does so in peril
of his or her own reputation as a supervisor before his or her superiors.
The idea is to mobilize the same sentiments on the part of police
supervisors that exist among judges who do not want to have their
decisions overruled by judges in a higher court.

Fifth and finally, after the review process is complete, normally within a
couple of days of the use-of-force incident, the use-of-force report and
evaluation by three supervisors should be returned to the officer. A
finding that the use of force was necessary and appropriate requires no
further comment. A reference to internal affairs will inform an officer that
the incident is under further investigation. However, a finding that the
officer's behavior was legitimate (i.e., that it did not constitute criminal,
civil, or scandalous misconduct) but an alternative approach might have
made it unnecessary should prompt an occasion in which a senior, skilled,
experienced police officer sits down with a fellow officer to explain in
detail how that officer might have conducted himself or herself in a way
that would have avoided the need to use force. No discipline should
follow, but supervisors must make clear that the officer will be expected
to work in that way in the future.

Using such instructions--from making supervisors take seriously their
obligation to supervise and teach the skills of good police work--real
progress will be made in controlling excessive use of force by police.
Incidental to that achievement will also come a whole host of free
measures of things that really matter.

Problem III--measuring police integrity: overcoming the fear of finding
out what you want to know

By virtue of the fact that policing is a highly discretionary, coercive
activity that routinely takes place in private settings, out of the sight of
supervisors, and before witnesses who are often regarded as unreliable, it
is, as the history of virtually every police agency in the world bears
testimony, an occupation that is ripe with opportunities for misconduct of
many types.[4] One type of misconduct, corruption--the abuse of police
authority for gain--has been particularly problematic.[5] Contributing
to the difficulties of controlling corruption are not only the reluctance of
police officers to report corrupt activities of their fellow officers--a
phenomenon sometimes identified as the Code or the "Blue Curtain"--and
the reluctance of police administrators to admit the existence of corruption
but also the fact that the typical corrupt transaction benefits the parties to
it and thus leaves no immediate victim or complainant to call attention to
it (Muir, 1979; Klockars and Mastrofski, 1983).

These three features of corruption in and of themselves pose enormous
obstacles to any attempt to measure it. Moreover, until relatively recently,
the administrative view of corruption was to see it as largely reflective of
the moral defects of individual police officers,[6] fighting corruption by
carefully screening applicants for police positions, pursuing defective 
officers aggressively, and removing them from their police positions
before their behavior spread throughout the agency. Sometimes referred to
as the "bad apple" theory of police corruption, it has been severely
criticized in recent years.[7]

The inherent resistance of corruption to direct measurement combined
with this police conception of how to deal with it doom any attempt to
measure it directly, in the same way all police statistics on crimes without
complainants are doomed. All such measures will not reflect the true level
of the problem but rather the resources and energies that are applied to its
discovery. Under such circumstances, it is possible for the most corrupt
police agencies--ones that make little or no effective effort to detect
corruption--to appear to be free of it.

Although high-quality research on corruption is very limited,[8]
contemporary approaches to corruption stress the importance of four
dimensions of corruption that go beyond the understanding of corruption
as a problem of the moral defects of individual "bad-apple" police
officers. Unlike the individualistic approach to police corruption, each of
these four dimensions is profoundly organizational in nature. Taken
together, they urge a reconception of the problem of corruption from one
of weeding out and hunting down corrupt officers to an organizational
obligation to create an environment that supports integrity and an
occupational culture among its officers that is intolerant of corruption.
The wonderful thing about each of these four dimensions, from the point
of view of those who would like to measure things that really matter, is
that each is readily measurable.

Organizational rules. The first of these dimensions is organizational rules
and the manner in which they are made, communicated, and understood.
In the United States, police organizations differ markedly in what they
officially prohibit as corrupt behavior (McCormack, 1986; Muir, 1979).
This is particularly true of marginally or mala prohibita corrupt behavior
such as off-duty employment and receipt of favors, gratuities, small gifts,
free meals, and discounts. The problem is further complicated by the fact
that in many agencies, although official policy formally prohibits such
activities, the agency's unofficial policy, supported in relative silence by
supervisors and administrators, is to permit and ignore such behaviors
provided they are limited and conducted discreetly.

Corruption control techniques. The second organizational dimension of
corruption is the entire range of activities police agencies employ to
prevent and control it. These include, but are not limited to, education in
ethics, proactive and reactive corruption investigations, integrity testing,
and the general deterrence of corruption by the discipline and punishment
of offenders. The extent to which these and other organizational
anticorruption techniques are employed varies enormously.

The Code. The third organizational dimension of corruption has already
been mentioned. It is the Code or the "Blue Curtain"--the informal
prohibition against reporting the misconduct of fellow police officers in
the occupational culture of policing. Two features of the Code bear
emphasis here.

First, exactly what behavior is covered by the Code varies enormously
between police agencies. In some agencies, it may cover only relatively
low-level corruption; in others it may cover corruption of even the most
serious degree. Secondly, the Code not only differs in what behavior it
covers but to whom the benefit of its coverage is extended. In some
agencies, the Code is largely limited to police partners who enjoy,
vis-a-vis one another, a testimonial immunity that police liken to
traditionally privileged relationships between husband and wife, physician
and patient, or lawyer and client.

Although most police administrators probably understand that
circumscribing both whom and what the Code covers should be an
administrative priority, (Barker and Wells, 1982) in virtually every police
agency, the Code develops as a response to the punitive orientation of the
quasi-military police administrative system. Put too crudely,
quasi-military police administration works by creating hundreds and
sometimes thousands of rules and then severely punishing deviations from
those rules. It is a sociological inevitability that under such administrative
and organizational conditions some form of the Code will evolve (Bittner,
1970; Bittner, 1990; Klockars, 1985; Jefferson, 1990; and Guyot, 1991).

The influence of public expectations. The fourth and final dimension of
police corruption emphasized by contemporary police theory is the
influence of the social and political environments in which police 
institutions, systems, and agencies operate.[9] Even within the same
country, as U.S. history illustrates, there are areas with long and virtually
uninterrupted traditions of police corruption (e.g., Chicago, New Orleans,
Key West), equally long traditions of minimal corruption (e.g.,
Milwaukee, Kansas City, Seattle), and still others that have undergone
repeated cycles of scandal and reform (e.g., New York, Philadelphia,
Oakland). From such histories we may conclude not only that public
expectations about police integrity exert vastly different pressures on
police agencies in different areas, but also that public pressures toward
corruption may be successfully resisted.

The major propositions of the idea that controlling corruption is an
organizational rather than an individual problem are questions of fact and
opinion that can be explored directly and without anything like the
resistance that direct inquiries about corrupt behavior are likely to
provoke. It is, for example, possible to ask factual questions about officers'
knowledge of agency rules, opinions about the seriousness of their
violation and the punishment they deserve or are likely to receive, and
their estimates of officers' willingness to report such behavior, without
asking them directly about their own or others' corrupt behavior.

As exhibit 2 to this paper I have included a device that my colleagues and
I have been using to measure some of the basic organizational and
occupational components of integrity. It describes 11 vignettes of police
activity, most of which may be regarded as instances of corruption. It then
asks the same seven questions of each of the vignettes.

To date, my colleagues and I have administered this questionnaire to
about 6,000 police officers in the United States and abroad. I offer it
merely as an example of an approach to measuring police integrity that
avoids the pitfalls of conceiving it as a problem of measuring corruption. It
is not perfect, surely does not probe officer knowledge, perception, or
opinions on all types of corruption, and does not even try to uncover a
single case of actual misconduct. What it can do is tell a police leader
what, for the types of conduct specified, his or her police officers think the
organization's rules are; how strongly they support them; what discipline
they think the organization will mete out for violating those rules; whether
they think that discipline is too lenient, too severe, or about right; and
where they think officers in the organization draw the line on tolerating
misconduct by other officers. It can offer these answers with mathematical
precision for the entire organization as well as in a way that permits
comparisons within the agency at administrative, supervisory, and line
levels. It can also permit comparisons between agencies of different sizes
and types. These answers really matter because each invites police leaders
to think of ways in which their organizations can behave to enhance
integrity. At the cost of a fairly simple in-house survey and some careful
analysis, they come very, very cheap.

Notes

1. Both exceptions placed King first, Fuhrman second, and Simpson last.
They ordered their choices in terms of the seriousness of the offenses they
assumed each man had committed, and their ranking reflected their moral
outrage. Both respondents were residents of the borough of Manhattan in
New York City. One, in fact, had written a letter of outrage to the
management of her condominium when it was rumored that Simpson was
considering purchasing a residence there. I suspect what permitted both
respondents to express their general moral hierarchy in response to the
question is that they, like most Manhattan residents, lived not in houses
but in "buildings." Neighbor problems in such residences particularly in
upscale settings, are of a wholly different order than those of people who
live in houses, and this strongly involves the reputation of the building as a
whole.

2. As is the case with all political strategies, there is danger to police
chiefs who elect to speak this script--that they may speak it so successfully
they come to constitute a threat to their political superiors, either by
demanding of them more resources than they can deliver or by becoming
more attractive than them.

3. As is the case with all political strategies, there is danger to police
chiefs who elect to speak this script--that a competitor chief will come
forward who is willing to assume the responsibility for waging a war on
crime and not leaving that important task to civilians in the community.

4. Histories of police that document the abiding prevalence of corruption
are too numerous to list here. The most thorough scholarly explorations of
the temptations to corruption in contemporary policing include Marx, G.,
1991; Punch, M., 1986; Manning, P.K., and L. Redlinger, 1983; and
Rubinstein, J., 1973.

5. The "for gain" dimension of corruption typically distinguishes it from
other forms of police misconduct such as brutality. There is, however,
debate over whether the definition of police corruption should include
various forms of the use of police authority for police political,
organizational, or strategic gains. See Klockars, C., and S. Mastrofski,
1983; Sherman, L., 1978; Goldstein, H., 1977; and Goldstein, H., 1975.

6. The capacity to predict police integrity from psychological testing is
extremely limited: Taller, J.E., and L.D. Hinz, 1990; Delattre, E.J., 1989;
Malouff, J., and N.S. Schutte, 1980; and Daley, R.E., 1980.

7. The analytical assault on the understanding of corruption as a problem
of individually defective police officers was begun by Goldstein in Police
Corruption: Perspectives on Its Nature and Control, and continued in
Goldstein, Policing a Free Society. It has, however, taken more than a
decade for most U.S. police agencies to embrace and begin to act upon
Goldstein's pioneering analysis.

8. Spurred at least in part by the national attention given to a corruption
scandal in New York City, documented in The Knapp Commission Report
on Police Corruption, New York: George Brazillier, 1972, the 1970s
produced a substantial number of serious studies of police corruption.
Since 1980, scholarly attention to police corruption has been minimal,
reflecting, at least in part, a shift in both public interest and Federal
funding priorities. This change in research activity occurred despite the
fact that the spread of drug usage during the 1980s created tremendous
new opportunities for corruption. See Carter, 1990.

9. Although this understanding is the tacit assumption of virtually all
historical studies of police, it received, to our knowledge, its first
systematic exploration in Reiss and Bordua, 1967, and in Reiss, 1971. The
specific application of these principles to police corruption was first
advanced by Goldstein, 1975, and later in Goldstein, 1977. Both points
inform the recent Croatian publication (Sintic, 1995).

References

Barker, T., and R.O. Wells. "Police Administrators' Attitudes Toward
Definition and Control of Police Deviance." FBI Law Enforcement
Bulletin 51 (4) (1982): 8-16. 

Bittner, E. Aspects of Police Work. Boston: Boston University Press,
1990. 

Bittner, E. "Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton: A Theory of
Police." In The Potential for Reform of Criminal Justice, ed. H. Jacob.
Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, Inc., 1974: 17-34. 

Bittner, E. The Functions of Police in Modern Society. Chevy Chase, MD:
National Institute of Mental Health, 1970.

Carter, D.L. "Drug-Related Corruption of Police Officers: A
Contemporary Typology." Journal of Criminal Justice 18 (1990): 88-98.

Daley, R.E. "The Relationship of Personality Variables to Suitability for
Police Work." DAI 44 (1980): 1551-1569.

Delattre, E.J. Character and Cops. Washington, DC: The American
Enterprise Institute, 1989.

Geller, William, and Hans Toch, eds. "A Theory of Excessive Force and
Its Control." In Police Violence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1996: 1-22. 

Goldstein, H. "Improving Policing: A Problem-Oriented Approach."
Crime and Delinquency 25 (April 1979): 236-258.

Goldstein, H. Policing a Free Society. Cambridge, MA: Ballinger
Publishing Company, 1977.

Goldstein, H. Police Corruption: Perspective on Its Nature and Control.
Washington, DC: Police Foundation, 1975.

Guyot, D. Policing As Though People Matter. Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1991.

Jefferson, T. The Case Against Paramilitary Policing. Milton Keynes,
England: Open University Press, 1990.

Klockars, C. The Idea of Police. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications,
Inc., 1985.

Klockars, C., and S. Mastrofski., eds. Thinking About Police. New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1983.

Malouff, J., and N.S. Schutte. "Using Biographical Information to Hire
the Best Police Officers." Journal of Police Science and Administration 14
(1980): 256-267.

Manning, P.K., and L. Redlinger. "The Invitational Edges of Police
Construction." In Thinking About Police, ed. C. Klockars and S.
Mastrofski. 

Marx, G. Surveillance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.

McCormack, R.J. "Corruption in the Subculture of Policing: An Empirical
Study of Police Officer Perceptions." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
1986.

Muir, W.K. Police: Streetcorner Politicians. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1979.

Punch, M. Conduct Unbecoming: The Social Construction of Police
Deviance and Control. London, England: Tavistock, 1986.

Reiss, A.J., Jr. The Police and the Public. New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 1971.

Reiss, A.J., Jr., and D.J. Bordua. "Environment and Organization: A
Perspective on the Police." In The Police: Six Sociological Essays, ed. D.
Bordua. New York: John Wiley, 1967.

Rubinstein, J. City Police. New York: Ballinger Publishing Company,
1973. 

Sherman, L. Scandal and Reform. Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 1978.

Sintic, J. Uloga Policije u Demokratskom Drustvu (The Role of the Police
in Democratic Society). Zagreb, Croatia: Ministry of the Interior, 1995.

Stoddard, E. "Blue Coat Crime." In Thinking About Police, ed. C.
Klockars and S. Mastrofski. 

Taller, J.E., and L.D. Hinz. Performance Prediction of Public Safety and
Law Enforcement Personnel. Springfield, IL: C. Thomas, 1990.

-------------------------------

Exhibit 1. Cover Letter and Victim Survey

Mr. John Doe
Any Street
Any City, Any State, Zip

Dear Mr. Doe:

According to our records, you have recently been the victim of a serious
crime that was assigned to an officer from our agency for investigation.
Often, due to lack of evidence, cases cannot be solved. But, whether your
case was solved or not, I am personally committed to seeing to it that
every case assigned to my officers is investigated thoroughly and that you
feel you were treated with dignity, courtesy, and respect.

In order to do so, I need your assistance. Would you take a moment to fill
out the enclosed questionnaire and return it to me in the postage-paid
envelope provided? I value your response and assure you that I will give it
my personal attention.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,
Chief [Sheriff, Commander, Precinct Captain]
encl.

Chief, Sheriff, Commander, or Precinct Captain 
Police Service Survey

Case #

1. Do you recall the name of the officer who handled your case?

No
Yes
If "yes," who was it?

2. Were you provided by the officer or some other representative of our
agency with a pamphlet called "Victim Assistance," which describes your
rights as a victim under our State's Law?

No
Yes

3. Did the investigator leave you a business card or otherwise provide you
with information on how to contact him or her on the progress of the
investigation?

No
Yes

4. Do you know the outcome of your case?

No
Yes

5. Was a person arrested for victimizing you?

No
Yes
Don't know

6. Were you treated by the investigating officer with dignity, courtesy,
and respect?

No
Yes
If "no," please explain:

7. Do you feel that your case was handled in a professional manner and
that the investigator assigned to it did everything within reason to
investigate it thoroughly?

No
Yes
If "no," please explain:

8. Any other comments?

Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey. Please return it to
me in the enclosed, postage-paid envelope.

(Signature)
Chief [Sheriff, Commander, Precinct Captain]

-------------------------------


Exhibit 2. Corruption Case Vignettes

Case 1. A police officer runs his own private business in which he sells
and installs security devices, such as alarms and special locks. He does
this work during his off-duty hours.

Case 2. A police officer routinely accepts free meals, cigarettes, and other
items of small value from merchants on his beat. He does not solicit these
gifts and is careful not to abuse the generosity of those who give gifts to
him.

Case 3. A police officer stops a motorist for speeding. The officer agrees
to accept a personal gift of one-half of the amount of the fine in exchange
for not issuing a citation.

Case 4. A police officer is widely liked in the community, and on holidays
local merchants and restaurant and bar owners show their appreciation for
his attention by giving him gifts of food and liquor.

Case 5. A police officer discovers a burglary of a jewelry shop. The
display cases are smashed, and it is obvious that many items have been
taken. While searching the shop, he takes a watch, worth about 2 days of
pay. He reports that the watch had been stolen during the burglary.

Case 6. A police officer has a private arrangement with a local auto body
repair shop to refer the owners of cars damaged in accidents to that shop.
In exchange for each referral, he receives a payment of 5 percent of the
repair bill from the shop owner.

Case 7. A police officer, who happens to be a good auto mechanic, is
scheduled to work during coming holidays. A supervisor offers to give
him these days off, if he agrees to tune up his personal car. Evaluate the
supervisor's behavior.

Case 8. At 2 a.m., an on-duty police officer is driving his patrol car on a
deserted road. He sees a vehicle that has been driven off the road and is
stuck in a ditch. He approaches the vehicle and observes that the driver is
not hurt but is obviously intoxicated. He also finds that the driver is a
police officer. Instead of reporting this accident and offense, he transports
the driver to his home.

Case 9. A police officer finds a bar on his beat that is still serving drinks
30 minutes past its legal closing time. Instead of reporting this violation,
the police officer agrees to accept a couple of free drinks from the owner.

Case 10. Two police officers on foot patrol surprise a man who is
attempting to break into an automobile. The man flees. They chase him
for about two blocks before apprehending him by tackling him and
wrestling him to the ground. After he is under control, both officers punch
him a couple of times in the stomach as punishment for fleeing and
resisting.

Case 11. A police officer finds a wallet in a parking lot. It contains an
amount of money equivalent to a full-day's pay. He reports the wallet as
lost property but keeps the money for himself.

Vignette Assessment Options

1. How serious do you consider this behavior to be?

Not at all serious--Very serious

1--2--3--4--5

2. How serious do most police officers in your agency consider this
behavior to be?

Not at all serious--Very serious

1--2--3--4--5

3. Would this behavior be regarded as a violation of official policy in your
agency?

Definitely no--Definitely yes

1--2--3--4--5

4. If an officer in your agency engaged in this behavior and was
discovered doing so, what, if any, discipline do you think should follow.

1. None
2. Verbal reprimand
3. Written reprimand
4. Period of suspension without pay
5. Demotion in rank
6. Dismissal

5. If an officer in your agency engaged in this behavior and was
discovered doing so, what, if any, discipline do you think would follow.

1. None
2. Verbal reprimand
3. Written reprimand
4. Period of suspension without pay
5. Demotion in rank
6. Dismissal

6. Do you think you would report a fellow police officer who engaged in
this behavior?

Definitely no--Definitely yes

1--2--3--4--5

7. Do you think most police officers in your agency would report a fellow
police officer who engaged in this behavior?

Definitely no--Definitely yes

1--2--3--4--5

-------------------------------

What Matters Routinely?

Robert H. Langworthy

For the past 30 years, there has been considerable interest in statistically
documenting the quality of policing in America. Although the issue of
"good" policing has been hotly contested since the inception of vocational
policing, mass interest in measuring the quality of policing dates back
only to 1967 with the report by the President's Commission on Law
Enforcement and Administration of Justice. The perennial interest in
quality policing, the emergence of the social sciences, and improvements
in the capacity to process data coalesced in the mid- to late 1960s to make
reasonable the call for the measurement of police services.

Since the President's Commission, there have been several major efforts
focused on measuring police performance. Most notable were the
American Justice Institute effort headed by J. Needle (1980) and the
University of North Carolina effort directed by Gordon Whitaker (1980).
These were omnibus efforts that sought to provide comprehensive
assessments of police organizational performance. That has been both their
strength and their weakness. By trying to be comprehensive, they became
too complex and expensive to be feasible. This paper seeks to outline a
system of measures that permits police organizations to routinely monitor
criteria that describe police organizational performance.

The scope of this paper is limited to criteria that describe police
organizational performance for which data are already being collected or
can be collected cheaply. This expressly excludes individual performance
measurement, which is certainly routine but is not organizational in scope
(see Wycoff and Oettmeier, 1994, for a discussion of individual
performance measurement). Neither is program evaluation within the
purview of this essay. Program evaluation focuses on assessment of an
element of organizational activities but is neither routine nor
organizational in scope. Finally, the system outlined below is distinct from
what Wesley Skogan has described as "high tech" evaluations of police
organizations High-tech evaluations are exceptional audits for
organizational performance that are typically performed by consultants
and strategically engaged (see attribution to Skogan in Brady, 1996).
Skogan's efforts to evaluate Chicago's Alternative Policing Strategy
(CAPS) program is an example of a high-tech evaluation. Skogan is
performing an exceptional audit of the Chicago effort to implement
community policing (see Chicago Community Policing Evaluation
Consortium, 1995 and 1996, for reports of the CAPS evaluation).
Although high-tech evaluations are certainly organizational in scope, they
are far too expensive to be undertaken routinely.

The focus here is on routine monitoring of police organizational
performance. Routine organizational performance monitoring is the
frequent review of indicators of organizational performance. The aim of
such a system is to ensure that the organization is continuously aware of
changes in performance and in conditions that affect performance. The
following outlines four conceptual clusters of measures of police
performance:

o Routine monitoring of intended environmental impact (crime, fear, and
disorder).

o Routine monitoring of enacted and perceived police process.

o Routine monitoring of police organizational health.

o Routine monitoring of the context of policing.

Domain I: intended environmental impacts (crime, fear, and disorder)

The first domain focuses on routine measurement of the police's reason
for being. Police organizations were created to lessen crime, public fear,
and disorder. There are a number of problems with the measurement of
crime, but they pale in contrast to the problem of attribution--who gets
credit for changes in the level of crime, fear, or disorder. Each of the 
intended environmental impacts is shared with other institutions (e.g.,
family, schools, churches), and each has a share in controlling those
domains (see Duffee, 1980: 100; Langworthy, 1986: 10). Issues of
attribution aside, it seems clear that police must monitor levels of crime,
fear of crime, and disorder--conditions they are charged with affecting.

Crime. Historically, crime has been measured by official reports of crimes
known to the police and victimization surveys. Official crime data are
widely available and routinely reported. It seems clear that agencies will
continue to be required to collect, report, and interpret these data. What
remains is to determine the scope of official crime data examined. Do we
focus on index crimes or do we extend the scope to include less serious
offenses? If we extend the scope to less serious offenses, data other than
crime reported to the police will have to be explored (e.g., arrest data,
emergency room statistics) and more completely understood.

Victimization surveys are less frequently completed by police agencies.
Routine collection and analysis of these survey data will provide the
police a window into less serious victimization that is problematic for
official statistics. It seems likely that costs associated with data collection
and analysis are major limitations on this form of data collection. A
number of victimization questionnaires are widely available and readily
adapted to organizational purposes.

Fear of crime. The level of fear in a community may be monitored by
surveys and focus groups. Numerous surveys have included items about
fear of crime, and the literature is replete with technical discussions of
alternative questions and the information elicited by each (for example,
see Warr, 1995). This allows those interested in monitoring the level of
fear of crime in their community to select questions that have been used
by others to collect information about the specific form of fear at issue.
Another advantage to a fear-of-crime survey that relies on established
questions is that they allow comparison of community response with some
other referent. As with victimization surveys, costs associated with data
collection and analysis restrict this form of data collection.

Focus groups provide another vehicle for understanding fear. Focus group
formats range from elaborate, well-modulated discussions with inperson
and electronic monitoring of group subjects to meetings that more closely
resemble structured coffee klatches. The structured klatch is the form
more common in criminal justice research and is particularly useful to
help gain a "feeling" about things. The data that come from focus groups
tend to be less likely to produce information that can be monitored
routinely.

Finally, there are a range of unobtrusive measures that might be
considered. For example, it may be reasonable to monitor crime
prevention activities such as handgun sales, burglar alarm installations,
and the frequency of calls to the police for prevention tips. These kinds of
measures may or may not be routinely available in all jurisdictions, and
they may be affected by saturation (e.g., burglar alarm sales will decline
regardless of fear if everybody already has an alarm).

Disorder. The most famous measure of disorder in our literature is "broken
windows" (Wilson and Kelling, 1982). Indicators of a place's level of
disorder may be monitored by surveys of perceptions of disorder, onsite
assessments (physical surveys), and archival data. Just as there are
numerous methods for collecting "disorder" data, numerous indicators of 
disorder have been established in the literature (see Skogan, 1999; Taylor,
1999).

Community surveys designed to assess disorder do not have the same
historical scope as either victimization surveys or fear-of-crime surveys.
Nevertheless, there have been numerous surveys designed to tap into
perceptions of disorder that provide many of the same benefits alluded to
in the discussion of victimization and fear surveys. Questions developed
and tested by others may be used to assess disorder in communities, and
perceptions of disorder in specific places can be compared with
perceptions of disorder in other places.

Onsite assessments provide information about the physical condition of
the community. Although less frequently employed than the other data
collection methods outlined above, physical surveys such as perception of
disorder surveys have precedents in the literature that can be drawn upon
(see Taylor, 1998). It seems likely that costs associated with placing
observers in the field to collect site-specific information are major
considerations that limit applications of this form of data collection. It
should be noted that there are a number of service personnel who routinely
observe communities (e.g., postal carriers observe every address daily,
trash collectors pick up at virtually every address weekly, and police are
routinely in the field), and if they can be mobilized to document disorder
as part of their routine, the costs of physical surveys are substantially
reduced.

Finally, there is a rich tradition of relying on archival data (particularly
information about the quality of the housing stock--e.g., vacancy rates,
plumbing, ownership) for indicators of decay that may be associated with
disorder (see Maltz, 1995). These data are widely available (U.S. Bureau
of the Census, many local planning/zoning departments) and economically
analyzed but substantially limit conceptualization of disorder.

Domain II: enacted and perceived police process

Mastrofski (see attribution to Mastrofski in Brady, 1996) observed that
many more police chiefs lose their jobs over process issues (e.g.,
corruption, riots, brutality) than over rises in the crime rate or other
impact measures noted in Domain I. It seems clear that police departments
are held accountable not only for what they are trying to accomplish but
also for the means they use to do their work. The second domain focuses
on isolating measures of policing process and of perceptions of policing
process that will allow departments to routinely monitor their performance
against salient dimensions of the means police use to do their work.

Assessment of services delivered

The concern here is with evaluations of service recipients (both those who
specifically request services and members of the general public who are
served by the police). The questions posed here are concerned with
satisfaction, ethical service delivery, and equity of services delivered.

Satisfaction. Four concepts are salient to satisfaction: fairness, civility,
concern, and effort. Public surveys concerned with attitudes toward the
police frequently ask about contact with the police. If contact is indicated,
respondents are asked to assess the quality of that contact. It seems likely
that data to monitor the way police treat people will continue to be
developed from surveys, but clearly it is not necessary to collect
information from the general population. When our interest is in service
delivered, our surveys may be directed to service recipients: citizens who
request service (officer concern and effort are particularly salient; see
discussions by Parks, 1976; Dean, 1980; Frank et al., 1994), citizens who
deal with police in officer-initiated situations (fairness and civility are
particularly important; see discussions by Parks, 1976; Dean, 1980; Frank
et al., 1994), and arrestees. Focusing on service recipients dramatically
reduces the size of the survey and permits shorter questionnaires (e.g.,
surveyors do not have to ask screen questions and can focus on
satisfaction) (see Klockars, 1999).

Ethical service delivery. Police are permitted far-reaching powers to
promote their ability to achieve assigned social goals. Paramount among
those powers is authority to use force as the situation dictates (see Bittner,
1970). However, the license to use force is not without restriction, and
abuse of force has led to dire consequences for communities and police
organizations. Therefore, it is important that police organizations monitor
the frequency of use of force. Many police departments require officers to
complete use-of-force forms anytime a police-citizen interaction results in
a police officer using force. The data may prove a valuable source of
monitoring information if indeed the reports are completed when they 
are supposed to be and if there is a plan for processing and reporting the
data. Arrestees are another source of information that might prove useful
to agencies interested in monitoring levels of force in their arrest. These
interviews help police departments and researchers to better understand
the frequency and character of force in arrest situations (see Garner et al.,
1995a and 1995b; Garner et al., 1996).

Lawlessness and corruption frequently are raised in discussions as process
concerns, but these issues are problematic for a routine performance
monitoring system of the type addressed here. Police are expected to
desist from lawlessness and corruption, unlike force, which police are
expected to apply judiciously. It is not reasonable for police organizations
to monitor levels of corruption and lawlessness in police practice because
the level must be zero. Rather, the police and public interest is in
developing detection devices that permit organizations to ferret out
lawlessness and corruption so the department can respond appropriately.
That noted, it is possible for police organizations to survey employees
about their understanding of department policy and values (see Klockars,
1999).

Equitable service delivery. The question posed here is, "Are police
services provided equally throughout the jurisdiction?" The concern is
with equitable distribution of a public good (or bad; see Rengert, 1989, for
an interesting discussion of spatial justice; see also Lineberry, 1977). It
will be necessary for agencies to define equity in terms of officer
deployment (e.g., police per capita, police per square mile, police per calls
for service), response times, and outcomes. Regardless of definition, it is
likely that the data to monitor equity are available in calls for service and
dispatch records, many of which are automated in computer-aided
dispatch (CAD) systems. Although many agencies have automated data
collection, it is not clear that they have also developed routine reports of
those data that permit monitoring of equity issues.[1]

Perceptions of police services

The foregoing has focused on service recipients' assessments of the service
they received from the police. This section outlines issues that could be
raised with the public at large. As police depend on "the public" for
support (with both information and funding so they may do their job), it is
critical that police organizations monitor public perceptions of the quality
of policing process. It is in this area that we have the most completely
developed question bank, because numerous polling firms have for years
asked questions of the general public about their attitudes toward the
police. Agencies with an interest in monitoring public attitudes toward
their department can use extant questions that have been benchmarked 
nationally. There are a number of polling firms that routinely ask
questions about police; many of these results are posted annually in the
Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.

Many questions about public attitudes toward the police have been asked
by polling firms. Examples are listed below. These questions offer a range
of issues that police organizations may benefit from by monitoring public
attitudes. These questions are drawn from the Sourcebook of Criminal
Justice Statistics, 1992 (Flanagan and Maguire, 1993).

o "How would you rate the honesty and ethical standards in these different
fields--very high, high, average, low, or very low: Policemen?" (Gallup)

o "How would you rate the police in your community on the following:
solving crime, preventing crime, responding quickly to calls for help and
assistance, being helpful and friendly, treating people fairly, not using
excessive force?" (Louis Harris)

o "How much respect do you have for the police in your area--a great
deal, some, or hardly any?" (Gallup)

o "In some places in the Nation, there have been charges of police
brutality. Do you think there is any police brutality in your area or not?"
(Gallup)

o "Are there any situations you can imagine in which you would approve
of a policeman striking an adult male citizen?" (National Opinion
Research Center)

This battery of questions taps many of the routine concerns of the public
and the police. These questions tap into attitudes about levels of trust and
confidence, police abilities, and police behavior.

Two things make these questions attractive. First, they have been
developed by professional survey researchers to assess attitudes of the
public toward the police. This means we do not have to go to the expense
of question development. A second and far more beneficial feature of
these questions is that they have been posed to national samples of
respondents. This means we have information about the distribution of
responses and can compare responses in our community with those of the
national sample.

Domain III: police organizational health

The third conceptual domain is organizational health. In civil society, we
charge the police with enormous responsibilities. Accordingly, it is
particularly important that we monitor the "blood pressure" of these 
organizations to ensure that the organization granted a virtual monopoly
on state-sanctioned use of force is healthy. This domain is composed of 
three classes of indicators: (1) the volume and nature of business and
product, (2) organizational climate, and (3) resources.

Business and product. Organizations that fail to monitor the volume and
nature of their business as well as the quality and volume of their product
place themselves in jeopardy. For service organizations, it is reasonable to
define the quantity of business as the volume of service the organization is
asked to provide. Further, it is reasonable to describe product as services
delivered. Data describing these issues are most readily available from
calls for service and dispatch records. As noted earlier, these data are
frequently in electronic form.

What remains missing is an analytical plan for these data that recognizes
the complexity of the information contained in CAD systems. While it is
informative to know the number of calls for service (volume of business),
it is far more informative to be able to track calls for specific types (e.g.,
ATM robberies, domestic assaults, bar fights). Monitoring the nature of
calls for service requires a taxonomy of calls that isolates fairly
homogeneous types of calls (see Goldstein, 1990). Once such a taxonomy
is created, the organization has the capacity to monitor changes in both the
volume and the nature of calls for service.

Recently, the police industry and the public have expanded the
expectations of police beyond the range of a service organization to those
of a proactive problem-solving organization. This brings a new set of
measurement problems. Police must now monitor the volume, nature, and
reaction to problems as well as continuing to monitor the volume, nature,
and reaction to calls for service.

Corporate product is yet another concern. Historically, police corporate
product has been measured by various arrest-related indexes (e.g., number
of arrests, clearance rates) and occasionally by dispatches (see differential
response literature[2] for creative uses of these data). There also have been
calls for quality assessments of arrests by monitoring conviction rates. 
A number of States have developed offender-based tracking statistics
(OBTS) databases designed to chronicle the disposition of felony arrests.

These established databases provide organizations the opportunity to
monitor the police product as long as that product is defined in terms of
response to calls and crime. However, if we are to include the
problem-solving product, it is necessary to know if problems isolated and
reacted to were solved. As problems are idiosyncratic, assessment of
problem-solving efforts will have to be tailored to the situation.
Ultimately, if we are to include problem-solving performance in an
organizational performance system, it will be necessary to develop
databases capable of capturing problems identified and the means to
determine if identified problems are solved. The National Institute of
Justice (NIJ) has funded research that has focused on problems as the unit
of analysis (see Capowich and Roehl, 1994; Capowich et al., 1995;
Capowich, 1996). An emerging database technology that focuses on the
problem as the unity of analysis will promote routine assessment of
problem solving.

Organizational climate.[3] In our society, we charge organizations (as
opposed to individuals) with the formal exercise of social control. One
organization in particular--the police--is charged with using force to
compel conformity with society's expectations (see Bittner, 1970;
Klockars, 1999, for further discussion of the police monopoly in the use of
force). That being the case, it is in the interest of the larger society and the
organization to ensure that these purveyors of force--police
organizations--are healthy.

Healthy organizations both know what they are supposed to do and have
the will to do it. Organizational health will most certainly be monitored by
routine review of department personnel records and occasional personnel
surveys. Department personnel records could provide information about
such things as turnover rate, sick days, and frequency of disciplinary
hearings. Routine personnel surveys could provide insights into job
satisfaction, emerging problems, and knowledge of policy and procedures
(the Baltimore County Police Department has conducted annual personnel
surveys for several years).

Resources. Starved organizations are not apt to be healthy any more than
starved plants or animals, so it behooves organizations to routinely
monitor their importation of new resources.[4]

The focus will be principally upon budgets and cash flow but certainly can
be extended to monitoring recruitment and retention of employees.
Examples of questions addressed are:

o Do we have sufficient resources (personnel, money to retain personnel,
etc.) to do the work we are expected to do?

o Do we have sufficient resources to make it to the next budget cycle?

o Do we have a capital improvement plan, and are capital improvement
funds properly invested?

Careful monitoring of data to answer these questions will permit the
organization to anticipate resource problems and develop strategies to
guard against starvation.

Domain IV: the context of policing

Concern with monitoring the change in context focuses on monitoring
conditions that affect an organization's ability to do its work and achieve
its goals, influence perception of the organization, or have an impact on
the health of the organization. The concerns raised here address the
organization's capacity to interpret changes in the preceding three
domains. For example, it is not terribly informative to police practice to
note that crime has gone up (or down, for that matter) without also
knowing something about conditions theoretically linked to the incidence
of crime (e.g., population, demographics, economic conditions).
Monitoring changes in these conditions will permit a more complete
understanding of current trends (for example, see Bratton, 1999). Three
contextual concerns will be touched on briefly: political climate, changing
demographics, and critical events.

Political climate. The availability of resources to maintain a police
organization is essentially the product of the political distribution of
resources among public agencies. Changes to the composition of the
electorate (including the degree of participation and political orientation)
as well as governing bodies may alter the capacity of a department to
garner the resources it needs to remain healthy. Voter participation rates
and affiliation data are frequently available from agencies that conduct
votes. It is also clear then there is turnover in governing bodies.
Monitoring political climate data may allow police departments to
understand and account for variation in levels of resources and thus
explain a dimension of organizational health.

Changing demographics. There is a substantial body of literature that
associates the incidence of crime with age, race/ethnicity, and sex. If the
demographic characteristics of a community are changing, this may
account for changes in the community's crime rate. These data are readily
available from the U.S. Bureau of the Census every 10 years as official
counts and more frequently as estimates. City and county planning
departments are another data source because they frequently have ready
access to population estimates.

Indexes developed from census and community survey data can provide
insights into structural changes in the community that are correlated with
the incidence of crime. Data from these sources can provide measures of
the capacity for informal social control (e.g., social disorganization,
heterogeneity, inequality, and social cohesion; see Sampson, 1986 and
1996, for examples of these measures).

Although there is ample evidence that the incidence of crime is related to
demographic and structural characteristics of communities, it is important
to remember that these characteristics evolve or change slowly. This
means that it is difficult to explain dramatic changes in the incidence of
crime (or fear or disorder) by reference to structural or demographic
characteristics of the community (for example, see Bratton, 1999). Unless
one is willing to demonstrate threshold effects, it is not reasonable to
account for precipitous changes in one set of conditions by citing
negligible changes in another. Monitoring community demographics and
structural indexes will aid agencies as they account for long-term trends
more than they will help explain short-term perturbations.

Critical events. Critical events can have a dramatic effect, particularly on
perceptions of the police. Recent examples of events that shook
confidence in the police are the beating of Rodney King and the handling
of evidence for the O.J. Simpson trial. In both cases, favorable public
perceptions of the police were diminished. Critical events are powerful
agents for change precisely because they destabilize the environment.
When serious enough, this destabilization can put the organization into
what Sherman (1984) has called a "temporary state of . . . receivership" (p.
99). This is arguably what happened to the Los Angeles Police
Department as a consequence of the Rodney King beating, which
eventually led to the demise of then Chief Daryl Gates (see Crank and
Langworthy, 1992). Monitoring the ebb and flow of critical events in the
policing industry is accomplished by attention to current events. Because
critical events are "critical," they will most assuredly be reported by the
media. Routine monitoring of the media to watch for critical events could
help police explain short-term perturbations in perceptions of the police
and perhaps anticipate the effects of those changes in perception.

Summary and conclusions

This paper is intended as a point of departure for those discussing the
content of a police organizational performance measurement system.
Exhibit 1 highlights the performance concepts and sources of data that
might be employed to measure each of the concepts.

What is immediately apparent is how much data are now within the grasp
of police. More than half of the concepts addressed in this paper can be
addressed with administrative statistics now collected by the police
department or another agency of local, State, or Federal government.

The most frequently noted source of information is public surveys. By this
vehicle, one can monitor victimization, fear, perceptions of disorder,
process concerns, and changes in the context of policing. Although general
public surveys are expensive and require a degree of expertise if they are
to be done reliably, they produce a wealth of information that may well
justify the expense. This expense to the police department can be
minimized if the police department can "piggyback" questions onto extant
surveys or if the unit of local government can be persuaded to routinely
survey residents about a full range of government services.

Three other surveys are suggested:

o A client survey designed to find out what service recipients think about
the way they were treated and how they would like to be treated.

o A personnel survey that asks about employees' feelings about the job.

o A windshield survey that is designed to monitor the condition of the
local infrastructure.

Only the windshield survey is particularly onerous. Both the client and
employee surveys are small enough (or can be with sampling) to keep
expenses down, and the information produced is very important.

While it is apparent that much of the information needed to monitor police
organizational performance is readily available (or can be), it is equally
clear that this information is not being used. Two things are missing. First,
there is no plan for analyzing the data. Data do not speak for themselves;
they must be processed to be transformed into useful information. Any
monitoring system must go beyond data capture to develop analysis plans
and report formats that transform data into useful information.

Second, a monitoring system will need to deal with periodicity. That is,
system administrators will need to determine how frequently to collect
and process data. For administrative statistics, collection is ongoing
(census and city/county planning data excepted), but processing will occur
when reports are due. However, surveys will be conducted at discrete
points in time. Generally, the longer the period between surveys, the
larger the survey can be, but the less closely one will be able to follow
short-term changes. Finally, several contextual data sources are updated
only infrequently (e.g., census, voting records, city and county data), and
estimates are used between enumerations.

Although it is clear that routine monitoring of police organizational
performance is complex, it is also apparent that it can be done, and with
some careful planning a great deal can be known for very little. The focus
of this paper has been on sparking a discussion of salient concepts and
sources of data by which we may construct measures. The next task is
more daunting--developing analyses and reporting plans capable of
transforming these data into useful information. When that task is
accomplished, police agencies will be in a position to empirically
understand their domain.

Notes

1. See Buerger (1991) for a discussion of difficulties associated with the
use of CAD data for analytical purposes.

2. For examples of differential response literature, see Summeral et al.
(1991).

3. Organizational climate has a number of definitions. It can be viewed as
a synonym for organizational culture or as "an amalgamation of feeling
tones, or transient organizational mood" (Ott, 1989: 47). The latter
definition is used here because the concern is with healthy or ill tones or
organizational mood. 

4. Yuchtman and Seashore (1967) make an interesting argument that
organizational effectiveness can be assessed by monitoring an
organization's capacity to gain resources. Organizations that get more
resources are more effective.

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-------------------------------

Exhibit 1. Police Organizational Performance Measurement: Concepts
and Promising Sources of Data (See PDF file)

-------------------------------

Appendix

Author Biographies

Andrew Benson is the President of the New Ohio Institute. He previously
was a journalist with The Plain Dealer in Cleveland.

Robert Berry is Chief of Police of the Hoover, Alabama, Police
Department.

Ali Bers was with Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research group
located in New York City.

Alfred Blumstein, Ph.D., is J. Erik Jonsson University Professor of Urban
Systems and Operations Research with the H. John Heinz III School of
Public Policy and Management at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

William J. Bratton served as the Commissioner of the New York City
Police Department from 1994 to 1996. Currently, he is President of
CARCO Group, Inc.

Christin Connolly was with Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
research group located in New York City.

Michael E. Clark is President of the Citizens Committee of New York
City.

David Duffee, Ph.D., is a professor with the School of Criminal Justice at
the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Juanita Eaton is a commander with the Franklin, Tennessee, Police
Department.

Steve Farkas is Senior Director of Research at Public Agenda, a nonprofit,
nonpartisan research group located in New York City.

Reginald Fluellen is a doctoral student with the School of Criminal Justice
at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Robert Ford, Ph.D., is Chief of Police with the Port Orange, Florida,
Police Department.

Warren Friedman is the Executive Director of the Chicago Alliance for
Neighborhood Safety.

Jean Johnson is Senior Vice President at Public Agenda, a nonprofit,
nonpartisan research group located in New York City.

Johnnie Johnson was Chief of Police of the Birmingham, Alabama, Police
Department. Currently, he is with the MayorŐs Office in Birmingham,
Alabama.

George Kelling, Ph.D., is a professor with the School of Criminal Justice
at Rutgers University.

Carl B. Klockars, Ph.D., is a professor of sociology and criminal justice at
the University of Delaware in Newark.

Robert H. Langworthy, Ph.D., is Director of the Justice Center at the
University of Alaska Anchorage.

Zarela Maldonado was with Public Agenda, a nonprofit, nonpartisan
research group located in New York City.

Mark Moore, Ph.D., is Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of
Criminal Justice Policy and Management with the John F. Kennedy
School of Government at Harvard University in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.

Dennis E. Nowicki was the Chief of Police of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg,
North Carolina, Police Department from 1994 to 1999.

Margaret Poethig was the Chief Operations Research Analyst with the
Chicago Police Department from 1994 to 1996.

Aric Press is editor in chief of The American Lawyer. Previously he was
senior editor at Newsweek.

Thomas Roscoe is a doctoral student with the School of Criminal Justice
at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Stuart Scheingold, Ph.D., is a professor of political science at the
University of Washington in Seattle.

Wesley G. Skogan, Ph.D., is a professor of political science and a faculty
fellow with the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University in
Evanston, Illinois.

Darrel W. Stephens is Chief of Police of the St. Petersburg, Florida, Police
Department.

Ralph B. Taylor, Ph.D., is a professor with the Department of Criminal
Justice at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

-------------------------------

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