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Constituent Expectations of the

Police and Police Expectations of

Constituents

implicit than explicit, there seemed to be a taken-forgranted 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,

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
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nondelusional members of the public. The contemporary case for this position has been particularly welldeveloped 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.

● 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.

● 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.

● 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 AfricanAmerican 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 AfricanAmericans from the “respectable classes”—including

African-American police officers. Similarly, Sasson

reports in a recently published article that workingclass 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, AfricanAmericans were less likely than whites to support the

illegal use of deadly force (Cullen et al., 1996: 454–

456). My research also revealed significant blackwhite differences on police shooting policy

(Scheingold, 1991: 50–55).
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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 AfricanAmericans 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
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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 consensusbuilding 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)
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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:

● Agreements between the police and the public on

law enforcement priorities.

● Mutual confidence in each other’s good intentions.

● 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 lawabiding 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
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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 longcherished 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
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Stuart A. Scheingold

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 zerotolerance 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 problemoriented 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.
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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.
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Stuart A. Scheingold

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.
Constituent Expectations of the Police and Police Expectations of Constituents

192

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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
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Measuring What Really Matters

Carl B. Klockars

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.

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, timeconsuming, 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
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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
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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:

● Should measurement be performed at all?

● Who is likely to profit from it?

● 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:

● 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
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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.)

● 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.)

.● 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 mindand 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.

● Inexpensive: a cheap meal.

● Of little value: talk is cheap.

● Of poor quality: a cheap suit.

● Easy to obtain: a cheap laugh.

● 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
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Carl B. Klockars

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.
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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:
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Carl B. Klockars

● 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.

● 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.
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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.
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Carl B. Klockars

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
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Exhibit 1. Cover Letter and Victim Survey (continued)

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]
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Carl B. Klockars

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 useof-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:

● Criminal law—an officer’s use of force shall not be

so excessive as to constitute a crime.

● 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.

● 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
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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
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Carl B. Klockars

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-offorce 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
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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.
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Carl B. Klockars

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-à-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
Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters

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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

12345
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Carl B. Klockars

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

Not at all serious Very serious

12345

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

Definitely no Definitely yes

12345

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 4. Period of suspension without pay

2. Verbal reprimand 5. Demotion in rank

3. Written reprimand 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 4. Period of suspension without pay

2. Verbal reprimand 5. Demotion in rank

3. Written reprimand 6. Dismissal

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

Definitely no Definitely yes

12345

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

12345

Exhibit 2. Corruption Case Vignettes (continued)
Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters

212

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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.
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Carl B. Klockars

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.
Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters

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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.
215

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What Matters Routinely?

ants 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:

● Routine monitoring of intended environmental

impact (crime, fear, and disorder).

● Routine monitoring of enacted and perceived

police process.

● Routine monitoring of police organizational health.

● 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

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 consult-
What Matters Routinely?

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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
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Robert H. Langworthy

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 farreaching 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).
What Matters Routinely?

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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 computeraided 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).

● “How would you rate the honesty and ethical standards in these different fields—very high, high,

average, low, or very low: Policemen?” (Gallup)

● “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)

● “How much respect do you have for the police in

your area—a great deal, some, or hardly any?”

(Gallup)

● “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)

● “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
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Robert H. Langworthy

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 problemsolving 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 literature2

 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 problemsolving 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:

● Do we have sufficient resources (personnel, money

to retain personnel, etc.) to do the work we are

expected to do?

● Do we have sufficient resources to make it to the

next budget cycle?

● Do we have a capital improvement plan, and are

capital improvement funds properly invested?
What Matters Routinely?

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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.
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Robert H. Langworthy

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

Exhibit 1. Police Organizational Performance Measurement: Concepts and Promising

Sources of Data

Administrative Windshield Public Client Employee

Domain Statistics Surveys Surveys Surveys Surveys

Impacts

Crime Xa X

Fear of Crime X

Disorder X X

Process

Fairness X X

Civility X X

Equity Xb X

Use of Force Xc X X

Corruption X

Lawlessness X

Organizational Health

Business and Product Xd

Organizational Climate Xe X

Resources Xf

Context

Political Climate Xg X

Changing Demographics Xh X

Critical Eventsi

a

 Uniform Crime Reports, National Incident-Based Reporting System, calls for service.

b

 Calls for service, dispatch, patrol deployment.

c

 Use-of-force reports.

d

 Calls for service, dispatch, disposition (e.g., arrest, problem solved).

e

 Personnel records.

f

 Budget records.

g Voting records.

h

 Census, city/county planning data.

i

 Media monitoring.
What Matters Routinely?

222

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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:

● 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.

● A personnel survey that asks about employees’

feelings about the job.

● 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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Appendix
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Appendix

Johnnie Johnson was Chief of Police of the Birmingham, Alabama, Police Department. Currently, he is

with the Mayor’s 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.

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.
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Box 6000

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800–851–3420

e-mail: askncjrs@ncjrs.org

To access the World Wide Web site, go to

http://www.ncjrs.org

If you have any questions, call or e-mail NCJRS.
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