New Perspectives in Policing 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

m a r c h 2 0 1 1 

National Institute of Justice 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism 


David Alan Sklansky 

Executive Session on Policing and 


Public Safety
 

This is one in a series of papers that will be published as a result of the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety. 

Harvard’s Executive Sessions are a convening 

of individuals of independent standing who take 

joint responsibility for rethinking and improving 

society’s responses to an issue. Members are 

selected based on their experiences, their reputation for thoughtfulness and their potential for 

helping to disseminate the work of the Session. 

In the early 1980s, an Executive Session on Policing 

helped resolve many law enforcement issues of 

the day. It produced a number of papers and 

concepts that revolutionized policing. Thirty years 

later, law enforcement has changed and NIJ and 

Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government are 

again collaborating to help resolve law enforcement issues of the day. 

Learn more about the Executive Session on 

Policing and Public Safety at: 

NIJ’s website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/ 

law-enforcement/executive-sessions/welcome.htm 

Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/ 

criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm 

Introduction 

For most of the 20th century, and especially 

from the 1950s through the early 1970s, efforts 

to reform American law enforcement were dominated by the ideal of police professionalism. There 

was always a degree of fuzziness about that ideal; 

by the late 1960s virtually every effort to improve 

policing was called “professionalization.”1 At its 

core, though, police professionalism had three 

elements: police departments should focus on 

crime suppression; they should do so objectively 

and scientifically, free from political influence; 

and authority within the department should be 

centralized and rationalized.2 By the 1980s the 

ideal of police professionalism was increasingly 

under attack, and by the end of that decade it 

had been displaced as the reigning orthodoxy 

of police reform. The new ideal was community 

policing. It, too, could be hard to pin down; by 

the 1990s almost every program of police reform 

was called “community policing.”3 At its core, 

though, community policing reversed the three 

key elements of police professionalism. Police 

departments broadened their focus from crime 

control to a range of other goals; they selected 

and pursued those goals in consultation and 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2 | New Perspectives in Policing 

cooperation with the public; and, to facilitate that 

consultation and cooperation, authority within 

departments was decentralized.4 

Outside law enforcement circles, the ideal of community policing remains broadly popular. Inside 

policing, though, a sense has been growing for at 

least the past decade that it is time for something 

new. That sense is still far from universal. Many 

police executives and many police reformers continue to believe in community policing. But for 

years other figures within policing have been casting about for the next big thing. There are signs that 

those efforts are beginning to coalesce, and that the 

next big thing is ... police professionalism. No one 

is arguing explicitly that policing should return to 

the 1960s. But there is increasing sympathy for the 

notions that police departments should focus on 

crime suppression, that they should do so in ways 

dictated by objective analysis rather than public 

whims, and that authority should be centralized 

and rationalized. 

The first part of this paper describes some of the 

ideas getting the most attention today in police 

management circles and the underappreciated 

ways in which they constitute a return to the ideal 

of police professionalism. The second part briefly 

speculates about why professionalism, so recently 

discredited, seems to be coming back. The third 

part sounds a note of caution, warning that, despite 

changes since the 1970s, there are still reasons for 

police departments to resist the pull of professionalism. The fourth and final part suggests that the 

competing ideal of community policing, for all its 

ambiguity and limitations, may deserve a longer 

run.5 

The Return of Police Professionalism 

When police reformers said in the 1990s that community policing was “a philosophy, not a program,” 

they meant, usually, that the essence of community policing was not any particular set of tactics or 

procedures — beat meetings, officers on bicycles, 

graffiti abatement, or the like — but rather a set of 

ideas guiding the selection and implementation 

of tactics and procedures, a set of ideas centered 

around listening to and working with people and 

organizations outside of policing.6 Similarly, police 

professionalism was not fundamentally about the 

tactics and programs characteristic of urban policing in the 1960s —random patrol, central dispatch, 

rapid response and so on — but rather about the 

governing mindset behind the selection and implementation of those policies: a mindset that saw the 

police as a “rational, efficient, scientifically organized, technologically sophisticated bureaucracy,”7 

operating “independent of local social conflict” and 

pursuing “objective and aggressive law enforcement.”8 Community policing was about the police 

not “going it alone”; professional policing was about 

the “thin blue line.”9 

It is at the level of fundamental mindset, not at the 

level of specific policies, that professional policing 

is mounting a comeback. It may be easiest to see 

this in the forms of local policing pushed by the 

federal government. Federal funding reflects and, 

to a degree, helps shape prevailing ideas about best 

practices in policing. For example, grants from 

the federal government to local law enforcement 

agencies in the 1960s and 1970s reinforced and 

intensified the heavy reliance on technology that 

had always been part of police professionalism.10 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 3 

In the 1990s, the federal government aggressively 

promoted community policing — causing some 

departments to slap the label “community policing” on “programs” that really were just business as 

usual, but also helping to spread the fundamental 

mindset of community policing: listening to and 

working with the community.11 But federal support for community policing has since declined. 

The newest approaches to policing pushed by the 

federal government are “intelligence-led policing” 

and “predictive policing.”12 

Intelligence-led policing — trumpeted by its 

supporters as a “new paradigm in policing,” 

“rapidly growing” into a “worldwide movement”13 — 

emphasizes the use of intelligence collection and 

data analysis to guide the selection and implementation of police policies. It is a “business 

model and managerial philosophy” for “objective 

decision-making” using “data and intelligence 

analysis.”14 The Department of Justice defines “ILP” 

as “a business process for systematically collecting, 

organizing, analyzing, and utilizing intelligence 

to guide law enforcement operational and tactical 

decisions.”15 

The Department claims that “ILP is not a new 

policing model” and is fully consistent with community policing. “The ILP process,” it says, “can 

provide a meaningful contribution by supporting 

the agency’s existing policing strategy, whether it 

is community-oriented policing, problem-oriented 

policing, or other methodology.”16 But this is window dressing. The whole thrust of intelligence-led 

policing is to make “objective” analysis of crime 

data and intelligence “the central component 

of police strategic thinking.”17 In the words of an 

influential backer, intelligence-led policing is a 

“top-down managerially driven approach to crime 

control,” in which “a community’s concerns are not 

permitted to perpetually trump an objective assessment of the criminal environment.”18 

There is thus “a great deal of daylight separating 

intelligence-led policing and community policing.”19 In fact, intelligence-led policing returns 

the police to each of the three central elements 

of professional policing. It makes crime control 

the “dominant function” of the police.20 It makes 

“objective,” scientific analysis the touchstone for the 

selection and implementation of police tactics and 

procedures. And it emphasizes the importance of 

centralized, “top-down” decision-making, on the 

model of modern, large-scale businesses. Indeed, 

intelligence-led policing stresses the importance of 

centralizing much of the handling and analysis of 

data above the department level, at regional “fusion” 

centers.21 

Like intelligence-led policing, predictive policing 

has been proclaimed “the next era in policing”— 

especially by the Los Angeles Police Department, 

which beginning under Chief William Bratton 

“assumed a leadership role” in developing and promoting it.22 Like intelligence-led policing, predictive 

policing puts intelligence collection and data analysis at the center of police decision-making, 

emphasizing “directed, information-based patrol; 

rapid response suppor ted by fac t-based 

pre-positioning of assets; and proactive, intelligence-based tactics, strategy, and policy.”23 The 

main distinction between intelligence-led policing 

and predictive policing is that predictive policing 

cla i ms to be more a mbit ious a nd more 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

4 | New Perspectives in Policing 

technologically sophisticated: it “builds on and 

enhances the promise of ILP” using “new technology, new business processes, and new algorithms”24 

that allow the police “to forecast crime and ... 

interven[e] before it happens.”25 Like intelligenceled policing, though, predictive policing refocuses 

the police on “fighting crime,” emphasizes the 

objective, scientific selection of strategies and tact ics, and puts a premium on cent ralized, 

rationalized, bureaucratic decision-making. It replicates, that is to say, all three core elements of 

police professionalism. 

There are important differences, of course, between 

what the backers of intelligence-led policing and 

predictive policing are promoting and the kind 

of policing practiced and celebrated in the 1960s. 

For example, no one is calling for a return to random patrols; instead, patrols should be “directed, 

information-based,” and “pre-position[ed].” More 

fundamentally, intelligence-led policing and predictive policing both emphasize the importance 

of continually reassessing strategies and tactics in 

light of their measured outcomes, albeit with measures that focus heavily on rates of serious crime. 

The emphasis on directed patrol, for example, is 

based in part on experimental evidence, accumulated over the past few decades, that crime rates can 

be reduced by sending more officers to “hot spots” 

where large numbers of offenses take place.26 That 

kind of reflective empiricism was no part of police 

professionalism in the 1950s and 1960s.27 But the 

underlying mindset of intelligence-led policing and 

predictive policing is similar, in crucial ways, to the 

mindset of police professionalism. The guiding philosophy is bureaucratic and technocratic rather 

than collaborative and community-based; the 

police are professional crime-fighters, not “streetcorner politicians.”28 

Nor are backers of intelligence-led policing and 

predictive policing the only ones drawn today by 

the pull of police professionalism. Christopher 

Stone and Jeremy Travis, for example, propose 

a new “conceptual framework” for policing centered not around data analysis but instead around 

“accountability, legitimacy, and innovation,” along 

with something they call “national coherence.”29 

They are far more complimentary of community 

policing than of “the so-called professionalism 

of mid-20th-century policing,” with its detachment from the community, its “limited set of 

routinized activities,” and “centralized and topdown” management.30 Nonetheless they call their 

own framework “the New Professionalism.” They 

want to recover a “truer, more robust” sense of 

professionalism — a sense of professionalism that 

they argue was better represented, ironically, by 

community policing than by the policing of the 

1950s and 1960s.31 Policing in the earlier period, they 

say, was too clumsy and unenlightened to deserve 

the name “professional.” “Its expertise was flawed, 

its techniques crude, its management techniques 

more military than professional, and it reinforced 

rather than challenged the racism of the wider 

society.”32 That indictment suggests, though, that 

professionalism is to a great extent a matter of better 

expertise, greater sophistication and more skillful 

management — precisely the attributes most heavily prized (no matter how poorly achieved) by the 

“old” police professionalism. 

Stone and Travis also want mobility of officers 

and uniformity of standards across state and local 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 5 

boundaries; that is what they mean by “national 

coherence.” They think this is necessary if police 

officers are to be “true professionals,” like doctors, 

lawyers or engineers.33 This may or may not be 

a departure from the mid-20th-century version 

of police professionalism. Police professionalism in the 1950s and 1960s focused less on “the 

individual professional police officer” than on 

the “professional agency 34”; it claimed autonomy 

“primarily for the institution of policing and only 

secondarily, and then only in a severely limited 

sense, for its functionaries.”35 But it is not clear 

whether the “New Professionalism” would prove 

very different in this regard, even if it gave police 

officers more job mobility. Metropolitan police 

officers operate within highly developed bureaucracies; they differ in this way from doctors and 

lawyers, and to a lesser but still significant degree 

from engineers. Any appeal for policing to operate with more objectivity and expertise is likely 

to be translated into “the bureaucratic ideal 

epitomized in modern police practice,” which 

is to say the ideal of the police department as a 

“rational, efficient, scientifically organized, technologically sophisticated” organization.36 More 

importantly, the “old” police professionalism was 

criticized even in its heyday, and on its own terms, 

as tolerating too much decentralization and too 

much parochialism.37 Centralized standards 

and job mobility were and remain fully consistent with the core commitments of traditional 

police professionalism: a focus on crime control; 

an emphasis on objective, scientific decisionmaking; and the centralization and rationalization of authority.38 

The Persistent Pull 

By the early 1980s, the “professional model” of 

policing was thoroughly discredited. It was 

blamed for making police departments insular, arrogant, resistant to outside criticism 

and feckless in responding to social ferment.39 

Community policing was very consciously a 

reaction against police professionalism: emphasizing the plurality of police functions instead 

of a single-minded focus on crime control, prioritizing community input and involvement over 

expertise and technical analysis, and favoring 

decentralized over centralized authority and 

locally tailored rather than globally rationalized 

solutions. And community policing is widely 

seen, at least by outsiders, as a spectacular success. At law schools, for example, scholars across 

the ideological spectrum began to argue in the 

1990s that legal constraints on the police should 

be loosened to allow community policing to proceed unimpeded,40 and that these new forms of 

policing should serve as a model for other government services in need of reform.41 So why does 

police professionalism continue to hold appeal 

for thoughtful police executives and scholars of 

policing? 

Part of the explanation is that community policing has some shortcomings, which have become 

particularly apparent to the officers, supervisors 

and chiefs who have tried to implement it. The 

most important of these is not that the strategies most commonly identified with community 

policing — beat meetings, bicycle patrols, antigraffiti campaigns and so on — have never been 

proven to reduce serious crime, although that is 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6 | New Perspectives in Policing 

true enough.42 Even on its own terms — as “a philosophy, not a program,” and as a philosophy that 

does not treat suppressing serious crime as the 

be-all and end-all of successful policing — community policing has always been troublingly vague, 

and it has too often traded on a naïve and simplistic 

picture of “the community.”43 What does it mean 

to “listen to,” “engage with” or “partner with” the 

community? What are the respective roles of line 

officers, supervisors and command staff in that process? Despite their preference for decentralization, 

enthusiasts of community policing have always 

been particularly weak at articulating a meaningful role for middle managers.44 And who or what is 

“the community,” anyway? What are the police to 

do when — as is always the case — different groups 

of residents have different concerns and different 

ideas about how the police should operate?45 And 

how are the police to think about the vast majority 

of the public who never attend community meetings 

and who may themselves have no clear ideas — or, 

worse, contradictory ideas — about how the police 

should go about their business? 

But the allure of police professionalism today is not 

just a matter of the weaknesses of community policing. The core ideal of the professional model — the 

police as crime control experts, leveraging managerial sophistication and advanced technology 

to enforce the law objectively, aggressively and 

apolitically — is in some ways more appealing today 

than it used to be. For one thing, claims of expertise by the police are more credible now, because 

police departments know more than they used 

to about how to fight serious crime. They may not 

know as much as they think they know. Just as the 

steadily rising crime rates of the 1960s and 1970s 

led to excessive pessimism about the effectiveness 

of criminal justice programs and resigned assertions that “nothing works,” the plummeting crime 

rates of the 1990s allowed virtually every police 

department but the most hapless or unlucky to 

claim stunning successes.46 But, even discounting 

for “the euphoric fallacy in eras of crime decline,”47 

the state of knowledge about effective crime-fighting 

is undeniably better today than it was 40 years ago.48 

And one thing we now know is that police can, in 

fact, improve their effectiveness by paying attention to data, including data about where and when 

crimes tend to happen.49 

Equally important, police departments themselves 

are different than they were 40 years ago. American 

law enforcement in the 1960s was overwhelmingly white, overwhelming male, and politically 

and culturally homogeneous. That made the “go 

it alone” mentality of police professionalism especially unfortunate. It reinforced levels of insularity, 

arrogance and hostility that were already dangerously high, and it gave license to the police to act on 

forms of prejudice that received few checks inside 

law enforcement agencies. Police forces today are 

much more diverse. Large numbers of minority officers, female officers and — increasingly — openly 

gay and lesbian officers have changed the internal culture of policing, making departments less 

cohesive in some ways, but also more vibrant, more 

open and better connected to the communities they 

serve.50 Police officers today are also better educated than they used to be: college education and 

even advanced degrees are no longer rarities.51 All 

of this may make trusting in police expertise easier 

and less frightening than it was 40 years ago. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 7 

Police expertise and police demographics are 

not the only things that have changed. Police 

face different challenges today than they did 

before September 11, 2001. Local law enforcement agencies have been enlisted in the fight 

against global terrorism, and to many that 

fight has seemed to call for a more aggressive, 

technology-intensive, expertise-driven style of 

policing — less Andy Griffith and more 24.52 As it 

happens, the most important contributions that 

local police departments can make to homeland 

security probably depend on precisely the kinds 

of outreach, partnership, and low-tech, personto-person trust-building stressed in community 

policing. Information cannot be collated, shared 

or cross-tabulated until it is collected, and people are much more likely to speak frankly with 

police officers they know, have worked with and 

trust. When a police officer goes to talk with, 

say, a local Arab-American leader, it helps if the 

officer has “met and assisted that leader before — 

protecting property, ironing out some administrative complexit y, or ensuring his safe 

worship.”53 If we want to prevent attacks from 

Islamic extremists, our most important allies will 

be found among moderate, mainstream Islamic 

Americans, and the way to gain their trust and 

cooperation is by working with them in precisely 

the ways emphasized by community policing. 

Finally, budget crises throughout the country 

have put pressure on police departments to cut 

costs, and community policing — not just the 

specific programs adopted under that framework but the framework itself — can seem a 

luxury.54 This assumes, though, that working with 

communities is less cost-effective for law enforcement agencies than going it alone. It could in fact 

be the other way around: the partnerships promoted in community policing might allow law 

enforcement to leverage its own resources, doing 

more with less.55 And whether community policing is more or less cost-effective than professional 

policing may depend, in part, on what the police 

are asked to do. 

In the end, the most important attractions of 

police professionalism today are likely the same 

ones it has always had. For reformers, the professional model offers not only a way of isolating 

the police from potential sources of corruption 

(the overriding concern of early 20th-century 

reformers)56 but also a way of emphasizing that 

the police have, or should have, special skills 

and knowledge that can be written down, taught 

and continually improved (a more common concern of reformers today).57 For the broader public, 

police professionalism offers the comforting 

idea that we can be kept safe by a heroic corps 

of high-tech guardians, applying objectivity and 

expertise, and operating in the background, without requiring our involvement. And for the police 

themselves, police professionalism offers status, 

glamour, organizational independence and — not 

least important — excitement. Some of the skepticism that community policing always elicited, 

and continues to elicit, has to do with the sense 

that the police will never embrace it enthusiastically because it does not seem like “real police 

work.”58 The notion is that police officers want 

to be part of an elite, gadget-equipped crimefighting force, not a team of social workers.59 That 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

8 | New Perspectives in Policing 

is plainly an oversimplification: it takes too little 

account of the challenges and rewards of community policing, the diversity and sophistication of 

today’s police officers, and the ways in which even 

veteran officers can be won over to the philosophy 

of community policing.60 But it is likely true that 

the kind of policing valorized in the professional 

model remains exciting to many officers in ways 

that community policing often is not. 

Choosing What to Emphasize 

The attractions of the professional model are real. So 

are the weaknesses of community policing, and so 

are the changes in policing forces and the advances 

in police knowledge since the 1970s. One hesitates, 

moreover, to quibble with ideas about policing 

backed by law enforcement executives as spectacularly successful as William Bratton and scholars as 

thoughtful and well-informed as Christopher Stone 

and Jeremy Travis. Nonetheless there are grounds 

for concern about the renewed popularity of police 

professionalism. 

Some of those reasons have to do with the heavy 

emphasis that police professionalism has always 

placed on technology — an emphasis that, if anything, has grown even more pronounced in today’s 

versions of the professional model. Overreliance 

on technology, particularly computers, was part of 

what earned police professionalism its unpopularity 

the last time around. An early, influential critique of 

the Los Angeles Police Department, written in the 

wake of the Watts Riots, complained that the police 

had been “caught up in the mania for systems analysis” and had equated “professionalization” with 

“computerization.” Data processing plainly had its 

uses in law enforcement, but a computer could not 

“sit in a house, winning the confidence of a juvenile 

arrestee.” That required “a dedicated police officer 

with enough time available” — which was to say 

an officer who was not judged predominantly “by 

computerized productivity standards” or asked to 

chase quotas generated by a “computerized anticipation of offenses.”61 

The number-crunching carried out by leading 

police departments today is a good deal more 

sophisticated than what critics saw in the 1960s and 

1970s. One critical difference — rightly emphasized, 

in particular, by advocates of predictive policing62 — 

is the focus on measuring actual results, rather than 

simply tallying “arrests, shakedowns, routs, and 

interrogations.”63 But there is still a strong tendency 

for technology to be overhyped. For all the talk 

about “advanced analytics”64 and “data fusion”65 

that can “discover non-obvious relationships” 

among risk factors for crime,66 the proven successes 

of predictive policing have involved fairly prosaic 

techniques. One commonly cited example of predictive policing is the “data mining” that police in 

Richmond, Va., employed to address the problem 

of gunfire on New Year’s Eve.67 Categorizing each 

complaint of gunfire by time and location, the 

police discovered that most of the shots occurred in 

four neighborhoods during a narrow time window 

around midnight on December 31. By concentrating its patrol officers in those areas and that time 

window, the department was able to reduce gunfire complaints, boost seizures of weapons and cut 

overtime expenses.68 Backers of intelligence-led 

policing and predictive policing can sometimes 

be dismissive of the old “dots on a map” style of 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 9 

analysis, but this amounted to dots on a map 

and on a timeline. As the consultant who helped 

the Richmond Police Department devise its new 

strategy points out, “[t]his wasn’t complicated at 

all; this was just simple descriptive statistics.”69 

Part of the reason technology tends to be overhyped is that there is money to be made from 

selling it. Another part of the reason is simply that 

gear and gadgets are sexy: shiny video screens, 

interactive maps, and “mathematical prophesy”70 

have allures that are not shared by, say, a poorly 

attended community meeting in a church basement. Once purchased, though, “the penetration 

of technology into the contours of the job is almost 

entirely dependent on its perceived utility on the 

ground.”71 This will be apparent to anyone who 

tours a high-tech crime control center and sees 

detectives and uniformed officers, surrounded 

by advanced information technology, continuing 

to rely on the tools with which they are familiar: 

spiral notebooks, index cards, telephone calls, etc. 

But it can be seen in less prosaic ways as well. A 

sociologist who spent six years watching the use 

of crime mapping and information technology 

in management meetings in three U.S. police 

departments concluded that the data were almost 

never used to call existing strategies into question; for the most part, information technology 

was simply “adapted to the police organization 

and its characteristic practices.”72 

The larger problem with advanced technology 

in law enforcement is not that it is overhyped, 

but that it can draw attention away from other 

concerns. It remains true in policing that “the 

primary technology is verbal — the words 

used to persuade and control others in interaction.”73 Attention paid to new computer systems 

is, inevitably, attention not paid to talk. More 

broadly, technology can draw attention away 

from traditional and more fundamental challenges in policing: how officers can do better in 

the complicated, dangerous situations in which 

we place them; how departments can do better in their relations with the public; and how 

managers and supervisors can do better both in 

dealing with problem officers and in developing 

and drawing on the intelligence and judgment of 

line personnel. 

None of this is to deny the “explosive potential” of 

information technology in policing,74 the importance of building on past advances in this area, 

or the desirability of continually reassessing 

police practices with the best data and assessment methods available. It would be foolish to 

ignore the new opportunities that smart phones 

and mobile computing, for example, provide for 

police officers to share information, pool expertise and coordinate responses — not only among 

themselves, but also with community members. 

And part of what the backers of predictive policing are calling for is what others have called 

“evidence-based policing”75 — a commitment to 

“parse out and codify unsystematic ‘experience’ 

as the basis of police work, refining it by ongoing systematic testing of hypotheses.”76 That is 

surely a good thing, and it can be assisted by 

data processing and statistical sophistication. 

The point is that numbers and hardware cannot 

do this work by themselves. A fixation on technology can distract attention from the harder and 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

10 | New Perspectives in Policing 

more important parts of this process, the parts 

that rely on imagination and judgment. It can distract attention, too, from other critical parts of the 

contemporary policing agenda: building trust and 

legitimacy, ensuring democratic accountability, 

and addressing the enduringly corrosive connections between criminal justice and racial inequity. 

As w it h tech nolog y, so w it h t he broader 

ideals of objectivity and professional expertise. 

Dispassionate analysis is a good thing. So are 

institutional self-reflection and a commitment to 

a process of continual learning. These are critical values in policing and they deserve attention. 

There is a constant danger, though, that they will 

crowd out imperatives that are at least as important, but harder and less glamorous to pursue, 

such as trust, legitimacy, fairness, accountability 

and racial equity.77 Not coincidentally, these are 

the imperatives that tended to be emphasized by 

enthusiasts for community policing, which was 

framed from the outset as a reaction against police 

professionalism.78 

Stone and Travis are quite clear that their “New 

Professionalism” should be built around the core 

goals of accountability, legitimacy and innovation.79 And backers of intelligence-led policing 

and predictive policing often claim that these new 

models build on and can strengthen community 

policing.80 But it is not enough to add goals like 

trust, legitimacy and fairness to a model of police 

professionalism, or to say that they are part of 

what the term “professionalism” should convey. 

Fundamentally, it is a question of emphasis, and 

you cannot emphasize everything at once. 

Architects of police professionalism in the 1950s 

and 1960s were also, at times, as explicit as anyone could want about the importance of fairness, 

accountability and community partnerships. In 

his influential treatise on police administration, 

for example, O.W. Wilson insisted on the need 

for accountability: “[C]ontrols must be provided 

so that those who exercise authority will be held 

responsible for the consequences of their actions. 

. . . Every delegation of authority should be accompanied by a commensurate placing of responsibility.”81 

He stressed, too, that the patrol officer is “the ultimate in the decentralization of municipal service” 

and should serve as “a roving city-hall information and complaint counter for the distressed 

citizen.”82 Officers needed to know their beats and 

“community geography,” and it was important for 

them to cultivate personal relationships with residents, business owners and employees.83 Wilson 

wrote that “[t]he active interest and participation 

of individual citizens and groups is so vital to the 

success of most police programs that the police 

should deliberatively seek to arouse, promote, and 

maintain an active public concern in their affairs.”84 

And he was explicit about the importance of building trust and legitimacy. “Public cooperation,” he 

explained, “is essential to the successful accomplishment of the police purpose,” and it cannot be 

obtained without scrupulous courtesy and fairness 

on the part of the police. Wilson advised police 

agencies to “critically examine their own conduct 

in all public contacts and remodel it to avoid situations unnecessarily unpleasant to citizens. They 

cannot hope to retain the friendship of the public 

if their conduct is unfair and unreasonable and if 

they unnecessarily embarrass, humiliate, annoy, 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 11 

and inconvenience the public.”85 He reiterated the 

point in a subsequent edition of the book, warning against reliance on “superficial community 

relations programs.” Instead, he argued that the 

police could best improve their image and their 

effectiveness through “dialogue with the community” and “fair and just treatment of all citizens.”86 

All of this, though, was secondary to the principal 

emphases of Wilson’s book, which were technological and managerial. Accountability, fairness 

and legitimacy got lost in the shuffle. So it was 

with police professionalism more broadly. The 

vast majority of what community policing advocates said in the 1980s had been said at least in 

passing by at least some advocates of professional 

policing in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The problem was that it got short shrift. 

There are grounds for worrying that a revival of 

police professionalism — whether packaged as 

intelligence-led policing, predictive policing, 

the New Professionalism or something else — 

will operate in the same way, focusing the police 

and the public on the vision of an elite corps of 

expert crime-fighters, acting independently 

but objectively and scientifically, to keep communities safe. We know this is a false ideal. It 

ignores most of what we learned about policing 

in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s: that much of what 

the police do is not crime control; that effective 

policing requires building trust and legitimacy; 

that trust and legitimacy depend heavily on fairness and decency; that policing depends heavily 

and unavoidably on the judgment and discretion exercised by street-level officers; that rigid, 

top-down management can impede tailored, 

innovative problem-solving; and that, especially in a democracy, calls for the police to be 

publicly accountable and publicly controlled are 

inevitable and fully appropriate. But adding these 

caveats to a vision fundamentally in keeping with 

the old ideal of police professionalism is likely 

to prove ineffective because the ideal itself is 

so alluring, so energizing for officers and so 

comforting for the public. 

The point of having an explicit model or philosophy of policing is to emphasize particular 

aspects of the police mission that, for one reason 

or another, need emphasizing. Mark Moore, one 

of the scholars who did much to promote community policing in the 1980s, argued for that 

framework partly on the basis that it “challenge[d] 

the police in the areas in which they are least 

likely to make investments in repositioning themselves,” namely forging “a relationship with the 

community” that would allow the police to “enlist 

their aid, focus on the problems that turn out to 

be important, and figure out a way to be accountable.” Moore did not deny the importance of 

developing “more thoughtful, more informationguided, more active attacks on particular crime 

problems.” But he suggested this agenda — which 

was fundamentally an elaboration of key strands 

of police professionalism — would “take care of 

itself,” because it was “much more of a natural 

development in policing.”87 

Stone and Travis quote these remarks, and they 

draw the right lesson: in fashioning any new 

model or philosophy of policing, “we should be 

alert to those aspects that will prove most difficult 

for police organizations to embrace.”88 Relations 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

12 | New Perspectives in Policing 

between major U.S. police departments and the 

communities they serve are plainly better today 

than they were in the 1960s, the 1970s or even the 

1980s. But it remains true that working with communities, rather than adopting new technology, is 

the hardest task facing metropolitan police forces 

and the one that most needs emphasis, encouragement and assistance. 

Community Policing, Carried Forward 

If not police professionalism, then what? One 

alternative is to forsake overarching philosophies 

altogether and to “engage, instead, in policing.” This 

was the advice that Gil Kerlikowske — a famously 

successful practitioner of community policing 

— gave in 2004. Kerlikowske warned that police executives were prone to “a 20-year learning cycle”: “after 20 

years we forget the lessons we learned . . . and move on 

to ‘the next new thing’ in policing.”89 (By that measure, 

the unlearning of community policing and the revival 

of the professional model are right on schedule.) To 

avoid the “20-year learning mistake,” Kerlikowske 

suggested that police leaders should abandon all conceptual models — not just police professionalism, 

but community policing as well. “Let us take the 

best of what we learned in this business over the last 

half century,” he urged, and just “call it policing.”90 

There is something to be said for this. The three core 

principles of the conceptual framework proposed by 

Stone and Travis — accountability, legitimacy and 

innovation — could be pursued without wrapping 

them in the language of professionalism, and would 

be more appealing without that packaging. (It is less 

clear whether the same can be said for what Stone 

and Travis call “national coherence.” That may be 

tied more closely to the ideal of professionalism.91 

But it also seems less obviously desirable and certainly less fundamental.) Stone and Travis seem to 

be right, though, that a conceptual frame can help 

police leaders, line officers and members of the 

public prioritize goals for policing.92 The problem 

is that professionalism is an undesirable frame; it 

pushes policing toward the wrong priorities. What 

would be a better frame? 

One possibility is community policing — or, if 

we want to encourage continual refinement of 

the model, “advanced community policing.” 

Community policing is a radically incomplete philosophy. If the police should focus on more than 

crime control, what should the “more” be, and 

how much of it should there be? How, in particular, 

should the police pursue fairness, accountability 

and legitimacy, and how should those goals be 

balanced against or combined with crime-fighting? Similarly, if the police are to partner with the 

community, what does it mean to “partner”? What 

kind of leadership should the police exercise, and 

in what directions should they lead? Who or what is 

“the community,” and how are the police supposed 

to respond to conflicts between or within communities — especially when those conflicts run along 

fault lines of race, class or ethnicity? If decentralization of authority is a good thing, how far should it go, 

and what is the proper role of middle management? 

And what role should new communication and 

data processing technologies — from cell phones 

to crime mapping — play in facilitating consultation and cooperation between police departments 

and the communities they serve? 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 13 

These are difficult questions, and they remain 

largely unanswered. They also remain the most 

important questions facing the police in the 

United States and in other modern, industrialized 

democracies. And they are still questions that 

often fail to get the attention they deserve. One 

virtue of retaining community policing, or some 

variant like “advanced community policing,” as 

the overarching conceptual frame for policing is 

precisely that it can help focus attention on the 

right questions. The rhetoric of police professionalism raises questions, too: What does it mean to 

be a “professional”? In what ways would it make 

sense for police officers to be like doctors, lawyers 

and engineers?93 But these seem far less critical 

than the questions to which community policing 

directs our attention. In assessing, for example, 

whether to make “national coherence” a central 

priority of police reform, the key questions worth 

asking are whether it would help police to be 

more open and accountable to the communities 

they serve, and more productive partners with 

those communities — not whether policing needs 

national coherence in order to be a “true profession,” like law, medicine or engineering. 

Any model of policing will highlight certain 

dimensions of the job, and certain challenges 

facing leaders, officers and reformers, while 

downplaying others. The strength of community 

policing — in the 1980s, the 1990s and today — is 

that it focuses attention on the problems in policing that most deserve attention, not only because 

of their intrinsic importance but also because of 

their difficulty and their tendency to be neglected. 

Much of the value of community policing, that 

is to say, may lie precisely in the ways that it can 

help law enforcement agencies, police researchers and the public resist the persistent pull of 

police professionalism. 

Endnotes 

1. See President ’s Com m ission on L aw 

Enforcement & the Administration of Justice, 

Task Force Report: The Police 20–21 (1967). 

2. See, e.g., Gene E. Carte & Elaine H. Carte, Police 

Reform in the United States: The Era of August 

Vollmer 114–15 (1975); David Alan Sklansky, 

Police and Democracy 35–37 (2008) [hereinafter 

Sklansky, Police and Democracy]. 

3. See, e.g., David H. Bayley, Community Policing: 

A Report from the Devil’s Advocate, in Community 

Policing: Rhetoric or Reality 225, 225 (Jack 

R. Green & Stephen D. Mastrofski eds., 1988) 

[hereinafter Community Policing: Rhetoric or 

Reality]; Willard M. Oliver, The Third Generation 

of Communit y Policing: Moving Through 

Innovation, Diffusion, and Institutionalization, in 

Contemporary Policing: Strategies, Challenges, 

and Solutions 39, 40 (Quint C. Thurman & Jihong 

Zhao eds., 2004). 

4. See, e.g., Bayley, supra note 3, at 226; Sklansky, 

Police and Democracy, supra note 2, at 82-83. 

5. The focus in this paper is on policing in the 

United States, but many of the trends described 

here may have parallels elsewhere. See, e.g., David 

Dixon, Why Don’t the Police Stop Crime?, 28 Austl. 

& N.Z. J. Criminology 4 (2005). 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

14 | New Perspectives in Policing 

6. See, e.g., David Thacher, Conflicting Values in 

Community Policing, 35 Law & Soc’y Rev. 765 

(2001); Mary Ann Wycoff, The Benefits of Community 

Policing: Evidence and Conjecture, in Community 

Policing: Rhetoric or Reality, supra note 3, at 225, 

226. 

7. Peter K. Manning, Police Work: The Social 

Organization of Policing 121 (2d ed. 1997) [hereinafter Manning, Police Work]. 

8. Carte and Carte, supra note 2, at 3, 105. 

9. See, e.g., Egon Bittner, The Rise and Fall of the Thin 

Blue Line, 6 Rev. Am. Hist. 421 (1978) [hereinafter 

Bittner, Rise and Fall], reprinted in Egon Bittner, 

Aspects of Police Work 357 (1990) [hereinafter 

Bittner, Aspects of Police Work]. 

10. See, e.g., Kent W. Colton & James M. Tien, 

Technology Transfer of Computer-Based Applications 

in Law Enforcement, 4 J. Tech. Transfer 63, 63–64 

(1979). 

11. See, e.g., National Research Council, Fairness 

& Effectiveness in Policing: The Evidence 30–34, 

105–06 (Wesley Skogan & Kathleen Frydl eds., 2004) 

[hereinafter Fairness & Effectiveness in Policing]. 

12. See, e.g., U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Bureau of Justice 

Assistance, Navigating Your Agency’s Path to 

Intelligence-Led Policing (2009) [hereinafter 

Navigating Your Agency’s Path]; U.S. Dep’t of Justice, 

Bureau of Justice Assistance, BJA Fact Sheet: Smart 

Policing Initiative (2009) (announcing $4 million 

in grants “to identify law enforcement tactics 

and strategies that are effective, efficient, and 

economical”). In September 2009, the National 

Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Bureau of Justice 

Assistance, in collaboration with the Los Angeles 

Police Department, sponsored “The First Predictive 

Policing Symposium,” in Los Angeles, Cal. A second 

symposium was held in Providence, R.I., in June 

2010, co-sponsored by NIJ, the Providence Police 

Department, and Roger Williams University. 

13. Jerry H. Ratcliffe, Intelligence-Led Policing xiii, 

xiv, 1 (2008). 

14. Id. at 6. 

15. Navigating Your Agency’s Path, supra note 12, 

at 3. 

16. Id.; see also, e.g., Charlie Beck & Colleen McCue, 

Predictive Policing: What Can We Learn from Wal-Mart 

and Amazon About Fighting Crime in a Recession?, 

Police Chief, Nov. 2009, at 18, 18 (suggesting that “ILP 

does not replace the community-involvement and 

problem-solving approaches in the communitypolicing model”). 

17. Ratcliffe, supra note 13, at 7. 

18. Jerry H. Ratcliffe, Intelligence-Led Policing, in 

Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis 

263, 271 (Richard Wortley & Lorraine Mazerolle 

eds., 2008). 

19. Ratcliffe, supra note 13, at 88; see also David 

H. Bayley & Christine Nixon, The Changing 

Environment for Policing 22 (discussion draft, Nov. 

2009). 

20. Ratcliffe, supra note 13, at 9. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 15 

21. Navigating Your Agency’s Path, supra note 12, 

at 10. 

22. Beck & McCue, supra note 16, at 18, 23; see 

also William Bratton, John Morgan & Sean 

Malinowski, Fighting Crime in the Information 

Age: The Promise of Predictive Policing 8 (discussion draft, Nov. 18, 2009) (claiming that “we have 

entered the era of predictive policing”). 

23. Beck & McCue, supra note 16, at 19. 

24. Id. 

25. Bratton et al., supra note 22, at 1. There may 

also be a difference in emphasis: intelligenceled policing is sometimes said to be marked by a 

“concentration on prolific and persistent offenders,” Ratcliffe, supra note 13, at 8; and predictive 

policing is sometimes said to focus on “times 

and locations predicted to be associated with 

an increased likelihood for crime,” rather than 

on “specific individuals,” Beck & McCue, supra 

note 16, at 22. But intelligence-led policing has 

also been said to include the identification of “hot 

spots” through “temporal and spatial analytical 

assessments,” Navigating Your Agency’s Path, 

supra note 12, at 17; and predictive policing has 

been described as including technologies that 

allow analysts to “identify, track and correlate 

repeat or potential offenders,” Bratton et al., supra 

note 22, at 3. 

26. See, e.g., David Weisburd & John E. Eck, What 

Can Police Do to Reduce Crime, Disorder, and 

Fear?, 593 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. 42 

(2004). 

27. In fact, the leading treatise on police management in the era of police professionalism argued 

explicitly that “indexes of efficiency” were of “limited utility” in assessing police practices because 

the available data were so crude. O.W. Wilson, 

Police Administration 8 (1950). This passage was 

retained in the second edition of the treatise, see 

O.W. Wilson, Police Administration 24 (2d ed. 

1963), but not in the third, see O.W. Wilson & Roy 

Clinton McLaren, Police Administration (3d ed. 

1972). 

28. William Ker Muir, Jr., Police: Streetcorner 

Politicians (1977). 

29. Christopher Stone & Jeremy Travis, Toward 

a New Professionalism in Policing 1 (prepublication draft, June 2009). 

30. Id. at 5–6. 

31. Id. at 8. 

32. Id. 

33. Id. at 19–20. 

34. Carte & Carte, supra note 2, at 112. 

35. Bittner, Rise and Fall, supra note 9, at 426; see 

also Dorothy Guyot, Policing as Though People 

Matter 5–10 (1991). 

36. Manning, Police Work, supra note 7, at 120–21. 

37. See, e.g., George E. Berkley, The Democratic 

Policeman 21–35 (1969). Localism in American 

policing has always been defended on grounds 

of democracy, not on grounds of professionalism. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

16 | New Perspectives in Policing 

See, e.g., id. at 21–22; John Edgar Hoover, The Basis of 

Sound Law Enforcement, 291 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. 

& Soc. Sci. 39, 40–42 (1954). For a more recent and 

more elaborate defense of local, democratic control over policing practices, see William J. Stuntz, 

Unequal Justice, 121 Harv. L. Rev. 1969 (2008). 

38. Which is not to say, of course, that a push for 

standardization is necessarily a push back toward 

insularity, hierarchy and technocracy. Just as 

old-style police professionalism never included 

a serious commitment to uniformity or a serious 

rejection of parochialism, so nationwide standards 

could conceivably be developed that lead the police 

away from, rather than toward, the core elements 

of mid-20th-century police professionalism. But 

nothing in the ideal of standardization makes that 

direction inevitable or even likely. 

39. See, e.g., Carte & Carte, supra note 2, at 105, 115; 

Herman Goldstein, Policing a Free Society 7, 135–36 

(1977); William A. Westley, Violence and the Police: 

A Sociological Study of Law, Custom, and Morality 

xv (1970); Bittner, Rise and Fall, supra note 9; Paul 

Jacobs, The Los Angeles Police, Atlantic, Dec. 1966, 

at 95. 

40. See, e.g., Dan M. Kahan & Tracey L. Meares, The 

Coming Crisis of Criminal Procedure, 86 Geo. L.J. 

1153 (1998); Debra Livingston, Police Discretion 

and the Quality of Life in Public Places: Courts, 

Communities, and the New Policing, 97 Colum. L. 

Rev. 551 (1997). 

41. See, e.g., Michael C. Dorf & Charles F. Sobel, A 

Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism, 98 

Colum. L. Rev. 267, 328–32 (1998). 

42. See, e.g., Fairness & Effectiveness in Policing, 

supra note 11, at 232–35. 

43. See, e.g., Sklansky, Police and Democracy, supra 

note 2, at 86–93, 98–102; Gerald E. Frug, City Services, 

73 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 23, 81–85 (1998). 

44. See, e.g., R. Gil Kerlikowske, The End of 

Community Policing: Remembering the Lessons 

Learned, FBI Law Enf’t Bulletin, April 2004, at 6. 

45. See, e.g., Sklansky, supra note 2, at 100–101; 

James Forman, Jr., Community Policing and Youth 

as Assets, 95 J. Crim. L. & Criminology 1–48 (2004). 

46. See, e.g., Franklin E. Zimring, The Great 

American Crime Decline 25–42 (2006). 

47. Id. at 42. 

48. See, e.g., Dixon, supra note 5, at 7–13. 

49. See, e.g., Weisburd & Eck, supra note 26. 

50. See, e.g., David A. Sklansky, Not Your Father’s 

Police Department: Making Sense of the New 

Demographics of Law Enforcement, 96 J. Crim. L. & 

Criminology 1209 (2006). 

51. See, e.g., Roy Roberg & Scott Bonn, Higher 

Education and Policing: Where are We Now?, 27 

Policing 469 (2004). On parallel developments in 

Britain, see Maurice Punch, Cops with Honours: 

University Education and Police Culture, in Police 

Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions 

105 (Megan O’Neill et al. eds., 2007). 

52. For the uninitiated, the television program 

24 and its influence are discussed in Jane Mayer, 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 17 

Whatever It Takes, New Yorker, Feb. 19, 2007, at 

68. Regarding The Andy Griffith Show, see Adam 

Dobrin, Professional and Community Oriented 

Policing: The Mayberry Model, 13 J. Crim. Just. & 

Popular Culture 19 (2006). 

53. Daniel C. Richman, The Right Fight, Boston 

Rev., Dec. 2004/Jan. 2005, at 6, 7; see also David 

H. Bayley & David Weisburd, Cops and Spooks: 

The Role of the Police in Counterterrorism, in 

To Protect and To Serve: Policing in an Age of 

Terrorism 81, 92, 94 (D. Weisburd et al. eds., 2009). 

54. See, e.g., Sklansky, Police and Democracy, 

supra note 2, at 131; Eric Moskowitz & Maria 

Cramer, Cities Cutting Police Work, Boston Globe, 

Mar. 5, 2009, at A1; Bobby White, California Cities 

Cut Police Budgets, Wall Street J., Oct. 31, 2008, at 

A3. 

55. See, e.g., George Gascón & Todd Foglesong, 

How to Make Policing More Affordable 7 (discussion draft, Oct. 2009). 

56. See, e.g., Carte & Carte, supra note 2, at 66–83; 

Robert M. Fogelson, Big-City Police 12–116 (1977). 

57. See, e.g., Egon Bittner, The Functions of the 

Police in Modern Society (1970), reprinted in 

Bittner, Aspects of Police Work, supra note 9, at 

89; Stone & Travis, supra note 29, at 3 (arguing 

that “for any profession to be worthy of that name, 

its members must not only have transportable 

skills, but must also be committed both to a set 

of ethical precepts and to a discipline of continuous learning”). 

58. Ratcliffe, supra note 18, at 269. 

59. See, e.g., Ratcliffe, supra note 13, at 9. 

60. See, e.g., Susan L. Miller, Gender and 

Community Policing: Walking the Talk (1999). 

61. Jacobs, supra note 39, at 101. Jacobs’s critique 

appeared the same year that Deputy Chief Edward 

M. Davis committed the LAPD to development of 

“the instant cop”: a “technological ‘fusion’ of men, 

communications, computers, [and] dispatching, 

coupled with a near ‘instantaneous’ arrival of officers at a crime location with sufficient electronic 

and other exotic equipment . . . to provide the 

means to swiftly transact the investigation.” Los 

Angeles Police Department, Advance Planning 

Division, LAPD and Computers 1 (1972) (quoting Davis’s Sept. 1966 speech to the Los Angeles 

Rotary Club). Davis led the LAPD throughout the 

1970s and retained his enthusiasm for “the search 

for uses of computer-based science and technology in law enforcement”; the department boasted 

in 1972 that it had become a national leader in 

that search. See id. 

62. See, e.g., Bratton et al., supra note 22, at 3; cf., 

e.g., Stone & Travis, supra note 29, at 12 (noting 

appreciatively that “the CompStat accountability 

process, in which district commanders are held 

accountable by headquarters leadership for continuing reductions in crime and other measures 

of effectiveness, is now a staple of police management in most large departments”). 

63. Jacobs, supra note 39, at 101. 

64. Beck & McCue, supra note 16, at 20. 

65. Bratton et al., supra note 22, at 12. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

18 | New Perspectives in Policing 

66. Id. at 8, 12. 

67. See, e.g., Beck & McCue, supra note 16, at 20–22; 

Rebecca Kanable, Dig Into Data Mining: Enhanced 

Analysis Can Help Law Enforcement be More 

Proactive, Law Enforcement Technology, March 

2007, at 62. 

68. Colleen McCue, Remarks at the First Predictive 

Policing Symposium, Los Angeles, Cal., Nov. 19, 

2009. 

69. Id. 

70. Jacobs, supra note 39, at 101. 

71. Peter K. Manning, The Technology of Policing: 

Crime Mapping, Information Technology, and the 

Rationality of Crime Control 252 (2008) [hereinafter 

Manning, The Technology of Policing]. 

72. Id. at 251–65. 

73. Id. at 252. On the central role of talk in policing, see also, e.g., Miller, supra note 60; Muir, supra 

note 28. 

74. Manning, The Technology of Policing, supra 

note 71, at 262. 

75. See, e.g., Lawrence W. Sherman, Ideas in 

American Policing: Evidence-Based Policing (1998). 

76. Id. at 4. Evidence-based policing, in turn, can 

be understood as one part of what others have 

called “problem-oriented policing”: an approach 

to policing that values innovation, eclecticism and 

fitting police tactics to the problem at hand. See, 

e.g., Herman Goldstein, Problem-Oriented Policing 

(1990); Weisburd & Eck, supra note 26, at 46. 

77. Cf., e.g., Carte & Carte, supra note 2, at 114 (suggesting that “[t]he more basic problems within the 

professional model emerged when it ceased being 

an unarticulated approach for reform and became 

a rigid ideology”) (emphasis in original). 

78. See, e.g., Sklansky, Police and Democracy, supra 

note 2, at 82–84. 

79. Stone & Travis, supra note 29, at 1. 

80. See, e.g., Navigating Your Agency’s Path, supra 

note 12, at 3; Bratton et al., supra note 22, at 2. 

81. O.W. Wilson, Police Administration (1950), supra 

note 27, at 58–59 (emphasis in original). 

82. Id. at 82. 

83. Id. at 91. 

84. Id. at 420. 

85. Id. at 388–91; see also O.W. Wilson, Police 

Administration (2d ed. 1963), supra note 27, at 

182–85. 

86. Wilson & McLaren, supra note at 27, at 217. 

87. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, National Inst. of Justice, 

Perspectives in Policing No. 5, Debating the 

Evolution of American Policing 5 (Francis X. 

Hartmann ed., Nov. 1988) (quoting remarks of Mark 

Moore). 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism | 19 

88. Stone & Travis, supra note 29, at 10–11. 

89. Kerlikowske, supra note 44, at 6. He attributed 

the diagnosis to Michael Shanahan, then Chief of 

Police at the University of Washington. 

90. Id. at 9. 

91. If not necessarily to the mid-20th-century 

version of police professionalism. See supra 

notes 37–38 and accompanying text. 

92. See Stone & Travis, supra note 29, at 2. 

93. For contrasting views on the nature and 

the merits of professionalism writ broadly, 

see, e.g., Margali Sarfatti Larson, The Rise 

of Professionalism (1977); Kevin T. Leicht & 

Mary L. Fennell, Professional Work 25–43 

(2001); Julia Evetts, The Sociological Analysis 

of Professionalism: Occupational Change in the 

Modern World, 18 Int’l Soc. 395 (2003). 

Author Note 

David Alan Sklansky is Yosef Osheawich Professor 

of Law, University of California, Berkeley. I thank 

Anthony Braga, Edward Davis, Ronald Davis, 

Thomas Feucht, Aziz Huq, Tracey Meares, John 

Morgan, Melissa Murray, Malcolm Sparrow, 

Darryl Stephens, and members of the Harvard 

Kennedy School Executive Session on Policing 

and Public Safety for helpful comments and criticism, and Baillie Aaron and Quinn Rotchford for 

excellent research assistance. 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

U.S. Department of Justice 

Office of Justice Programs 

National Institute of Justice 

Washington, DC 20531 *NCJ~232676*

Official Business 

Penalty for Private Use $300 

presorted standard 

postage & fees paid 

doJ/niJ 

permit no. g –91 

Members of the Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety
 

Chief Anthony Batts, Oakland Police 

Department 

Professor David Bayley, Distinguished 

Professor, School of Criminal Justice, 

State University of New York at Albany 

Dr. Anthony Braga, Senior Research 

Associate, Lecturer in Public Policy, 

Program in Criminal Justice Policy and 

Management, Kennedy School of 

Government, Harvard University 

Chief William J. Bratton, Los Angeles 

Police Department 

Chief Ella Bully-Cummings, Detroit Police 

Department (retired) 

Ms. Christine Cole (Facilitator), Executive 

Director, Program in Criminal Justice Policy 

and Management, Kennedy School of 

Government, Harvard University 

Commissioner Edward Davis, Boston 

Police Department 

Chief Ronald Davis, East Palo Alto 

Police Department 

Chief Edward Flynn, Milwaukee 

Police Department 

Colonel Rick Fuentes, Superintendent, 

New Jersey State Police 

Chief George Gascón, San Francisco 

Police Department 

Mr. Gil Kerlikowske, Director, Office of 

National Drug Control Policy 

Chief Cathy Lanier, Washington, D.C. 

Metropolitan Police Department 

Dr. John H. Laub, Director, National 

Institute of Justice 

Ms. Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Visiting 

Scholar, New York University 

Professor Tracey Meares, Walton Hale 

Hamilton Professor of Law, Yale Law School 

Chief Constable Peter Neyroud, Chief 

Executive, National Policing Improvement 

Agency (U.K.) 

Ms. Christine Nixon, Chair, Victorian 

Bushfire Reconstruction and Recovery 

Authority (Australia) 

Chief Richard Pennington, Atlanta Police 

Department 

Mayor Jerry Sanders, City of San Diego 

Professor David Sklansky, Professor of 

Law, Faculty Co-Chair of the Berkeley Center 

for Criminal Justice, University of California, 

Berkeley, School of Law 

Mr. Sean Smoot, Director and Chief Legal 

Counsel, Police Benevolent and Protective 

Association of Illinois 

Professor Malcolm Sparrow, Professor of 

Practice of Public Management, Kennedy 

School of Government, Harvard University 

Chief Darrel Stephens, CharlotteMecklenburg Police Department (retired) 

Professor Christopher Stone, Guggenheim 

Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice, 

Kennedy School of Government, Harvard 

University 

Mr. Jeremy Travis, President, John Jay 

College of Criminal Justice 

Mr. Rick VanHouten, President, Fort Worth 

Police Association 

Professor David Weisburd, Walter E. Meyer 

Professor of Law and Criminal Justice; 

Director, Institute of Criminology, Faculty 

of Law, The Hebrew University; and 

Distinguished Professor, Department of 

Criminology, Law and Society, George 

Mason University 

Dr. Chuck Wexler, Executive Director, 

Police Executive Research Forum 

Learn more about the Executive Session at: 

NIJ’s website: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/topics/law-enforcement/executive-sessions/welcome.htm
 

Harvard’s website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/criminaljustice/executive_sessions/policing.htm
 

NCJ 232676