An excerpt from the preface
Observations on the Study of Police Accountability
Candace McCoy
Police accountability is out of style. It was once a major concern, generally regarded as a primary spur for systematic police reform efforts of the 1960s and 1970s.1 Back then, “police accountability” was a codeword for the drive to bring state and local police procedures and practices into conformity with the U.S. Constitution, not only in such areas as searches and seizures or interrogations but in efforts to change a police subculture that was too often racist, violent, and dismissive of due process (Skolnick 1966). A herculean program of social change involving hotly contested cases from the U.S. Supreme Court and painful confrontations between police officials and citizens’ groups ripened into shared agreement that some reform was necessary.
Eventually, a “professional model” of policing emerged and supplanted the old-style traditional “watchman” model. (Wilson [1968] coined these terms; see Walker [1977] for this history.) Accountability was universally understood to be an essential component of such police professionalism, and the term was assumed to mean “held to standards of law and internal departmental rules written in compliance with that law.” An officer held accountable would be asked to “account” for his or her actions to determine whether they fit with established police department rules—rules that were themselves “held accountable” to the law (Murphy 1975). The buzzword “oversight” shares much of its meaning with the term “accountability,” and it is currently in vogue as part of, or even as an alternative to, “regulation” (in hot debates about the unregulated excesses of Wall Street investment firms and lack of appropriate oversight in the subprime mortgage industry). But accountability is broader than oversight or regulation. It encompasses not only scrutiny by outside agencies but ethical vigilance from within the organization itself. Ultimately, it means that the organization must comply with the rule of law.
Perhaps the very success of the professionalism model slowly eroded concerns about police accountability. Because there was a serious and important movement to modernize and professionalize American police and because accountability was a part of that movement, reformers assumed that accountability would improve as professionalism proceeded. In the 1960s and 1970s, reformers focused on discovering police illegality, and professionalism insisted on implementing rules and guidelines to eradicate it. Once local police practices followed the law, reformers assumed that accountability would naturally be achieved. In turn, police scholarship would move on to new research challenges.
Mostly, that is indeed what happened. Professionalism changed American policing in fundamental ways, and police managers and officers today are more attuned to the requirements of law and ethics than they were prior to the 1970s. But it is possible that, precisely because the professionalism movement mostly succeeded in shaking police out of traditional practices and procedures, complacency about accountability to the law could set in—after all, the problem had been “dealt with.” When serious legality problems arose in new ways in the 1990s—racial profiling, wrongful convictions, brutality by rogue police units—it became clear that accountability had not, in fact, been “dealt with” entirely successfully.
Police reformers and scholars missed an important factor in their studies of accountability: political environments outside the police department can influence police policies, and these in turn produce actions that violate the law. (The influence of the federal government’s “Operation Pipeline” on the New Jersey State Police, and subsequent racial profiling scandals, springs to mind.) How can there be accountability to the law when outside directives to the police, or expectations of the police, are antithetical to legal norms?
In the 1990s, concern about police illegality that was the result of outside political pressure played itself out on the front pages of newspapers more than in scholarly research, although there was some important scholarship about racial profiling (see, for example, Harris 1997 and 1999; Zingraff et al. 2000; see also Holmes and Smith 2008, arguing that police brutality against minorities will be reduced not by police organizational change but by wider social intergroup conflict reduction). The scandals were disheartening to advocates of police professionalism and the social science researchers who study the police—partly, perhaps, because they had hoped that the accountability measures set into place in the 1980s would have prevented such widespread phenomena as racial profiling and wrongful convictions. But wrongful convictions, for example, are scarcely attributable solely to the police. Trial courts themselves, those bastions of “lawfulness,” are ultimately responsible and present an example of the wider organizational environment that permits police to act irresponsibly. Police misconduct arises from factors outside the police organization as much as within it, and researchers should approach the problem of accountability anew, with an eye on this different source of misconduct.
But there has been no renewed wave of scholarship on police accountability to the law. Why are so few researchers studying the conditions that gave rise to the accountability scandals of the 1990s and 2000s? Why is accountability to the law not more of an issue in contemporary evaluations of such innovations as community or problem-oriented policing? One way to understand the development of American police practices and scholarship about them, to explain why some topics have been deeply studied while others lie fallow, is to look at police scholarship over time as intellectual history. What ideas, theories, and research about police have been most prominent over the past half century, and how have they changed?
Police use of deadly force and the development of problem-oriented policing are two such ideas. Scholarship about the police responds to changes in policing, of course, but sometimes research has helped initiate those changes, which is the case with these two topics. The chapters in this book continually refer to research on police use of force, both deadly and nondeadly, because such research first developed the template for studying police accountability. This scholarship first blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s in the context of studies on controlling police discretion to use force. Indeed,Sam Walker's excellent introductory chapter sets this topic into the broader history of the "central problem" in criminal justice organizations generally: how much discretion the law and policy should provide for each criminal justice decisionmaker, and how that discretion should be structured and controlled. Police discretion and accountability to the law ans police mission "to protect life" is but one of many examples of the need to structure justice officials' decisions.
Another reason this book continually refers to previous research on deadly force is that it grew out of a conference celebrating the scholarly legacy of James Fyfe, known to his jocular contemporaries as “Doctor Deadly Force.” Fyfe’s 1977 doctoral dissertation examined the effect of a policy the New York Police Department adopted that allowed officers to shoot a fleeing felon only if the suspect presented significant danger to the officer or bystanders (Fyfe 1978). (At the time, most states permitted such shooting.) Fyfe showed that, after adopting the policy, deaths of suspects dropped significantly but crime rates were unaffected, and he concluded that meaningful change in police operations could be achieved from within, through administrative controls, if administrators were attuned to broader social, legal, and ethical standards. In a lifetime of writing, teaching, and expert witnessing, Fyfe’s was the preeminent voice of the police officer–scholar, explaining how accountability to the primary police mission “to protect life” could be achieved.2
NOTES
1. See the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), which spawned the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration.
2. The term is taken from the New York Police Department’s Patrol Guide, which is a detailed statement of proper procedures for patrol officers to follow when encountering a wide variety of situations. For instance, in the section on “aided cases,” standard operating procedure for responding to a mentally ill or emotionally disturbed person is spelled out. The section begins by stating, “The primary duty of all members of the service is to preserve human life. The safety of all persons involved is paramount” (New York City Police Department, procedure No. 216-05, effective January 1, 2000). Similar statements to the effect that “the primary purpose of the police is to protect life” (including the officers’ lives) are found throughout the patrol guide and NYPD regulations. Fyfe often mentioned while testifying in court or talking to criminal justice officials that he first concentrated on that phrase and realized its implications while studying for the sergeant’s exam in 1975.
REFERENCES
Fyfe, James J. 1978. "Shots Fired: An Analysis of New York City Police Firearms Discharge." Ph.D. diss., State University of New York at Albany. Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms.
Holmes, Malcolm D., and Brad W. Smith. 2008. Race and Police Brutality: Roots of an Urban Dilemma. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Murphy, Patrick V. 1975. "Police Accountability." In Readings on Police Productivity, edited by Joan L. Wolfle and John F. Heaphy (35–46). Washington, DC: Police Foundation.
President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. 1967. The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office.
Skolnick, Jerome H. 1966. Justice Without Trial. New York: John Wiley and Sons.
Walker, Samuel. 1977. A Critical History of Police Reform: The Emergence of Professionalism. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.
Wilson, James Q. 1968. Varieties of Police Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zingraff, Matthew T., Marcinda Mason, William R. Smith, Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, Harvey L. McMurray, and C. Robert Fenlon. 2000. Evaluating North Carolina State Highway Patrol Data: Citations, Warnings, and Searches in 1998. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Crime Control and Public Safety.
