Seeing Blue: Police Reform, Occupational Culture, and Cognitive Burn-In

Abstract:     
For over half a century, police reform in the United States has been guided by a broadly shared set of assumptions about the nature of the police subculture and its central importance in shaping the behavior of the police. Those assumptions - that police officers think alike; that they are paranoid, insular, and intolerant; that they intransigently oppose change; that they must be rigidly controlled from the outside, or at least from the top - made a good deal of sense in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, but make less sense today. Nonetheless lawyers, scholars, and reformers still tend to think of the police rank-and-file as sharing a monolithic occupational mindset, and still tend to treat this mindset as the chief impediment to law enforcement that is fairer, more effective, and more humane. This view of the police makes it hard to see differences between officers, new complexities of police identity, and dynamic processes within the police workforce. It has led us to neglect some important avenues of reform, by diverting attention from the internal design of police departments, the differences between officers, and the possibility of giving rank-and-file officers a larger, collective role in the shaping of their work. It has diverted attention, too, from certain emerging challenges in policing, including the possibility that the recent, dramatic diversification of police workforces may be stalling, and the dangers posed the expansion of private policing and its characteristic culture of managerialism.

Keywords: police, criminal procedure, employment

Accepted Paper Series