DAVID H. BAYLEY, MICHAEL A. DAVIS, AND RONALD L. DAVIS

David H. Bayley (b. 1933) is a distinguished professor emeritus in the School of Criminal Justice at the State University of New York–Albany. Michael A. Davis is the chief law enforcement officer for Northeastern University in Boston. Ronald L. Davis (b. 1964) was appointed by U.S. attorney general Eric Holder in November 2013 as the director of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Together, they co-authored this report for the Executive Session on Policy and Public Safety at the Harvard Kennedy School, Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. The article was published in June 2015.

Race and Policing: An Agenda for Action

American police confront issues of race, daily, in almost everything they do. They confront race in the geographic distribution of criminality and the fear of crime as well as in assumptions about what criminals look like. They confront race in the suspicion and hostility of many young African American men they encounter on the street. They confront race in complaints from ethnic communities about being either over- or under-policed. They confront race in charges of racial profiling and unequal justice. And they confront race in decisions about hiring, promoting and assigning police officers. In short, race remains an “American dilemma,” as Gunnar Myrdal famously observed in 1944 (Myrdal, 1944), especially and inescapably for today’s police.

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The importance of race in policing has been demonstrated in discussions held since 2008 at the Second Executive Session on Policing and Public Safety at Harvard University. At almost every session, race emerged as a troubling preoccupation for police executives. Although many suggestions for dealing with the issue were discussed, the Executive Session did not try to formulate policies to deal with the various issues involving race. Concern about race seemed to become stalled in discussion rather than advancing to action. So, the authors of this article suggested to the Session members that we try to cull an agenda for action from the years of frank, insightful and sometimes passionate conversation. The Session readily agreed. These are the ideas we think are most promising in terms of what police executives might do to alleviate the problems of race in contemporary policing. They reflect what we have learned that might help the most. We alone are responsible for the contents of this agenda.

Readers should also understand that the agenda consists of suggestions, not directions. Although some of these ideas have been tried, few, if any, have been evaluated. Furthermore, many of them are controversial. We include them nonetheless in order to provoke thought, often explicitly acknowledging their shortcomings. We hope that this agenda will move discussions about race from anger and yearning to concrete action by police leaders, and beyond. This is also not a “scholarly” paper that cites and explores all the writing that has been done on the activities suggested. That is beyond our ability. Therefore, before following any of our leads, readers should do their homework. Others, often more experienced than we, have thought about these issues before.

The agenda is organized into two parts — Strategic Voice and Tactical Agency. Strategic Voice argues that problems of race in policing cannot be resolved by the police alone. Other people must help by understanding and ameliorating the social conditions that cause race to be associated with crime and hence become a dilemma for American policing. Rather than accepting these conditions as givens, police leaders with their powerful collective voice should actively call attention to what needs to be changed.

5 Tactical Agency outlines what the police can do on their own initiative to deal with the operational dilemmas of race — in the communities they serve and in their own organizations.

STRATEGIC VOICE

We believe there are two messages that police leaders must find the voice to deliver: (1) Police need to be supported by policies that address conditions causing criminality and disorder to be concentrated in particular places, especially in communities of color; and (2) police strategies must expand freedom and justice, not just provide safety.

Strategic Voice One

Police officers know, through hard-won experience, that crime is not randomly distributed in society. It is concentrated in particular places. Any good cop can drive immediately to the neighborhoods where crimes rates are the highest and 911 calls are most common. Most of the rest of their jurisdictions are virtually free of reported crime.

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The problem is that the highest rates of violent crime are in minority neighborhoods — those where African Americans, Latinos and new immigrants live. This creates the impression that race or ethnicity is implicated in criminality and that serious crime in America is particularly a “black problem” (Braga and Brunson, 2015). However, this reasoning gets the causality backward. Race does not generate criminality but, rather, the circumstances that create compacted disadvantage for minority groups also create criminality. As the police who work in minority communities know, people of color are no more tolerant of crime and disorder than others. It also obscures the fact that minority people are more likely than the majority of white people to be victims of crime.

Police also know that their ability to reduce crime where it matters most, as in disadvantaged neighborhoods, is limited through both reactive law enforcement and proactive crime prevention programs. This is not to say that the police cannot do anything, although it is generally agreed that deterrence alone will not reduce crime for people most at risk from it. Police officers are often frustrated by what little they can achieve as they respond over and over to the same problems among the same people in the same places. They feel that they are only “a band-aid on a cancer.”

10 So, our first recommendation is that police leaders call attention publicly to the conditions of economic and social disadvantage that generate crime and disorder and undermine the ability of communities to protect themselves. They should speak loudly about the connections they see in their own experience between serious crime and conditions of unemployment, poverty, truancy, education attrition, teen pregnancy, housing segregation, inadequate health care, crowded and unsanitary housing, homelessness, underfinanced public services, and a lack of civic amenities such as parks, public transportation and street lighting. They should say publicly, out loud, as one commentator said almost 40 years ago, that police can only “perform a holding operation until other institutions attack such problems with an array of resources” (Robinson, 1975: 278).

Of course, it is one thing to be critical of, even outraged by, persistent, self-perpetuating conditions associated with high crime rates. It is another to frame policies that will successfully remedy them. Doing this will take the finest minds the country has. All we can do is suggest the sorts of policy changes that should be considered:

Strategic Voice One may be sensible and righteous, but it poses risks for police. It puts them squarely into politics by challenging the policy shortcomings of the very governments that hired them. Furthermore, these brave words undermine what police chiefs promise and what the public expects from the police — safety represented by effective crime control. They challenge the very raison d’etre of police. Although social policies undoubtedly contribute to crime, the police have been created precisely to minimize their effects.

Strategic Voice One is also out of sync with American public opinion about structural inequality, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll in June 2013 (Blow, 2013). Asked to explain poverty in the U.S., most people (24 percent) blamed the individuals themselves, especially citing receipt of welfare that eroded individual initiative. Only 4 percent blamed “lack of government money.” They did implicate unemployment (18 percent) and poor schooling (13 percent), although one wonders where they thought the remedies would come from, if not from government. The article concludes that “the stereotypes of poor people in the United States are among the most negative prejudices that we have. . . . It seems like Washington is a place without pity right now” (Blow, 2013). That these uncharitable views may be laced with racism goes without saying.

Scholars, too, have been complicit in fostering doubts about the efficacy of structural interventions. In his 1975 book, Thinking about Crime, James Q. Wilson argued that government was ill-equipped to remedy the root causes of crime, even if they could be identified with certainty (Wilson, 1975). He believed that public policy should focus on changing the incentives for crime by increasing the risk to offenders and lowering the relative rewards. Criminology in the following years seemed to follow his lead, focusing more on exploring factors that facilitated criminality (such as “routine activity theory,” Cohen and Felson, 1979) or changing criminal trajectories of individuals than on macrosocial correlates (Sampson, 2012). Advocates for structural reform have been very few (Currie, 2010). Intellectual predispositions, it would seem, may shape scholarship just as ideology does politics.

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15 Asking police leaders to speak with Strategic Voice One is asking a lot. It requires them to articulate a larger vision of the social forces and structural factors linked to crime, even as they direct the everyday efforts of their police officers to address specific incidents of crime. As one member of the Executive Session said, “I feel like if we are going to be the canaries in the coal mine about this issue [race] from a macro level, we are going to really injure our ability to do any good at the micro level.”

Strategic Voice Two

The primary purpose for which police have been created is to safeguard life and property. This should continue to be their operational focus because public safety is not only a human right; it is fundamental to any constructive social activity, including the kind of community reconstruction suggested by Strategic Voice One. Implementing this purpose is more complex in the United States, however, because public safety must be created in a particularly demanding way, namely, within a rule of law that protects individuals from unjustified intrusions of governmental power. American policing is not just about crime fighting; it involves enhancing human freedom at the same time. Policing in America has two goals, both equally important (Manning, 2011).

Accordingly, we recommend that police leaders explain, publicly and repeatedly, what is involved in combining effective law enforcement with liberty. It begins with finding the voice to criticize criminal justice policies that produce high rates of black male incarceration, perceptions of racial profiling, unequal enforcement of drug laws, and justice outcomes affected by race and class.

But it goes farther. It requires police, through word and deed, to obtain the public’s consent for their actions. Policing with consent is an old theme in the democratic police tradition. Sir Robert Peel, considered the founding father of modern Anglo-American policing (1829), is credited with formulating nine principles of policing, three of which involve policing with communities (CIVITAS, 2014):

These principles became meaningful at first through the encouragement of the public to contact police directly whenever something is wrong that needs authoritative intervention, such as the commission of crime. Operationally, this became the 911 dispatch system developed during the 20th century. The importance of public input in creating the police agenda was reaffirmed by the First Executive Session on Police and Public Safety, 1986–1992, but with a new wrinkle. Rather than having police work defined by individuals as well as the police themselves, the First Session stressed the importance of police consulting with, as well as mobilizing, communities with common interests. This was called community policing. Two of the recommendations were to create neighborhood advisory boards and for police officers to conduct periodic visits to individual homes and businesses. In effect, community policing introduced a new level of social organization into policing by consent — groups of individuals organized by interest and / or geography.

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20 Together, 911 and community policing empowered the public to shape what police do through individual and neighborhood instigation. Through them, policing by consent became radically democratized. It shifted the authority for determining what police do away from formal government, represented by the police, and directly to the public. As a result, police in the United States and in other democratic countries became more than agents of government. They became the citizens’ police (Bayley, 1985). “Consent” in democratic countries means more than acceptance by the public of what the police are doing; it also means the ability to shape that activity directly through personal contact. This represents a radical change in the relation of security institutions to the public — one that has become the distinguishing characteristic of democratic policing. Policing by consent, in this sense, exists in only a handful of countries worldwide.

Policing with consent has another dimension, one more recently discovered: namely, how the police act in their encounters with the public. Beginning in the early 1990s, Professor Tom Tyler showed that when people are treated by the police in ways they regard as respectful and fair, they are less likely to resist and more likely to conform to what the law requires (Tyler, 2006). Robert Peel, in fact, made much the same point in one of his nine principles of policing (CIVITAS, 2014):

[Police should] seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion[,] but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws[;] by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing[;] by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humour; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.

Tyler’s research moved significantly beyond Peel’s generalities by showing that police behavior, both in attitude and procedure, could improve law enforcement outcomes even with people who have violated the law. “Procedural justice,” as he calls it, undercuts a common belief among police that authority has to be visibly demonstrated to actual and potential lawbreakers and that adhering to technicalities of legal procedure undermines deterrence. Procedural justice challenges the mindset that there are tradeoffs between effectiveness in controlling crime and observance of civil rights guaranteed by the Constitution.

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Giving voice to policing by consent is probably less controversial than the social reforms of Strategic Voice One. Priorities in police work and the behavior of officers are ongoing topics of conversation within contemporary police agencies, well within the “police line of work.” Moreover, police officers understand from their own experience the importance of having the public “on their side.” Exercising “discretion” in applying the law is an accepted part of police professionalism. Police officers know that different folks need different strokes. The crucial question is, which folks?

At the same time, some of the issues embedded in policing with consent are controversial among police, and discussing them in public is not something they may be comfortable doing.

Responding to calls for service in a timely manner, for example, is enormously popular with the public and politicians alike. It is costly, however, and may divert resources that might be more effectively employed in proactive crime prevention. Some of the popular new strategies, such as predictive and hot spots policing, depend on analyses done by headquarters staff, not input from the public. Police may also know better, in some cases, about how to deal with particular forms of crime. Furthermore, police are increasingly expected to address not just crimes that affect individuals (street crime) but also crimes that affect the society as a whole, such as terrorism, drug markets, human trafficking and violent youth gangs. Within this crowded agenda, encouraging and facilitating direct public input may seem a luxury from a bygone age (Bayley and Nixon, 2010).

25 So, too, with procedural justice. Many police officers believe that respect comes from a display of authority. They believe that they are the best judges of people who are deserving of soft or hard treatment, and they resent having their decisions challenged. The public, too, is ambivalent about procedural justice. Many people believe strongly in being “tough on crime” and not “coddling criminals,” and they are willing to excuse intrusive and punitive policing when they fear the crime is close at hand.

Selling procedural justice will be much easier in the abstract than in the particular. In areas experiencing high levels of violence, police and the public may doubt that procedural justice will gain enough consent, especially from troublemakers, to improve safety significantly. Perhaps in those situations, consent is more likely to come from being “tough on crime” rather than from procedural justice (Tankebe, 2009). Issues like these are being explored and tested in a departmentwide training program developed by the Chicago Police Department in 2011. It has already been given to over 3,000 employees (Meares and Neyroud, 2015).

Finally, supporting policing by consent involves taking a stand on another development that is very controversial among police, namely, civilian review. In the U.S., racial minorities have repeatedly criticized the willingness of police agencies to investigate themselves. Their consent to be policed turns, to a considerable degree, on whether they believe police are being held to account. Civilian review is supposed to provide that assurance. Civilian review panels have been used to evaluate both the crime-control effectiveness of the police and the behavior of police in carrying out assigned duties.

The questions for American police are not “whether” to allow civilian review but, instead, “when” and “how.” More than 100 American cities have already developed some form of it. All Canadian provinces and all Australian states have; so, too, has Great Britain (Stenning, 2011; Walker, 2010). Civilian review is being advocated by both the United Nations and the U.S. government as fundamental to police reform in countries emerging from civil strife. For many people in democratic countries, civilian review is essential for ensuring that police are practicing procedural justice.

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What is often not recognized in debates about civilian review is that it is not unidimensional. It varies from place to place in membership, powers and ambit of oversight. Some civilian review boards, for example, only evaluate the rigor with which the police receive, investigate and discipline allegations of misbehavior and then publish the results. Others have the power to oversee particular investigations and provide advice about them. Still others completely remove investigations and the determination of sanctions from police authority. Being either in favor or opposed to civilian review in principle is naive — especially when one considers that, in democratic countries, civilian review already occurs by elected officials, courts and the media. “Civilian review” may be new, but review by civilians is not.

30 In sum, speaking with Strategic Voice Two is easy to do in normative generalities. It fits America’s democratic heritage. The difficulty comes in convincing police officers and the public that policing with consent improves the effectiveness of crime control. Scholars and many police officers believe that it does. Strategic Voice Two requires police leaders to participate in a public discussion about the importance of policing with consent in achieving public safety. In particular, it challenges them to discuss openly whether small encroachments on civil rights enhance public safety or, at the very least, to explain when exceptions are justified.

TACTICAL AGENCY

Police may do important things to address the dilemmas of race in policing without waiting for outside support in the form of either additional resources or progressive social policies. Indeed, many departments have courageously accepted the need to confront issues of race, instituting new programs and revising customary ways of doing business. We provide references to some active programs (see “References”). However, given the number and variety of American police agencies, the implementation of such actions has been uneven. To encourage and assist in reform, we make the following suggestions, drawing on the growing experience of police themselves and on the research by scholars. Our suggestions are divided into two parts — engaging the community and managing police agencies.

Engaging the Community

Managing the Organization

Police organizations are themselves microcosms of the community they serve, where larger societal issues have very real implications for running an effective organization. In order to make progress externally, the police need to improve race relations internally.

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CONCLUSION

The purpose of this article has been to move the discussion about the dilemmas of race in policing from talk to action. Although we think these actions will help to ease tensions at the intersection of policing and race, race will remain difficult to talk about. However, at some point in the career of every senior officer, the need to do so will almost inevitably arise. It will occur when a white officer shoots a black man, when police of any color arrest distraught minority women amid a jeering crowd, and when crime-control activities in high-crime neighborhoods weigh more heavily on minority people. In situations like these, race becomes “the third rail” in discussions between police leaders and their communities, leading to an angry disconnect. Because of its sensitivity, therefore, police leaders should think carefully about what they should say when race-infused events occur.

The key is for police leaders to remember that they are not trying to change the minds of the people who are either irretrievably bigoted or already open-minded. Some people are attuned to expect prejudice in all dealings with the police, others reflexively defend the police and discount charges of unequal treatment, and still others wave the “bloody flag” of race for their own purposes. The target audience is not these, but the vast majority who know little about either policing or race. For these people, the discussion needs to move away from charge and countercharge to an understanding of what police work requires and what minority status compels with regard to treatment.

If approached with forethought and no small amount of courage, controversial race-implicated events should be seen as opportunities to develop new understandings and not just as inevitable public relations disasters. Police officials should not speak hastily before they have basic facts about what occurred. And they must be willing to “let the chips fall where they may” if mistakes, individual or organizational, have been made. This requires police leaders to do a tricky two-step — reassuring their officers that there will be no rush to judgment while convincing minority communities that justice will be done.

Police officials should use these occasions to point out that confrontations between police and minorities do not arise primarily out of differences in values. Minority individuals, except for a few unredeemable criminals, want safety and order as much as the majority of people. Sadly, however, many minority individuals have been raised within a structure that limits their ability to have stable families, obtain necessary education, and be gainfully employed. Their culture is not at fault, but the circumstances into which they were born are.

50 On the other hand, most police officers are not prejudiced against minorities, although some are. Most act according to inherited understandings that focus enforcement attention on minority people, especially young males. Police officers are required to prevent crime by acting on suspicion within a society where many people, white as well as black, identify young, black males as likely threats and stereotype them as criminals.

Developing this kind of empathic voice in contemporary policing is a tall order. But words can shape events, creating new and more positive directions as scenarios unfold. In particular, they can diminish the perception that race is the sole or primary issue affecting police-minority relations.

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REFERENCES

Bayley, David H. 1985. Patterns of Policing: A Comparative International Analysis. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press.

Bayley, David H., and Christine Nixon. 2010. The Changing Environment for Policing, 1985–2008. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Kennedy School.

Bayley, David H., and Jerome H. Skolnick. 1988. Community Policing: Issues and Practices Around the World. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice.

Blow, Charles M. “A Town Without Pity,” The New York Times, Aug. 10, 2013, A19. Report of NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, June 2013.

Braga, Anthony, and Rod K. Brunson. 2015. The Police and Public Discourse on “Black-on-Black” Violence. New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice. NCJ 248588.

CIVITAS (The Institute for the Study of Civil Society). 2014. The Nine Principles of Policing. Based on “General Instructions” to British Metropolitan Police, 1829, by Sir Robert Peel, and republished 1956 as appendix in A New Study of Police History, by Charles Reith (London: Oliver and Boyd). www.civitas.org.uk/pubs/policeNine.php.

Cohen, Lawrence E., and Marcus K. Felson. 1979. Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review 44: 588–608. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2094589

Currie, Elliott. 2010. “On Being Right, but Unhappy.” Criminology and Public Policy 9(1): 1–10. (Vollmer Award Address, American Society of Criminology, 2009.)

Fridell, Laurie, Bob Lunney, Drew Diamond and Bruce Kobe. 2001. Racial Profiling — A Principled Response. Washington, D.C.: Police Executive Research Forum.

Kennedy, David. 2011. Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America. New York: Bloomsbury.

Maguire, Edward R., Joseph B. Kuhns, Craig D. Uchida and Stephen M. Cox. 1997. “Patterns of Community Policing in Nonurban America.” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency 34 (3): 368–394.

Manning, Peter K. 2011. Democratic Policing in a Changing World. Boulder, Colorado: Paradigm Publishers.

Meares, Tracey L., with Peter Neyroud. 2015. Rightful Policing. New Perspectives in Policing Bulletin. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of Justice. National Institute of Justice. NCJ 248411.

Myrdal, Gunnar. 1944. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper & Bros.

Robinson, Cyril D. 1975. “The Mayor and the Police — the Political Role of the Police in Society,” in George L. Mosse (ed.), Police Forces in History, vol. 2. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications.

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stenning, Phillip. 2011. “Governance of the Police: Independence, Accountability and Interference.” Flinders Law Journal 13 (2): 241–267.

Tankebe, P.J. 2009. “Public Cooperation with the Police in Ghana: Does Procedural Fairness Matter?” Criminology 47 (4): 1265–1294.

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Tyler, Tom R. 2006. Why People Obey the Law. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Walker, Sam. 2010. “Police Accountability and the Central Problem of American Criminal Justice,” in Candace McCoy (ed.), Holding Police Accountable. Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute.

Wilson, James Q. 1975. Thinking About Crime. New York: Basic Books.