How to Improve Policing Argumentative Essay

Beyond Police Oversight

Oversight by external agencies has been posited as one of the best means of improving the standard of policing in America. In recent years, issues with many police departments have come to the fore, in particular the treatment of minorities by police departments. Issues identified include a lack of consistent training, either on ethics or on operations, that allows bad police to continue to operate, to the detriment of the people whom they are serving, and to the detriment of the reputation of police officers across the country. Scholars have sought to examine the sometimes vague, but broad-based issues faced by police departments in ensuring a high standard of quality, looking at issues of recruitment, training and motivation, all of which go far beyond what external oversight boards can offer. If one is seeking to improve the quality of policing, then it should be understood that the problem itself is ill-defined, and the solutions poorly-understood. As such, an oversight board would be hard pressed to achieve meaningful change. To achieve change requires understanding the issues, and dealing with them on many different levels, from structural, to leadership, to transactional. To improve policing in the United States, it is essential to move beyond the idea of external oversight, a panacea wholly incapable of addressing the myriad issues that face police departments in America today.

Training is one of the most important ways that policing can be improved. Evidence-based training can be implemented in a systematic way to the benefit of overall policing quality. For example, it has been shown necessary to specifically train to eliminate racial bias in assessing danger -- without specific training in that regard, bias will not be eliminated (Sim et al., 2013). There have been calls for a national training standard to be established, which would assist police forces in ensuring that a minimum standard of officer competency is established. This would be especially helpful for smaller forces that do not have the resources to run their own comprehensive training programs, because institutes can be established to train officers to a national code, if one exists. Even larger centers would benefit because there would be a consistent standard established. This would provide the opportunity for oversight. While it is true that oversight alone is not sufficient to improve the quality of policing, the antecedents of a good oversight program, such as national training and performance standards, would contribute to a higher quality of policing.

The same can be said for recruiting, though it may be more difficult for smaller forces to enforce national standards. One model that could be implemented to deal with the problem of recruitment for smaller forces is something like the RCMP in Canada, a nation-level police force, or a state-wide equivalent. Major Canadian cities, and many smaller ones, have their own police forces, but smaller centers and rural areas are typically served by the RCMP, or a provincial-level equivalent such as the Ontario Provincial Police. The variances that exist in policing quality in the United States could be reduced by having state-wide police forces, because both recruitment and training could be consistent by state, so that the quality of policing does not have the city-to-city variance that is often seen in the U.S. This alone will not address the problem, but it would put a structure in place that would promote higher standards for both recruitment and training. Currently, this structure is lacking, and that is why it is difficult to enforce any kind of consistency in American policing.

Another element in a plan to improve policing is to understand what effective policing looks like. In many instances, police forces have been left to establish their own ideas about what effective policing is and is not. The problem with this is that there is no particular consistency. People who are frustrated with policing can point to faulty administration, racial bias and other problems, but ultimately there is no consistent view of what good policing is, which makes the establishment of quality standards more difficult. Porter (2013) advocates a problem-based approach to understanding policing quality, by identifying what communities want from police forces and starting with the elimination of the problem areas. If we do not understand what the problems are, what use is oversight to enforce solutions?

It has to be noted that oversight does have a role to play. The establishment of a structure to promote standards and consistency is important, and oversight plays the enforcement role. Just as police cannot enforce laws without there being laws, oversight alone cannot effectively improve policing. Oversight without context will just end up a politicized body reacting to negative press and protest, rather than a body that seeks to build up the quality of policing in America from the ground up. Ultimately, there needs to be a structure in place to develop better police officers, better administrators and better rules, before there is much point to having a third party body to enforce quality standards. Oversight only works when there are meaningful standards, where police officers and forces have been able to understand and train to those standards, and where it is easy to determine if somebody has violated a standard. At present, none of those other structural elements are in place, and it would be nearly impossible to implement them given the current state of law enforcement organization.