Improving Police Accountability in Law Enforcement

¶ … law enforcement agents do better?

The key to improving the efficacy of law enforcement agents is changing the organizational culture to one built on accountability. Walker and Archibold offer a new and potentially revolutionary framework for police accountability. The new vision for law enforcement centers on the PTSR model, in which policy, training, supervision, and review are the core parts of organizational change. The current organizational culture of law enforcement has several dysfunctional features, values, and norms. Viewing police culture from anthropological and sociological perspectives, as Kappeler, Sluder and Alpert suggest, shows how norms, values, structures, and institutions create dysfunction, misbehavior, and corruption. Problems like excessive use of force and abuse of power can only be controlled through systematic changes in the organizational culture of policing.

Changing organizational culture requires more than just altering departmental policies and procedural guidelines. After all, most departments will have codes of ethics and guidelines that reflect an idealized set of values. In practice, though, there are two distinct cultures within policing: the legitimate one projected in official literature like codes of ethics, and the tacit culture that is more implicitly conveyed through police culture socialization. Officers at an early stage in their training and careers are socialized into the police subculture, which perpetuates the dysfunctional behavioral habits and traits that lead to problems like abuse of power and excessive force.

Current police subculture includes values such as protecting other officers even when they do wrong or violate organizational policy. Even superior officers are socialized to protect those under them rather than intervene or use discipline. A new model for police accountability depends on supervisors and others in positions of leadership to change their behaviors to be more in accordance with organizational goals. Supervisors should no longer protect themselves and their officers from reprimand, and should encourage officers to inform on each other when the misbehavior is grave, serious, and has tangible consequences. Similarly, Walker and Archibold recommend a revised system of disciplining bad behavior, whereby punishment is eschewed in favor of an "early intervention system." An early intervention system comprises processes that are far less threatening and therefore far more effective than confrontational or punitive punishments that "do not necessarily result in better conduct by the officer," and which "only create resentment and ... reinforce negative attitudes on the part of the officer," (Walker and Archibold 24). Early intervention also engages officer training, calling upon training to be more standardized and professionalized, as well as capable of weeding out "bad seeds" before they become problematic additions to any police agency. An early intervention model identifies problem behavior and provides the immediate and appropriate interventions to stop that behavior, including social sanction and formal education. Education-based models aim to change behaviors among officers, with the ultimate goal of changing organizational culture.

Today's law enforcement agents can also improve their performance by welcoming processes of assessment like critical incident review, external reviews, and internal reviews (Walker and Archibold). Ongoing methods like these are used to improve organizational and officer accountability over the long haul, rather than offering temporary solutions. Police organizations have the potential to become "learning organizations," which are proactive and willing to change (Walker and Archibold).

In addition to the ethos of silence or protecting fellow officers, current dysfunctional police culture tends to encourage a false sense of bravery as well as exaggerated autonomy (Kappeler, Sluder and Alpert). The ethos of bravery can be a potentially valuable trait to engender in law enforcement, but it can also be dysfunctional, as when officers use peer pressure to encourage use of force due to an ethos of bravery. Likewise, viewing the civilian as a natural threat and creating antagonism between citizens and law enforcement is another dysfunctional interpretation of the ethos of bravery. An ethos of autonomy is also present in current, dysfunctional police subculture. The principle of autonomy causes law enforcement leaders to place undue amounts of discretion to police officers. Police leaders and supervisors therefore deny responsibility and accountability, which creates poor models of leadership. Ensuring accountability through improved training, officer supervision, and ongoing assessment and review will create organizational change, by making sure that leaders take responsibility for the actions of their officers and ensuring also that officers are responsible for their own actions and others on their team.

Another dysfunctional aspect of police culture is the ethos of authoritarianism. Kappeler, Sluder and Alpert cite research showing that officers learn authoritarian behaviors through a process of socialization from the time they are in training to the time they are fully-fledged members of the force. These processes of socialization are no different from the ways children are socialized in to their cultures. Police do not start being "cynical, hard, and conservative," but exhibit these types of traits and behaviors because of a process of social learning (87). Features of police subculture therefore facilitate deviance, and the only way to prevent deviance is to change police culture.

One specific and pragmatic way of improving officer accountability is through the use of body-worn cameras. Body-worn cameras record incidents as they happen from the officer's perspective, and the documentary evidence can be used to either corroborate or refute what an officer states in an official report. The documentary evidence prevents problems associated with the "silence" code that many officers use to protect each other from reprimand or legal action. With the cameras recording incidents, officers are prevented from lying. The goal would be to prevent problems before they occur because many officers will change their behaviors when knowing they are being recorded. The cameras can also help reduce preventable problems like lawsuits against departments. Miller and Tolivier cite emerging literature showing that when body-worn cameras are "implemented correctly," they can in fact "strengthen the policing profession" by increasing transparency, accountability, and professionalism (50).