SEEING BLUE: POLICE REFORM, OCCUPATIONAL CULTURE, AND COGNITIVE BURN-IN

David Alan Sklansky

University of California, Berkeley

[forthcoming in Police Occupational Culture: New Debates and Directions

(Megan O'Neill and Monique Marks eds., Elsevier Science Jan. 2007)]

Plasma televisions, like old-fashioned cathode-ray sets and first-generation

computer screens, are prone to a problem called "image burn-in." If a stationary picture
or graphical feature is shown for long enough, it can leave a permanent, ghostlike trace.
What happens is that the light-emitting phosphors coating the screen deteriorate over
time, and the speed of the process depends on how often each phosphor is triggered. So
if a particular image is displayed on the screen for an extended period, it leaves an
imprint, altering how later signals are processed.

Something similar happens with ideas. We view the world through schemas—
mental constructs that sort and organize experience (e.g., Blasi 1995). Schemas are
powerful conceptual tools. We need them in order to make sense of the blizzard of
information we face every day. But schemas used for too long without interruption can
become difficult to dislodge. A sort of cognitive burn-in can permanently alter our
perceptions. Paraphrasing Marcus Aurelius, we might say that the mind becomes dyed
with the color of its thoughts.

A story of cognitive burn-in has long been part of the received wisdom about the
police subculture. New recruits, the story goes, have a range of different outlooks. But
they quickly become assimilated into a powerful occupational culture with its own ways
of seeing, and they adopt those ways of seeing as their own. After a while it can be
difficult for them to see the world in any other way. Their minds are dyed blue. In the
words of one officer (Conlon 2004: 320), "[o]ver time and in the main, cops tend to think
like other cops."

I am interested here in a different kind of cognitive burn-in, also associated with

the police subculture—a cognitive burn-in not caused by that subculture but rather
consisting in ideas about it. 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—themselves constitute a schema.

First developed in the 1950s, this schema made sense of much of what lawyers
and social scientists were then beginning to learn about the police. Its explanatory power
grew in the 1960s, as the police felt themselves increasingly under siege. By the early
 SEEING BLUE

1970s this view of the police—call it the Police Subculture Schema—had achieved the
status of unquestioned orthodoxy. A process of cognitive burn-in was underway.

Much has changed in American policing since the early 1970s. Community
policing has replaced police professionalism as the taken-for-granted ideal of police
reformers and law enforcement administrators alike (e.g., Livingston 1997). Civilian
oversight, once resisted tooth-and-nail by the police, has become unexceptional (Walker
2001). The virtually all-white, virtually all-male departments of the 1950s and 1960s
have given way to departments with large numbers of female and minority officers, often
led by female or minority chiefs; openly gay and lesbian officers, too, are increasingly
commonplace (e.g., Sklansky 2006a). College educated officers are no longer a rarity;
increasingly they are the norm (Carter and Sapp 1990). Police solidarity has declined,
and with it police insularity; the profession is "less and less a fraternity" (Conlon 2004:
9). Police ethnographers find that the "unified occupied subculture" of policing is being
replaced by workforces marked by "segmentation and division" (Haar 1997: 66; see also,
e.g., National Research Council 2004: 80-82). Police benevolent associations look more
and more like other labor unions (Delaney and Feuille 1987), and increasingly they
compete for influence with identity-based caucuses of minority officers, female officers,
and gay and lesbian officers (Barlow and Barlow 2000: 235-41). The self-identity of
police officers is more complex and more varied today than forty years ago. Police
departments are marked by less consensus and more debate. Policing is not what it used
to be.

But legal regulation of the police and new efforts at police reform in the United
States continue to be shaped by the Police Subculture Schema. Partly this is a matter of
institutional inertia, and partly it is a matter of cognitive burn-in. 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
policing that is fairer, more effective, and more humane. The Police Subculture Schema
makes it hard to see differences between officers, new complexities of police identity,
and dynamic processes within the police workforce. When we look at the police, all we
see is blue.

My goals here are twofold: to trace the imprint that the Police Subculture Schema
has left on American police reform and the ongoing legal regulation of the police; and to
identify some of the opportunities and dangers that the schema has made it harder to
perceive. I will start by describing how the Police Subculture Schema helped to shape
the "criminal procedure revolution" of the 1960s and broader patterns of police reform. I
will then discuss important avenues of reform the schema may have led us to neglect.
These include questions of institutional design, insights to be gained by focusing on
differences between officers, and the possibility of giving rank-and-file officers a larger,
collective role in the shaping of their work. Finally I will address two problems the
schema has tended to make less visible. The first of these is the risk that diversification
of police departments may be stalling. The second is the set of challenges posed the
recent expansion of private policing and its characteristic culture of managerialism.

2
 SEEING BLUE

There is a real danger here of overstating. The Police Subculture Schema retains
explanatory power. Police officers still tend to derive a good part of their self-identity
from their work, and many of the defining qualities of that work—the unpredictability;
the physical danger; the routine exposure to failure, folly, and meanness—remain largely
unchanged. Understanding the police, and crafting intelligent strategies of police reform,
still require sensitivity to the powerful and distinctive ways in which the day-to-day
experiences of law enforcement officers influence their behavior. Nor are police racism,
sexism, and homophobia things of the past. But "every way of seeing is also a way of not
seeing" (Lynd 1958). The Police Subculture Schema has always obscured certain critical
dimensions of policing and police reform, and changes in policing over the past few
decades have made it more important than ever to rectify those blind spots.

I focus here on American scholars, American police departments, and American

reform efforts. The Police Subculture Schema may have a looser hold elsewhere. In
Australia, for example, Janet Chan (1996: 110) has influentially criticized the entire
concept of "police culture." In Britain, Robert Reiner (1992: 109) has warned that police
occupational norms are "neither monolithic, universal, nor unchanging," and Nigel
Fielding has stressed both the multiplicity of cultures found within law enforcement
agencies and the way in which individual recruits mediate workplace influences,
"constructing an 'organizational reality' special to themselves" by selectively resisting and
embracing the norms they encounter (1988: 9). In the end, though, Chan replaces the
concept of police culture in part with an account of the police "habitus" that replicates
most of the key elements of the Police Subculture Schema (Chan 119: 119-22), and
Reiner emphasizes "commonalities of the police outlook . . . as discovered by many
studies in several different places and periods" (Reiner 1992: 109, 136). So the story I
tell here may have parallels outside the United States.

Origins of the Police Subculture Schema

The notion that police officers tend to share a distinctive outlook is at least as old
as police departments themselves. But the Police Subculture Schema, as a rounded, fully
articulated theory of how to think about the police, dates from the mid-1950s, when
William Westley (1953 and 1956) published two highly influential articles based on his
firsthand observation of and interviews with working police officers. The articles were
adapted from Westley's doctoral dissertation (1970), later published in its entirety.
Earlier studies of policing had tended to be the work of journalists, blue-ribbon
commissions, or reform-minded police executives. Westley helped to inaugurate a new
field of interdisciplinary, academic inquiry, which we can loosely call police studies.

The field burgeoned in the 1960s and 1970s, as more and more social scientists
and legal scholars turned their attention to the police. In critical ways Westley's work set
the pattern for these later studies. Westley thought the key to understanding the police
was to see them "as a social and occupational group" (Westley 1970: 8). More precisely,
the police were a "conflict group," united by the manner in which their work isolated
them from the community and threatened their collective sense of status. The police
officer came to regard himself as a "pariah" and came to "regard the public as an enemy"

3
 SEEING BLUE

(Westley 1953: 35 and 1956: 256). The shared alienation of police officers led to the
creation of a distinctive set of group norms, into which new recruits were systematically
indoctrinated. The internal, group norms of the police were at war in important respects
with their formal legal mandate. The norms of the police approved the selective use of
illegal violence against suspects, for example, and forbade officers from testifying against
each other.

Westley thus argued that the key to understanding the police was to understand
their shared mentality—their subculture—and that the key to their shared mentality was
the nature of their job, including the ways in which it estranged them from the
community and threatened their collective sense of self-esteem. This set of premises—
what Cain (1993) calls "the Policeman as Other"—became the central motif of police
studies in the 1960s and 1970s. It linked together, in particular, the work of the two most
influential social scientists to write about American police in the 1960s, James Q. Wilson
and Jerome Skolnick. As Simon (2000) points out, Wilson and Skolnick differed
fundamentally in their attitudes toward policing: Wilson was very much a conservative,
and Skolnick was very much a liberal. But they both shared, with Westley, the Police
Subculture Schema.

Wilson and Skolnick agreed, too, on an important extension of that schema. Like
other police scholars of the era, they believed that the psychology of law enforcement
officers was shaped not just by occupational role and outcast status, the factors Westley
had stressed, but also by certain inclinations that officers brought with them to the job.
Wilson (1968) speculated that the "working-class backgrounds" of police officers
predisposed them to view violence as legitimate and gave them "a preoccupation with
maintaining self-respect, proving one's masculinity, 'not taking any crap,' and not being
'taken in.'" Skolnick (1966) thought it plain that "a Goldwater-type conservatism was the
dominant political and emotional persuasion of the police." The worldview of the police
included a simplistic, acontextual understanding of criminality, an apprehensive
traditionalism, an intolerance for nonconformity, and a hostility to permissive
childrearing (Skolnick 1969).

The Police Subculture Schema and American Police Reform

The Police Subculture Schema made sense to scholars in the 1960s in part
because it fit nicely with then-prevalent ideas about democracy and social relations.
Those ideas included the fundamental role of interest groups in modern democratic
politics and the existence of an "authoritarian personality." As to the first, the Police
Subculture Schema resonated strongly with the view, held by many if not most social
scientists in the middle decades of the twentieth century, that groups—including
occupational groups—were "the primary, though not the exclusive, means by which the
individual knows, interprets, and reacts to the society in which he exists" (Truman 1971:
21). As to the second, the distinctive mentality that scholars like Wilson and Skolnick
saw in the police "was almost a classic example of the authoritarian personality" (Balch
1972: 107), that cluster of dispositions widely thought to characterize the bulk of

4
 SEEING BLUE

ordinary, working-class citizens and to make them a dangerous force in democratic

politics (see Adorno et al. 1950).

In turn, the Police Subculture Schema supported and helped to motivate the two
major lines of police reform in the 1960s: the "police professionalism" agenda of law
enforcement executives and the "criminal procedure revolution" mounted by the United
States Supreme Court. Police professionalism, which reached the peak of its popularity
in the 1950s and 1960s, aimed to raise the quality of law enforcement by streamlining
operations, improving task specification, strengthening lines of command, tightening
standards, and leveraging personnel with technology. The models were the Chicago
Police Department under Superintendent O. W. Wilson and the Los Angeles Police
Department under Chief William Parker (see, e.g., Fogelson 1977). Police leaders like
Wilson and Parker fought hard for, too, for the political independence of police
departments; this was part of what they meant by "professionalism." But autonomy for
the rank and file, individually or collectively, was no part of the program—quite the
contrary (see, e.g., Bittner 1990: 357-66).

The Police Subculture Schema, which understood police officers in terms of a

pervasive and dangerous set of characteristic predispositions—what Skolnick (1966)
called their "working personality"—made police professionalism, with its commitment to
rigid top-down control of officers, much more attractive. In a similar way, the Police
Subculture Schema lent support to the Supreme Court's "criminal procedure revolution,"
led by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Warren took office in 1953, the same year Westley
published the first results of his fieldwork. Under Warren's leadership, the Supreme
Court reined in the discretion of police officers, most notably by beefing up systems of
judicial oversight. The Police Subculture Schema was never articulated and defended in
these decisions, but it plainly lurked in the background. The Court sometimes deferred to
judgments of forward-thinking law enforcement executives, but it was distinctly
distrustful of line officers (see, e.g., Sklansky 2005: 1736-45).

That distrust helped motivate the most characteristic tool of the criminal
procedure revolution—the requirement that searches and seizures be authorized in
advance with a judicial warrant. The constitutional text does not explicitly require
warrants; it requires only that searches and seizures be reasonable, and that warrants,
when they do issue, be appropriately narrow and based on probable cause. The Court's
efforts to harmonize these two commands were always erratic, but by the time Warren
took the bench the Court seemed inclined to the general view that searches and seizures
were constitutional if they were reasonable, regardless whether they were pursuant to
warrant. The Warren Court emphatically rejected that position. Again and again, the
Court insisted that, with certain narrow exceptions, every search and seizure required a
warrant. The point was that judges should be in control, not police officers. The Court
liked to quote Justice Jackson's famous warning in United States v. Johnson (1948) that
the decision should not be left to "the officers engaged in the often competitive enterprise
of ferreting out crime." So fond was the Court of this formulation that it was hard not to
see it as a diplomatic expression of worries about the police that went beyond their
excessive zeal. Justice Jackson himself voiced concern than that the point of

5
 SEEING BLUE

constitutional guarantees was "often not grasped" by the police—even, presumably, in

their reflective moments—and that concern found echoes in the Court's later opinions
(see Sklansky 2005: 1734).

Herbert Packer (1966: 241), a leading legal scholar largely sympathetic to the
direction the Warren Court took in criminal cases, suggested that the Court saw the police
as "suspect"; the Justices were "unconvinced that the police regard[ed] the rights of the
accused as anything but a nuisance and an impediment." Packer shared that skepticism,
as did many if not most scholars writing about the police in the 1960s—and, for that
matter, in the 1970s. Their concerns about the police mentality, and their attraction to the
Police Subculture Schema, were only heightened by the heavy-handed, reactionary police
responses to the rioting and political protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and by
the knee-jerk hostility that law enforcement administrators and police unions showed to
key Warren Court rulings and to emerging proposals for civilian oversight boards (see,
e.g., Fogelson 1977). The turmoil of the late 1960s and early 1970s made it seem more
obvious than ever that police officers shared a distinctive and dangerous mentality—
rigid, insecure, inclined toward violence, and hostile to anyone "different."

The Police Subculture Schema pictured the police as a discrete and unified group,
alienated from mainstream society and inherently hostile to democratic values. It thus
encouraged the notion that effective regulation of the police required strong oversight
from the outside, or at least from the very top. And it contributed to the great pessimism
shown by scholars in the 1960s and afterward about the potential for police forces ever to
regulate themselves effectively, or even to cooperate voluntarily with systems of outside
review. Herbert Jacob (1974: 10) was fairly typical in perceiving, "deeply embedded in
the norms and work routines of policemen," a "gigantic conspiracy against the outside
world." This perspective helps to explain why the major institutional reform drive in
American policing over the past four decades has focused on civilian review boards.
Samuel Walker (2001) counts roughly 100 police agencies across the United States now
subject to some form of civilian oversight, including eighty percent of the departments in
the fifty largest cities. Most commonly the oversight consists of civilian involvement in,
or review of, police disciplinary proceedings.

Walker notes that civilian oversight, which existed virtually nowhere in the
United States at the end of the 1960s, is now “firmly entrenched as an important feature
of American policing." The criminal procedure revolution has faltered significantly since
Earl Warren retired from the Supreme Court in 1969, but in many ways the Warren Court
innovations still provide the doctrinal framework within which the police operate (see,
e.g., Steiker 1996). Mid-twentieth-century police professionalism, on the other hand, fell
into disfavor in the 1980s and never recovered. "Community policing," the new shared
orthodoxy of police reformers and forward-thinking law enforcement executives, is
notoriously ill-defined; its core, though, may be a rejection of the kind of policing
championed in the 1960s by O. W. Wilson in Chicago and William Parker in Los
Angeles. But community policing, like police professionalism, is fully compatible with
the view of the Police Officer as Other—the view lying at the heart of the Police
Subculture Schema. The rhetoric of community policing calls for the police to be

6
 SEEING BLUE

partners with the community, not part of the community. In reality, the relationship falls
short of true partnership: community policing as practiced rarely intrudes much on the
operational autonomy of the police. But community policing does even less to challenge
the longstanding view of police officers as necessarily a breed apart. Almost always, a
police department engaged in community policing remains "a force of outsiders" (Frug
1998: 81).

It is telling in this regard that the reinstatement of residency requirements for

police officers is rarely part of the community policing agenda. Requirements that
officers live in the communities where they work were widely discarded in the era of
police professionalism. A few departments brought back residency requirements in the
early 1970s, but police unions strongly opposed the idea, and in most cases the opposition
was successful (see, e.g., Fogelson 1977: 306-07). Since the 1970s, the number of
departments imposing a residency requirement appears to have declined (see Waldeck
2001: 1295-96). Through the lens of the Police Subculture Schema, residency
requirements seem pointless: police behavior is shaped by occupational norms, not by
the lives officers lead off-duty.

Neglected Avenues of Reform: Institutional Design

The Police Subculture Schema has helped to shape American police reform not
only by supporting the top-down management style of police professionalism, the judicial
oversight model at the heart of the Supreme Court's criminal procedure revolution, and
more recently the agenda of civilian oversight. It has also left a mark by diverting
sustained attention away from certain other avenues of reform—notably those avenues of
reform that focus on institutional design rather than occupational culture, differences
between officers rather than similarities among them, and rank and file participation
rather than top-down control. I will address each of these three large categories of reform
possibilities in turn, starting with institutional design.

The Police Subculture Schema has encouraged academics and reformers

interested in the police to train their sights on the shared mentality of law enforcement
officers and away from the internal structure of police departments. Police administrators
tinker endlessly with organization of their departments, but generally with an eye to
efficiency, not with any real expectation of significantly changing the nature of policing.
The civilian oversight boards for which so many outside reformers fought so long and so
hard are also, of course, a kind of restructuring, but a relatively modest kind, consisting
essentially of an added layer of review. Most academics, like most police reformers,
persist in stressing the group psychology of the police and in treating the internal
organization of police departments as largely irrelevant. In the words of Edward Maguire
(2003: 39), "[r]esearchers have generally neglected studying police organizations in favor
of studying police work—including situations, encounters, strategies, and occupational
characteristics—and police officers—their attitudes, feelings, beliefs, behaviors, and
interactions." The blue-ribbon commissions appointed after each police scandal in the
United States typically take the same tack, stressing the importance of changing the
"culture" and "mindset" of whatever department is at issue. The questions that rarely get

7
 SEEING BLUE

asked about policing are the ones that would have seemed most obvious to, say, the
eighteenth-century framers of the United States Constitution, had they foreseen the
emergence of modern police departments: How should law enforcement be organized to
best assure that the powers given to police officers are used wisely and fairly? What
departmental structures will best harness and counterbalance the ambitions of police
officers, aligning their collective objectives with public purposes?

For example, virtually every American police agency of significant size now has
an internal affairs department, which investigates allegations of wrongdoing by officers
(see Perez 1994). These departments vary widely in their functional organization, lines
of reporting, operational protocols, and policies for rotating officers into and out of
internal affairs work. We know very little about internal affairs departments and what
features of institutional design work best, in large part because most scholars and
reformers have written off the whole idea of internal review as a joke. How can police
misconduct be addressed by police officers themselves, when the root problem is the
shared mentality and culture of the police?

The widespread pessimism about internal review is not entirely baseless; officers
obviously can experience divided loyalties when investigating their colleagues. But line
officers do not view internal affairs investigations lightly, nor should they. In fact,
internal affairs departments on average sustain allegations against officers at significantly
higher rates than civilian oversight boards. No one thinks internal affairs departments
can take sole responsibility for improving the quality of policing: wholly aside from
conflicts of interest, internal affairs investigations tend by their nature to be punitive
rather than forward-looking, and to focus on specific incidents rather than systemic
failures. But some internal affairs departments function better than others, and some
even depart from a pure incident-by-incident focus (see, e.g., Armcost 2004). Writing off
internal affairs departments as hopeless make no sense. Finding the best ways to
organize and to run internal affairs departments is an important, largely neglected
strategy of police reform, and it is part of a broader category of neglected questions
pertaining to institutional redesign of police departments. Some of the blame for this
neglect can be laid at the feet of the Police Subculture Schema.

Neglected Avenues of Reform: Good Cops and Bad Cops

The Police Subculture Schema has also diverted attention from another set of
approaches, focusing on differences between officers rather than on similarities among
officers. Since the 1950s, the overwhelming bulk of research on the police has tried to
explain the characteristics of police as a group. The question it poses is, "Why are the
police the way they are?" Much rarer is research that tries to understand why some
police officers wind up more effective and more trustworthy than others. Precisely
because it did ask this latter question, the justly celebrated study of Oakland, California,
police officers by William Ker Muir, Jr. (1977) has been far less influential than the work
of scholars like Skolnick and James Q. Wilson, who focused on group characteristics and
group behavior—the matters highlighted by the Police Subculture Schema, and the
matters on which police researchers have continued to train their sights.

8
 SEEING BLUE

Police reformers, too, have tended to pursue measures that treat all cops alike and
all recruits as essentially fungible. Recruiting practices have received less attention than
they deserve, and all officers are generally treated as needing the same degree and kind of
supervision. One encouraging departure from this approach is the increasing emphasis
on the use of data management systems to identify and to track officers with a history of
violent encounters and disciplinary actions. There is growing recognition that a small
subgroup of officers accounts for a large share of police abuse, and that identifying these
officers and closely monitoring them is a particularly promisingly strategy for reducing
violence and illegality in the ranks (see Walker 2003). Tracking systems of this kind are
required under the settlements negotiated in civil rights lawsuits brought against police
departments by the United States Department of Justice, and in some case by private
plaintiffs (see, e.g., Johnson 2004). But the systems are still far from universal (see
Armacost 2004). More importantly, they differentiate officers only at the low end,
distinguishing "problem officers" from the great majority. They do not pursue the agenda
suggested by Muir's work: identifying excellent officers, rewarding them for their
excellence, and learning from them.

Neglected Avenues of Reform: Participatory Decisionmaking

The third category of reform possibilities the Police Subculture Schema has
tended to slight consists of efforts to enlist rank-and-file officers in the collective
reshaping of their work. In ways discussed above, the police professionalism movement
of the 1950s and 1960s and the Supreme Court's "criminal procedure revolution" both
operated on a model of rigid, top-down reform of the police. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, when many people saw workplaces as ideal venues for experiments in
participatory democracy, several scholars—including Westley (1970)—argued for
bringing a degree of workplace democracy to policing (see also, e.g., Berkley 1969,
Angell 1971). The core idea was that officers who participated collectively in the
shaping of police work would be less alienated, more effective, and more acculturated to
and comfortable with democratic values and practices. There even were scattered efforts
to implement these ideas, and they met with some success. In Oakland, for example,
Toch et al. (1975) led a team of officers that itself developed a novel institutional
mechanism for reducing police violence—a mechanism that itself drew heavily on the
involvement of rank-and-file officers, and that actually enjoyed a promising degree of
success, before it fell victim to budget cuts (see Toch and Grant 2005: 100).

As it happened, the late 1960s and early 1970s were about the worst possible time
to argue for giving police officers a larger role in reshaping their work. Police unionism
and rank-and-file activism were surging at the time, and they took distinctly unattractive
forms. The rallying issues included not only working conditions and compensation but
also, and more strikingly, opposition to civilian review boards and related efforts at
police reform. And those were some of the tamer forms of police politics in the late
1960s and early 1970s. The less tame forms included active participation in far right-
wing organizations, vigilante attacks on black activists, organized brutality against

9
 SEEING BLUE

political protesters, and open defiance of civilian authorities (see, e.g., Fogelson 1977).
The Police Subculture Schema seemed to fit events better than ever.

As a result, liberal academics and reformers who might otherwise have been
sympathetic to giving police officers a collective say in the nature of their work instead
concluded that democracy and the rule of law required that police officers be followers,
not innovators (see, e.g., Skolnick 1969). By the end of the 1970s, enthusiasm largely
disappeared for bringing workplace democracy to law enforcement, and it has never
really reappeared. “Team policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” two important
predecessors of community policing, each incorporated elements of participatory
management (see Livingston 1997). But those elements became much more muted as
time went on and as team policing and problem-oriented policing were absorbed into
mainstream thinking about law enforcement. Theories of "cooperativist" management,
which became popular in industrial relations circles in the 1980s and 1990s (see, e.g.,
Wilms 1996), had little impact on law enforcement.

Today, policing clings stubbornly to authoritarian management practices long

discredited in other, traditionally hierarchical sectors of the American economy—
including, ironically, the military (see Cowper 2004). Little has changed in this regard in
the decade and a half since the assessment by Herman Goldstein (1990: 27) that "[t]he
dominant form of policing … continues to view police officers as automatons" and to ask
them for "nonthinking compliance." An extreme, but telling illustration: The city of
New London, Connecticut, went to court several years ago to defend, successfully, its
policy of refusing to hire applicants who scored too high on a test of “cognitive ability”
(see Allen 1999). The publisher of the test recommends its use to screen out employees
unsuited for jobs “where creativity could be a detriment.” New London’s deputy police
chief told a reporter that the department had adopted the test because “[p]olice work is
kind of mundane.” The president of the test publishing company agreed: "You can't
decide not to read someone their Miranda rights because you felt it would be more
efficient, or you thought they knew them already.” All of this would make perfect sense
to Frederick Taylor, the Progressive Era champion of top-down, thoroughly regimented
workforces, and who warned that “[t]he man who is mentally alert and intelligent is for
this very reason entirely unsuited” for monotonous work (Taylor 1911: 59). Taylorism
has few fans today among management theorists and other students of employment, but
law enforcement has remained a bastion of something not too distant, in some ways, from
the Taylorist faith in "scientific management."

The Police Subculture Schema is part of the reason. The sense lingers that the
self-perpetuating occupational norms of law enforcement are inherently antithetical to
democracy. For some scholars, the power of those norms in shaping police behavior is
reason to couple top-down reforms with management practices that "obtain 'buy-in' from
the ground up." But in the main the Police Subculture Schema has dulled the interest of
academics and reformers in efforts to "mobilize … the energy, passion, commitment, and
expertise" of the police rank and file. (Armacost 2004: 546). It has kept them wedded to
a command-and-control model of police reform.

10
 SEEING BLUE

Because departures from that model have been so limited, we have little evidence
about how well they work. But the evidence we do have is encouraging. The success of
the Oakland violence reduction project has already been mentioned. The Madison,
Wisconsin, Police Department, which began experimenting with participatory
decisionmaking in the 1980s, found that it increased job satisfaction, made officers more
open to reform, and improved the level of police service in the eyes of the public (see
Wykoff and Skogan 1993). More recently, the police department in Broken Arrow,
Oklahoma, has turned much of its policymaking over to a twelve-member committee of
management officials, union leaders, and rank-and-file officers, a move that appears to
have contributed to greater productivity (as measured by arrest and clearance rates), a
sharp drop in citizen complaints, and higher levels of job satisfaction (see Wuestewald
and Steinheider 2006).

These results are consistent with the growing body of research on participatory
management in workforces outside law enforcement. That research suggests that
involving employees in decisionmaking does more than boost morale; it improves the
quality of decisions by capitalizing on the diffused, hands-on knowledge that workers
gain by actually doing their jobs (see, e.g., Wilms 1996). Mobilizing the energy and
expertise of the rank and file may be particularly important in policing, given the large
amounts of discretion that police officers exercise and the extent to which good police
work relies on localized, ground-level intelligence—points stressed by Goldstein (1990).
Valuing the intelligence and initiative of police officers may also be the best way to get
the kind of educated, highly qualified recruits that most departments (contra New
London) seem to want these days—and that they report increasing difficulty attracting
(see McGreevy 2006).

These are not the only ways in which participatory decisionmaking may have
special advantages in policing. A long tradition—dating back to John Stuart Mill and G.
D. H. Cole and revived in the wake of the 1960s by scholars like Carol Pateman (1970)
and Jane Mansbridge (1980)—sees the workplace as the ideal training ground for
democratic citizenship and argues against rigid, autocratic workplaces on the ground that
they stunt the political development of employees, not only depriving them of full,
satisfying lives but also weakening democracy in the broader society. This viewpoint
remains controversial. But even if democracy does not depend on fostering the political
growth of all employees, there are two special reasons to want police officers to
internalize democratic values and habits. First, the police are often placed in positions
where they can actively support or actively threaten democratic activities: they can
protect political protesters, for example, or they can attack them; they can help create a
climate of respect for individual privacy and autonomy, or they can make privacy
insecure and nonconformity difficult; they can enforce norms of tolerance, or they can
reinforce bias and prejudice; they can teach citizens that authority may safely be
challenged, or they can teach the opposite (see, e.g., Goldstein 1977). Second, there are
reasons to think that effective policing in general—at least the forms of effective policing
most congenial to a free and open society—depends on some of the same values and
skills often thought important for democratic citizenship more broadly.

11
 SEEING BLUE

This is one of the great lessons of Muir’s extraordinary study of Oakland police
officers in the early 1970s. Trying to determine what made some police officers more
effective and more trustworthy than others, Muir concluded that good police officers had
democratic virtues: a comfort with moral ambiguity, an ability to see shades of gray, a
broad capacity for tolerance and empathy, and, perhaps most important, “an enjoyment of
talk”—an affinity, that is to say, for conversation, argument, deliberation, advocacy, and
compromise (Muir 1977). Police officers developed these virtues, in part, by working in
a department that itself embraced them. Among the heroes of Muir’s book is Chief
Charles Gain, a legendary reformer who ran Oakland’s police force from 1967 to 1973.
Gain ruled with a heavy hand and was never popular with the rank and file; in 1972 the
Oakland Police Officers’ Association voted no confidence in his administration (see
Jackson 1979). Muir admired him nonetheless for infusing the department “with a sense
of purpose," which gave his officers "dignity and moral meaning.” Much of that was
accomplished, Muir thought, through a training style and a workplace climate that invited
“participation, discussion, argument, and questioning.” What Muir liked about the
Oakland Police Department, in short, was the way it seemed to operate as a school for
democratic citizenry—or, more precisely, democratic leadership. Muir saw police
officers as “streetcorner politicians,” and they were most likely to grow in that that role if
they worked in departments that within themselves fostered “widespread political
participation.” (Muir 1977: 253, 281).

Now is a propitious time to explore the potential of participatory decisionmaking

in policing. There is a large literature on cooperative decisionmaking in other workplaces
and organizations, and a small but instructive body of work experimenting with these
ideas in policing. Police unions, implacable foes of reform in the late 1960s and early
1970s, have since moderated their rhetoric and their politics, and in some cases they have
become active proponents of reform (see Marks and Fleming 2006). Increasingly, police
unions are rivaled for influence by identity-based groups of police officers—groups of
minority officers, of female officers, and of gay and lesbian officers—many of which are
quite vocal in pushing for reform (see, e.g., Barlow and Barlow 2000). And police
workforces have grown more educated and more diverse; they are more hospitable
venues than they used to be for experiments in employee empowerment (see Sklansky
2006a). To take advantage of these changes, though, we need to recognize them, and
recognition has been hindered by the lasting hold of the Police Subculture Schema.

Overlooked Dangers: Diversification and Affirmative Action

In addition to making certain reform possibilities harder to see, the Police

Subculture Schema has also obscured a pair of increasingly pressing problems. The first
is the risk that the diversification of police departments, which has done so much to clear
space for debate and disagreement within the ranks, may be stalling prematurely, as
court-ordered affirmative action remedies grow less common. The second is the set of
challenges posed by the growth of police managerialism. Let me take each of these in
turn.

12
 SEEING BLUE

First, diversification and affirmative action. Much of the reason the Police
Subculture Schema now seems out of date is that police workforces are no longer unified
and homogeneous. Minority officers, female officers, and openly gay and lesbian
officers are slowly but dramatically transforming a profession that 35 years ago was
virtually all white, virtually all male, and uniformly homophobic. Blacks, for example,
made up somewhere around 6% of sworn officers in the 300 or so largest American
police departments in 1970; today the figure is around 18% (see McCrary 2003). In
2005, for the first time in the history of the New York City Police Department, a majority
of the new officers graduating from its academy were members of racial minorities (see
Lee 2005). In some major cities—including Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington,
D.C.—the entire police force is now majority minority (see Reaves and Hickman 2000).
Women were 2% of sworn officers in large police agencies in 1972; today they are close
to 13% (see National Center for Women and Policing 2002). Again, the figure in some
departments is significantly higher, although it tops out around 25%. Like minority
officers, female officers remain concentrated in lower ranks—although, as with minority
officers, the extent and uniformity of the concentration is less than one might expect. It is
therefore difficult to estimate the number of gay and lesbian police officers, or even those
who are, to a greater or lesser extent, open about their status. The latter category is
clearly growing, though, to the point where, in some departments, "the presence of self-
disclosed gay and lesbian officers has become normalized" (Belkin & McNichol 2002:78,
see also Miller 1999). And the mere fact that there are any openly gay officers, let alone
gay police executives, is a sea change from the situation thirty years ago (see, e.g., Leinen
1993, Miller et al. 2003).

All of this has made the Police Subculture Schema, with its picture of police
departments as insular, homogeneous bastions of unchallenged patriarchy, racism, and
authoritarianism, increasingly out of date. Police officers today report lines of division,
distrust, and resentment not only between white officers and minority officers, but also
between male and female officers, between gay and straight officers, and sometimes
between Black officers and Latino officers, Latino officers and Asian-American officers,
and so on. In the words of one white, male officer, "It used to be we were all 'blue,' but
that has changed over the past years. Today there is black, white, and female
segregation." (Harr 1997: 66).

The decline in solidarity does not seem to have impaired police effectiveness; for
operational purposes it appears still to be true that "blue is blue" (see, e.g., Myers et al.
2004). In between calls to service, though, police officers are a less cohesive group than
they used to be, and that turns out to be a largely good thing. That has made the internal
cultures of police departments less stifling, and it has opened up space for dissent and
disagreement. Studies of police departments today read far differently than those of
thirty or forty years ago: investigators rarely find a single police perspective on any
given issue, but rather a range a conflicting perspectives (see, e.g., Barlow et al. 1994,
Harr 1997).

Moreover, the social fragmentation has gone hand in hand with a decline in police
insularity. For identity binds as well as divides (see Oberweis and Musheno 1999).

13
 SEEING BLUE

Minority officer organizations frequently work closely with minority organizations

outside law enforcement; to a lesser extent, female officers sometimes form
organizational ties with women working in other historically male professions. The
National Center for Women and Policing, for example, is part of Eleanor Smeal’s
Feminist Majority Project. Organizational alliances like this operate alongside, and help
to foster, less formal ties of affinity between minority cops and minority citizens, female
cops and women more broadly, and gays and lesbians inside and outside law enforcement
(see Barlow and Barlow 2000). Both the formal, organizational alliances and the less
formal ties of affinity create channels for expanding civilian involvement in the shaping
and directing of law enforcement.

The growing, still far from complete acceptance of openly gay and lesbian
officers may contribute in a particularly powerful way to the social realignment of law
enforcement—in part by accelerating the fragmentation of the police subculture, in part
by creating new channels of communication with groups outside of law enforcement, and
in part by challenging the endemic homophobia of law enforcement. There is good
reason to think that the suppression of homosexuality has played a central role in
cementing police solidarity, in part by rendering professional male-male partnerships
sexually unthreatening, and in part by helping to shape a whole, hyper-masculinized
professional ethos (see, e.g., Harris 2000, Messerschmidt 1993). The presence of openly
gay and lesbian officers, particularly once they begin to rise through the ranks, challenges
the easy, taken-for-granted homophobia of law enforcement, and all that it has helped to
foster—the nominally desexualized police workplace, the hyper-masculinized ethos of
the profession, and the tacit acceptance of extra-legal violence. All of that is on top of
the ways in which gay and lesbian officers, like minority officers and female officers,
will help to fragment the police subculture and to build identity-based bridges to groups
outside of law enforcement.

The clear weight of the evidence suggests that the diversification of American
police departments over the last four decades owes much to race-conscious and gender-
conscious affirmative action remedies, typically under court order (see, e.g., Sklansky
2006a). Some of the most striking evidence is the progress over time in particular
departments. In Pittsburgh, for example, the percentage of women officers went from 1%
in 1975, when court-ordered hiring quotas were imposed, to 27.2% in 1990, the highest
figure at the time for any large city in the nation. When the quota was lifted in 1991, the
female share of new hires plummeted from 50% (required under the court order) to 8.5%,
and by 2001 the percentage of women in the rank of police officer had dropped to 22%
and was continuing to decline. (National Center for Women and Policing 2003). The
clear implication—that court-ordered affirmative action has played a pivotal role in
diversifying police departments—is confirmed by more sophisticated and broad ranging
statistical analyses of police hiring in the United States (see, e.g., Martin 1991, McCrary
2003). Because the statistics regarding gay and lesbian officers are so paltry, it is more
difficult to assess the role of lawsuits here. Anecdotally, though, lawsuits appear to have
played a significant role in spurring departments to become more welcoming to, and
tolerant of, openly gay and lesbian cops, just as earlier lawsuits were pivotal in bringing

14
 SEEING BLUE

more race and gender diversity to policing (see, e.g., Belkin & McNichol 2002,
Hernandez 1989).

All this gives reason to be concerned about the recent contraction of court-ordered
affirmative action in the United States. Turnover in police departments is low—typically
about 4% annually—so it takes many years for changes in hiring practices to have their
full effect on workforce composition (see McCrary 2003). With affirmative action
increasingly under fire in the United States, hiring and promotion quotas are often lifted
before the demographics of police forces are brought fully in line with the communities
they serve. Backsliding at that point is a real possibility—as Pittsburgh discovered. The
Pittsburgh experience serves as a warning about what may happen elsewhere, and may in
some respects already be happening. The nationwide increase in the representation of
women in large police departments, for example, appears to have stalled since 1999, and
the percentage of officers who are female in these departments may have ticked slightly
downward (see National Center for Women and Policing 2003).

The danger of losing ground in the gradual diversification of American police

forces has received less attention than it deserves. Part of the reason may well be the
Police Subculture Schema, which conditions us to see police officers as fungible, police
occupational norms as unchanging, and police demographics as functionally irrelevant.
Cognitive burn-in has made it harder to see the dramatic though still incomplete ways in
which the internal dynamics of police forces have been transformed, and how much rides
on continuing that progress.

Overlooked Dangers: Police Managerialism

The Police Subculture Schema focuses attention on the occupational norms and
practices of the police rank and file. Police leaders almost always start their careers as
patrol officers and work their way up the ranks, but by the time they become managers, it
is generally assumed, they are no longer part of the subculture. The police
professionalism movement was predicated, in part, on this assumption; much of the point
of police professionalism was to replace unwritten, rank-and-file norms with explicit
rules imposed from above. An influential study in the early 1980s argued that
"management cops" have their own culture, separate and distinct from "street cop
culture". But "management cop culture" essentially consisted of a commitment to rules
and regulations and a faith in "the theories and practices of scientific management and
public administration." In contrast, street cop culture was a real culture, replete with
socialization practices, informal role assignments, and an elaborate set of unwritten
maxims of conduct—"the cop's code." (Reuss-Ianni and Ianni 1983: 257, 266). Not
surprisingly, then, it is the street cop culture, not the management cop culture, that has
continued to receive the lion's share of the attention from scholars and reforms, and the
lion's share of the blame for the weaknesses and pathologies of law enforcement.

But alongside the social realignment within police forces, described above, there
is another cultural change brewing in law enforcement, and focusing on the rank and file

15
 SEEING BLUE

makes it harder to see. There has been a pronounced shift toward managerialism in
American policing, and the change is most apparent in the command ranks.

The new managerialism of law enforcement has been driven in part by a shift of
policing responsibilities to the private sector, discussed more extensively elsewhere in
this book. Borrowing terms from Philip Selznick (1969), Elizabeth Joh (2004: 65-66)
suggests that at bottom the difference between private policing and public policing may
be the difference between "management" and "governance"—between organizations that
emphasize "efficiency and goal achievement," and organizations that "take[] into account
broader values such as integrity, the accommodation of interests, and morality." Selznick
developed this distinction as part an argument for workplace democracy; he was part of a
broad intellectual movement in the late 1960s and early 1970s that saw workplaces as
particularly promising sites for participatory democracy. I discussed earlier the reasons
why efforts to extend that kind of thinking to policing proved largely abortive. The
frightening forms that police activism took in the late 1960s and early 1970s dulled the
appetite of scholars and reformers for bringing any kind of participatory management to
law enforcement. The idea was pretty much dead by the end of the 1970s, and it has
never really been revived.

In some respects, though, democratic values have been brought into the internal
operations of police workforces. Over the past three decades, police departments have
become heavily unionized, and police officers have been given, by statute and court
decision, a robust range of due process protections against adverse employment
decisions. As we have seen, police workforces are also far more diverse than they were
thirty years ago, far less monolithic, far less insular, and far more open to dissent and
disagreement.

Police privatization puts these gains at risk. In a recent, illuminating study of a

large Canadian security firm, George Rigakos (2002) found a workplace marked by
extraordinary efforts at monitoring, controlling, and disciplining employees, and by
levels of alienation and cynicism remarkable even in comparison with what we have
come to expect from public law enforcement officers. There is no reason to think other
security firms would look strikingly different in these regards. It may be possible, of
course, to bring public values of employee due process and participatory decisionmaking
to the private security industry. The industry is currently the target of a major organizing
campaign (see Greenhouse 2006), and workplace democracy could be imposed by statute
on private security firms—just as on any other private firm. At bottom, though, what a
private security firm offers its customers is, as Rigakos puts it, "a management system for
hire” (Rigakos 2002: 148). This will likely make public norms regarding the internal
operation of police forces the hardest to export to the private sector. Their internal
operations—overwhelmingly nonunion, unburdened by civil service rules and "police
officers' bills of rights," relentlessly focused on efficiency and narrowly drawn
performance goals—are precisely what the private firms have to offer. It is what
distinguishes one firm from another, and what still, despite the spread of public sector
managerialism, most strongly distinguishes private policing as a whole from public law
enforcement. If the current trend toward police privatization has any single point, after
all—other than retreating from a collective commitment to egalitarian protection against

16
 SEEING BLUE

illegal force—the point is to escape, to circumvent, or to limit the domain of the

organizational styles associated with public law enforcement, and to move the internal
operations of policing some distance from governance toward management (see Sklansky
2006b).

Rather than serving as the model for private policing, public police agencies may
find themselves copying the strategies, rhetoric, and self-conception of the private
police—much as Henry Fielding's Bow Street Runners brought the entrepreneurial spirit
of thief-taking to the eighteenth-century London magistracy, and J. Edgar Hoover later
mimicked the marketing tactics of Alan Pinkerton (see Sklansky 1999). Some police
departments may already be drifting in this direction, pulled along by the mounting
tendency for the public and private police to see themselves as partners, "with similar
goals but different approaches and spheres of influence" (International Association of
Chiefs of Police 2004: 1, see also Joh 2004).

In principle, the expanding cooperation between public law enforcement and the
private security industry, and the growing feeling of affinity between the two sectors,
could facilitate a transfer of norms in either direction. In practice, though, there is little
evidence so far of private security firms becoming more mindful of values beyond
efficiency and the achievement of narrowly-defined goals. It is easier to find signs of
police departments becoming more "managerial," both in their practices and in their sense
of organizational mission. Probably the best example is Compstat, the New York Police
Department's statistics-based system of performance evaluations for mid-level
supervisors, now emulated throughout the nation (see, e.g., Walsh and Vito 2004). But
the growing managerialism of police departments is a much broader phenomenon (see,
e.g., Garland 2001, Loader 1994, Wood 2004). Even the "client-driven mandate" of
private security firms may be crossing over to the public sector: one of the many
plausible definitions of "community policing" is "police treating a neighborhood the way
a security guard treats a client property" (Sherman 1995: 338-39). Police unions, with
their guild instincts, may slow growth of managerialism in some public law enforcement
agencies (see Fleming and Lafferty 2000, O'Malley and Hutchinson 2005). But there are
signs that police unions, too, are beginning to adopt, out of necessity, the rhetoric of
managerialism (see McLaughlin and Murji 2001).

None of this is unambiguously bad. Managerialism has its strengths. Compstat,

for example, may have contributed to New York City's unusually sharp decline in crime
rates in the 1990s (see, e.g., Moore and Braga 2003, Walsh and Vito 2004)—although
this is very much a matter of debate (see, e.g., Levitt 2004, Rosenfeld et al. 2003). The
rapid spread of managerialism in public policing is cause for concern, though, because of
the way in which it threatens to supplant older—and some newer—traditions of
governance in public law enforcement with a focus on efficiency and narrowly defined
goal achievement. “Community policing,” for example, has at times meant something
quite different from adopting the mindset of private security firms; it has meant reducing
the organizational insularity by opening new channels of communication and cooperation
with a variety of outside groups, both governmental and nongovernmental. Officers in
these departments have been forced, regularly and systematically, to confront and to
accommodate conflicting views of their mission and conflicting notions of how best to

17
 SEEING BLUE

balance liberty and security (see Thacher 2001). They have been pushed away, in other
words, from a single-minded focus on a narrow set of performance goals; they have been
driven from management toward governance. It would be a mistake to overstate the
extent of this trend in public policing. But there is no corresponding trend whatsoever in
the private security industry.

A final caveat: there are grounds for strong skepticism about how strongly the
official ethos of a police organization, public or private, shapes the behavior of officers
out on the streets. Rigakos found that the private security guards he studied thought and
acted, in many respects, much like public law enforcement officers engaged in similar
work, and for much the same reasons. Among private police, just as among public
police, "conditions of dependent uncertainty," "status frustration," and physical risk breed
"a strong occupational ethic of interdependence in the face of immediate or impending
dangers"—"not unlike the occupational codes of public police agencies" (Rigagos 2002:
119-20).

That is exactly what the Police Subculture Schema would predict, of course. It is
one more piece of evidence that the schema retains considerable explanatory power. But
the grounds for concern about the Police Subculture Schema have to do less with what it
suggests than with what it obscures. The problem with a burned-in image, even a good
one, is what it prevents us from seeing.

References

Adorno, T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D. J., & Sanford, R. N. (1950). The authoritarian
personality. New York: Harper.
Allen, M. (1999, Sept. 19). Help wanted invoking the not-too-high-IQ test. New York Times, p. D4.
Angell, J. E. (1971). Toward an alternative to the classic police organizational arrangements: a democratic
model. Criminology 9, 185-206.
Armacost, B. E. (2004). Organizational culture and police misconduct. George Washington Law Review
72, 453-545.
Balch, R. W. (1972). The police personality: fact or fiction? Journal of Criminal Law, Criminology, &
Police Science 63, 106-19.
Belkin, A., & McNichol, J. (2002). Pink and blue: outcomes associated with the integration of open gay
and lesbian personnel in the San Diego Police Department. Police Quarterly 5, 63-95.
Berkley, G. E. (1969). The democratic policeman. Boston: Beacon Press.
Barlow, D. E. and Barlow, M. H. (2000). Police in a multicultural society. Long Grove: Waveland Press.
Bittner, E. (1990). Aspects of police work. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Blasi, G. L. (1995). What lawyers know: lawyering expertise, cognitive science, and the functions of
theory. Journal of Legal Education 45, 313-97.
Cain, M. (1993). Some go forward, some go back: police work in comparative perspective. Comparative
Sociology 22, 319-24.
Carter, D. L., & Sapp, A. D. (1990). The evolution of higher education in law enforcement: preliminary
findings from a national study. Journal of Criminal Justice Education 1, 59-85.
Chan, J. (1996). Changing police culture. British Journal of Criminology 36, 109-34.

18
 SEEING BLUE

Conlon, E. (2004). Blue blood. New York: Riverhead Books.

Cowper, T. J. (2004). The myth of the "military model" of leadership in law enforcement. In Q. C.
Thurman & J. Zhao (Eds.), Contemporary policing: controversies, challenges, and solutions (pp. 113-25).
Los Angeles: Roxbury.
Delaney, J. T., & Feuille, P. (1987). Police. In D. B. Lipsky & C. B. Donn (Eds.), Collective bargaining in
American industry: contemporary perspectives and future directions (pp. 265-306). Lexington, Mass.: D.
C. Heath & Co.
Fielding, N. G. (1988). Joining forces: police training, socialization, and occupational competence.
London: Routledge.
Fleming, J., & Lafferty, G. (2000). New management techniques and restructuring for accountability in
Australian police organizations. Policing 23, 154-68.
Fogelson, R. M. (1977). Big-city police. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Frug, G. (1998). City services. New York University Law Review 73, 23-96.
Garland, D. (2001). The culture of control. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Goldstein, H. (1977). Policing a free society. Cambridge, Mass.: Ballinger.
Goldstein, H. (1990). Problem-oriented policing. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Greenhouse, S. (2006, July 26). Borrowing language of civil rights movement, drive is on to unionize
guards. New York Times, p. A13.
Haar, R. N. (1997). Patterns of interaction in a police patrol bureau: race and gender barriers to integration.
Justice Quarterly 14, 53-85.
Harris, A. P. (2000). Gender, violence, race, and criminal justice. Stanford Law Review 52, 777-807.
Hernandez, M. (1989, Nov. 22). 2 LAPD officers join homosexual bias suit. Los Angeles Times, p. B3.
International Association of Chiefs of Police (2004). National policy summit: building private
security/public policing partnerships to prevent and respond to terrorism and public disorder. Retrieved
July 3, 2006, from http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/mime/open.pdf?Item=1355
Jackson, B. M. (1979). Leadership and change in public organization: the dilemmas of an urban police
chief. (Doctoral dissertation, University of California, Berkeley).
Jacob, H. (1974). The potential for reform of criminal justice. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.
Joh, E. (2004). The paradox of private policing. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95, 49-131.
Johnson, C. (2004, May 31). Oakland's new system to weed out bad officers. San Francisco Chronicle, p.
B1.
Lee, J. 8. (2005, July 8). In police class, blue comes in many colors. New York Times, p. B2.
Leinen, S. (1993). Gay cops. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Levitt, S. D. (2004). Understanding why crime fell in the 1990s: four factors that explain the decline and
six that do not. Journal of Economic Perspectives 18, 163-90.
Livingston, D. (1997). Police discretion and the quality of life in public places: courts, communities, and
the new policing. Columbia Law Review 97, 551-672.
Loader, I. (1994). Democracy, justice, and the limits of policing: rethinking police accountability. Social
and Legal Studies 3, 521-44.
Lynd, H. M. (1958). On shame and the search for identity. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.
Maguire, E. R. (2003). Organizational structure in American police agencies: context, complexity, and
control. Albany: State University of New York Press.

19
 SEEING BLUE

Mansbridge, J. J. (1980). Beyond adversary democracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Marks, M., & Fleming, J. (2006). The right to unionize, the right to bargain, and the right to democratic
politics. Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 605, 178-99.
Martin, S. E. (1991). The effectiveness of affirmative action: the case of women in policing. Justice
Quarterly 8, 489-504.
McCrary, J. (2003). The effect of court-ordered hiring quotas on the composition and quality of police.
Retrieved June 29, 2006, from http://www-personal.umich.edu/~jmccrary/mccrary2004.pdf.
McGreevy, P. (2006, July 2). LAPD is under the gun on recruitment. Los Angeles Times, p. B1.
McLaughlin, E., & Murji, K. (2001). Lost connections and new directions: neo-liberalism, new public
managerialism and the 'modernization' of the British police. In K. Stenson & R. Sullivan (Eds.), Crime,
risk, and justice: the politics of crime control in liberal democracies (pp. 104-21). Cullompton: Willan.
Messerschmidt, J. W. (1993). Masculinities and crime: critique and reconceptualization of theory.
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
Miller, S. L. (1999). Gender and community policing: walking the talk. Boston: Northeastern University
Press.
Miller, S. L., Forest, K. B., & Jurik, N. C. (2003). Diversity in blue: lesbian and gay police officers in a
masculine occupation. Men and Masculinities 5, 355-85.
Moore, M. H., & Braga, A. A. (2003). Measuring and improving police performance: the lessons of
Compstat and its progeny. Policing 26, 439-53.
Muir, W. K. M. (1977). Police: streetcorner politicians. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Myers, K. A., Forest, K. B., & Miller, S. L. (2004). Officer Friendly and the tough cop: gays and lesbians
navigate homophobia and policing. Journal of Homosexuality 47, 17-37.
National Center for Women and Policing (2002). Equality denied: the status of women in policing, 2001.
Retrieved June 29, 2006, from http://www.womenandpolicing.org/PDF/2002_Status_Report.pdf.
National Center for Women and Policing (2003). Under scrutiny: the effect of consent decrees on the
representation of women in sworn law enforcement. Retrieved June 29, 2006, from
http://www.womenandpolicing.org/pdf/Fullconsentdecreestudy.pdf.
National Research Council (2004). Fairness and effectiveness in policing: the evidence. Washington,
D.C.: National Academies Press.
Oberweis, T., & Musheno, M. (1999). Policing identities: cop decision making and the constitution of the
citizen. Law & Social Inquiry 24, 897-923.
O'Malley, P., & Hutchinson, S. (2005). Police culture and the new police corporations. Unpublished
manuscript.
Pateman, C. (1970). Participation and democratic theory. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University
Press.
Perez, D. W. (1994). Common sense about police reform. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Reaves, B. A., & Hickman, M. J. (2002). Police departments in large cities, 1990-2000. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Reiner, R. (1992). The politics of the police (2nd ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Reuss-Ianni, E., and Ianni, F. A. J. (1983). Street cops and management cops: two cultures of policing:
street cops and management cops. In M. Punch (Ed.), Control in the police organization (pp. 251-74).
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Rigakos, G. (2002). The new parapolice: risk markets and commodified social control. Toronto:
University of Toronto Press.

20
 SEEING BLUE

Rosenfeld, R., Fornango, R., & Baumer, E. (2005). Did Ceasefire, COMSTAT, and Exile reduce homicide?
Criminology & Public Policy 4, 419-49.
Selznick, P. (1969). Law, society, and industrial justice. New York: Sage.
Sherman, L. W. (1995). The police. In J. Q. Wilson & Joan Petersilia (Eds.), Crime (pp. 327-48). San
Francisco: Institute for Contemporary Studies Press.
Simon, J. (2002). Speaking truth and power. Law & Society Review 36, 37-50.
Sklansky, D. A. (1999). The private police. UCLA Law Review 46, 1165-1287.
Sklansky, D. A. (2005). Police and democracy. Michigan Law Review 103, 1699-1830.
Sklansky, D. A. (2006a). Not your father’s police department: making sense of the new demographics of
law enforcement. Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology 96, 1209-43.
Sklansky, D. A. (2006b). Private police and democracy. American Criminal Law Review 43, 89-105.
Skolnick, J. H. (1966). Justice without trial: law enforcement in a democratic society. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
Skolnick, J. H. (1969). The politics of protest. New York: Ballantine Books.
Steiker, C. (1996). Counter-revolution in constitutional criminal procedure? Two audiences, two answers.
Michigan Law Review 94, 2466-2551.
Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. New York: Harper.
Thacher, D. (2001). Conflicting values in community policing. Law & Society Review 35, 765-98.
Toch, H., Grant, J. D., & Galvin, R.T. (1975). Agents of change: a study in police reform. New York:
John Wiley & Sons.
Toch, H., & Grant, J. D. (2005). Police as problem solvers: how frontline workers can promote
organizational and community change (2nd ed.). Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
Truman, D. B. (1971). The governmental process: political interests and public opinion (2nd ed.). New
York: Alfred A. Knopf.
United States v. Johnson (1948). 333 U.S. 10.
Waldeck, S. E. (2000). Cops, community policing, and the social norms approach to crime control: Should
one make us more comfortable with the others? Georgia Law Review 34, 1253-1310.
Walker, S. (2001). Police accountability: the role of citizen oversight. Belmont: Wadsworth.
Walker, S. (2003). The new paradigm of police accountability: the U.S. Justice Department "pattern or
practice" suits in context. Saint Louis University Public Law Review 22, 3-52.
Walsh, W. F., & Vito, G. F. (2004). The meaning of Compstat: analysis and response. Journal of
Contemporary Criminal Justice 20, 51-69.
Westley, W. (1953). Violence and the police. American Journal of Sociology 59, 34-41.
Westley, W. (1956). Secrecy and the police. Social Forces 34, 254-57.
Westley, W. A. (1970). Violence and the police: a sociological study of law, custom, and morality.
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Wilms, W. W. (1996). Restoring prosperity: how workers and managers are forging a new culture of
cooperation. New York: Random House.
Wilson, J. Q. (1968). Varieties of police behavior: the management of law and order in eight communities.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Wood, J. (2004). Cultural change in the governance of security. Policing & Security 14, 31-48.

21
 SEEING BLUE

Wuestewald, T., & Steinheider, B. (2006, January). Shared leadership: Can empowerment work in police
organizations? The Police Chief 73, 48-55.
Wykoff, M. A., & Skogan, W. K. (1993). Community policing in Madison: quality from the inside out.
Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice.

22