At the beginning of the twentieth century, Progressive reformers' notion of
good policing matched that of their contemporaries and the modern public.
According to one prominent historian of policing, most assumed and expected
that police
enforced the law kept the peace, and served the public; they suppressed vice
and eradicated crime, preserved order at the polls and in the street, and aided
citizens in distress. Underlying this notion were two assumptions. One was that
most policemen did their job. The patrolmen, who were assigned to precincts,
walked the beat looking for a complaint or a call for help... The detectives...
investigated serious crimes and watched well known criminals. And the special
detailed maintained order at the courts, theaters, docks, railway stations, and
other public places. The other assumption was that most policemen used little
or no discretion... they should be guided only by the language of the law and
the constraints of a policed society. (Fogelson 1972: 31)
Progressive efforts over the next fifty years sought to bring actual
street-level policing behavior in harmony with the first expectation through
management techniques built upon the second assumption.
This disjunction between expectations placed upon police departments and their
real-world performance motivated the reform efforts of good-government
activists. They waged their campaigns in no small part by publicizing the
dimensions and extent of poor policing. A survey of Chicago policemen in 1904
revealed, for example, that "they spent most of their time in saloons,
restaurants, barbershops, bowling alleys, pool halls, and bootblack stands.
They were everywhere except the beat" (Fogelson 1972). It did not require
sophisticated social science methods to show that patrolmen did not enforce
vice laws uniformly, but instead that they often used their public powers for
personal gain or to supported machine politicians (Royko 1972: 102-11). From
the turn of the century throughout the 1920s, Progressive reformers generated
reports, staffed commissions, published newspaper articles, conducted official
inquiries, and sponsored legislation that exposed corruption forces, drew the
links between machines and police, and argued for professional, de-politicized
police forces.
One particularly critical and prominent investigation began in 1911 in
response to the complaints of angry onlookers who reported seeing police take
protection bribes from bookies outside of Comiskey Park during a wrestling
match. Subject to increasing public pressure from this and similar violations,
then Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison appointed three Civil Service
commissioners to investigate reports of collusion between the police and
organized perpetrators of vices such as gambling and prostitution (Lindberg
1991: 106-7). The commissioners conducted a sweeping three month probe into the
activities and organization of the police department and published their
results in a highly critical report that found:
(a) That there is and for years has been a connection between the Police
Department and the various criminal classes in the City of Chicago.
(b) That a bi-partisan political combination or ring exists, by and through
which the connection between the Police Department and the criminal classes
above referred to is fostered and maintained.
(c) That to such connection may be charged a great part of the
inefficiency--disorganization and lack of discipline existing in the
Department.
(d) That aside from such connection, inefficiency also arises through faults of
organization and administration.
(e) That the Police Department, as now numerically constituted, can enforce any
reasonable regulation... if honestly and efficiently administered...
(f) That with the Department as now organized, efficient administration cannot
be expected nor secured. (Chicago Civil Service Commission 1912: 52).
Specific findings brought rather severe personnel discipline: "One captain
resigned under charges, and three inspectors, three captains, one sergeant, and
six plain clothes men have been discharged" (Chicago Civil Service Commission
1912: 8). More generally, the report's constructive recommendations followed
the standard good government formula for professional, hierarchical
administration: completely reorganize the department along "logical and
scientific lines," remove "the service as far as possible from the influence of
politics," "simplify and modernize" the records, consolidate the executive
officers into a central facility, and establish standards and professional
training capacities (52-3). Predictably, those at the apex of political and
administrative police power ignored these blue ribbon recommendations.
Between 1890 and 1930, Progressive reformers outside of police departments
launched many similar attacks against the machine. Their efforts met with
gradual, cumulative success in large cities across the nation. In 1894, Chicago
reformers raised standards for police personnel by putting the department under
civil service regulation and otherwise stiffened entrance requirements. They
raised officers' salaries an average of 50% between 1919 and 1929 in Chicago to
attract more qualified candidates (Fogelson 1977:82). By the 1930s, most big
city departments had founded professional training academies. Over this period,
Progressives had managed to implement important parts of their program, but
left many of the basic, dysfunctional operations of the departments
untouched--city-wide chiefs exercised little real-authority over precinct-level
commanders or rank-and-file officers, and the daily operations of the police
were still very much under the local control of ward machines.
A second round of reform between 1930 and 1960 transformed big city police
departments around the country into the large bureaucracies with which we are
familiar today. In contrast to the earlier Progressive movement, forces from
within the police community led these wave. Perhaps Progressivism's most
effective action lay not in their political skirmishes with machines, but in
sowing two ideological seeds that grew within in professional communities: that
the purpose of municipal agencies was to provide the most effective public
service and the lowest possible cost and that the organizational form that best
achieved this end was rationalized bureaucracy (Fogelson 1977: 90, 144; Sparrow
1990: 34-41; Carte and Carte 1975). Chiefs who led the second wave of reform
imbibed and then developed these ideas in the community of police discourse
formed by new institutes and professional associations such as the
International Association of Police Chiefs, American Association for the
Advancement of Criminology, state police associations, the University of
Louisville's Southern Police Institute, Florida State University's Southern
Institute for Law Enforcement, and seminars sponsored by Harvard University or
the Operations Research Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(Fogelson 1977: 144). Wherever a member of this new generation came to power,
he sought to remake his department in the shape prescribed by these
professional discussions prescribed.
In Chicago, the ax fell in 1960 when Orlando W. Wilson became police chief. His
appointment was the result of persistent low level corruption combined with a
series of highly publicized scandals that left no doubt in the minds of Chicago
residents that some substantial fraction of the police department was involved
in serious criminal activity. These revelations created a kind of legitimation
crisis for Mayor Daley, and he responded with the appointment of a nationally
respected police reformer.
In the decade of the 1950's, writes one Chicago police observer,
Inefficiency and corruption still undermined the detectives' bureau and the
police squads... Any wise motorist who owned a car in the 1950s knew that the
best way to beat a traffic ticket was to keep a $10 bill wrapped around the
driver's license at all times. Typically, a patrol officer would pull an
offender over to the curb and ask the driver to accompany him to the front seat
of the squad car, where the money would be passed (Lindberg 1991: 287).
At least a few police officers, local politicians, and traffic court judges
colluded to fix more serious traffic violations. Another investigation in the
late 1950s resulted in the indictments of thirty five court officers involved
in ticket-fixing for money and favors (Peterson 1959). Several months after
this already serious revelation, a far greater criminal conspiracy surfaced. In
the "Summerdale Scandal" of 1958, a burglar confessed that some eight police
officers were his associates in crime; for over two years, they had been
helping him carry his loot away in their squad cars while on duty. Stolen
property was recovered in the homes of the officers, and quickly there was talk
that many of hundreds of officers could be involved (Lindberg 1991: 295-304).
Royko (122) writes that, "the public was genuinely shocked. It's one thing to
take a few bucks to overlook an illegal U-turn; but even Chicagoans could
become indignant at the thought of policemen jimmying the locks of appliance
stores and loading up their trunks, on city time yet."
Daley, who had previously accepted police corruption and local ward-control of
the police department, surprisingly adopted an extreme reform program to regain
public confidence. He began by searching for a new chief, one with impeccable,
nationally recognized credentials. He found Orlando W. Wilson, whose
qualifications included running police departments in Berkeley, Fullerton
(California), and Witchita (Kansas), serving as professor of policing and dean
of the School of Criminology at Berkeley, and consulting for some dozen police
departments across the country. Well aware of the obstacle that Chicago's
political-police links would pose to reform, Wilson demanded carte-blanche
inside the Department and political support from the Mayor outside, and Daley
gave it to him. Over the next ten years, Wilson implemented a stunning series
of changes that completed the Progressive institutional program within the CPD.
He implemented state of the art techniques and technologies such as motorized
patrol using one-man cars, efficient centralized radio dispatch, specialized
functional squads such as vice, vastly improved record-keeping, and improved
training, recruiting, and promotion practices. Lindberg (1991: 314) credits
Wilson with forcing the CPD "to break from its historic nineteenth century
roots. [Under him] the period of modernity had at last begun."
These modernizing reforms included three fundamental planks constitutive of
professional bureaucracy: professional autonomy, hierarchical
command, and the development of expert sources of practical
knowledge. Each of these bureaucratic characteristics stood on its own as
part of a larger scheme of efficient police service delivery, but each can also
be understood as a contextual strategy for wresting control of police from the
political machine. To foreshadow our constructive account, Street Level
Democracy reverses each of these three features.
Mike Royko writes that Wilson's predecessor, Chief Timothy "O'Connor was never
in any position to reform, or even control, the police force. The day to day
management of the department was conducted by the seven aged and canny
assistants in his office who took their orders from the politicians while
O'Connor went through the motions of being in charge" (Royko 1971: 113; see
also Lindberg 1991: 274). Wilson's first task, then, was to increase the
professional and organizational autonomy of the police department at the
expense of these local politicians. With the support of Daley, Wilson shattered
ward control by moving more operations to the headquarters, reducing the number
of police districts from thirty-eight to twenty-one, breaking the alignment
between police-district and political-ward boundaries, and instituting stricter
procedures for hiring and promotion that would make police employment less
subject to political manipulation (Royko 1971: 117; Fogelson 1977: 175-82,
226). He moved an Illinois law that shifted discipline procedures from the
Civil Service Commission to a five-member police board. Any other police
reform, Wilson correctly supposed, depended upon this first reform of
transferring control over the police from machine politicians to professionals
inside the law enforcement community.
Beyond organizational autonomy, Wilson favored the model of centralized
command and coordination that had proved its mettle not only in other municipal
service agencies, but also in the military and large private corporations. This
strict hierarchical model of police organization first of all implies the
separation of task-conception and task-execution (Wilson 1950): the details of
organization and routine were to be determined at headquarters and then passed
down to the districts and then finally to the patrol officers who would execute
them. A 1964 report on the progress and direction of CPD reform advertises its
management philosophy:
A core of 62 officers now constitutes the top command of the Chicago Police. It
is to these men that the task of successful implementation has fallen. Each has
the job of interpreting plans and policies in frequent face-to-face contact
with the men under his command. His subordinates must be kept fully informed,
understand the reasons for change, and be properly motivated. (Chicago Police
Department 1964: 7, 14)
Strict hierarchy and supervision made sense not only as an organizational
embodiment of efficiency, but as a way to combat the widespread corruption that
had brought Wilson to Chicago. He imposed stricter regulations on behavior of
patrol officers both on duty and off and he established Bureau of Inspectional
Services section to monitor these regulations (Chicago Police Department 1964:
8). In line with professional recommendations, he re-organized the department
along functional rather than geographic lines by moving many of the patrolman's
responsibilities to centralized special units such as intelligence and vice.
Finally, Wilson institutionalized the generation of expert knowledge within
the department and cultivated sources outside of it. The police organization
was to be guided not by politics, but by a body of practical knowledge called
policing, or more expansively criminology. Like all other big city police
departments, the CPD has its own research and development section that
generates usable knowledge about the local departmental matters. Nationally,
expert knowledge comes from groups like the National Institutes of Justice, the
FBI, and numerous centers and departments in Universities. One enduring
achievement of the reform period was the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports that
collect, centralize, and then report incidents of crime and police response
across the country. Note two aspects of this expert knowledge that will be
reversed in our discussion of Street Level Democracy. First, those who generate
theoretical knowledge and practical recommendations are for the most part
divorced from the day to day operations of policing, and they have only quite
tenuous connections to street level operators. Second, expert prescriptions
propagate downward through the bureaucracy. Research and development
departments transmit their results to chiefs who then order their subordinates
to follow these recommendations.
Through this bureaucracy, the police department became quite good at
implementing the three crime-fighting strategies that together form the
foundation of modern policing: preventative patrol, rapid response, and
retrospective investigation. Each of these strategies was based upon
reasonable, but quite speculative, theories about crime abatement. Preventative
patrol is the practice off maximizing police visibility--first by putting them
in automobiles and then by monitoring to ensure that officers are indeed
patrolling--in order to reduce opportunities for criminal behavior. An early
1970s experiment in Kansas City cast doubt on the efficacy of preventative
patrol and shocked the law enforcement community. Patrol areas were divided
into three sections. In one section, patrol manpower remained at its previous
level, it was doubled in the second, and the third area received no patrol at
all. Researchers found no discernible impact on crime rates (Kelling et. al.
1974; Fogelson 1977: 231-2; Sparrow et. al. 1990: 15-16).
The second basic anti-crime strategy is rapid response to citizen calls for
police service. Everywhere in the United States, this has been instituted
through the 911 emergency system and radio dispatch. The theory of rapid
response holds that minimizing the time between the occurrence of a crime and
the arrival of police will increase the probability of apprehending the
perpetrator. Two findings about police operations cast doubt on this theory.
First, it turns out that the vast majority of 911 calls and patrolman's time is
spent on non-criminal matters such as traffic directions, domestic disputes,
and the like (Fogelson 1977: 231). Second, even the shortest response times
have been shown to be insufficient to allow police to catch criminals because
"the chance of arresting a villain at the scene became infinitesimal if victims
waited more than five minutes to call the police. Unfortunately, most waited
far longer" (Friedman and Matteo 1988).
The third crime-fighting strategy is post-facto investigation and apprehension
of criminals by detectives and patrolmen. Inside police departments, the ratio
of apprehended suspects to reported crimes is known as a "clearance rate," and
it is a figure of substantial managerial merit (Simon 1991). Assuming that
criminals are rational actors, increasing the probability of arrest (an
severity of punishment) will deter crime (Wilson 1983). Like most hypotheses
about rational action, the evidence for this one is mixed. Without engaging too
much in the debate, evidence does at least suggest that apprehension is
insufficient as a crime controlling measure because in recent years crime rates
have soared right along with incarceration rates (see Figure 5.2 below).
By the 1960s, Wilson and others across the country had largely completed this
bureaucratic reform project. The CPD weathered disturbances of the late 1960s
and 1970s; its basic institutional design and practical theory remained intact
until another legitimation crisis which perhaps dates from the mid-1980s.
Whereas the first crisis consisted of disjunction between widespread notions
about the ideal form of policing and its actual corrupt, machine-serving
practice, the latest crisis concerned the inability of police--irrespective of
organizational form--to maintain safety and social order in urban
neighborhoods. The precise dimensions of the crisis in law enforcement are
difficult to establish, as are the levels of performance anxiety and outside
pressure necessary to induce change in insular bureaucracies like police
departments (Downs 1967). I offer two kinds of gross evidence--attitudinal and
epidemiological--to support the case that those inside the law enforcement
community had good reason to feel some performance anxiety and that outsiders
demands some kind of change.
Consider first trends in national attitudes toward crime. Along with economic
issues like unemployment and the high cost of living, Americans have
consistently and frequently name crime as "the number one problem facing this
country" in national surveys since the 1970s. If survey results indicate at all
the national sentiment, then Americans' anxiety about crime has dramatically
increased over the last decade. The Gallup polling organization frequently
administers a national survey that asks, "what do you think is the most
important problem facing this country today?" and then provides a menu of
responses that includes "crime," "inflation and the high cost of living,"
"unemployment," and since the 1970s has included "drugs." The figure below
plots the percentage of Americans who responded that "crime" or "drugs" was the
nation's most important problem.[1]
These trends of increasing crime and public concern sparked tremors of police
reform in many cities across the United States in the 1980s that continue
today. Reformers struck deeply by questioning the cardinal strategies of
policing discussed above--preventative patrol, rapid response, and
investigation--and suggested that alternative, admittedly vague strategies such
as "pro-active problem-solving" and "community partnership" might do better
(Goldstein 1992; Sparrow et. al. 1990; Chicago Police Department 1993). Those
departments that chose these sorts of strategies as a way out of their
legitimation crises would quickly find their accustomed centralized,
hierarchical, paramilitary organizations incompatible with the effective
implementation of these alternatives, and have since embarked on institutional
explorations for more compatible forms. Putting it unfashionably, the means of
effective policing had become incompatible with inherited relations of
policing.
The Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety (CANS) was among the earliest
proponents for this wave of police reform in Chicago. It began in 1980 as a
public safety and crime prevention technical assistance group that aided
Chicago neighborhood organizations with federal funding under the Urban Crime
Prevention Program (UCPP). Adhering to an ideology of community organizing
common to both the New Left and Saul Alinsky, CANS stressed indigenous
neighborhood capacity, autonomy from state power (though ironically itself a
creature of the state), and frequent opposition to constituted power. By the
late `80s, the limitations of this micro-organizing strategy had become
apparent, and CANS re-invented itself into an advocacy group that pushed for
institutional reforms to the police that would make it more responsive to
neighborhood residents. In the words of long-time CANS Executive Director
Warren Friedman:
The organizations [we helped] were supposed to take these resources, organize
residents, develop action plans and, when necessary, work with the
police to make the neighborhood safer... There was no hint of policy
participation or institutional change. With the lack of police cooperation,
this strategy began losing credibility. CANS... began to evolve in response to
the clear limits of its community safety strategy. (Friedman, forthcoming)
It's revamped organizing strategy, then, would be two-fold. First, it would
agitate for reforms to the CPD that would make police more responsive to
community voice. Retaining its ideological and organizational commitment to
local participation, community involvement would always figure prominently in
its reform proposals. Second, it would organize community groups and
residents--it would capacitate them--to take advantage of the institutional
permeability which it demanded from the police.
CANS waged its campaign to change the police department in part with reports
that explained national best practices in community policing and criticized the
CPD for failing to adopt these practices (Friedman and Matteo 1988; Friedman
1996). Using a kind of carrot and stick approach, it first discussed these
reports with high-level police officials and then, pending lack of cooperation,
used them publicly as organizing tools. In 1991, CANS organized a city-wide
Community Policing Task Force of some 100 community-based organizations as a
forum to discuss and push for these ideas. It also conducted a Leadership
Institute for Community Policing that consisted of six seminars led by
professors of criminology and policing. It additionally sponsored field trips,
attended by Leadership Institute participants as well as CPD personnel, to New
York and Seattle to see their community policing efforts first hand.
Foreshadowing the intensive provisions for community participation that would
later distinguish Chicago's program, Friedman writes that,
Most evenings [during the field trips], ... we met to discuss what we had seen
and heard that day. Over and over, the question was raised "where's the
community?" In both cities, they saw that little thought had been devoted to
or investment made in community participation, education, or training.
(Friedman, forthcoming)
Inextricably but independently from this Movement campaign, the upper echelons
of the police department and City Hall also began making reform motions in the
early 1990s. For a sticker price of $475,000, the City commissioned a study of
the CPD from the consulting firm of Booz, Allen, & Hamilton that was
completed in 1992 (Spielman 1992). In addition to an array of management
techniques to increase the number of patrol officers per city dollar,
Booz-Allen recommended that the city experiment with various community policing
devices in the five of the city's twenty-six police districts. Many of these
devices would resemble the community policing efforts of other cities, with the
principal difference being Chicago's extensive provisions for community
involvement. While the substance of most of the policing reforms can be
attributed to an evolving professional (police) consensus about community
policing, CANS can probably be given credit for the reform's participatory
emphasis. Because they were loud, because there was no fundamental conflict of
interest between the community organizers and the police reformers, and because
CANS' institutional suggestions might actually enhance the effectiveness of
policing in the eyes of police professionals, their suggestions were rather
smoothly integrated into the early rounds of police reform.
As the first step of a city-wide policing initiative dubbed "Chicago's
Alternative Policing Strategy" (CAPS), the five prototype districts went
on-line in January 1993. They incorporated devices that break with traditional
policing tenants. Against the principal of hierarchy, the new policing
recommends that street-level police officers pro-actively identify and solve
problems. To make room for this activity, units in prototype areas were
divided into "beat" and "response" sections, with the former solving problems
and the later responding to 911 calls for assistance. Against the principal of
centralization, prototypes built the capacity of operational "beat" units. The
geographic atom of policing in Chicago is the beat--the city itself is divided
into 279 beats, each of which delineates the patrol area for one squad car at
any given time.[4] The prototypes stressed
"beat integrity" which means that individuals officers focus service on their
patrol areas more--they do not patrol areas outside the beat, individuals are
assigned to particular beats for sustained periods, police officers know the
problems and residents of their beats, and residents get to know them.
Prototype areas opened channels of participation at both the beat and district
levels. At monthly meetings in each beat, police met with residents to jointly
identify, strategize, and eventually solve the most urgent problems of crime
and disorder in their neighborhoods. Beyond this, each District created an
advisory body of community leaders to represent larger concerns to each
District's commander. The prototype program was hailed as a success (Chicago
Community Policing Evaluation Consortium 1994) and expanded to cover the entire
city beginning in fall 1994 (James 1994). Approximately 80,000 people attended
beat meetings during 1995 and the first four months of 1996 (Chicago Community
Policing Evaluation Consortium 1994).
Old school local democracy would--and did through the persistent voice of
CANS--recommend the sorts of organizational innovations adopted in the
prototypes and then expanded to the entire city. Localism in the form of
devolution of decision power to street-level police officers, pragmatism as
focus on specific chronic crime problems, and democracy through the creation of
neighborhood-level channels of participation are all consistent with
prescriptions that a certain kind of participatory democrat might make. Based,
as they were, on a fusion of indeterminate concepts like problem-solving,
decentralization, participation, partnership, and teamwork, it is unsurprising
that practitioners in both the police department and interested community
organizations would continue to re-fashion these rough-cut reformed
institutions in light of revealed shortcomings. These responses to concrete
experience would move institutional innovation in directions uncharted by
either decentralist or bureaucratic prescriptions. Most versions of local
democracy emphasize the autonomy of small polities, but the Chicago experiments
would soon discover that operational units would need support and tutelage in
order to function effectively. And though autocrats would be unsurprised by
this quick reassertion of the center, management of the new police work would
consist not in defining the tasks of subordinates and then checking their
performance, but rather in monitoring and guiding their officers' self-defined
problem-solving activities. These changes follow the design for a "Supportive
Center" described in chapter 9 below.
In rather short order, it became clear that participating residents would need
support and training in order to solve local problems effectively. The Joint
Community-Police Training (J.C.P.T.) Program was developed to meet this need.
Part community mobilization, part civic instruction, the two-year program
deployed teams of organizers and instructors throughout Chicago
neighborhoods--in all of the city's beats--first to mobilize residents around
public safety and then to train them in the techniques of problem-solving and
interacting with police-officers in their beats. These teams were composed of
both police patrol officers who had shown special interest in CAPS and
"civilian" community organizers (Fung 1997e). CANS received a $2.8 million
contract from the City to run the project, much of which was used to hire 20
trainers and 40 outreach organizers.
In each beat, the team of organizers and trainers were given three or four
months to jump start community policing neighborhood groups. The team would
conduct an orientation session to introduce residents to the fundamental idea
of Chicago-style community policing: residents work with police to solve
concrete, identifiable problems of crime, safety, and disorder in their
neighborhood. CANS staff would then "train" citizens in problem-solving by
getting them to pick an actual problem on their beat--say the crack house or
gang hangout corner--and work with them to solve this problem through
strategies that utilized the police, the court system, city services, and
direct action. Ani Russell, CANS training director, estimates that CANS has
touched some 12,000 distinct residents. According to an independent evaluation
of the program from the Institute for Policy Research (IPR) at Northwestern
University, total cumulative attendance at these neighborhood problem solving
and leadership development sessions between May 1995 and July 1996 was over
18,000. The IPR study also found residents who participated in community
policing training were able to solve, in part or completely, 41% of the
problems they attacked.
In 1997, the City declined to renew CANS's funding to continue J.C.P.T. For
reasons never publicly articulated, officials in City Hall decided to shift
this training money away from CANS and split it between the CAPS section of the
Mayor's Office and the Police Academy. At the point of contract termination,
officials in both the Mayor's office and the police department still expressed
a strong commitment to public support for the organization and training of
residents around community policing issues, but through a funding decision have
moved the locus of that training away from an independent community
organization and into the purview of city agencies (Fung 1997e).
In addition to training, officials also saw the need for procedures to monitor
street level problem solving activities; more broadly, they needed to redefine
the role of management in light of devolution and shift to neighborhood
problem-solving. Inevitably, the police and residents of some beats solve
problems better than those in others. So, whereas the role of management under
hierarchy is to command, some functions of management under this new scheme are
to (i) find out which beats are doing better others, (ii) discover the roots of
this success, and (iii) improve non-performers. A "General Order" on community
policing issued to the Chicago Police Department in April 1996 can be
interpreted at a first attempt at this formalization and re-definition (Chicago
Police Department 1996). The General Order requires officers to document and
justify their selection of particular problems, choice of strategies, and the
successes and failures of efforts to implement those strategies. This
documentation can then be used by the officers themselves and by their
supervisors to compare efforts against one another and to understand the causes
of success and failure.[5]
As of this writing, the institutions of Chicago community policing are very
young and still very much in development. This historical narrative sets a few
important devices--beat meetings, beat integrity, citizen training, and
management-as-monitoring--in the context of their pragmatic, muddling origins.
Because the effort to shift policing to a participatory, problem-solving form
is very much in play, any snapshot of these institutions will lack the
coherence of venerable organizational forms like "bureaucracy," "representative
democracy," or even "direct democracy." Any institutional alternative,
however, demands a level of coherence that is not easily available through
historical narrative. In Part II, we move from the descriptive to the
theoretical and normative mode by weaving these somewhat haphazard real-world
institutional reforms into the detailed architecture, once again ideal and
stylized, of Street Level Democracy.
[1] Data from Gallup Poll, various years, as
stored in Lexis-Nexis Polling Results electronic archive.
[2] These figures were very kindly provided to
me by the Epidemiology Program at the Chicago Department of Health. They are
based upon the records of the Chicago Police Department.
[3] Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services, various years. Figures for the United States are based upon coroners'
reports that are collected nationally by the Centers for Disease Control.
[4] To be clear, the city as a whole is divided
into 26 polices districts, each of which is divided into between eight and
twelve beats. There are 279 beats in the entire city. Each beat is numerically
designated with four digits, DDBB, where DD gives the district number and BB
gives the beat number.
[5] See chapter 7 (section 7.2) and chapter 8
for the detailed discussion of these relationships between CPD headquarters and
the local beat units.