The Rationalization of Law Enforcement Jordann Smith-Burgess | SOCI 57H

Pictured here are the eyes of Eric Garner, one of the thousands of individuals whose lives were claimed at the hands of police brutality in the United States.

His tragic story begins with the prohibited sale of cigarettes in Staten Island and ends with a banned chokehold and the fatal use of force in his arrest. The officers responsible for Eric Garner's death were not indicted.

A question I seek to answer is: how did we get to an era of policing where this behavior is possible, justifiable, legal, and enforced? To what extent can we attribute this style of policing to Ritzer’s forces of rationalization: calculability, control, efficiency, and predictability?

Calculability

Law enforcement statistics make significant contributions to the measurement of the effectiveness of policing. A barrier we face with these numbers, however, is how representative they are of the reality of policing and of crime in America.

I use the example of broken windows policing in New York to demonstrate how the calculability of policing can work against rationalization. In the early 2000s, the NYPD began enforcing a style of policing that aimed to decrease the rate of serious crimes by targeting misdemeanor crimes, contributing to an overall decrease in the crime rate. The data do show a decrease in felony arrests as well as an increase in misdemeanor arrests. But these stats are not representative of the reality of crime in New York. Not only did the statistics simply indicate a change in the style of policing, but they were also skewed by the general decrease in the crime rate across the United States.

The enforcement of broken windows policing contributed to the brutality employed against Eric Garner.

Using metrics such as the number of arrests made or tickets issued alters the numbers without actually correlating to an improvement in the quality of policing.

Control

Control is central to the execution of reform ideas in the field. In the past, reform efforts have gained traction only to fizzle out due to a lack of oversight over how individual officers actually integrated these concepts into their styles of policing. In order to maintain the momentum that rationalization introduced to policing, an entire profession was created to control the implementation of policies and ideas in law enforcement.

Additionally, technology has served as an important catalyst for this force of rationalization. Police departments have used software such as CompStat and the Early Interventions Systems to record police conduct and keep the information available to authority figures within law enforcement. Technology such as cell phone video, security camera footage, and video from body cameras have assisted with holding police accountable.

Efficiency

Like calculability, efficiency in policing can actually serve to decrease the quality of policing, prioritizing quicker methods of crime reduction over proactive methods of crime prevention. Management in law enforcement looked to classical organization theory to understand the most optimal approaches to rationalizing the police. The tenets of the theory included: “Organizations and members behave rationally, organizations strive to be efficient, efficiency is achieved through specialization and the division of labor, and efficiency is maximized through scientific inquiry” (Reisig).

Data actually shows that less efficient methods of law enforcement were actually more effective not only in reducing crime but in "influencing individual perceptions of safety" (Reisig).

Herman Goldstein claimed that “police professionals in the United States suffered from the ‘means over ends syndrome’” (Reisig). This meant that when professionals tried to make a more businesslike model for law enforcement, policing became inefficient. But when reform turned to improve efficiency, police seemed to lose sight of “the objectives of preventing and controlling crime and related problems” (Reisig).

Predictability

In policing, unpredictability can be lethal. Gilmartin described policing as “an often-mundane job punctuated by bursts of extraordinary intensity and mortal peril, thus requiring a particular ‘hypervigilance’ while on the job” (Reisig). Policing can also be unpredictable and threatening to the officers in potentially dangerous situations. In a country with a heavily armed civilian population, individuals might be carrying weapons invisible and potentially fatal to the officer. An individual might be “acting in a way that appears unpredictable to the officer”, because of a mental health crisis or substance use, for example (Reisig). It becomes apparent that there must be a standardized procedure for processing incidents in a way that is optimal for both the community and its officers.

This standardized procedure came to fruition as the SARA Model. The Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment Model was created as a form of problem-oriented policing to increase efficiency without neglecting the need for critical analysis of the issue at hand and how to get to the root to find the solution. Ideally, officers should “identify what the particular cause of a conflict is in a specific place and subsequently take the steps to address that issue” (Reisig).