Perspectives

The Occupational Culture of Police

By Zoilo Torres -Guest Columnist- | Last updated: Dec 24, 2014 - 3:47:28 PM

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The known numbers of police killing of civilians clamor for radical changes in the criminal justice system and the instrumentality of the Grand Jury. With dangerously few exceptions, recent history shows that the system is better suited to providing cover for dishonorable law enforcement officers rather than serving justice. Instituting change in the criminal justice system necessarily includes reorienting the typical values, norms, and attitudes comprising the occupational culture of police.

Short of hiring an entirely new generation of well trained and educated police officers loyal to equal justice, racism will continue to exist in the ranks of the New York City Police Department. However, certain assumptions in police culture revealed by decades of research lead us to believe that these occupational assumptions will persist well into the future absent a program of cultural reorientation of the profession.

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“As long as police perceive themselves as law enforcers as opposed to peace-keepers, they will remain antagonists to the civilian population police are mandated to protect.”
Some of the assumptions in police occupational culture include: people are too dangerous and cannot be trusted; experience is better than abstract rules; police must make people respect them; everyone hates cops; the legal system is unworthy-police make the best decision about guilt or innocence; people who are not controlled will break the law; police must appear respectable and efficient; police most accurately identify crime and criminals; the major job of police is to enforce the law as opposed to keeping the peace; stronger punishment deters criminals from repeating their errors.

These occupational assumptions are particularly ominous when applied in poor communities of color, and often lead police to manipulate the criminal justice system to ensure successful prosecutions.

Moreover, Jerome Skolnick in his “The Politics of Protest” describes the political profile of police as conservative, perhaps reactionary, a person from the lower-middle class, repressive, and often extremely ambivalent about the rights   of others. All these factors militate against the generally accepted conception of a democratic individual. Whether police admit it or not, political prejudice like racism, finds its way into the practice of law enforcement.

Mix the occupational assumptions and political profile with the specter of racism, what you have is Eric Garners and Tamir Rices waiting to happen. Both were African American victims of police violence in Staten Island, NY and Cleveland, Ohio respectively. Revealingly, the White officer who killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, MO, said in an interview after the shooting: “I was just doing my job.” This statement is reflective of a repugnant occupational culture.

Embodied in police occupational culture is police seeing themselves as personifying authority. Disorderly Conduct, Resisting Arrest, Felonious Assault, or Impeding the Administration of the Law, are challenges to police authority that become grounds for violence that regularly entail an arrest that must culminate in a conviction in order for it to be measured as successful police work.  Only then can an arrest be considered a good point for future promotions. In this process the fabrication of reality (the lie), the shroud of secrecy, and the unspoken pact with the District Attorney’s Office, all become endemic to the structure of criminal justice not only in New York City but in the nation as well.

One last point on police culture: as long as police perceive themselves as law enforcers as opposed to peace-keepers, they will remain antagonists to the civilian population police are mandated to protect. The difference between a law enforcer and a peacekeeper is the difference between an occupying army and an international peacekeeping force. One imposes social order by force of arms regardless of how unjust or humiliating that social order may be. The other maintains social peace while adversaries workout a political solution to their differences.

If we don’t deal with the occupational culture of police gone awry since perhaps the beginning of policing, body cameras and community policing will help but won’t cure police corruption and unjustified violence.

Zoilo Torres is a field representative for the union, 32BJ SEI., He was formerly director of organizing and advocacy for the Fifth Avenue Committee for Community Development, and director of public health campaigns for the NYC Department of Health. He can be reached at [email protected].