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Styles of urban policing: Organization, environment, and police styles in selected American cities
360
BOOK
REVIEWS
tural and material inequities which have historically been associated with criminal be-
havior. Turning to rehabilitation, Shireman and Reamer contend that the court has an obligation to inquire into the antecedents of delinquent behavior and provide feasible help to families and children. The authors evaluate research on rehabilitation and conclude that it is not so much that “nothing works, ” but that effectiveness is unpredictable, state coercion is too often punitive, and research methods are woefully limited when it comes to discerning the specific effects of programming. They argue for practice-oriented research, designed not to reshape our understanding of delinquent conduct, but to more simply assist practitioners in doing their jobs. All of the arguments are well made, but the issue of unpredictable effectiveness is perhaps the least effective-one must question how unpredictable effectiveness must become before the link between cause (rehabilitation effort) and effect (declining delinquency) is too irretrievably broken. In addition to its assessment of the deeper issues of substantive justice, this book provides an excellent review of major proposals for juvenile court restructuring, and offers specific directions for reform, ranging from alternative intervention mechanisms for status offenders to a scale of sanctions for serious offenders. The “system” of juvenile justice is also evaluated, with special emphasis on various aspects of intake and institutionalization. On the whole, Rehabilitating Juvenile Justice manages to achieve its well conceived objectives through an unusually comprehensive, insightful and reasoned analysis. REFERENCES Asquith, S. (1983) Justice, retribution and children. In Providing criminal justice for children. ed. A. Morris and H. Geller, pp. 7-19. London and Baltimore: Edward Arnold.
Belinda McCarthy School of Social and Behavioral Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, Alabama 35924
Styles of Urban Policing: Organization, Environment, and Police Styles in Selected American Cities by Jeffrey S. Slovak. Columbia University Press (562 West 113th Street, New York, New York 10025) 1986, 198 pp., hardcover-$35.00. In Styles of Urban Policing, Jeffrey Slovak applies James Q. Wilson’s notion of organizational style to explain variation in the way police agencies perform their work. Slovak frames his explanation by pitting organizational against environmental influences. His quantitative analysis leads him to conclude that city, and especially neighborhood, environments play a minor role compared to organizational factors in determining the style of street-level practice. This suggests to the author that police organizations enjoy considerable autonomy to identify objectives and implement strategies, and are only minimally constrained by local considerations. Little has been written on this topic since Wilson’s Varieties of Police Behavior, although noteworthy contributions have included Brown (1981), Smith (1984; 1986), and some ethnomethodologies-all of which have focused on police style as revealed in the decisions of individual officers. The usefulness of these studies notwithstanding, research on police organizations and their environments has not moved far beyond Wilson’s original analysis. Slovak’s foray into this arena is then a welcome effort. It is, however, a disappointing one, marred by weak data and dubious interpretations, which render suspect many of his conclusions. The first thing to strike the reader is the book’s attention to data. Most of the analysis of police style uses dispatch logs from a sample of convenience-Elyria, Ohio; Columbia, South Carolina; and Newark, New Jersey. Characteristics of citizen and policeinitiated incidents are aggregated to the neighborhood, as are census data on those neighborhoods (fifty total); reported crimes and department characteristics are used to characterize each jurisdiction and police organization. Slovak argues that two important dimensions of police style are revealed in the
BOOK REVIEWS
dispatch logs-aggressiveness (number of police-initiated events per thousand population) and substantive effort (the proportion of incidents that are legalistic or watchmanlike). “Watchmanism” is operationalized as the proportion of all traffic, crime, and disorder incidents that are citizen-initiated, and the legalist style is construed as the proportion of such incidents that are officer-initiated. The author is sensitive to the many problems that the use of agency-generated data entail, but his methods of coping with them prove less than convincing. For example, his effort to overcome intercity variation in the classification of incidents forces him to use very broad categories to characterize police style. An aggressiveness indicator that covers all police-initiated incidents fails to distinguish among the diverse implications of the various forms of police initiative, such as stopping traffic violators, conducting field interrogations, performing home security checks, doing routine follow-up investigations, and intervening with juveniles, public drunks, and citizens in distress. Characterizing “substantive effort” by collapsing traffic, crime, and disorder incidents into “legalist” and “watchman” styles does grave damage to Wilson’s conceptual framework, which itself requires reconsideration if theories of police discretion are to enjoy greater predictive power. Slovak’s schema places a noisy party complaint, a traffic accident call, and a reported rape in the same “watchman” category, causing the reader to wonder what “watchmanism” really means. Indeed, the face validity of the substantive effort variable as an indicator of pa/ice style is doubtful, for the problems that appear on the police log do so for reasons mostly beyond the department’s control. Limited by the restrictions of the dispatch log, Slovak’s analysis of police style is forced to ignore what many would consider the most important element of officer discretion-what officers do once they have intervened. It may be time to discard the notion that global indicators of police “style” can fairly represent the complex array of things police do. The study’s reliance on data aggregated to the neighborhood level does little to advance
361
our understanding of whether and how the innumerable applications of individual officer discretion are transformed into organizational style, something that surely must be done if we are to have faith that police style at the organizational level is more than an academic construct. The acuteness of the aggregation problem is exemplified in the author’s attempt to test conflict theory. In Elyria and Columbia he finds a positive relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic status and proactive policing, leading him to infer that the police are not attempting to control the resourceless to the benefit of those with resources. This requires an ecological leap of faith that the targets of police proactivity in wealthier neighborhoods are the wealthier residents, not the less wealthy residents and transients. It also requires the assumption that the essence of police proactive intervention is only repressive. Without compelling evidence on these assumptions, the author cannot draw meaningful conclusions. Indeed, his formulation of the conflict theory hypothesis ignores a more reasonable alternative that is consistent with his findings-to the extent that police today serve the interests of one social class over another, it is selective protection, not repression, that they offer, regardless of the social class of the targeted offenders. The book’s theoretical framework seems driven by the available data. Department size, supervisory span of control, civilianization, and form of accountability between chief and political superior are used to characterize the police organization. Absent are indicators of the policies of administrators, the monitoring and incentive structures available to implement them, recruitment, hiring, and training systems, and a host of informal organizational considerations widely believed to have relevance for how police behave. Data on the environment are limited to demographic and socioeconomic variables about the cities and neighborhoods, leaving unmeasured and unconsidered other key environmental considerations, such as the law, the political climate, efforts by neighborhood and other interest groups, the availability of alternative public and private institutions to handle citizens’ problems, and the police departments’
362
BOOK
relationship to those organizations. All social science researchers are plagued with insufficient data, but the limitations here allow only a very narrow test of the organization-versusenvironment question. Given the study’s focus on just three organizations, one would have hoped for a better “feel” for the environment and organizations than the aggregate data and perfunctory descriptions of locales provide. The author acknowledges many data limitations but has a tendency to draw conclusions that exceed the bounds of reasonable inference. For example, relatively small and inconsistent correlations between neighborhood characteristics and police style are found across the three cities. Slovak finds this “particularly damning for the contention of situational determinism of police style” (p. 179). Neighborhood characteristics seem an inadequate if not inappropriate operationalization of the sort of incident-specific factors that have been alleged and shown to “situationally determine” officer behavior (complainant’s preference, citizen demeanor, nature of offense, relationship between disputants-to name just a few). Another example is the author’s cross-city multivariate analysis in Chapter Six, which shows that two-thirds to three-fourths of the variance in police style across neighborhoods is accounted for by city identity and central business district status; other neighborhood characteristics do not add appreciably to the model’s explanatory power. How this can be taken as evidence that organization dominates environment is puzzling. First, the analysis clearly shows that a neighborhood’s business district status is a powerful predictor of police style, particularly aggressivenesssomething the author acknowledges but discounts for reasons that are not evident. Second, it is not at all clear what city identity represents-organization or environmentprobably both. His interpretation here seems to be that to the extent that city identity represents environmental considerations (such as city size and urbanization), its only appreciable impact is realized by its influence on organizational structures. The point is that the multivariate analysis does not include a clearly distinguishable organizational variable that
REVIEWS
would allow an unambiguous comparison of organizational and environmental effects. The author is on stronger ground in his claim that neighborhood demography and socioeconomic status do not show strong effects on police style. This is consistent with research findings that local governments allocate public services in accordance with bureaucratic decision rules that are unaffected by neighborhood wealth (Jones et al., 1980). It is contrary to other recent findings that show substantial neighborhood-level effects with disaggregated, encounter-level data on police discretion (Smith, 1986). The absence of such effects in this study may be due to the rather severe risks of ecological fallacy, misspecification, and measurement error mentioned above, but it may also be that these neighborhood-level factors are relatively unimportant in these and many departments. One would have greater faith in that conclusion if other evidence of the departments’ resource allocation and command-and-control apparatus had been marshaled. To conclude, however, that these departments delivered a “nearuniform product to almost all of the elements of a diverse, differentiated market” (p. 182) is to misconstrue the meaning of modest correlation and beta coefficients. Although the study’s data are weak and the interpretations speculative and sometimes tortuous, it generates an implicit theoretical framework worth developing. Slovak acknowledges the tension between the police administrator’s conflicting compulsionsfreedom from external influence and the need for external support. The organization’s sustenance depends upon its capacity to find the appropriate balance between the two, and I believe that Slovak is correct to argue that the range of an agency’s freedom of action is characteristically broad for a large number of issues and circumstances (though this varies considerably). That is not to say, however, that organization “dominates” environment, for that grossly oversimplifies what is a complex interplay between the two. As Slovak notes, the local environment plays a major role in determining what opportunities are available to demonstrate the agency’s worth to external constituencies and what risks at-
BOOK
tach to various strategic alternatives. Slovak’s contention that the choice of a department’s stylistic aspirations is relatively immune from environmental considerations and that it is the consequence of some unitary, rational decision process is unverifiable from his data and seems highly questionable, despite the sometimes heroic efforts of police at various levels to realize these objectives. And the conclusion that organization dominates environment because the latter operates indirectly through the former reflects an unnecessarily simplistic theoretical construction. Environmental effects, even if only indirect, are hardly less theoretically or practically significant. Ultimately, because of operational flaws, the book’s principal contribution is not what it adds to the “storehouse of knowledge” on police style but rather what it suggests about fruitful directions for future research on how organization and environment impinge on what is still the situationally determined decisionmaking of street-level officers. Rather than asking which exerts the greatest influenceorganization or environment-researchers
363
REVIEWS
need to learn more about the conditions under which various elements of the environment exert greater and lesser influence and through what mechanisms. I suspect that if we are to learn much more about this, we must begin to get inside the “black box” of police decisionmaking at all levels. This is not only the unmet challenge of this book but of studies of police discretion in general.
REFERENCES Brown, M. K. (1981). Working the Street: Police discretion and the dilemmas of reform. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Smith, D. A. (1984). The organizational context of legal control. Criminology 22: 19-38. Smith, D. A. (1986). The neighborhood context of police behavior. In Communities and crime, ed. A. J. Reiss, Jr. and M. Tom-y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stephen D. Mastrofski Administration of Justice Department The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania 16802
BOOK
REVIEWS
tural and material inequities which have historically been associated with criminal be-
havior. Turning to rehabilitation, Shireman and Reamer contend that the court has an obligation to inquire into the antecedents of delinquent behavior and provide feasible help to families and children. The authors evaluate research on rehabilitation and conclude that it is not so much that “nothing works, ” but that effectiveness is unpredictable, state coercion is too often punitive, and research methods are woefully limited when it comes to discerning the specific effects of programming. They argue for practice-oriented research, designed not to reshape our understanding of delinquent conduct, but to more simply assist practitioners in doing their jobs. All of the arguments are well made, but the issue of unpredictable effectiveness is perhaps the least effective-one must question how unpredictable effectiveness must become before the link between cause (rehabilitation effort) and effect (declining delinquency) is too irretrievably broken. In addition to its assessment of the deeper issues of substantive justice, this book provides an excellent review of major proposals for juvenile court restructuring, and offers specific directions for reform, ranging from alternative intervention mechanisms for status offenders to a scale of sanctions for serious offenders. The “system” of juvenile justice is also evaluated, with special emphasis on various aspects of intake and institutionalization. On the whole, Rehabilitating Juvenile Justice manages to achieve its well conceived objectives through an unusually comprehensive, insightful and reasoned analysis. REFERENCES Asquith, S. (1983) Justice, retribution and children. In Providing criminal justice for children. ed. A. Morris and H. Geller, pp. 7-19. London and Baltimore: Edward Arnold.
Belinda McCarthy School of Social and Behavioral Sciences University of Alabama at Birmingham Birmingham, Alabama 35924
Styles of Urban Policing: Organization, Environment, and Police Styles in Selected American Cities by Jeffrey S. Slovak. Columbia University Press (562 West 113th Street, New York, New York 10025) 1986, 198 pp., hardcover-$35.00. In Styles of Urban Policing, Jeffrey Slovak applies James Q. Wilson’s notion of organizational style to explain variation in the way police agencies perform their work. Slovak frames his explanation by pitting organizational against environmental influences. His quantitative analysis leads him to conclude that city, and especially neighborhood, environments play a minor role compared to organizational factors in determining the style of street-level practice. This suggests to the author that police organizations enjoy considerable autonomy to identify objectives and implement strategies, and are only minimally constrained by local considerations. Little has been written on this topic since Wilson’s Varieties of Police Behavior, although noteworthy contributions have included Brown (1981), Smith (1984; 1986), and some ethnomethodologies-all of which have focused on police style as revealed in the decisions of individual officers. The usefulness of these studies notwithstanding, research on police organizations and their environments has not moved far beyond Wilson’s original analysis. Slovak’s foray into this arena is then a welcome effort. It is, however, a disappointing one, marred by weak data and dubious interpretations, which render suspect many of his conclusions. The first thing to strike the reader is the book’s attention to data. Most of the analysis of police style uses dispatch logs from a sample of convenience-Elyria, Ohio; Columbia, South Carolina; and Newark, New Jersey. Characteristics of citizen and policeinitiated incidents are aggregated to the neighborhood, as are census data on those neighborhoods (fifty total); reported crimes and department characteristics are used to characterize each jurisdiction and police organization. Slovak argues that two important dimensions of police style are revealed in the
BOOK REVIEWS
dispatch logs-aggressiveness (number of police-initiated events per thousand population) and substantive effort (the proportion of incidents that are legalistic or watchmanlike). “Watchmanism” is operationalized as the proportion of all traffic, crime, and disorder incidents that are citizen-initiated, and the legalist style is construed as the proportion of such incidents that are officer-initiated. The author is sensitive to the many problems that the use of agency-generated data entail, but his methods of coping with them prove less than convincing. For example, his effort to overcome intercity variation in the classification of incidents forces him to use very broad categories to characterize police style. An aggressiveness indicator that covers all police-initiated incidents fails to distinguish among the diverse implications of the various forms of police initiative, such as stopping traffic violators, conducting field interrogations, performing home security checks, doing routine follow-up investigations, and intervening with juveniles, public drunks, and citizens in distress. Characterizing “substantive effort” by collapsing traffic, crime, and disorder incidents into “legalist” and “watchman” styles does grave damage to Wilson’s conceptual framework, which itself requires reconsideration if theories of police discretion are to enjoy greater predictive power. Slovak’s schema places a noisy party complaint, a traffic accident call, and a reported rape in the same “watchman” category, causing the reader to wonder what “watchmanism” really means. Indeed, the face validity of the substantive effort variable as an indicator of pa/ice style is doubtful, for the problems that appear on the police log do so for reasons mostly beyond the department’s control. Limited by the restrictions of the dispatch log, Slovak’s analysis of police style is forced to ignore what many would consider the most important element of officer discretion-what officers do once they have intervened. It may be time to discard the notion that global indicators of police “style” can fairly represent the complex array of things police do. The study’s reliance on data aggregated to the neighborhood level does little to advance
361
our understanding of whether and how the innumerable applications of individual officer discretion are transformed into organizational style, something that surely must be done if we are to have faith that police style at the organizational level is more than an academic construct. The acuteness of the aggregation problem is exemplified in the author’s attempt to test conflict theory. In Elyria and Columbia he finds a positive relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic status and proactive policing, leading him to infer that the police are not attempting to control the resourceless to the benefit of those with resources. This requires an ecological leap of faith that the targets of police proactivity in wealthier neighborhoods are the wealthier residents, not the less wealthy residents and transients. It also requires the assumption that the essence of police proactive intervention is only repressive. Without compelling evidence on these assumptions, the author cannot draw meaningful conclusions. Indeed, his formulation of the conflict theory hypothesis ignores a more reasonable alternative that is consistent with his findings-to the extent that police today serve the interests of one social class over another, it is selective protection, not repression, that they offer, regardless of the social class of the targeted offenders. The book’s theoretical framework seems driven by the available data. Department size, supervisory span of control, civilianization, and form of accountability between chief and political superior are used to characterize the police organization. Absent are indicators of the policies of administrators, the monitoring and incentive structures available to implement them, recruitment, hiring, and training systems, and a host of informal organizational considerations widely believed to have relevance for how police behave. Data on the environment are limited to demographic and socioeconomic variables about the cities and neighborhoods, leaving unmeasured and unconsidered other key environmental considerations, such as the law, the political climate, efforts by neighborhood and other interest groups, the availability of alternative public and private institutions to handle citizens’ problems, and the police departments’
362
BOOK
relationship to those organizations. All social science researchers are plagued with insufficient data, but the limitations here allow only a very narrow test of the organization-versusenvironment question. Given the study’s focus on just three organizations, one would have hoped for a better “feel” for the environment and organizations than the aggregate data and perfunctory descriptions of locales provide. The author acknowledges many data limitations but has a tendency to draw conclusions that exceed the bounds of reasonable inference. For example, relatively small and inconsistent correlations between neighborhood characteristics and police style are found across the three cities. Slovak finds this “particularly damning for the contention of situational determinism of police style” (p. 179). Neighborhood characteristics seem an inadequate if not inappropriate operationalization of the sort of incident-specific factors that have been alleged and shown to “situationally determine” officer behavior (complainant’s preference, citizen demeanor, nature of offense, relationship between disputants-to name just a few). Another example is the author’s cross-city multivariate analysis in Chapter Six, which shows that two-thirds to three-fourths of the variance in police style across neighborhoods is accounted for by city identity and central business district status; other neighborhood characteristics do not add appreciably to the model’s explanatory power. How this can be taken as evidence that organization dominates environment is puzzling. First, the analysis clearly shows that a neighborhood’s business district status is a powerful predictor of police style, particularly aggressivenesssomething the author acknowledges but discounts for reasons that are not evident. Second, it is not at all clear what city identity represents-organization or environmentprobably both. His interpretation here seems to be that to the extent that city identity represents environmental considerations (such as city size and urbanization), its only appreciable impact is realized by its influence on organizational structures. The point is that the multivariate analysis does not include a clearly distinguishable organizational variable that
REVIEWS
would allow an unambiguous comparison of organizational and environmental effects. The author is on stronger ground in his claim that neighborhood demography and socioeconomic status do not show strong effects on police style. This is consistent with research findings that local governments allocate public services in accordance with bureaucratic decision rules that are unaffected by neighborhood wealth (Jones et al., 1980). It is contrary to other recent findings that show substantial neighborhood-level effects with disaggregated, encounter-level data on police discretion (Smith, 1986). The absence of such effects in this study may be due to the rather severe risks of ecological fallacy, misspecification, and measurement error mentioned above, but it may also be that these neighborhood-level factors are relatively unimportant in these and many departments. One would have greater faith in that conclusion if other evidence of the departments’ resource allocation and command-and-control apparatus had been marshaled. To conclude, however, that these departments delivered a “nearuniform product to almost all of the elements of a diverse, differentiated market” (p. 182) is to misconstrue the meaning of modest correlation and beta coefficients. Although the study’s data are weak and the interpretations speculative and sometimes tortuous, it generates an implicit theoretical framework worth developing. Slovak acknowledges the tension between the police administrator’s conflicting compulsionsfreedom from external influence and the need for external support. The organization’s sustenance depends upon its capacity to find the appropriate balance between the two, and I believe that Slovak is correct to argue that the range of an agency’s freedom of action is characteristically broad for a large number of issues and circumstances (though this varies considerably). That is not to say, however, that organization “dominates” environment, for that grossly oversimplifies what is a complex interplay between the two. As Slovak notes, the local environment plays a major role in determining what opportunities are available to demonstrate the agency’s worth to external constituencies and what risks at-
BOOK
tach to various strategic alternatives. Slovak’s contention that the choice of a department’s stylistic aspirations is relatively immune from environmental considerations and that it is the consequence of some unitary, rational decision process is unverifiable from his data and seems highly questionable, despite the sometimes heroic efforts of police at various levels to realize these objectives. And the conclusion that organization dominates environment because the latter operates indirectly through the former reflects an unnecessarily simplistic theoretical construction. Environmental effects, even if only indirect, are hardly less theoretically or practically significant. Ultimately, because of operational flaws, the book’s principal contribution is not what it adds to the “storehouse of knowledge” on police style but rather what it suggests about fruitful directions for future research on how organization and environment impinge on what is still the situationally determined decisionmaking of street-level officers. Rather than asking which exerts the greatest influenceorganization or environment-researchers
363
REVIEWS
need to learn more about the conditions under which various elements of the environment exert greater and lesser influence and through what mechanisms. I suspect that if we are to learn much more about this, we must begin to get inside the “black box” of police decisionmaking at all levels. This is not only the unmet challenge of this book but of studies of police discretion in general.
REFERENCES Brown, M. K. (1981). Working the Street: Police discretion and the dilemmas of reform. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Smith, D. A. (1984). The organizational context of legal control. Criminology 22: 19-38. Smith, D. A. (1986). The neighborhood context of police behavior. In Communities and crime, ed. A. J. Reiss, Jr. and M. Tom-y. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stephen D. Mastrofski Administration of Justice Department The Pennsylvania State University University Park, Pennsylvania 16802