Many scholars view the police use of legitimate force as the defining characteristic of police departments.
In a free society, there is at least as much concern about the proper use of "public force" as there is about the proper use of public funds. Consequently, the police are held strictly accountable for their exercise of authority and force. Unfortunately, the guiding principles for the use of force are far more complex than those for the use of public money. In both cases, there is a general expectation that the use will be economized. Hence force should not be used "excessively." Shooting a youth who is running to avoid an arrest for marijuana possession is excessive, as are blaring one's siren and driving fast through city streets to catch a speeder or expressing peremptory commands and racial insults while managing pedestrian traffic at sporting events.
In addition, there are clear boundaries-marked out by the constitutional rights of citizens-that must never be crossed despite the possibility that doing so may accomplish police purposes. Some uses offered are not only unwise or wasteful but inherently wrong. They cannot be justified even if they would allow the police to achieve other ends more "efficiently" (when calculated in terms of money) or more "effectively" (when calculated in terms of the value of the objective).
Finally, there is the expectation that force will be employed fairly as well as efficiently. Fairness seems straightforward, especially in its most intuitive form: the idea that like cases should be treated alike. But there is also a second principle that identifies fairness with being able to recognize relevant differences among the cases and treating different cases in an appropriately dissimilar manner. And there is a third principle that views private settlements and agreements as preferable to publicly enforced adjudications, so that if the parties can agree to some solution distinct from what would be imposed by the state that is the preferable solution.
What is problematic about these principles for police managers is that they require, or make a virtue of, inconsistency-that is, acting on the basis of different ideas of fairness, depending on particular circumstances. Consider the issue of fairness in the way that the police respond to juveniles on the street late at night.
In such a situation, the principle of like cases treated alike would require the police to consider only the issue of whether an offense had been committed: whether children had violated a curfew. They would be discouraged from looking too closely at the circumstances surrounding the offense to decide if it was grave enough to justify an arrest. And they would be discouraged from thinking about the existence of private or non-criminal-justice-based solutions to the issues presented by the case. To ensure simple justice, they would respond only to those features of the situation that legally defined the offense and only in terms of applying or not applying the law.
The principle of treating different cases differently would require the police to investigate the circumstances of the crime to determine whether the situation was really as it appeared. Perhaps the child had left the house because he or she had been beaten by a parent. To the extent that the investigation revealed new, differentiating features of the situation, the police response might be modified to fit the case. Individualized justice would substitute for simple justice as a guide to police action. Also, the principle of preferring private settlements of disputes to public adjudications might influence the police response: If the parents of the child seemed capable of effective supervision, the police might simply return the child to the home.
In short, preferring one concept of' 'fairness" (or "justice") over another in the application of the law produces very different results in the handling of certain cases. These irregularities might well be inexplicable and therefore cast doubt on the fairness of the police operations, even though the police and many outside observers might agree that the police were being fair in a different sense than the crud notion of like cases treated alike.
To the extent that the principles governing the police use of force and authority are ambiguous and in conflict, and to the extent that the use of force has to be justified, the police mission is made "impossible." This conclusion is far more than a logical nicety. At their core, scandals focusing on police brutality and corruption reflect the public's concern that the police exercise the force and authority entrusted to them sparingly and fairly. More police departments and more police leaders have been skewered by such scandals than by concerns about their ability to handle public funds well. And police departments are often aggressively managed to ensure that corruption and brutality are minimized- frequently at the expense of other important police objectives such as controlling crime or keeping economic costs low.
