The reality is quite different, however. For the most part, the police operate on their own. Although they must be responsive to dispatchers, they tell the dispatchers when they are available for service and where they are located. Their supervisors are often absorbed with other duties and cannot always find them. Supervisors respond to calls with the officers only on the most important occasions. These conditions establish an irreducible degree of discretion for police officers. As a practical matter, although the written procedures and hierarchical structure create deterrents for misconduct, the officer controls most of the information about his or her whereabouts and activities, and that fact defeats the effectiveness of these control arrangements.
To complicate matters, police officers often have a substantial degree of power they can wield against their immediate and higher-level officers, some of it founded on mutual blackmail. Paradoxically, the dense framework of rules means that virtually all officers are guilty of some infraction some time in their careers. This is as true for supervisors as for officers. Knowledge of the infraction, sometimes even evidence, is often held by one's subordinate. In the worst cases, superior and subordinate have colluded to cover up some offense. In these situations, the supervisor's power to control the subordinate is checked by the implied threat to reveal the incriminating information. The practice is referred to as "dropping a dime," and its threat blunts a great deal of supervisory authority.
At a more positive level, most police managers recognize that they need the cooperation of their officers. Indeed, it is very unsettling to preside over an organization of several thousand officers who roam the streets carrying guns.
Every police manager is keenly aware of the fragility of his or her control-how easy it would be for the officers to cause a lot of trouble in a short period by either failing to do their jobs or doing them too zealously. To ensure the cooperation of the troops, they express deep concern about "maintaining morale." And when they make a decision that is unpopular with their troops, they are warned ominously that "morale will go down."
Although there are perfectly good reasons for worrying about esprit in an organization like a police department, the obsessive concern with morale often has a darker side. To some extent, the warning that morale will go down is a threat that if the police executive asks the officers to do something they do not want to do, they will begin behaving badly on the street. This possibility sometimes leads police executives to back off from demanding things from their officers that should be demanded on behalf of the public. In cases of police corruption and brutality, for example, the police routinely expect their leaders to "support" their troops against the charges. Sometimes these pressures are quite intense, and police executives yield to the expectations of their subordinates.
The effective independence of the police force from close managerial control is greatly reinforced by formal arrangements as well as working conditions and informal threats. The civil-service system establishes performance standards and protects people with those competences. The restrictions can be overcome only with the aid of enormous political and administrative effort. In addition, many departments now have police unions, with explicit contracts and official grievance procedures.2 This factor adds to the complexity of making general or specific changes in organizational procedures of personnel policies. It also compounds the political difficulties, for police unions are often politically powerful. In many northeastern cities, police personnel and their many relatives vote reliably to ensure that their elected leaders are responsive to their desires. It is the public sector version of having employee stockholders. Police executives are thus quite cautious in challenging their own organizations-despite the illusion of power that comes from their gold braid, the chain of command, and their tough disciplinary procedures.
Ironically, this situation has worsened as a result of making the police independent of politics. Police departments were separated from mayoral control and accountability as a means of guarding against political corruption. But police leaders did not really become independent. They became dependent on, and responsive to, the aspirations of their own troops. They began to define their jobs in terms of supporting the profession of policing. Without a countervailing public pressure that would focus their attention on the performance of public duties, they were powerless to resist the demands and expectations of their own subordinates. As a result, the police have substantial informal powers over their own leaders, who find it particularly hard to stand against a police force that can mobilize its own political constituency against them.
An alternative approach to managing police organizations would be to shift from a "command and control" system to one built on "professional responsibility." In this concept, the irreducible discretion of officers would be officially recognized. They would be trained to exercise this discretion wisely not only through instruction on the techniques of their profession (e.g., the skilled, disciplined use of force) but also through inculcation in the values that should guide their activities. Moreover, control would be exerted through after-the-fact examinations of their conduct and performance, rather than before-the-fact establishment of rules followed by direct supervision to ensure compliance. They would be liable to citizens whose rights and interests they had violated in the performance of their duties.
The first difficulty with shifting to this style of organizational control is that it is not certain it would succeed. Other barriers are no less considerable: The public is unwilling to grant police officers the status and pay associated with professionalism; neither the community nor the police executives who represent the community are clear on what purposes and values should guide officers; and the officers themselves prefer the protection of the organization, its rules, and its informal understandings to the vagaries of consumer satisfaction and liability judgments. Indeed, some police unions have opposed requirements that officers wear identifying name plates or badge numbers, to escape direct accountability to citizens.
In sum, it is not clear that police managers can direct their own troops even if they know what they should do and have suitable technologies for accomplishing their purposes. The mechanisms of command and control are unreliable in the face of discretion and countervailing power. The potential for professionalism in the field is limited by the reluctance of the public to rely on and pay for this alternative means of control, as well as by the desire of the police themselves to assume the prerogatives of professionalism but escape the responsibilities.
