Beyond the Law: An Agenda for Policing Reform

Abstract

Legal discussions about how best to manage the use of force by the police have focused on possible changes in the legal standards through which the police are held accountable for their actions-standards established in Graham v. Connor. We argue that such changes are unlikely to change police conduct in desirable ways. The police are currently trained and equipped to manage all the problems they face through the threat or use of coercion even though this approach is a poor fit to most of the issues the police actually deal with in their everyday work. The consequence of this mismatch is that police actions provoke and intensify conflict in many settings, leading inevitably to instances of the overuse of force. A better solution to the problem of the police use of force is to focus beyond the law on the organization of policing. We propose four approaches for possible reorganizations of the police. The goal of the first two approaches--exiting the social welfare field and collaboration with nonpolicing agencies-is to limit police actions to those situations in which their willingness and ability to compel obedience via force is appropriate. The other two approaches-specialization and civilianization-aim to diversfy the skill set of police so that some members of the department are trained, equipped, and able to be deployed to deal with the variety of problems that can be better handled through a "social welfare" skill set.