Pulling Together: Integrating Craft and Science

Pressure for police reform over the last century has come in many guises. The latest attempt is police science or evidence-based policing, and in this article, we consider how this approach can engage with the craft of policing to improve police science and the prospects that it will be used well. We suggest police science needs to do a better job of making itself relevant to the operational concerns of rank-and-file officers in their encounters with the public and of attending to the best that police craft has to offer. By studying craft carefully and showing a willingness to listen and learn from those who do the work, police science will demonstrate the kind of respect necessary for increasing the likelihood of a productive alliance between these two partners for the purpose of police reform. Though none but a fool or a madman will ever pretend to dispute the authority of experience, or to reject that great guide of human life –David Hume (2007/1748, p. 26) Our purpose, in this article, is to consider how the science and craft of policing can engage to improve police science and increase the likelihood that it will be used well. Our subject of inquiry is policing in USA, although we take occasion to refer to policing in other liberal democracies. Moreover, our attention is on the police patrol function and not criminal investigations. The largest resource in almost any police department is its patrol officers, and while there are studies exploring the culture of detectives (see Ericson, 1993), most discussion of the police craft has focussed on the culture of street-level patrol officers (O’Neill et al., 2007; Paoline, 2014). Similar to other occupations, such as medicine, to which police scholars often draw an analogy (Thacher, 2008, p. 50), craft and science are but two of many forces vying to influence what police do and how they do it. Political entities work hard to shape police practice, operating through legal institutions or by other means. Inside the organization, police administrators have their agendas, and many elements of the police occupational subculture pursue theirs. Police reformers in USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and elsewhere have long tried to influence police culture either through the implementation of management systems such as Compstat or New Public Management (Neyroud, 2011), the adoption of new technologies (Chan, 2001), bureaucratic changes (Ericson and Haggerty, 1997), or modifications to training and education standards (Mastrofski, 2007), but the Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia, USA. E-mail: jwillis4@gmu.edu Department of Criminology, Law and Society, George Mason University Fairfax, Virginia, USA. 321 Policing, Volume 8, Number 4, pp. 321–329 doi:10.1093/police/pau049 The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com craft has demonstrated an impressive resistance to these influences. And while there are assuredly examples of these efforts influencing police decision-making at the ‘coal-face’, to what degree these changes are revolutionizing police work requires additional systematic research. What is clear is that many researchers have concluded that recent reform efforts have fallen far short of transforming patrol officers’ commitment to the craft aspects of the work they do (Manning, 2003; Willis et al., 2007; Loftus, 2009; Manning, 2011; Koper et al., 2014). As for science as a harbinger for change, we think it is fair to say that it is currently a relatively weak player in the police organization, at least at the street level, where the work gets done and the discretion is the greatest (Sherman’s (2013) review of scientifically based knowledge of policing led him to conclude that while scientific knowledge has grown quite impressively since 1975, actual use of that knowledge has lagged far behind). Science is undoubtedly growing in popularity with administrators (whatever its prospects for improving police performance, it enhances their professional status and career chances), but the vast majority of the rank and file who actually do the work find it of limited utility at best. For example, a recent National Police Research Platform survey showed that 60% of a nationally representative sample of 95 US police chiefs and sheriffs in agencies of 100– 3,000 sworn indicated that they had promoted evidence-based policing ‘a great deal’ or ‘made it a top priority’ (Mastrofski, 2014) (As a basis for comparison, 90% of the local law enforcement CEOs indicated the same for community policing). Yet the few studies of the rank and file available indicate heavy reliance on police experience and reluctance to forego the implications of scientific findings when they conflict with traditional ways of doing things (Lum et al., 2012; Mastrofski et al., 2011). In rapidly increasing numbers, police leaders may see the benefits of the evidence-based approach, but most of their subordinates do not yet have a strong faith in the benefits of science (Our study of a professional, progressive suburban police agency of approximately 100 officers showed that knowledge of scientific evidence ranked at the bottom of 13 areas of skill and knowledge required for good police performance. Only 7% felt that knowledge of scientific evidence on what works is very important; 95% said that knowledge of laws and regulations was very important; 47% said that knowledge of people, places, and customs where the officer is assigned are very important (Mastrofski et al., 2011). Skill in verbal coercion and negotiation was also ranked as very important by a substantial number of respondents (about 40%)). One solution is to replace the current batch of street-level officers who have little faith or skill in science with a new batch who do. This approach, of course, is infeasible. Civil service protections and collective bargaining units make it hard to fire officers, even for cause, much less not being proscience, and it would take far too long to replace retiring officers with converts willing to embrace science fully. More importantly, even more science-prone officers, once on the job, may find that science does not solve ‘their’ most pressing problems. Hence, they will continue to rely on experience, not science, to direct their practices. Another strategy is to indoctrinate the existing street-level officers through training and supervision so that they appreciate and accept that evidence-based policing should be the driving force in their decisionmaking. Police officers have shown a remarkable resistance to such indoctrination for a host of reasons: training that is not meaningful to the audience, training built on weak science, and training that lacks specificity regarding what to do under what circumstances (Bayley and Bittner, 1984; Buerger, 1998; Lum et al., 2012). They tend to see science as something for the ‘brass’, not terribly relevant, and sometimes even harmful to the sorts of work choices they must make on a daily basis (Thacher, 2008). In an environment where so many in police organizations are estranged from the modus operandi of science, as well as being sceptical of their top leadership, it seems to us that a useful strategy to advance the acceptance and adoption of scientific methods is 322 Policing Article J. J. Willis and S. D. Mastrofski