just answer in essay format the 2 questions below based on the attached article. cite from the article too. 150 words total for both
The article attached needs to have a paragraph response is all that is needed to answer the following 2 question:
Internal affects: Have more diverse police department departments changed police culture or not?
External affects: Have more diverse police departments changed the job of policing (i.e. police interactions with the public) or not?
Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology
Volume 96
Issue 3 Spring
Article 9
Spring 2006
Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making
Sense of the New Demographics of Law
Enforcement
David Alan Sklansky
Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/jclc
Part of the Criminal Law Commons, Criminology Commons, and the Criminology and Criminal
Justice Commons
Recommended Citation
David Alan Sklansky, Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law Enforcement, 96 J. Crim.
L. & Criminology 1209 (2005-2006)
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0091-4169/06/9603-1209
THEJOURNAL
OF CRIMINAL LAW & CRIMINOLOGY
Copyright © 2006 by Northwestern University, School of Law
Vol. 96, No. 3
Printedin U.S.A.
CRIMINOLOGY
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE
DEPARTMENT: MAKING SENSE OF THE
NEW DEMOGRAPHICS OF LAW
ENFORCEMENT
DAVID ALAN SKLANSKY*
I. INTRODUCTION
Several decades ago, when social scientists were discovering the
police, and the Supreme Court was beginning to construct the modem law
of criminal procedure, American law enforcement was structured roughly
the same way it is today. Policing was largely a local responsibility.
Departments were organized hierarchically and quasi-militarily. Line
officers exercised wide discretion. Patrol and detective functions were
separated, and most officers were assigned to patrol. Detectives, like
supervisors, started out as patrol officers and were promoted from within.
The critical operational unit was the squad: a handful of line officers
supervised by a sergeant, or in the case of detectives, by a lieutenant.
Officers generally began police work when young and made it their career.
All of this remains true today. “As a legal and organizational entity,” David
Garland is right to observe, “the public police look much the same today as
they did thirty years ago. ‘
Professor of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Ann Carlson first focused my
attention on the topics I address here, and Frank Zimring helped me develop and sort out my
ideas. For criticism and assistance along the way, I also owe thanks to Gillian Lester, Justin
McCrary, Anjuli McReynolds, Michael Musheno, Katherine Saral, Jerry Skolnick, Joel
Willard, Leti Volpp, and Stephen Yeazell; to workshop participants at the Center for the
Study of Law and Society at U.C. Berkeley; and to the UCLA and U.C. Berkeley law
libraries.
1 DAVID
GARLAND,
THE
CULTURE
OF CONTROL:
CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 169 (2001).
1209
CRIME
AND
SOCIAL
ORDER
IN
1210
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
In other respects, though, American policing has been transformed.
Three changes are particularly notable. First, the mantra of community
policing has replaced the orthodoxy of police professionalism. Second,
civilian oversight, once resisted tooth-and-nail by the police, has become
unexceptionable. Third, and most striking of all, police workforces have
grown much more diverse. The virtually all-white, virtually all-male
departments of the 1950s and 1960s have given way to departments with
large numbers of female and minority officers, often led by female or
minority chiefs. Openly gay and lesbian officers, too, are increasingly
commonplace.
Today’s Los Angeles Police Department is not the
homogeneous workplace celebrated on Dragnet-andneither is the police
force of any other large American city.
This article focuses on the last of these changes, the dramatic shift in
the demographics of police departments-in who the police are. What
implications should this transformation have for how we think about and
regulate the police? The same question can, and should, be asked about
community policing and civilian oversight. But workforce diversity is at
once the most dramatic and the least scrutinized major change that
American policing has undergone over the past several decades. There is a
widespread sense that the change has been revolutionary,2 but it is hard to
know quite what to make of it. So often the change is simply ignored. Law
enforcement is analyzed as though it were still monolithically white, male,
and straight.3 The Dragnetpicture of American law enforcement continues
to lurk, in particular, in the background of most criminal procedure
scholarship–even when that scholarship pays careful attention to the race,
gender, and sexual orientation of the people being policed.
Those scholars who have not ignored the new demographics of
American policing have tended to reach one of two polar conclusions about
their implications. Either the growing diversity of American police forces
changes almost nothing, or it changes almost everything. Usually the new
demographics are treated as cosmetic or, at best, largely symbolic. The
nature of policing, the argument goes, is overwhelmingly a matter of
occupational outlook and organizational culture, not of the personal
characteristics of new recruits. “Blue is blue”: the job shapes the officer,
not the other way around.4 Officers of all backgrounds are assumed either
2 See, e.g., DAvID H. BAYLEY, POLICING IN AMERICA: ASSESSMENT AND PROSPECTS 3
(1998), available at http://www.policefoundation.org/pdf/Bayley.pdf.
3 See, e.g., KENNETH BOLTON JR. & JOE R. FEAGIN, BLACK IN BLUE: AFRICAN-AMERICAN
POLICE OFFICERS AND RACISM 2, 4 (2003) (noting that “[i]n many discussions of policing, all
the law enforcement officers are, implicitly or explicitly, taken to be white”).
4 See, e.g., SAMUEL WALKER, CASSIA SPOHN & MIRIAM DELONE, THE COLOR OF JUSTICE:
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT
1211
to make peace with the “white, masculine, heterosexual ethos”‘5 of policing,
or to have difficulty lasting. At the other extreme, the growing diversity of
American police forces is sometimes cited as grounds for a complete
rethinking of criminal procedure and, more generally, our entire approach to
law enforcement. Here the line of thinking is that the integration of police
forces, coupled with the increased political power of minority groups, has
made the restrictions the Supreme Court placed on law enforcement in the
1960s obsolete. The “great theme of the Warren Court,” that “the criminal
justice system had to be massively reformed to protect the constitutional
rights of all citizens,” makes little sense now that police departments, and
the political establishments that oversee them, reflect the diversity of the
communities they serve.6
I argue here for a less categorical assessment. The transformation of
law enforcement workforces is far from complete, and it does not come
close to justifying a complete overhaul of criminal procedure-in part
because the transformation may in fact be slowing. Still, the demographics
of law enforcement have already altered dramatically, and the consequences
are profound.
This article has three parts. The first part describes how the makeup of
police workforces has changed over the past several decades. The short
answer is that the workforce has grown much more diverse with regard to
race, with regard to gender, and more recently with regard to sexual
orientation-but that the pace of change has varied greatly from department
to department, and virtually all departments have a good ways left to go.
The second part of the article assesses the effects of the changes that
have already occurred in law enforcement demographics. I consider three
different categories of effects: competency effects (ways in which minority
officers, female officers, and openly gay and lesbian officers may have
distinctive sets of abilities), community effects (ways in which the
demographic diversity of a police department may affect its relations with
RACE, ETHNICITY AND CRIME IN AMERICA 111-12, 115 (2d ed. 2000) (summarizing research).
5 Kristen A. Myers et al., Officer Friendly and the Tough Cop: Gays and Lesbians
Navigate Homophobia and Policing, 47 J. HOMOSEXUALITY 17, 18 (2004); see also, e.g.,
JAMES W. MESSERSCHMIDT, MASCULINITIES AND CRIME 184 (1993) (arguing that “the police
construct a white, heterosexual form of hegemonic masculinity”).
6 Craig Bradley, The Middle Class Fourth Amendment, 6 BUFF. CRIM. L. REv. 1123,
1126-28 (2003).
In a category by himself, there is John Lott, who argues that police diversity has been
purchased at a sobering cost: higher crime rates, particularly in minority neighborhoods. See
John R. Lott, Jr., Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police
Departments, and Crime, 38 ECON. INQUIRY 239 (2000). For a discussion of Lott’s findings,
see infra text accompanying notes 76-77.
1212
DA VID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
the community it serves), and organizational effects (ways in which the
workforce diversity may affect the internal dynamics of the department
itself). Of these three categories of effects, the last one has received the
least attention but is probably the most important. In particular, there is
police
among
commonplace
evidence-increasingly
mounting
ethnographers, but largely unfamiliar to legal academics and the broader
public-that the demographic transformation of American law enforcement
has done much to break down the police subculture, by weakening both the
occupational solidarity and the social insularity of the police. When police
departments began adopting affirmative action policies three decades ago,
even some police officials sympathetic to the policies worried about
factionalism and a decline in esprit de corps. As it has turned out, though,
Police
the decline in occupational solidarity is very good news.
effectiveness does not appear to have suffered, a range of police pathologies
have been ameliorated, and police reform has grown easier and less
perilous.
The third and last part of the article explores the ramifications of the
changing demographics of law enforcement. I focus on four sets of
ramifications. The first set concerns affirmative action. Here law
enforcement appears to be a striking success story, but a success story in
danger of ending prematurely. The evidence is strong that the demographic
transformation of American law enforcement over the past few decades
owes much to race-conscious remedies, typically imposed pursuant to
consent decree or other court order. There are lessons here for the broader
debate over affirmative action, and grounds for concern about future
progress integrating police departments as court-ordered hiring and
promotion plans expire or are rescinded. The second set of implications
concerns the debate over litigation as a strategy for social reform. Here,
again, the integration of police departments is a noteworthy success storyone that casts doubt on sweeping generalizations about the ineffectiveness
of courts in catalyzing social large-scale change. The third set of
ramifications concerns police reform. Here the lessons are twofold:
continued diversification of law enforcement workplaces deserves more
attention as a key component of police reform, and the diversification
already accomplished should prompt reconsideration of avenues of reform
previously thought too dangerous because of the solidarity and insularity of
the police. The fourth and final set of implications concerns criminal
procedure. The changing demographics of American law enforcement fall
far short of making Warren Court criminal procedure obsolete, but they do
justify more careful and nuanced thinking about race, gender, and sexuality
dynamics in policing.
2006)
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1213
There is a story running through this article, about a profound insight
ossifying into orthodoxy. The insight in this case was that police behavior
is overwhelmingly determined by a homogeneous occupational subculture,
a subculture shaped by the nature of the job itself and marked by paranoia,
insularity, and intolerance. This became the orthodox view of the police for
good reason: it had tremendous explanatory power when it was first
developed in the late 1950s, and made even more sense by the end of the
1960s, as the police felt themselves increasingly under siege. Even today,
police solidarity and insularity are hardly things of the past. But neither are
they what they used to be. In large part because of the demographic
transformation of law enforcement, police officers are far less unified today
and far less likely to have an “us-them” view of civilians. But our beliefs
about the police have had trouble keeping pace with the changes on the
ground. We still tend to believe that police behavior is shaped by a
monolithic professional subculture, to which all recruits either assimilate or
fall victim. That belief has made it hard for us to see the ways in which
policing has changed as police officers themselves have changed-the ways
in which the new diversity of police workforces has altered the dynamics of
law enforcement.
II. CHANGES
How have the demographics of American police departments changed
since the 1960s? The short answer is by quite a lot, although not as much
as might be hoped, and at a widely varying pace. That is the short answer
with regard to race, with regard to gender, and with regard to sexual
orientation. But the details of the three stories differ.
A. RACE
American police departments are far more racially integrated today
than they were in the 1960s. In 1970, blacks made up somewhere around
six percent of sworn officers in the three hundred or so largest American
police departments; today that figure is around eighteen percent. 7 In cities
with populations over 250,000, twenty percent of sworn officers are black,
and fourteen percent are Latino-up from figures of eighteen percent and
nine percent, respectively, in 1990.8 In 2005, for the first time in the history
7 See Justin McCrary, The Effect of Court-Ordered Hiring Quotas on the Composition
and Quality of Police 44 (Nov. 30, 2003) (unpublished manuscript), availableat http://wwwpersonal.umich.edu/-jmccrary/mccrary2004.pdf.
8 See BRIAN A. REAVES & MATTHEW J. HICKMAN, BUREAU OF JUSTICE STATISTICS, U.S.
DEP’T OF JUSTICE, POLICE DEPARTMENTS IN LARGE CITIES, 1990-2000, at 3 (2002), available
at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/pdf/pdlcOO.pdf. This report compiles figures from the
1214
DA VID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
of the New York City Police Department, a majority of the new officers
graduating from its academy were members of racial minorities. 9
Figure 1 shows the change, since the 1960s,0 in the minority percentage
of a sampling of major American police forces:’
Figure 1
Officer
Percentage
Minority
80/
70%
60%
50%
1f9-671
40%r
20%
10%
*/o
San
New York
Chicago Philadelphia
Detroit
Phoenix
Baltimore
Francisco
Memphis Washington
Boston
Two things are particularly worth noting about Figure 1. First, the
overall pattern is one of dramatic increases in racial diversity. Second,
there is a lot of variation among departments: with respect to how diverse
they were in the 1960s, with respect to how much they have changed, and
with respect to how diverse they are now. Some departments, like Phoenix,
are still heavily white. In other departments, like Detroit and Washington,
D.C., white officers are now a clear minority.11 Some departments, like
2000 Law Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey.
9 Jennifer 8. Lee, In Police Class, Blue Comes in Many Colors,N.Y. TIMES, July 8, 2005,
at B2.
10 The figures for 2000 are from REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8. The 1967 figures
are from NAT’L ADVISORY COMM’N ON CIVIL DISORDERS, REPORT OF THE NATIONAL
ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS (1968).
11Although it does not appear in Figure 1, Los Angeles is also in this category. White
officers now constitute slightly less than forty-six percent of the Los Angeles Police
Department. See L.A. POLICE DEP’T, LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT ANNUAL REPORT,
at 27 (2000); REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8.
2006]
1215
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
Chicago and Philadelphia, were relatively integrated by the standards of the
1960s, but now lag behind other cities in this respect.
Do the increases shown in Figure 1 simply reflect increases in the
minority population of the cities in question? They would be noteworthy
even if they did, but for the most part they do not. Figure 2 shows the
in Figure 1 by the minority percentages
results of dividing the percentages
12
of the city populations:
Figure 2
Minority Officer PercentageDivided by Minority Resident Percentage
1 20
1 00
0 80
01967
*M2000
0 60
40
–
–
0 20—
000
New York
Chicago Philadelphia
Detroit
Phoenix
Baltimore
San
Francisco
Memphis Washington
Boston
In cities like Chicago and Philadelphia, where there has been little
change in the ratio of the minority share of the police department to the
minority share of the city population, the increases shown in Figure 1
reflect demographic shifts in the cities themselves. But for most of the
cities in this sample, there have been dramatic increases, not only in the
minority percentage of the police force, but also in the ratio of that
percentage to the minority percentage of the city itself.
One difficulty with comparing figures of these kinds from two
different decades is that the definitions of “white” and “minority” have
changed, particularly with regard to Americans of Mexican or Latin
American heritage. But the basic patterns remain the same if we look
12 Again, the figures for 2000 are from REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8, and the
figures for 1967 are from
NAT’L ADVISORY COMM’N ON CIVIL DISORDERS,
supra note 10.
1216
[Vol. 96
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
instead at black officers. Figure 3 compares the percentage of black
officers in a handful of major American police departments in the 1960s
and 2000.13 Figure 4 gives the
same numbers, divided by the black
14
population.
city
the
of
percentage
Figure 3
Black Officer Percentage
70%
60%
50%
40%
EI1960s
2000
Los Angeles
Detroit
Indianapolis
San Francisco
Washington
Boston
Denver
13 The figures for 2000 are from REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8. The earlier figures
for Detroit, Indianapolis, Washington, and Boston are for 1966; they are taken from
PRESIDENT’S COMM’N ON LAW ENFORCEMENT & ADMIN. OF JUSTICE, THE CHALLENGE OF
CRIME IN A FREE SOCIETY (1967) The earlier figure for Denver is from DAVID H. BAYLEY &
HAROLD MENDELSOHN, MINORITIES AND THE POLICE 157 (1969)
The figure for San
Francisco is for 1962; it comes from CAL. ADVISORY COMM. TO U.S. COMM’N ON CIVIL
RIGHTS, POLICE-MINORITY GROUP RELATIONS IN LOS ANGELES AND THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY
AREA (1963).
14 The denominators are taken from the 1960 census.
2006]
1217
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT
Figure 4
Black Officer PercentageDivided by Black Resident Percentage
140 r
Cl1960s
0 2000
~UTEll
Los Angeles
Detroit
Indianapolis
San Francisco
Washington
Boston
Denver
Again, the story is one of great variation from city to city, but with a
clear overall change in the direction of much more diverse departments.
Figures on the penetration of minority officers into supervisory and
command ranks are harder to obtain. Figures from Los Angeles, though,
will suggest the nature of the change, at least in one city:15
15L.A. POLICE
DEP’T,
supra note 11, at 27.
[Vol. 96
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
1218
Figure 5
LAPD Racial Composition by Rank, 2000
80%
70%
60%
Mother
MHispani
Efliack
50%
40%
30%
20%
1000
000
All Sworn Personnel
Officer
Detective
Lieutenant
Top Command
Figure 5 shows that minority officers remain concentrated in the lower
But the degree of
ranks of the Los Angeles Police Department.
concentration is lower than might be expected, in part because black
officers, as opposed to minority officers more broadly, are not concentrated
in the lower ranks. Latino officers, by contrast, are strongly concentrated in
the lower ranks-at least in part, presumably, because the Latino percentage
of the city population has been steadily growing over the past several
decades, and with it the Latino percentage of new officers hired by the
department. Nationwide, as in Los Angeles, the Latino officer-to-resident
ratio lags behind the black officer-to-resident ratio, but leads the
corresponding figure for other minorities: 16
16 Figure 6 is reformatted from REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8, at 3.
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1219
Figure 6
Officer PercentageDivided by Black Resident Percentage
80% l
70%
60%
50%
1990
40%1
30%
20%
—
0%
Any Minority
Black
Hispanic/Latino
Other Minority
B. GENDER
The basic story about women officers is the same as the story about
minority officers: dramatic increases over the past three decades, with
tremendous variation between departments. But there is one important
wrinkle: whereas the proportion of minority officers in some large
departments now approaches or exceeds the minority percentage of the city
population, the proportion of women officers tops out at twenty-five
percent, and there are 17indications that this ceiling may remain in place for
the foreseeable future.
17
Women comprise a much larger share of the civilian workforce in large police
departments In departments with over one hundred sworn officers, women hold more than
two-thirds of the civilian positions-which generally are lower paid and offer fewer
opportunities for advancement See KIM LONSWAY ET AL., EQUALITY DENIED: THE STATUS
OF WOMEN IN POLICING 2001 8 (2002), available at http //www.womenandpolicing org/
PDF/2002_StatusReport.pdf Chiefly to save money, American police departments have
greatly increased their reliance on civilian employees in recent years; large departments now
employ more civilians than sworn officers. See, e g, REAVES & HICKMAN, supra note 8, at
2. The stark gender difference between the two groups-the vast majority of officers are
men, and the vast majority of civilian employees are women-both exacerbates and makes
more troubling the way in which “civilianization” has tended to create two-tier departments,
with civilian employees treated as second-class citizens For a discussion of this problem in
the Los Angeles Police Department, see RAMPART INDEP.
RAMPART INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL 62-66 (2000)
REVIEW PANEL, REPORT OF THE
1220
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
Figure 7 compares the percentage of female officers in several large
departments in 1971 and 2000.18 As with racial integration of American
police departments, the overall picture is one of dramatic increases in
gender integration, with very substantial variation among departments.
Figure 7
Female Officer Percentage
30%
25%
20%
15%
-97
1500102000
10%
500
000
New York
Chicago Philadelphia
Detroit
San
Phoenix San Antonio Baltimore Francisco Memphis
Boston
Female officers, like minority officers, remain concentrated in lower
ranks-although, once again, the extent and uniformity of the concentration
is less than one might expect. Figure 8 shows the numbers calculated by
the National Center for Women in Policing (NCWP) for the gender
composition of American police forces, by rank, in 2001. Figure 9 shows
the breakdown for ten large departments, again based on the data reported
to the NCWP. As with the overall degree of gender integration, there is
tremendous variation among departments with regard to the penetration of
female officers into upper ranks.
18 The sources are the 2000 LEMAS survey, supra note 8, and the 1971 FBI survey of
American police departments, see FED’L BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, UNIFORM CRIME
REPORTS FOR THE UNITED STATES 165-72 (1971).
2006]
1221
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT
Figure 8
Gender Composition by Rank, 2001
100%
90%
60%..
.
50%
.
–
40%
30%.
..
20%
10%
‘0
–
0%
All Sworn Personnel
Line Officers
Supervisory
Top Commander
—
1222
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
Figure 9
Female Officer Percentageby Rank
–
35%
30%
25%
20%
10%
5%
Los Angeles
Houston Philadelphia San Diego
Detroit
!JLine Officers ESupervisory
Dallas
San Antonio Columbus
Memphis
Boston
MTop Command
C. SEXUAL ORIENTATION
The presence of openly gay and lesbian officers, and even some openly
gay and lesbian command staff, in American police departments is a sea
change from the situation thirty years ago. San Francisco had no openly
gay or lesbian officers as late as 1980; Chicago had none as recently as
1991.19 Even today, gay and lesbian officers can feel strong pressures to
19
See STEPHEN LEINEN, GAY COPS 11 (1993); Katy Butler, The Gay Pushfor S F Police
Jobs, S.F. CHRON, Apr. 9, 1979, at Al; Randy Shilts, Gay Police-“We’re Not All That
Different, ” POLICE MAG., Jan. 1980, at 32. The novelist Jonathan Kellerman recalls that he
created the character of a gay Los Angeles homicide detective in the early 1980s “because I
wanted to avoid cliches, and a gay officer was a revolutionary concept”
Jonathan
Kellerman, Two Identities, But One Compulsion, N.Y. TIMES, Mar. 31, 2003, at El Most
police chiefs at the time adamantly opposed hiring gay officers, and “even San Francisco
Police Chief Charles Gain, a staunch gay-rights supporter, concede[d], ‘In most cities it
would be considered catastrophic to have homosexual police officers.”‘ Shilts, supra, at 32.
On the growing but still incomplete acceptance of gay officers, see, e g , Aaron Belkin &
Jason McNichol, Pink and Blue. Outcomes Associated with the Integrationof Open Gay and
Lesbian Personnel in the San Diego Police Department, 5 POLICE Q. 63 (2002); Susan L.
Miller, Kay B Forest & Nancy C. Jurik, Diversity in Blue Lesbian and Gay Police Officers
in a Masculine Occupation, MEN & MASCULINITIES 355 (2003); Myers et al., supra note 5;
Tracy Gordon Fox, Seminar to Focus on Gay Officers, HARTFORD COURANT, May 5, 2004,
at B 11; James Sterngold, Possible Candidatefor LAPD’s Top Job Is Gay-So What?, S F.
CHRON, Aug 26, 2002, at Al
2006)
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT
1223
keep their sexual orientation hidden, or at least unadvertised. This is
particularly true for gay male officers.2 °
It is therefore difficult to estimate the number of gay and lesbian police
officers, or even those who are, to a greater or lesser extent, open about
their status. The latter category is clearly growing, though, to the point
where, in some departments, “the presence of self-disclosed gay and lesbian
officers has become normalized.”,21 Between 1992 and 2001, for example,
the number of “self-identified gay men and women” working for the San
Diego Police Department increased from five to somewhere between thirtyfive and fifty. In San Diego, as elsewhere, as the number of “out” cops has
risen, their presence on the force has become increasingly taken for
granted.2 2 The participation of uniformed police officers in gay pride
parades is now commonplace, if at times still controversial. And in
November 2004, the annual meeting of the International Association of
Chiefs of Police included, for the first time, a workshop on gay, lesbian,
bisexual, and transgendered officers.2 3
III. EFFECTS
American law enforcement has come a long way from the
overwhelmingly white, virtually all-male, pervasively homophobic police
forces of thirty or forty years ago-although there is still a good way left to
go, and the extent of the changes vary greatly from department to
department. What have been the effects of this dramatic, if uneven and
incomplete, transformation? Let us consider, in turn, three categories of
possible effects: competency effects, community effects, and organizational
effects. By competency effects, I mean distinctive sets of skills and abilities
that minority officers, female officers, and gay and lesbian officers may
bring to their work. Community effects are consequences that integrating a
police department may have for the relationship between the department
and the community it serves. Organizationaleffects are ways in which the
presence of minority, female, and gay and lesbian officers may change the
internal dynamics of a police department.
20 See,
e.g.,
DAVID
E.
BARLOW
&
MELISSA
HICKMAN
BARLOW,
POLICE IN
A
MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY 275-76 (2000).
21 Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 78; see also, e.g., SUSAN L. MILLER, GENDER
134 (1999).
Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 77-83.
See Fox, supra note 19, at B 11; Laurel J. Sweet, O’Toole Aims for Gay Cops’
AND COMMUNITY POLICING: WALKING THE TALK
22
23
Acceptance at Powwow, BOSTON HERALD,
June 21, 2004, at 12.
1224
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
A. COMPETENCY EFFECTS
The special skills of officers who are not white males have long been
an important part of the case for diversifying police departments, dating
back at least until the 1960s. The Challenge of Crime in a Free Societythe landmark report by President Johnson’s Commission on Law
Enforcement and the Administration of Justice-blamed much of the
difficulties that police experienced in the inner city on white officers’ “lack
of understanding of the problems and behaviors of minority groups,” and on
the inability of all-white police departments “to deal successfully with
people whose ways of thought and action are unfamiliar., 24 Here, as
elsewhere, minority officers were suggested to have two different kinds of
special competencies: greater understanding of minority communities, and
greater credibilityin minority communities.
Minority officers have long believed that they do, in fact, have these
special competencies.2 ‘ But the quantitative evidence on this score is
actually quite conflicting. There are studies finding that black officers
shoot just as often as white officers; 26 that black officers arrest just as often
as white officers; 27 that black officers are often prejudiced against black
citizens; 28 that black officers get less cooperation than white officers from
black citizens; 29 and that black officers are just as likely, or even more
likely, to elicit citizen complaints and to be the subject of disciplinary
actions. 30 But there are also studies concluding that black officers get more
24 PRESIDENT’S COMM’N ON LAW ENFORCEMENT
& ADMIN. OF JUSTICE, supra note 13, at
107.
e.g., BOLTON & FEAGIN, supra note 3, at 6-7, 215-16, 250.
26 See, e.g., James J. Fyfe, Who Shoots? A Look at Officer Race and Police Shooting, 9 J.
25 See,
POLICE SCI. & ADMIN. 367, 372 (1981); William A. Geller & Kevin J. Karales, Shootings of
and by Chicago Police: Uncommon Crises, Part : Shootings by Chicago Police, 72 J. CRIM.
L. & CRIMINOLOGY 1813, 1815 (1981); cf Albert J. Reiss, Police Brutality, in CRIME AND
JUSTICE: THE CRIMINAL IN THE ARMS OF THE LAW 157 (Leon Radzinowicz & Marvin E.
Wolfgang eds., 2d ed. 1977) (finding little difference in the likelihood of black and white
officers to use force).
27See Robert E. Worden, Situationaland Attitudinal Explanations ofPolice Behavior: A
Theoretical Reappraisaland EmpiricalAssessment, 23 LAW & SOC’Y REv. 667, 700 n.42
(1989).
28See Jack L. Kuykendall & D.E. Bums, The Black Police Officer: An Historical
Perspective, 4 J. CONTEMP. CRIM. JUST. 4, 9-10 (1980).
29See Stephen D. Mastrofski et al., Compliance on Demand: The Public’s Response
to
Specific Police Requests, 33 J. RES. CRIME & DELINQ. 269, 289 & tbl. 2 (1996).
30 See BERNARD COHEN & JAN M. CHAIKEN, POLICE BACKGROUND CHARACTERISTICS
AND PERFORMANCE xii & tbl. 24 (1972); ANTONY M. PATE & LORIE A. FRIDELL, POLICE USE
OF FORCE: OFFICIAL REPORTS, CITIZEN COMPLAINTS, AND LEGAL CONSEQUENCES 102, 155
(1993); Liqun Cao & Bu Huang, Determinants of Citizen Complaints Against Police Abuse
of Power, 28 J. CRIM. JUST. 203, 209 (2000); Kim M. Lersch & Tom Mieczkowski, Who Are
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1225
cooperation than white officers from black citizens;3” that black officers are
less prejudiced against blacks 32 and know more about the black
community; 33 and that black officers are more likely to arrest white suspects
and less likely to arrest black suspects. 34 On both sides of this debate, many
of the findings are hard to interpret. If, for example, black officers draw
more complaints, is that because they act more aggressively, or because
they are assigned to tougher beats, or because prejudice makes their
assertions of authority seem more objectionable, or because minority
citizens feel more comfortable complaining about officers from whom they
do not fear retaliation?
The fairest summary of the evidence is probably that we simply do not
know whether black officers, or minority officers more generally, bring a
significantly different set of pertinent abilities and understandings to their
work. But that is not the way the evidence is usually understood. Instead,
the evidence is typically viewed as demonstrating that minority officers do
not, in fact, differ appreciably in their on-the-job behavior from white
officers. The scholarly consensus is that “no evidence suggests that African
American, Hispanic, and white officers behave in significantly different
ways. 3 5 Or, as Edward Conlon puts it in his recently published memoir of
officer, “[o]ver time and in the main,
his work as a New York City police
36
cops tend to think like other cops.,
The evidence has been understood in this way in part because there is
an orthodox, long-standing explanation of why minority officers should be
expected to behave the same as white officers. The explanation is
occupational ethos and organizational culture. As an influential scholar of
policing explained in the mid-1970s, “[t]he pressures for conformity are so
strong that the new officer will either be forced into the police subculture,
the Problem-Prone Officers? An Analysis of Citizen Complaints, 15 AM. J. POLICE 23, 33
(1996).
31 See Albert J.Reiss, Jr., Career Orientations,Job Satisfaction, and the Assessment of
Law Enforcement Problems by Police Officers, in 2
STUDIES IN CRIME
AND LAW
ENFORCEMENT INMAJOR METROPOLITAN AREAS 81 (Albert J. Reiss ed., 1967).
32See Donald J. Black & Albert J. Reiss, Patterns of Behavior in Police and Citizen
Transactions, in 2 STUDIES IN CRIME AND LAW ENFORCEMENT IN MAJOR METROPOLITAN
AREAS 132-37, supra note 31.
33See Rita M. Kelly & Gorman West, The Racial Transitionof a Police Force: A Profile
of White and Black Policemen in Washington, D.C., in THE URBAN POLICEMAN IN
TRANSITION 354, 374-77 (John R. Snibbe & Homa M. Snibbe eds., 1973).
34See John J. Donohue III & Steven D. Levitt, The Impact of Race on Policing and
Arrests, 44 J.L. & ECON. 367, 371 & tbl. 2 (2001).
35 WALKER, SPoHN & DELONE, supra note 4, at 111; see also, e.g., BARLOW & BARLOW,
supra note 20, at 249.
36 EDWARD CONLON, BLUE BLOOD 320 (2004).
1226
DA VID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
with the values and orientation of the larger group replacing his own, or his
life will be made so unpleasant that he will decide to resign., 37 This view
has become pervasive among scholars who study the police, including legal
scholars writing about criminal procedure. The governing assumption is
that police behavior is determined by “situational and departmental factors,”
not by race.38 Nor, for that matter, by gender: the consensus view is that
“male and female officers,” like white and black officers, “have been found
to behave in roughly similar ways. 39
In fact, the quantitative evidence regarding the differential
performance of women officers, like the corresponding evidence about
minority officers, is equivocal. Several studies have found that female
officers are slightly less proactive than male officers but otherwise behave
Other studies have found no differences
substantially the same.40
whatsoever. 4 1 Still other studies have concluded that female officers are
substantially less apt to shoot or to use excessive force,42 and significantly
more helpful to victims of domestic violence.43 There are also studies,
37 HERMAN GOLDSTEIN, POLICING A FREE SOCIETY 259 (1977).
38 WALKER, SPOtiN
& DELONE, supra note 4, at 111; see also, e.g., JOHN L. COOPER, THE
POLICE AND THE GHETTO 29-53, 116-19, 125-28 (1980); Ellis Cashmore, Black Cops Inc., in
OUT OF ORDER?: POLICING BLACK PEOPLE 87, 104-08 (Ellis Cashmore & Eugene
McLaughlin eds., 1991); Reiss, supra note 26, at 157; cf Janet Chan, Changing Police
Culture, 36 BRIT. J. CRIMINOLOGY 109, 110 (1996) (“Conspiracy theory aside, the most
powerful and currently popular explanation for the recalcitrance of police organizations to
change has been to postulate the existence of a ‘police culture.’).
39 Chan, supra note 38, at 110; see also COMM. TO REVIEW RES. ON POLICE POLICY &
PRACTICES, FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING: THE EVIDENCE 147 (Wesley Skogan
& Kathleen Frydl eds. 2004) (reporting the “received wisdom from the research
community… that whatever influence race and gender may exert on behavior is
overwhelmed by the unifying effects of occupational socialization”).
40 See PETER B. BLOCH & DEBORAH ANDERSON, POLICEWOMEN ON PATROL: FINAL
REPORT
2-3 (1974);
JOYCE SICHEL ET AL., WOMEN ON PATROL: A PILOT STUDY OF POLICE
PERFORMANCE IN NEW YORK CITY 28-31 (1978); Lewis J. Sherman, An Evaluation of
Policewomen on Patrol in a Suburban Police Department, 3 J. POLICE SCI. & ADMIN. 434,
435 (1975).
41 See Sean A. Grennan, Findings on the Role of Officer Gender in Violent Encounters
with Citizens, 15 J. POLICE SCI. & ADMIN., 78, 83-4 (1987); John R. Snortum & John C.
Beyers, Patrol Activities ofMale and Female Officers as a Function of Work Experience, 6
POLICE STUD. 36, 41 (1983); Alissa P. Worden, The Attitudes of Women and Men in
Policing: Testing Conventional and Contemporary Wisdom, 31 CRIMINOLOGY 203, 227-29
(1993).
42 See INDEP. COMM’N ON THE L.A. POLICE DEP’T, REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT
COMMISSION ON THE LOS ANGELES POLICE DEPARTMENT 83-84 (1991); Frank Horvath, The
Police Use of Deadly Force: A Description of Selected Characteristics of Intrastate
Incidents, 15 J. POLICE SCI. & ADMIN. 226, 229 (1987).
43 See Robert J. Homant & Daniel B. Kennedy, Police Perceptions of Spouse Abuse: A
Comparison ofMale and Female Officers, 13 J. CRIM. JUST. 29, 42-43 (1985).
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1227
though, suggesting that women officers may be more apt to shoot than male
officers.” Again, many of these findings are difficult to interpret: the
greater helpfulness of female officers to domestic violence victims may
simply reflect the fact that female officers tend to be better educated than
male officers and are more likely to be single. 5
Whereas minority officers tend to believe that they do in fact have
special competencies-specifically, understanding of their communities and
credibility in their communities-female officers appear to be divided on
that question. The divide is mirrored in the arguments advanced by
advocates of increased hiring and promotion of women in police
departments, arguments that reflect, in turn, the broader divide between
“equality feminism” and “difference feminism.” A recent report, for
example, from the NCWP argues both that male and female officers are
“equally capable” and that women are, in fact, better officers in a range of
respects: less prone to use excessive force, more skillful at “defusing and
de-escalating potentially violent confrontation,” better at securing the
“cooperation and trust,” and more effective in responding to incidents of
domestic violence. 46
There has been virtually no research on the relative competencies of
gay and straight officers. Anecdotally, though, claims have been made for
gay and lesbian officers that echo claims long made for minority officers:
that they bring to their work a valuable understanding of their off-the-job
community, as well as greater credibility within that community. 47 There
are suggestions, too, that gay and lesbian officers, because of “their own
experience in marginalized groups,” may be especially skilled in
“responding to the needs of other oppressed groups.”‘4 But there are also
suggestions that homosexual officers, like minority officers and female
officers, are strongly constrained by the “white, male, heterosexual ethos”
44 See Lott, supra note 6, at 260; Brad W. Smith, The Impact of Police Officer Diversity
on Police-CausedHomicides, 31 POLICY STUD. J.147, 155 (2003).
45 See Homant & Kennedy, supra note 43, at 34-35.
46 KIM LONSWAY ET AL., HIRING AND RETAINING MORE WOMEN: THE ADVANTAGES
TO
LAW ENFORCEMENT
2-4 (2003), available at http://www.womenandpolicing.org/pdf/
NewAdvantagesReport.pdf.
47 See, e.g., ROBIN A. BUHRKE, A MATTER OF JUSTICE: LESBIANS AND GAY MEN IN LAW
ENFORCEMENT 25-131 (1996); Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 87; Brittany Wallman,
Police Try to Recruit More Gay Officers, SUN-SENTINEL (Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.), Dec. 18,
2005, at 1.
48 Miller, Forest & Jurik, supra note 19, at 378; see also id. at 370-71, 376; Myers et al.,
supra note 5, at 34.
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
of policing and by the overriding determination to be perceived as “good
cops,” both by their fellow officers and by themselves.4 9
Most scholars of policing, including most criminal procedure scholars,
probably assume that an individual officer’s sexual orientation-like the
officer’s race and gender-is a relatively unimportant influence on the
officer’s behavior; what really determines police conduct is the police
subculture. That is one reason why it is such welcome news that the
growing diversity of police workforces is changing the police subculture,
too-a matter to which we will return shortly.
B. COMMUNITY EFFECTS
The presence of minority officers, female officers, and gay and lesbian
officers in a police force might have a range of beneficial effects in the
surrounding community. One important set of effects, indirect and often
overlooked, stems from the role that police employment has traditionally
played in social mobility. 50 A more immediate set of effects pertains to the
benefits that police diversity can provide for the credibility of the
department overall. Just as black officers, for example, may have more
credibility than white officers in a predominantly black neighborhood, a
department that recruits, retains, and promotes a significant number of black
officers may find the credibility of its entire force enhanced in black
neighborhoods.
That prospect has long served as a significant part of the case for
diversifying police workforces. President Johnson’s Crime Commission,
for example, argued strongly in the late 1960s that improving relations
between the police and minority communities required “recruiting more,
many more, policemen from minority groups”–because “every section of
the community has a right to expect that its aspirations and problems, its
hopes and fears, are fully reflected in the police.” 5 1 A similar argument has
been made, more recently, for hiring more gay and lesbian officers. Gay
and lesbian officers in San Diego, for example, believe that the success of
community policing in San Diego is attributable in part to the involvement
of openly homosexual officers. As one gay officer explained, “[y]ou gain
way more respect from the community that you’re policing if you have
members of the diverse community working as cops.”5 2
49 Myers et al., supra note 5, at 18, 35; see also Shilts, supra note 19, at 32-33.
50 See, e.g., ROBERT M. FOGELSON, BIG-CITY POLICE 296-98 (1977).
51 PRESIDENT’S COMM’N ON LAW ENFORCEMENT & ADMIN. OF JUSTICE, supra note 13, at
107.
52
Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 87.
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1229
As with competency effects, though, the objective evidence regarding
community effects is mixed. Just as there is some evidence that black
officers get more cooperation from black citizens than white officers, and
some evidence that they get less, 53 so there is some evidence that minority
citizens think minority officers improve the overall quality of policing, but
also some evidence that they perceive no difference. 54
Again, there is a longstanding, broadly accepted explanation for the
lack of any clear effect of police diversity on community relations, and,
here as well, the explanation blames the police subculture. That subculture
has long been thought to sever a minority officer, for example, “from his
community and his roots. 55 An early, influential ethnographic study of
black police officers concluded that they forfeited, in becoming officers,
much of their credibility as blacks. Occupying “a doubly marginal position
between the marginal police and his own [racial] marginality,” the black
officer was “a man exposed to the shame of his race,” because his
occupational role was perceived as antagonistic to the interests of the
ghetto.56 A pioneering, equally influential study of female officers found
that they, too, suffered from a kind of double marginality, forced to choose
only by
between “defeminization” and “deprofessionalization”:
relinquishing much of their identity as women could they fully succeed as
police officers.57 Gay and lesbian officers, too, have been said to lead
“double lives”: by joining the ranks of law enforcement they estrange
themselves from the gay and lesbian community.58
C. ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTS
Organizational effects of police diversity have received relatively less
attention than competence effects and community effects. That is a
mistake: the clearest benefits provided by the growing numbers of minority
officers, female officers, and gay and lesbian officers pertain to the effects
53 See supra notes 29 & 31.
54 See Irving A. Wallach & Colette C. Jackson, Perception of the Police in a Black
Community, in THE URBAN POLICEMAN IN TRANSITION, supra note 33, at 382, 401; Ronald
Weitzer, White, Black, or Blue Cops? Race and Citizen Assessments of Police Officers, 28 J.
CRIM. JUST. 313, 316 (2000).
55 See BARLOW & BARLOW, supra note 20, at 249.
56 NICHOLAS ALEX, BLACK IN BLUE: A STUDY OF THE NEGRO POLICEMAN 20-21 (1969);
accord, e.g., COOPER, supra note 38, at 111-15, 119-25; Cashmore, supra note 38, at 96;
Edward Palmer, Black Police in America, BLACK SCHOLAR, Oct. 1973, at 19, 21-23.
57 SUSAN E. MARTIN, BREAKING AND ENTERING: POLICEWOMEN ON PATROL 197-98
(1980).
58 Marc Burke, Homosexuality as Deviance: The Case of the Gay Police Officer, 34
BRIT. J. CRIMINOLOGY 192 (1994); see also, e.g., Myers et al., supra note 5, at 31.
1230
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96′
that the new demographics have had on the internal dynamics of police
departments. The organizational effects can usefully be subdivided into
three further categories: one-on-one interactions, rival trade groups, and
socialfragmentation.
By one-on-one interactions, I mean the way that a minority, female, or
openly homosexual officer can change the attitudes and behavior of other
officers with whom he or she comes into contact-particularly his or her
partner. Minority officers tend to believe these effects are significanti 9 So
do gay officers 60 and appreciable numbers, if not a majority, of female
officers. Quantitative studies of this matter are limited, but they too suggest
that the officers are correct. There is evidence, for example, that biracial
teams of partners use less force, 6′ and men partnered with women handle
domestic violence calls as well as women. 62 These results are broadly
consistent with the large body of research on integration outside of policing,
which suggests on the whole that “the experience of working together
across lines of social division.., though not untroubled by prejudice and
hostility, tends to reduce prejudice and hostility. 63
By rival trade groups, I mean groups that compete for membership
with the longstanding police benevolent associations, which generally serve
today not only as social and fraternal organizations but also as collective
bargaining agents and lobbying groups. The police benevolent associations
now co-exist with a range of organizations, many highly vocal, representing
the interests of minority officers. 64 In Los Angeles, for example, the Police
Protective League competes for members with the Oscar Joel Bryant
Foundation, which represents black officers, and the Latin American Law
Enforcement Association, known informally as “La Ley.” On the national
level, there is the National Black Police Association, the National
Organization of Black Law Enforcement Officers, the National
Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives, the Hispanic National
Law Enforcement Association, and the National Latino Peace Officers
Association.
59 See, e.g., BOLTON & FEAGIN, supra note 3, at 22.
60 See, e.g., Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 77-79.
61 See Robert J. Friedrich, Police Use of Force: Individuals, Situations, and
Organizations,452 ANNALS AM. ACAD. POL. & SOC. Sci. 82, 90 (1980).
62 See Michael Cassidy, Caroline G. Nicholl, Carmen Ross & Kimberly A. Lonsway,
The Victims’ View: Domestic Violence and Police Response 4-15 (August 2003)
(unpublished paper on file with author).
63 CYNTHIA ESTLUND, WORKING TOGETHER: How WORKPLACE BONDS STRENGTHEN A
DIVERSE DEMOCRACY 84 (2003); see also id at 60-101.
64See, e.g., BARLOw & BARLOW, supra note 20, at 235-41; Erin Aubry Kaplan,
Rethinking the LAPD Black and Blue, L.A. WEEKLY, Sept. 6, 2002.
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1231
At both the local and national level, these organizations often take
positions at dramatic variance from the position of mainline police
organizations-not just on hiring and promotion policies, but on issues such
as racial profiling and police brutality, 65 and on questions of police
leadership. In Los Angeles, for example, when Chief Bernard Parks was
being considered for reappointment in 2002, he was strongly opposed by
the Police Protective League, supported by the Oscar Joel Bryant
Foundation, and opposed by La Ley.66 Another, earlier, example: in 1991,
after Milwaukee’s police chief suspended three officers in the fallout from
the Jeffrey Dahmer case, the Milwaukee Police Association voted “no
confidence” in the chief, but the League of Martin-an organization of
black officers-pointedly distanced itself from the vote and defended the
suspensions. 67
One-and-one interactions and rival trade groups are important, but not
nearly as important as the third subcategory of organizational effects: social
fragmentation-the decline of the monolithic police subculture. This is
something that older officers-particularly white, male, heterosexual
officers-talk about a lot. A white male officer interviewed by sociologist
Robin Haarr in the mid-1990s put it this way: “It used to be we were all
‘blue,’ but that has changed over the past years. Today there is black,
white, and female segregation. ’68 Haarr agrees. Expressing what seems to
be the emerging consensus among police ethnographers, she reports that
“unified occupational subculture” of policing is 69being replaced by
workplaces marked by “division” and “segmentation.’,
65 See, e.g., SAMUEL WALKER & CHARLES M. KATz, THE POLICE IN AMERICA 433 (4th ed.
2002); Cashmore, supra note 38, at 96;
NAT’L ORG. OF BLACK L. ENFORCEMENT
EXECUTIVES, A NOBLE PERSPECTIVE: RACIAL PROFILING-A SYMPTOM OF BIAS-BASED
POLICING (2001); National Black Police Association, Positions of the National Black Police
Association, http://www.blackpolice.org/Positions.html (last visited June 9, 2006).
66 See, e.g., Latino Group Opposes Parks Bid for Second Term, L.A. TIMES, Mar. 12,
2002, at B5; Jill Leovy, Review of Parks Will Be Private,L.A. TIMES, Apr. 2, 2002, at B1.
67 Melissa Hickman Barlow, David E. Barlow & Stan Stajkovic, The Media, the Police
and the MulticulturalCommunity: Observations of a City in Crisis, 17 J. CRIME & JUST. 133,
137, 140, 144-45 (1994).
68 Robin N. Haarr, Patternsof Interaction in a Police PatrolBureau: Race and Gender
Barriersto Integration, 14 JUST. Q. 53, 66 (1997).
69 Id. at 53; see also, e.g., BARLOW & BARLOW, supra note 20, at 205; COMM. TO REVIEW
RES. ON POLICE POLICY & PRACTICES, supra note 39, at 80-82; STEVEN MAYNARD-MOODY &
MICHAEL MUSHENO, Cops, TEACHERS, COUNSELORS: STORIES FROM THE FRONT LINES OF
PUBLIC SERVICE 64-76 (2003). Samuel Walker has been pressing this point for twenty years.
See WALKER, SPOHN & DELONE, supra note 4, at 115; Samuel Walker, Racial Minority and
Female Employment in Policing: The Implications of ‘Glacial’ Change, 31 CRIME &
DELINQ. 555, 556, 565 (1985).
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
This is exactly what many people feared thirty years ago, when courts
began imposing race and gender-conscious hiring plans on police
departments. Samuel Williams, a black lawyer serving as president of the
Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, warned in 1975 that “[t]he
entrance of minorities into a department under a judge-fashioned statistical
umbrella can only lead to an organization … torn by faction and laced with
angry mutterings,” an organization “deprived of that crucial cooperation
70
among brother officers so critically essential to effective service.,
The factions and angry mutterings have come. Police officers today
report lines of division, distrust, and resentment, not only between white
officers and minority officers, but also between male and female officers,
between gay and straight officers, and sometimes between black officers
and Latino officers, Latino officers and Asian-American officers, and so on.
It is not clear how much of this can be laid at the feet of the courts; some of
it may have happened no matter what route police departments took to
greater workforce diversity. But the decline in solidarity is everywhere
apparent. The good news is that it has turned out to be a much more
beneficial development than Williams and others feared. The decline in
solidarity does not seem to have impaired police effectiveness. For
operational purposes, it appears still to be true that “blue is blue.’
In
between calls to service, police officers are a less cohesive group than they
used to be. But that appears to be a very good thing. It makes the internal
cultures of police departments less stifling, and it opens up space for dissent
and disagreement. Studies of police departments today read far differently
than those of thirty or forty years ago: investigators rarely find a single
police perspective on any given issue, but rather a range a conflicting
perspectives.72
Moreover, the social fragmentation has gone hand in hand with 73
a
divides.
as
well
as
binds
identity
For
insularity.
police
in
decline
Minority officer organizations frequently work closely with minority
organizations outside law enforcement; to a lesser extent, female officers
sometimes form organizational ties with women working in other
historically male professions. The National Center for Women and
Policing, for example, is part of Eleanor Smeal’s Feminist Majority Project.
Organizational alliances like this operate alongside, and help to foster, less
70 Samuel L. Williams, Law Enforcement and Affirmative Action, POLICE CuEF, Feb. 1975,
at 72.
See, e.g., Myers et al., supra note 5, at 34.
72 See, e.g., Barlow, Barlow & Stajkovic, supra note 67, at 140.
73 See Trish Oberweis & Michael Musheno, Policing Identities: Cop Decision Making
and the Constitution of the Citizen, 24 L. & SOC. INQUIRY 897, 901-02, 904 (1999).
71
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NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT
1233
formal ties of affinity between minority cops and minority citizens, female
cops and women more broadly, and gays and lesbians inside and outside
law enforcement.74 Both the formal, organizational alliances and the less
formal ties of affinity create channels for expanding civilian involvement in
the shaping and directing of law enforcement.7 5 The social fragmentation I
have been discussing might more accurately be described, therefore, as
social realignment.
The benefits of social realignment would come at a steep cost if, as
people like Williams predicted, the decline in police solidarity meant the
police did a worse job controlling crime. But that does not seem to have
happened. John Lott concluded several years ago that affirmative action in
He
policing had raised crime, particularly in black neighborhoods.
attributed this effect not to a decline in solidarity but the relaxed hiring
standards that he claimed had been part and parcel of affirmative action in
policing.76 Lott’s results, though, have never been duplicated, and more
recent work casts them in serious doubt.7 7
There is reason to think that the growing, though still far from
complete, acceptance of openly gay and lesbian officers may contribute in a
particularly powerful way to the social realignment of law enforcement-in
part by accelerating the fragmentation of the police subculture, in part by
creating new channels of communication with groups outside of law
enforcement, and in part by challenging the endemic homophobia of law
enforcement. 78 There is good reason to think that the suppression of
homosexuality has played a central role in cementing police solidarity, in
part by rendering professional male-male partnerships sexually
unthreatening, and in part by helping to shape a whole, hyper-masculinized
professional ethos.
When William Westley did his pioneering ethnography of an
American police department in the 1950s, for example, he found that the
74 See BARLOW & BARLOW, supra note 20, at 235-41; Oberweis & Musheno, supra note
73, at 910-17.
75 I owe this point to Michael Musheno.
76 See Lott, supra note 6.
77 Using data regarding hiring of police officers in New York City, Justin McCrary has
found that “even aggressive hiring quotas change the test score distribution of new hires only
minimally.” McCrary, supra note 7, at 26-31, 33. McCrary also did a time series
comparison of crime rates in cities that had been sued for discriminatory police hiring and in
cities that had not, and an “event study” analysis of crime rates before and after litigation.
He found little evidence that litigation was related to crime rates. See id. at 26-29.
78 Cf COMM. TO REVIEW RES. ON POLICE POLICY & PRACTICES, supra note 39, at 82
(noting that “in important respects,” the new employment of openly gay and lesbian officers
“represents an even greater transformation of the traditional police subculture than the
employment of female officers as equals in the 1970s”).
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
rampant condoning of illegal violence among police officers owed a good
deal to the experiences that officers had policing “sex cases”-a category
which for him, and for the officers he studied, lumped homosexuals
together with rapists, peeping toms, and exhibitionists. Westley thought the
police correctly understood the public to approve “extremely rough
treatment” in sex cases, but to want that treatment carried out unofficially
and without their involvement. 79 The experience of the police in these
cases, Westley believed, “encourage[d] them to use violence as a general
resource,” and left them embittered and cynical about what the public
expected of them. 80 It helped to convince them that their jobs required them
to exercise discretion in a way that could not be publicly acknowledgedthat police work was essentially and necessarily outside the law.
The presence of openly gay and lesbian officers, particularly once they
begin to rise through the ranks, challenges the easy, taken-for-granted
homophobia of the law enforcement, and all that it has helped to foster-the
nominally desexualized police workplace, the hyper-masculinized ethos of
the profession, and the tacit acceptance of extra-legal violence. All of that
is on top of the ways in which gay and lesbian officers, like minority
officers and female officers, will help to fragment the police subculture and
to build identity-based bridges to groups outside of law enforcement. The
social realignment of policing-the decline in the solidarity and insularity
of the police-has turned out to be the most important effect of the
profession’s growing diversity.
IV. RAMIFICATIONS
I now want to explore four sets of ramifications of the demographic
changes in police departments and of the various effects that those changes
have had. The first set of ramifications concerns affirmative action. Law
enforcement appears to be a striking success story for affirmative actionbut a success story that remains incomplete, even as affirmative action plans
around the country expire or are rescinded. The second set of implications
concerns the debate over litigation as a strategy for institutional reform; I
will call this the “hollow hope” debate, after Gerald Rosenberg’s influential
79 WILLIAM
A.
A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY OF LAW,
(1970).
William Westley, Violence and the Police, 59 AM. J. Soc. 34, 37-38 (1953); see also
WESTLEY, VIOLENCE AND THE POLICE:
CUSTOM, AND MORALITY 61-63
80
id. at 89-90, 107. Seven of fifteen law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County
interviewed by law students in 1966 admitted engaging in organized, extralegal harassment
of homosexuals. See Project, The ConsentingAdult Homosexual and the Law: An Empirical
Study of Enforcement and Administration in Los Angeles County, 13 UCLA L. REV. 643, 719
(1966).
2006]
NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1235
argument that courts are ineffective in catalyzing large-scale social
change. 8 1 The integration of police departments, I will suggest, is some
evidence to the contrary, some evidence that the hope is not always hollow.
The third set of ramifications concerns police reform. Here I will suggest
both that the continued diversification of law enforcement workplaces
deserves more attention as a key component of police reform, and that what
the integration has already accomplished should prompt reconsideration of
avenues of reform previously thought too dangerous because of the
solidarity and insularity of the police. The fourth and final set of
implications concerns criminal procedure. Here the lessons are harder to
state with confidence. The changing demographics of American law
enforcement pretty plainly fall far short of making Warren Court criminal
procedure obsolete, but it does justify, at a minimum, more careful and
nuanced thinking about race, gender, and sexuality dynamics in policing.
A. AFFIRMATIVE ACTION
The first and most obvious ramification of the new demographics of
American law enforcement pertains to the continuing debate over raceconscious and gender-conscious affirmative action. Policing seems to be a
dramatic success story for such measures, because the overwhelming
weight of the evidence suggests affirmative action played a pivotal role in
the diversification of American police departments.
Some of the most striking evidence is the progress over time in
particular departments. In Pittsburgh, for example, the percentage of
women officers went from 1% in 1975, when court-ordered hiring quotas
were imposed, to 27.2% in 1990, the highest figure at the time for any large
city in the nation. When the quota was lifted in 1991, the female share of
new hires plummeted from 50% (required under the court order) to 8.5%,
and by 2001 the percentage of women in the rank of police officer had
dropped to 22% and continued to decline.82
Justin McCrary has compiled a more extensive set of data about the
integration of the Chicago Police Department. A lawsuit challenging racial
discrimination in police hiring in Chicago was filed in 1970 by the AfroAmerican Patrolmen’s League; it was joined by the United States
Department of Justice in 1973, and it resulted, in 1974, in a court-ordered
hiring quota, made permanent in 1976. The black share of new hires rose
81 GERALD N. ROSENBERG, THE HOLLOW HOPE: CAN COURTS BRING ABOUT SOCIAL
CHANGE? (1991).
82 KIM LONSWAY ET AL., NATIONAL CENTER FOR WOMEN & POLICING, UNDER SCRUTINY:
THE EFFECT OF CONSENT DECREES ON THE REPRESENTATION OF WOMEN IN SWORN LAW
ENFORCEMENT 1 (2003).
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
from roughly 10% in 1971-1973 to 40% in 1975.83 (The percentage of
black officers on the force as a whole rose much more slowly, even
following the hiring change. There is a lesson here: police departments
have low turnover. The annual quit rate is around 4%.84 So it takes a while
for changes in hiring practices to alter the composition of the workforce.)
McCrary also conducted a more systematic examination comparison of
changes in what he calls the “representation gap”-the difference between
the percentage of black officers and the black share of the relevant city
population. He compared changes in this figure in two groups of cities:
those that were sued for discriminating against blacks in hiring, and those
that were not. The bulk of the lawsuits were filed in the 1970s, and they
were concentrated in big cities with large black populations-populations
that were growing faster than the black share of the local police workforce.
Many of the hiring quotas remained in effect into the 1990s, and some are
still in place.8 5 McCrary found that the representation gap in the 1970s was
much more sizeable in litigated cities than in unlitigated cities, but that in
the 1980s and 1990s, when hiring quotas would be expected to begin
having an effect on workforce composition, the gap in litigated cities
improved markedly,
while there was relatively little change in the
86
unlitigated cities.
McCrary’s study is the most sophisticated and wide-ranging work to
date on the relationship between affirmative action decrees and either racial
or gender integration of police departments. But the broad conclusion he
reaches-that affirmative action has played a large role in the demographic
transformation of American police forces-is the same conclusion reached
by virtually everyone who has studied these questions. Fifteen years ago,
for example, William Lewis ran regressions on black police employment in
46 municipal police departments between 1975 and 1985. He found that
the most powerful variables associated with increases in the black
percentage of the police force were “Black mayors, Black police chiefs, and
affirmative action consent decrees., 87 Even John Lott is in agreement on
this point. Reviewing data on the race and gender composition of 189
American police forces in 1987 and 1993, Lott concluded that the median
change in the percentage of black officers was 3.2% in cities with consent
decrees as opposed to 0.73% in other cities, and that the 90th percentile
83 McCrary, supra note 7, at 8.
84 See id. at 9.
s See id. at 7, 14, 26.
86 See id. at 47.
87 William G. Lewis, Toward Representative Bureaucracy: Blacks in City Police
Organizations,1975-1985, 49 PUB. ADrmN. REV. 257 (1989).
2006]
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1237
change in the percentage of black officers was 18.2% in cities with consent
decrees and 6.0% in cities without them.88
The available statistical work on women officers points in a similar
direction. After surveying 446 departments in the mid-1980s, Susan Martin
reported that police forces with consent decrees addressing gender in hiring
or promotion were 10.1% female, compared with 8.3% for forces with
89
voluntary affirmative action programs, and 6.1% for all other departments.
Based on a smaller survey, the National Center for Women in Policing
estimated in 2003 that 17.8% of the officers in municipal police
departments with consent decrees were women, compared to 10.1% in
surveyed departments without consent decrees, and 14.2% of all municipal
departments. 90 Tim Sass and Jennifer Troyer, performing a regression
analysis of EEOC data, concluded that prior anti-discrimination ruling were
associated in the 1980s with an increase of seven to ten percent in the
female proportion of newly hired officers. 9 1 Lott reported that, in his
sample of 189 large departments, the median decrease in the percentage of
male officers between 1987 and 1993 was 2.8% in departments with
consent decrees and 1.1% in departments without decrees.92
Because the statistics regarding gay and lesbian officers are so paltry,
it is much more difficult to assess the role of lawsuits here. Anecdotally,
however, lawsuits appear to have played a significant role in spurring
departments to become more welcoming to, and tolerant of, openly gay and
lesbian cops, 9 3 just as earlier lawsuits were pivotal in bringing more race
and gender diversity to policing.
The heavy role that court-ordered affirmative action has played in
integrating police departments provides reason to be concerned that
88 See Lott, supra note 6, at 244.
89 Susan E. Martin, The Effectiveness of Affirmative Action: The Case of Women in
Policing, 8 JUSTICE Q. 489 (1991). Martin ran a series of regressions to control for the
effects of region, city size, and minority representation. The results indicated that “both
court-ordered and voluntary affirmative action were associated significantly with the
proportion of women in a department,” after controlling for other variables. Id. at 494.
90 LONSWAY ET AL., supra note 82.
91 Tim R. Sass & Jennifer Troyer, Affirmative Action, PoliticalRepresentation, Unions,
and Female Police Employment, 20 J. LAB. RES. 571 (1999). They found no similar effect
on hiring rates in 1991, a result they speculated might reflect the fact that most of the
decisions were handed down in the early 1980s: “Of the 65 decisions in gender-related cases
against municipal police departments decided by 1991, only 16 decisions occurred in the
1986-1991 period.” Id. at 579, 585 n. 14.
92 See Lott, supra note 6, at 244.
93 On the impact, in particular, of a lawsuit filed by a gay LAPD officer in 1988, see,
e.g., Belkin & McNichol, supra note 19, at 69; Marita Hernandez, 2 LAPD Officers Join
Homosexual Bias Suit, L.A. TIMES, Nov. 22, 1989, at B3.
DAVID A. SKLANSKY
1238
[Vol. 96
progress may stall, or even be reversed, as consent decrees expire or are
rescinded-often before departments are fully integrated. (The courtordered hiring quotas in Boston, for example, were rescinded in 2004,
despite the fact that the minority representation gap remained somewhere
between six to eight percent: racial minorities made up thirty-eight to forty
percent of the population in Boston, but only approximately thirty-two
percent of the police force.94)95 The worry is that the Pittsburgh experience
will be replicated nationwide.
There is some evidence that this is already occurring. Figure 10 shows
how the overall female percentage of large American police departments
have changed over the past thirty-five years:
Figure 10
Female Officer Percentage
18%
16%
U
14%
a
12%
10%
8%
6%
M
4%
2%
0
1965
1970
1975
1980
* 20 biggest
cities
1985
1990
1995
2000
2005
m 100+ officer
departments
Figure 10 contains two sets of figures: one for the twenty largest
American cities, 96 and the other for all departments with 100 or more
94 See Deleo v. City of Boston, No. 03-12538-PBS, 2004 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 24034 (D.
Mass. Nov. 23, 2004); Reaves & Hickman, supra note 8, at 11.
95 See supra note 82 and accompanying text.
96 The data are drawn from LEMAS surveys, and before 1987 from the FBI surveys of
American police departments. FED. BUREAU OF INVESTIGATION, UNIFORM CRIME REPORTS
FOR THE UNITED STATES (1965-1986); NAT’L ARCHIVE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE DATA, LAW
ENFORCEMENT
MANAGEMENT
AND
ADMINISTRATIVE
STATISTICS
DATA,
available at
http://www.icpsr.umich.edu/NACJD/lemas/. The twenty cities included are: New York, Los
2006]
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1239
officers. 97
The latter set of figures suggests that the gender integration of
American police departments has stalled and even suffered a slight reversal
since 2000. The researchers who compiled this set of figures for the
National Center for Women and Policing believe that the decline is in fact
real, and that it reflects the expiration of consent decrees.
B. HOLLOW HOPE
The key role that race-conscious remedies imposed pursuant to consent
decrees appear to have played in diversifying American police forces has
implications beyond the debate over race-conscious remedies. It also has
implications for the debate over the utility of litigation in bringing about
social change-what might be termed the “hollow hope” debate, after the
title of Gerald Rosenberg’s influential argument that the utility is, in fact,
close to zero.98
The demographic transformation of American police forces looks like
a success story not only for affirmative action, but also for litigation as a
strategy for social reform. Rosenberg can easily accommodate this story,
because he is careful to acknowledge that courts can, in fact, help to bring
about social change in instances where they implement polices blessed by
the legislature, and/or where court decrees provide political cover for
forward-thinking bureaucrats. 99 But the story of police diversification
reminds us that this is a larger category than we sometimes imagine, and
that conflating all impact litigation within simple pronouncements from on
high-like Brown v. Board of Education or Roe v. Wade-is a serious
mistake.
C. POLICE REFORM
Now consider the ramifications of changing police demographics for
police reform. There are two implications that seem particularly important.
First, continuing diversification of police workforces should be a
The evidence regarding the
central component of police reform.
competence and community effects of police integration is equivocal, but
certainly not sufficiently negative to warrant discounting the belief, very
broadly held by minority, female, and openly gay officers, that they bring
special understandings and special credibility to their work. All the more so
Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, San Diego, Detroit, Dallas, Phoenix, San Antonio,
San Jose, Baltimore, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Jacksonville, Columbus, Milwaukee,
Memphis, Washington, and Boston.
97 See LONSWAY ET AL., supra note 17, at 6.
98 See ROSENBERG, supra note 81.
99 See id. at 30-36.
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
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when much of the reason for skepticism about these benefits has stemmed
from concern about the insular and monolithic police subculture-a
subculture that is itself now being transformed, segmented, and rendered
more porous by the growing diversity of the police workforce. By
weakening the social solidarity of the police, the growing diversity of law
enforcement workforces makes it more likely that departments will be able
to take advantage of the special competencies of minority officers, female
officers, and openly gay and lesbian officers. And by weakening the
political solidarity of the police, and the uniformity of viewpoints within
police departments, police diversity greatly facilitates other reformsincluding civilian oversight, community policing, and systematic efforts to
ameliorate racial bias in policing. 00
The second ramification for police reform is this: in the late 1960s and
early 1970s, a series of efforts were made to bring a degree of workplace
democracy or participatory management to policing-efforts to get police
officers intellectually and collectively involved in the shaping of their work.
The core idea was that officers who participated collectively in the shaping
of police work would be less alienated, more effective, and more
acculturated to and comfortable with democratic values and practices.101
There were even scattered efforts to implement these ideas, and they met
with a promising degree of success. In Oakland, for example, a team of
researchers led officers in the collective development of novel institutional
mechanisms for reducing police violence102-mechanisms that themselves
drew heavily on the involvement of rank-and-file officers, and that actually
enjoyed a promising degree of success, before they fell victim to budget
cuts. 103
By the end of the 1970s, those efforts had all been abandoned-in
large part, but not exclusively, because many of the people that might
100On the large obstacle that the monolithic occupational subculture of law enforcement
posed to police reform, see, e.g., HERMAN GOLDSTEIN, PROBLEM-ORIENTED
(1990).
101See GEORGE E. BERKLEY, THE DEMOCRATIC POLICEMAN 29-39 (1969);
POLICING
29-30
EGON BUTNER,
THE FUNCTIONS OF THE POLICE IN MODERN SOCIETY (1970), reprinted in EGON BITTNER,
ASPECTS OF POLICE WORK 89, 162-68 (1990); WILLIAM KER MUIR, JR., POLICE:
STREETCORNER POLITICIANS (1977); WESTLEY, supra note 80, at xvii; John E. Angell,
Toward an Alternative to the Classic Police OrganizationalArrangements: A Democratic
Model, 9 CRIMINOLOGY 185, 187, 193-95 (1971); David Alan Sklansky, Police and
Democracy, 104 MICH. L. REV. 1699, 1774-78 (2005).
102 See HANS TOCH, J. DOUGLAS GRANT & RAYMOND T. GALVIN, AGENTS OF CHANGE: A
STUDY IN POLICE REFORM (1975).
103 See JEROME K. SKOLNICK AND DAVID H. BAYLEY, THE NEW BLUE LINE: POLICE
INNOVATION IN SIX AMERICAN CITIES 151-52 (1986); HANS TOCH & J. DOUGLAS GRANT,
POLICE AS PROBLEM SOLVERS 85 (1991).
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NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICE DEPARTMENT
1241
otherwise have been expected to support them were scared half to death, for
good reason, by the extraordinarily reactionary forms that police activism
took in the late 1960 and early 1970s.10 4 Those kinds of police activismrabid, knee-jerk opposition to civilian oversight, active participation in far
right-wing organizations, vigilante attacks on black activists, organized
brutality against political protesters’ 05-are now a thing of the past, along
with the monolithic police subculture that allowed them to emerge. Police
departments today, in short, are much safer places for experiments in
workplace democracy, and many of the ideas along those lines, shelved
since the 1970s, may deserve to be dusted off and reexamined.
D. CRIMINAL PROCEDURE
What implications, if any, do the changing demographics of law
enforcement have for criminal procedure? I have left these implications for
last, because they are the hardest to state with certainty. The most that can
be said with confidence is that the dramatic but still incomplete integration
of American police departments does not remove the entire foundation of
criminal procedure law, but neither can it be entirely ignored. As it
happens, these are important claims, because most criminal procedure
scholars either exaggerate the significance of the new demographics of law
enforcement or disregard them altogether.
On the one hand, there are occasional suggestions that the integration
of police forces, coupled with the increased political power of minority
groups, has made the restrictions the Supreme Court placed on law
enforcement in the 1960s obsolete. The argument here begins with the
proposition that the whole point of Warren Court criminal procedurealbeit a point often left unstated-was to guard against the use of the
criminal justice system as an instrument of racial subordination. Now that
police departments, and the political establishments that oversee them,
reflect the diversity of the communities they serve, judicial constraints on
police practices approved or tolerated by majoritarian political processes no
longer make sense: they have become
unjustifiable, antidemocratic
06
1
self-rule.
collective
to
encumbrances
This is doubly simplistic. First, police departments are still far from
completely integrated, and, with race-conscious remedies being phased out,
104 See, e.g., JEROME H. SKOLNICK, THE POLITICS OF PROTEST 286-88 (1969); Sklansky,
supra note 101, at 1772, 1778.
105See, e.g., FOGELSON, supra note 50, at 239-42; CHRISTOPHER LASCH, THE AGONY OF
THE AMERICAN LEFT 206 (1969); SKOLNICK, supra note 104, at 274-78.
106 See, e.g., Bradley, supra note 6, at 1126-28; Dan M. Kahan & Tracey L. Meares, The
Coming Crisis of CriminalProcedure,86 GEO. L.J. 1153, 1161-62 (1998).
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DAVID A. SKLANSKY
[Vol. 96
progress toward complete integration may be slowing. Second, the
exclusion of minority groups and women from police ranks and political
power structures was never the sole basis for the criminal procedure
revolution. Race has long been an important subtext to criminal procedure
jurisprudence, but it has never been the whole story. The landmark
criminal procedure rulings of the 1960s were motivated by a complex set of
commitments, concerns, and intuitions. Among these were commitments to
human dignity, concerns about European-style totalitarianism, and
intuitions that the political system-even without regard to race-was
unlikely to give much weight to the rights and interests of criminal
defendants. 0 7 Even the complete integration of police departments would
not put these worries to rest; the partial integration that we have actually
achieved surely does not do so.
At the same time, criminal procedure scholars cannot simply ignore
the changing demographics of American policing-particularly not when
they are trying to understand the racial and gender dynamics of policing
(issues that many criminal procedure scholars do try to understand) or the
role that the suppression of homosexuality has played in how both the
police and the rest of us think about the work of law enforcement (issues
that fewer scholars, to date, have explored). It will not do, for example, to
suggest that criminal procedure jurisprudence would be improved if the
Supreme Court saw police-citizen interactions as, at their core, a special
case of the interaction of white authorities with black subjects, or
understood domestic violence investigations as about male power figures
deciding the fate of female victims. Nor, increasingly, will it do to analyze
the police as monolithically heterosexual and homophobic. The altered
demographics of American policing do not change everything, but they may
well mean that some features of criminal procedure law deserve to be
reconsidered, and they certainly mean that criminal procedure scholars
trying to understand the role of race, gender, and sexuality in police-citizen
interactions need to broaden their focus beyond the citizen.
V. CONCLUSION
Incomplete revolutions can easily escape notice. Because American
police departments remain far from fully integrated, they are widely
assumed still to be the overwhelmingly white, nearly all-male, uniformly
homophobic institutions they were thirty years ago. But they are not.
Large numbers of minority officers, female officers, and openly gay and
lesbian officers are dramatically transforming the profession. Some
107
See Sklansky, supra note 101, at 1728-56.
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departments have made much more progress than others, and virtually all
departments have a good way to go before their rank-in-file and command
structure fully reflect the diversity of the communities they serve. There are
grounds for concern; moreover, that progress may be slowing. Still, the
progress that has already been made is impressive, and it has broad
ramifications. Ignoring the new demographics of law enforcement, or
failing to appreciate their significance, will leave us less committed than we
should be to continued diversification of police departments; it will blind us
to new possibilities of police reform now opening up; and it will thwart our
efforts to understand, in any but the crudest way, the complex dynamics of
race, gender and sexuality that shape and give meaning to policing.
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