Not your father's police department: making sense of the new demographics of law enforcement.

• Author: Sklansky, David Alan

1. INTRODUCTION

   Several decades ago, when social scientists were discovering the police, and the Supreme Court was beginning to construct the modern 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." (1)

   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--and neither 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 Dragnet picture 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 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 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 mounting evidence--increasingly commonplace among police 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, the decline in occupational solidarity is very good news. Police 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 story--one 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.

   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.

2. 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...