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18 Policing Soc'y: Int'l J. Res. Pol'y 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/pgsty18 and id is 1 raw text is: Policing & Society, Routledge Vol. 18, No. 1, March 2008, 1-6 - Tay1or&FrancisGroup INTRODUCTION The role of the rank and file in police reform David Alan Sklanskya* and Monique Marksb aSchool of Law, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA; bSociology Department, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa Police departments today are more attractive places than they used to be for experiments in participatory management and other forms of workforce empowerment, but experiments of this kind in law enforcement remain disappointingly rare. The articles in this special issue, drawn from an interna- tional, cross-disciplinary conference on 'police reform from the bottom up,' highlight the potential benefits of giving rank-and-file officers a larger collective voice in the shaping of their work, as well as some of the difficulties of doing so, and the conditions under which it is most likely to succeed. Keywords: participatory management; policy diversity; police management; police rank and file; police unionism; workplace democracy The dominant mindset of police departments, police reformers, appellate judges, and criminal justice scholars the dominant mindset, in short, of nearly everyone who thinks about policing and its problems is, and always has been, that policing needs strong, top-down management. Good police officers are police officers who follow rules. Rank-and-file organizing is an obstacle to reform and an impediment to maintaining a 'disciplined' work force. The rule of law makes policing no place for participatory management. Even the fiercest foes of authoritarian worksites tend to make an exception for law enforcement. In many ways, of course, police officers necessarily collaborate in the shaping of their work. Partners assigned to the same patrol car discuss how they should spend their time and what the best ways are of responding to known problems in familiar places. Teams of officers plan undercover stings and neighborhood sweeps. At a more indirect level, police officers have a say in organizational planning and policy making through strongly supported police unions. Today police unions may be joined at the table by identity-based caucuses of police officers groups, for example, of minority officers, or women officers, or of gay and lesbian officers. And even without pressure from below, wise sergeants, lieutenants, and captains like wise supervisors in any occupation find ways to enlist the rank and file in processes of cooperative problem solving. However, in law enforcement all of this occurs at the margins. Arguments for systematically involving frontline employees in workplace decision making have gained extraordinarily broad currency over the past several decades, in the public sector and the private sector alike but not in policing. This is despite the increasing frequency with which police executives around the globe speak *Corresponding author. Email: d.a.sklansky@gmail.com ISSN 1043-9463 print/ISSN 1477-2728 online © 2008 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/10439460701718484 http://www.informaworld.com

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