THURSDAY, JANUARY 9, 2025
The purpose of law enforcement is to protect communities, hold individuals accountable, and ensure justice. But how exactly do police carry out these duties, and what other responsibilities have they taken on? Who controls the police force at different levels of government and who holds them accountable? How can we bridge gaps between citizens and officers?
CONTENTS
01 Introduction
02 Putting it in Context
03 The Role of Government
04 Challenges and Areas for Reform
05 Conclusion
06 Thought Leaders and Additional Resources
07 Ways to Get Involved/What You Can Do
08 About the policy Circle
Introduction
By nature, police and communities are intertwined, and both are essential stakeholders in debates surrounding police reform. Dr. Karen Bartuch, Sgt. Sofia Rosales-Scantena, and Toni McIlwain joined The Policy Circle to discuss the role of police and the role of community involvement, and how citizens can help bridge gaps between communities and police officers:
ccording to Sir Robert Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing, the basic mission for which the police exist is “to prevent crime and disorder,” but it is also necessary to “recognize always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of [police] existence, actions and behavior, and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.” This is because police officers are in a unique position, being “both part of the community they serve and the government protecting that community.” This position was the focus of the Obama administration’s President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing, an endeavor to strengthen relations between law enforcement officers and the communities they serve, and it was at the heart of nationwide protests that erupted in May 2020 and sparked national debate over the role of police.
After over two decades of declining crime, there was a resurgence of homicides and gun violence in 2020. A July 2020 analysis of crime statistics by the Wall Street Journal found that reported homicides were up 24% for the first 7 months of 2020, compared with 2019. In 36 of 50 cities examined, homicides rose at double digit rates, including Milwaukee (37%) and New York City (23%). The FBI Uniform Crime Report shows a 30% increase in homicides for all of 2020 over 2019.
A May 2021 report from the National Commission on COVID-19 and Criminal Justice found that homicide rates declined from their 2020 peaks during the first quarter of 2021, but are still elevated compared to recent years. Aggravated and gun assault rates are also elevated. On the whole, 2021 saw homicide counts continue to climb, but at a slower pace than in 2020.
Crime maps indicate city centers, the sites of anti-police protests, did not experience these upticks; rather, the low-income neighborhoods outside of the city centers are seeing violence peak. These increases in criminality – and in some cases disregard for the law – have made life on the street for the average police officer much more difficult. Lockdowns and protests against the police sidelined the social institutions that tend to keep communities safe, leaving streets emptied “of eyes and ears on their communities.”
WHY IT MATTERS
Feeling safe and knowing that someone will help if you are threatened, attacked or your property is damaged is the foundation of confidence in oneself, in a community and in the world. Without safety people live in fear, and living in fear hinders well-being. People will not feel protected if they believe police are ineffective, or that they do more harm than good. At the same time, the role of police in protecting communities and stopping criminals has become more complex as officers are asked to respond to a broader breadth of community needs outside of law enforcement. Police need resources and support to carry out their duties, but they need to do so without using tactics that generate animosity. To understand how best to find this middle ground, let’s understand how law enforcement functions and is managed today.
“…the safety and happiness of society are the objects at which all political institutions aim, and to which all such institutions must be sacrificed.”
JAMES MADISON
Putting it in Context
In colonial times, law enforcement was a localized endeavor, carried out voluntarily by citizen groups, or sometimes by part-time officers privately funded by local communities. The Texas Rangers that patrolled Texas settlements in the 1800s became the basis from which state law enforcement agencies grew. In 1838, Boston established the first municipal police department, and was quickly followed by New York City, Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia.
POLICE
There are over 660 law enforcement academies that train the officers who go on to work in almost 19,000 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. The bulk of these agencies are at the state and local level; state and local police departments employ over 930,000 people, with roughly 718,000 officers with power of arrest. In total, there are about 2.2 officers for every 1000 individuals living in the United States.
SPENDING
Spending on state and local police increased from $42 billion in 1977 to $115 billion in 2017 (adjusted for inflation), over 85% of which is local spending. Local spending on police “has outpaced the overall growth of city and county budget” over that time period, “rising faster than K-12 education, sanitation and parks and recreation.” Determining how much is spent on policing is difficult because funding comes from multiple sources; it is not enough to look at a city, county, or state budget alone for a full picture. In 2017, for example, Las Vegas spent less than 2% of its budget on police, but Clark County spent 15% of its budget on police; in Chicago that same year, the city spent almost 20% of its budget on policing, but Cook County only spent 2% of its budget.
VIOLENT CRIME AND DEATHS
Based on the FBI’s annual report of serious crime and the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ annual crime survey, crime in the U.S. fell by 50%-70% between 1993 and 2018. Yet in 18 out of 22 surveys conducted between 1993 and 2018, at least 60% of respondents said they believed there was more crime in the U.S. compared to the year before. There are on average 8.25 million criminal offenses each year, resulting in about 10 million arrests.
As of mid-2022, the most recent statistics available are from 2020. Since 2015, law enforcement agencies have been transitioning to a detailed (but more complicated) format known as the National Incident-Based Reporting System. The new system involves financial and technical hurdles for many police departments across the country. Less than 60% of America’s local law enforcement agencies voluntarily submitted data in the new format, meaning national-level and state-level crime data is not universally available.
Crime statistics from the FBI for 2020 show that homicides rose 30% between 2019 and 2020, to 6.5 killings per 100,000 people. In the 1990s, this rate peaked at 9.8 per 100,000 people. Experts have pointed to the pandemic, fallout from social justice protests, and economic disruptions as possible causes, although overall crime fell by 6% between 2019 and 2020. Agencies across the country voluntarily submit data for these statistics. For 2020, 85% of eligible agencies submitted data; some missing include agencies in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Crime Victimization Survey, through which U.S. residents self-report whether they have been victims of violent crime, reported 4.6 million total violent incidents in 2020, down from 5.8 million in 2019. In total, numbers have held relatively steady since 2010. It is important to note differences between self-reported crime and national statistics; based on comparisons to statistics from the FBI, about 40% of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2020.
According to the Washington Post’s police shootings database, 1,021 people were shot and killed by police in the U.S. in 2020. Of those civilians who lost their lives, 652 were reportedly in possession of a gun and 175 were reportedly in possession of a knife, while 60 were reported unarmed. An article published in The Lancet indicates deaths involving police may have been undercounted in the U.S. (by as many as 17,000 data back to 1980) due to discrepancies between independent tallies and government data of death certificates. Others note the independent tallies come from crowd-sourced databases, which may not be reliable based on specific criteria used in classification.
Although Black Americans made up 14% of the U.S. population in 2019, they accounted for 26.6% of arrests and 24% of individuals shot and killed by police. White Americans, at 60% of the population, accounted for 69.4% of arrests and 45% of individuals shot and killed by police. “A simple count of the number of police shootings that occur does little to explore whether racial differences in the frequency of officer-involved shootings are due to police malfeasance or differences in suspect behavior.” In light of population proportions, some point to these figures as proof of systemic racism and that Black Americans are more likely to be killed by police than White Americans. Others look at violent crime statistics that indicate Black Americans are more frequently involved in criminal incidents, which could mean they are more likely to have encounters with police.
Diving deeper into these statistics, the FBI estimates Black Americans were 39% of offenders in murder incidents in 2019, almost three times greater than their share of the population. Still others point to statistics that indicate Black Americans are even more likely to be victims of violent crime than offenders; at 14% of the population, Black Americans were 54% of murder victims in 2019.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2019 Crime Victimization Survey, violent criminal incidents with Black offenders and Black victims accounted for 70% of violent incidents involving Black Americans in 2019, a share much greater than their share of the population. In comparison, violent crimes with white offenders and white victims, at 62% of criminal incidents involving White Americans, is approximately equivalent to the population of White Americans. According to the 2020 survey, this rate did not significantly change over the course of the next year.
The chart from the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2019 Crime Victimization Survey examines the race and ethnicity of violent incident offenders and victims.
The Role of Government
FEDERAL
The U.S. Constitution “established a federal government of limited powers. A general police power is not among them.” Congress does, however, have legislative powers that allow it “to enact legislation that relates to law enforcement matters.” Federal laws, such as those related to immigration, bankruptcy, civil rights laws, and tax fraud, apply in every state. Data collection on crimes and law enforcement is mainly done at the federal level to compile national statistics. The federal government is also the largest provider of law enforcement training, primarily through the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers under the Department of Homeland Security. Finally, the federal budget includes provisions for supporting state and local law enforcement via justice assistance grants and public safety programs.
FEDERAL AGENCIES
The Department of Justice (the DOJ) is the primary federal agency dedicated to public safety and controlling crime. The Attorney General (AG) supervises and directs the DOJ and its agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI); the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA); the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; the Bureau of Prisons; and the U.S. Marshals Service.
For FY2021, total funding for the DOJ amounted to $55.3 billion. Law enforcement operations totaled $18.7 billion.
In total, there are 65 federal agencies and 27 offices of inspector general that employ full time personnel authorized to make arrests and carry firearms. These include the DOJ offices mentioned above as well as U.S. Customs and Border Protection under the Department of Homeland Security (DHS); the Park Service Rangers under the Department of the Interior; and lesser known security offices and details under the Departments of Commerce, Labor, and State, among others.
CONGRESS
Congress can influence policing at the local level via the relationship between the DOJ and police throughout the country. Both the House and Senate Committees on the Judiciary provide oversight of the DOJ and DHS. In the Senate, the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism oversees the DOJ’s criminal division and most offices, including the FBI and DEA. In the House, the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigations has jurisdiction over the Federal Criminal Code, sentencing, prisons, parole, and pardons.
STATE AND LOCAL
The Constitution gives authority over policing to the states. Each state and territory has its own legal and court system to handle criminal matters. State and local agencies make up the bulk of the almost 19,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and local police departments employ the vast majority of all law enforcement officers, employing approximately 650,000 officers.
Each state has an attorney general who acts as “the chief legal officer of the state” and oversees law enforcement and reform. The attorneys general of each state and Washington D.C., and the chief legal officers of Puerto Rico, the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Virgin Islands are all members of the National Association of Attorneys General (NAAG).
At the local level there are municipal, county, tribal, and regional police departments that “uphold the laws of the jurisdiction, provide patrol, and investigate local crimes.” Sheriffs offices are granted authority by the state to enforce the state law at the local level in the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S. Police chiefs, who oversee departments, report to local elected officials such as a mayor, a city manager, or a city council.
Local police department officers have the most interaction with their communities. City, county, and municipal officers are those who respond to 911 calls, and monitor roadways and enforce traffic laws. Traffic stops are the primary way most people interact with law enforcement personnel. Most importantly, local law enforcement, like hospitals, operate 24 hours, 7 days a week; people turn to police departments when they do not know who else to turn to.
Challenges and Areas for Reform
A series of incidents of excessive use of force in 2020, including the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain, sparked calls for more police oversight and reform. Mounting concern about violent crime in the U.S. has tempered some of these calls. In a July 2020 poll by Gallup, 58% of all Americans said that there were “major changes needed” for police reform. In mid-2021, 61% of Black Americans, 41% of White Americans, and 30% of Hispanic Americans reported having very little or no confidence in the criminal justice system. By late 2021, the share of adults who want more funding for policing in their area increased to 47%, up from 31% in June 2020.
ACCOUNTABILITY
MISCONDUCT AND EXCESSIVE USE OF FORCE
Use of force is one of the greatest concerns for many Americans. A June 2020 PEW poll found that only 35% of Americans believe the police do a good or excellent job of “using the right amount of force.”
Finding data to verify these assumptions is difficult. A 2017 Harvard study on police use of force and racial bias found “[d]ata on lower level uses of force…are virtually non-existent,” and “the analysis of police behavior is fraught with difficulty including, but not limited to, the reliability of the data that does exist.” The study examined data from New York’s City’s Stop and Frisk policy, the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Police-Public Contact Survey, and officer-involved shooting data reported voluntarily from twelve police departments across the country. The main findings (p. 29-30) report:
“On non-lethal uses of force, there are racial differences – sometimes quite large – in police use of force, even after controlling for a large set of control designed to account for important contextual and behavioral factors at the time of the police-civilian interaction. As the intensity of force increases…the overall probability of such an incident occurring decreases but the racial difference remains constant. On the most extreme uses of force, however – officer-involved shootings with a Taser or lethal weapon – there are no racial differences in either the raw data or when accounting for controls.”
Federal legislation can establish a national use of force standard and a national database to keep better track of use of force data. Clearly defined legal standards means data can be objectively analyzed and paired with accountability measures. For example, federal grants can be tied to ensuring police departments adhere to standards and report data.
Mandating body cameras is a suggestion for ensuring reliable data and accountability. Live footage can guarantee police reports are accurate. It will also help target individual officers for wrongdoing as opposed to intense and lengthy investigations into entire police departments that may interfere in officers’ abilities to respond to community needs. As of mid-2022, seven states mandate body cameras for law enforcement personnel (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Carolina). About half of local police departments have acquired body cameras as of 2018. Urban Institute further breaks down each state’s body camera laws and regulations.
The Police Data Initiative collects, compiles, and encourages using open data to foster understanding and accountability between communities and their law enforcement agencies. See if your local law enforcement agency is involved.
DID YOU KNOW?
While body cameras have generally received wide-spread support, other means of equipping police officers have been called into question. The 1033 program authorizes the transfer of U.S. military equipment to state and local law enforcement agencies. This includes necessary ammunition and medical supplies, but also sometimes armed assault vehicles and weapons reserved for military conflict. Equipping local law enforcement officers properly is essential to their protection and that of their communities, but excessive weaponization of police has been linked to more cases of excessive use of force, and “exacerbates the gap between police and those they are supposed to serve.”
UNIONS AND COLLECTIVE BARGAINING
Other barriers to holding police officers accountable for misconduct can sometimes be found in police contracts negotiated by unions. Police unions emerged alongside many other labor unions at the beginning of the 20th century. Although they initially enjoyed little public support, roughly two-thirds of American police officers are part of police labor unions today.
Police officers are government employees who require civil service protections in terms of demotions or transfers, layoffs or discharges, and pay and benefit determination. Additionally, due to the nature of police officers’ work, misconduct by officers can have more serious consequences than misconduct by other public employees. For this reason, state labor laws and Law Enforcement Officers’ Bill of Rights (LEOBRs) “provide police officers with due process protections during disciplinary investigations that are not given to other classes of public employees.” Collective bargaining by unions ensures these laws are included in police departmen
Posted 11:35 AM