Joshua Chanin

Examining the Sustainability of Pattern or Practice Police Misconduct Reform

Section 14141 of the Violent Crime Act of 1994 fundamentally restructures the regulation of police behavior in the United States. Since the law’s passage, dozens of police departments have undergone lengthy and complex reforms designed to eliminate a pattern or practice of misconduct. Despite the program’s wide application, neither scholars nor practitioners know much about the efficacy or sustainability of these reforms. This article draws on longitudinal data across several outcome metrics, including citizen complaints, use of force incidence, and civil litigation, and a series of interviews with key stakeholders to examine pattern or practice initiatives in Pittsburgh, PA; Washington, DC; and Cincinnati, OH. Findings suggest that the reform process has the ability to minimize unwanted police misconduct and generate desirable policy outcomes, particularly during the period of Department of Justice oversight. Sustaining these reforms after the settlement agreement is dissolved, however, has proved a challenge.

Early Stages of Pattern or Practice Police Misconduct Reform: An Examination of the Department of Justice’s Investigation and Negotiation Processes

This essay focuses on two significant blind spots in knowledge of the Justice Department’s (DOJ) pattern or practice police misconduct initiative: (a) DOJ investigation of alleged systemic police misconduct and (b) the negotiation that defines the terms of the settlement agreements between the DOJ and jurisdictions found to have engaged in a pattern or practice of unlawful activity. This article will discuss each stage in some detail, beginning with a description of the relevant federal and state or local stakeholders involved and the key decisions they face throughout the investigation and negotiation processes. The article goes on to address several points of criticism, including the ambiguous legal and evidentiary standards underlying the DOJ’s investigation process and the insularity and opaqueness that characterize settlement negotiation, while considering how each affects the process of implementation and the sustainability of the organizational change at issue and the broad goals of the initiative.

Examining the Determinants of Police Department Transparency The View of Police Executives

Scholars know relatively little about why law enforcement agencies choose to share information with the public. Empirical research has shown that departments often do so to satisfy an external demand, whether in the form of a statute requiring information to be collected and disseminated, the presence of a consent decree, or some other similar pressure. There is also evidence that transparency is the product of a unique constellation of factors within agencies that lead certain departments to share more information than others. But this line of inquiry is underdeveloped, and questions remain about both the nature and degree to which these external and internal factors matter. This article focuses on the role of police executives in generating the agency’s response to transparency demands, with a particular focus on such demands generated by civilian oversight agencies and the role that top leadership plays in establishing an organizational culture that values openness and transparency. To address these issues, we draw on the results of a series of Q-sorting exercises and the insights gleaned from several semi-structured interviews with municipal police chiefs and county sheriffs. Preliminary results suggest that the vision and goals of police executives are critical to his or her department’s online transparency.

Depolicing as Dissent Shirking

Theory suggests that bureaucratic actors express opposition to unfavorable organizational and policy changes by acting in ways inconsistent with established rules, norms, and community expectations . Empirical evidence from various professional contexts and geographic locations lends support to the notion that some public employees have indeed engaged in dissent shirking by refusing to perform at their best so as to express work-related dissatisfaction. This research relies on a quasi-experimental design to examine this phenomenon in the context of the police. The study’s analysis will be driven by a series of autoregressive integrated moving average models in order to examine the extent to which a form of dissent shirking—“depolicing”—has occurred in jurisdictions investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice under that agency’s pattern or practice authority. Despite qualitative support for depolicing under these conditions, this analysis shows no evidence that officers responded to external criticism and intensified oversight brought on by the pattern or practice reform process by policing less proactively. Findings are discussed in terms of both theory and policy.

Traffic Enforcement Through the Lens of Race: A Sequential Analysis of Post-Stop Outcomes in San Diego, California:

Research has shown that Black and Hispanic drivers are subject to disproportionate stop and post-stop outcomes compared with White drivers. Yet scholars’ understanding of how and why such disparities persist remains underdeveloped. To address this shortcoming, this article applies a sequential approach to the analysis of traffic stop data generated by San Diego Police Department officers in 2014 and 2015. Results show that despite being subject to higher rates of discretionary and nondiscretionary searches, Black drivers were less likely to be found with contraband than matched Whites and were more than twice as likely to be subjected to a field interview where no citation is issued or arrest made. Black drivers were also more likely to face any type of search, as well as high-discretion consent searches, that end in neither citation nor arrest. The article concludes with a discussion of the findings and a series of recommendations.

The Underexplored World of Remedial Law in Public Administration Scholarship An Examination and Proposed Research Agenda

Remedial law involves the use of litigated reform and injunctive relief to bring misfeasant state and local bureaucracies in line with federal law. This article highlights the need for further scholarly engagement with remedial law. It also indicates that within each stage of the remedial process lies a series of important research questions, making the area fertile ground for the very type of administrative expertise and agency-centric approaches that are lacking from our scholarly discourse. Attention to remedial law would not only strengthen the management of rights-driven reform but also contribute to the ongoing legitimacy of the public administration field.

Police Reform Through an Administrative Lens: Revisiting the Justice Department’s Pattern or Practice Initiative

The U.S. Department of Justice’s “pattern or practice” initiative has been used to address systemic police misconduct in cities like Ferguson, Los Angeles, and Baltimore. Despite its clear relevance to administrative theory building and the practice of organizational change, the subject remains almost entirely unknown to public administration scholars. This article is designed to serve as an introduction to pattern or practice reform and a detailed agenda for future scholastic and practical contribution, with focus on three areas where administrative scholars could be of particular insight: (a) public personnel management, discretion, and accountability; (b) the influence of legal principles on the management of public bureaucracies; and (c) representative democracy and federalism. Engagement with the issue not only gives administrative scholars a voice on an increasingly salient public issue, but also would add depth and a much-needed perspective to management of such an important policy initiative.