Richard R. E. Kania

Should we tell the police to say “yes” to gratuities?

(1988). Should we tell the police to say “yes” to gratuities? Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 7, No. 2, pp. 37-49.

A Brief History of a Venerable Paradigm in Policing

The authors of “The Meaning of Compstat” take the position that Compstat is a paradigm of the kind described by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1970). It is a view that has been advanced before (Walsh, 2001). A contrary position by Weisburd, Mastrofski, McNally, Greenspan, and Willis (2003) is reported but not sustained in this article. It is my view that Weisburd and his associates are right. Compstat is a command and control aid, not a new way of doing policing. Compstat is a technology, not a paradigm. It is reactionary in a sense, a reaction to the feel-good promise of community policing. It makes sense to revisit what Kuhn (1970) refers to as paradigms. He wrote, “These I take to be universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners” (p. vii). It can be argued that community policing was a such a paradigm, perhaps a failed paradigm, and I would accept that argument. It saw the problem of policing as being located at the police-community interface and conceptualizes problem solving as decentralized and as bottom up, a complete reversal of the top-down hierarchal management strategies of both the traditional bureaucratic managerial model, which the article refers to as the rational-legal bureaucratic model, and the resurgent Compstat-aided approach to reasserting hierarchal managerial command and control of policing. The old-time religion of the traditional bureaucratic managerial model emerged as a paradigm a century ago. Advocates of bureaucracy and of scientific management placed great emphasis on the use of data in intelligent managerial decision making. The R for reporting in Luther Gulick’s 1937 mnemonic of POSDCORB (planning, organizing, staffing, directing, coordinating, reporting, and budgeting) makes this very clear. A full generation earlier than that, in the contributions of Frederick Taylor and of Max Weber, there was a similar emphasis on scientific data collection and analysis and on the files and using the best data available to support managerial decision

CONSERVATIVE IDEOLOGY IN CRIMINOLOGY AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE

As often as the label “conservative” is used in criminological and criminal justice books, papers, articles, lectures and discussions, rarely is the substance of what “conservative” might mean raised. Its use as a prejoritive by those who are not conservative clouds the word and the complex of ideas it represents with a negative imagery. The author, a confessed conservative, seeks to dispel that cloud by identifying the common features of contemporary American conservative thought in its five major divisions: secular and theological fundamentalism, core conservatism, conservative pragmatism, and libertarian conservatism. How adherents of each of these five camps impact on criminal justice policy and criminological theory is explained. Proposals for a conservative pedagogy in criminal justice are offered to sympathizers and a conservative who’s who and reading list are provided for further reading.

Joining anthropology and law enforcement

The role of anthropology in law enforcement involves three aspects of law enforcement activity; forensic anthropology, police-community relations research, and legal ethnographic research on the law enforcement agencies themselves. The first of these contributions to law enforcement by physical anthropologists faces competition from other closely related fields. Police-community relations research is a potential growth area for the application of anthropological efforts, as is legal ethnographic analysis of police organizationa. These latter two areas are within the realm of social anthropology, while the former is a specialty of physical anthropology. This article reviews the contributions of anthropologists and the applications of anthropological methods to law enforcement. It contends that criminal justice educators and police practitioners alike can benefit from knowing more about how these anthropological specialties have contributed and can continue to contribute to law enforcement.

Amanda Cross and Androgyny

Abstract Amanda Cross is the pen name Carolyn Heilbrun used for her mystery fiction. In two of her novels she employed the theme of androgyny. She also wrote the non-fiction, 1973 Toward a Recognition of Androgyny in which she promoted androgyny as aspect of her approach to feminism, an intellectual denial of any significant differences between the sexes. While that thread of American feminism has lost favor in current feminist ideologies, matters of gender identity are rising in prominence in American social and political thought, reviving the debate on male and female roles and identities in the United States.

The ethics of the death penalty

Clearly among the criminal justice faculty teaching about the death penalty, many find the use of capital punishment highly objectionable, and some of them will use their classrooms to convey their arguments against it. At academic conferences vocal advocates have passed resolutions against the death penalty, and held panels to criticize its continued use. Among the more important books in criminal justice ethics it is customary to give the arguments both for and against capital punishment, but the full range of pro‐execution arguments rarely appears, and the selected defenses often are the easiest “straw men” to bat down. Rarely are the social contract or religious bases adequately argued. As a supporter of limited use of capital punishment, the author presents some pro‐execution arguments either absent from or seriously understated in the prevailing literature. Support for executions as an ethical exercise of state power can be found in the moral and religious doctrines of the leading western religions ...

Media issues in police education and training 1

Abstract Using an in‐class survey conducted with two Administrative Officers Course classes of the Southern Police Institute, the author determined these mid‐career police officials generally were in favor of increasing the amount of formal education and training devoted to police media relations issues. The respondents were regular media consumers, reading local newspapers and watching local television news with high frequencies, most doing so daily. They viewed all news media as being between somewhat accurate and of mixed quality, and felt TV and film crime fiction were somewhat accurate to very inaccurate. Unlike some earlier studies of police attitudes toward the mass media, these officers did not see the media as overtly hostile toward the police, but judged them neither pro‐police nor anti‐police in their outlook and coverage. Their views are used by the author in support of advocating additional media training of police and the inclusion of media relations in collegiate criminal justice education ...

A preliminary analysis of feminist views on the crime of rape

Although rape has been considered a serious social problem for centuries, the rise of the Feminist Movement in North America in the 1970’s has served to bring the problem into the public eye. Leading Feminists, among them Camille LeGrand and Susan Brownmiller, have proposed new hypotheses both on rape and the rapist which differ significantly from traditional theories on the crime. Some of the Feminists’ hypotheses, particularly those which presuppose very high levels of rape and assume massive underreporting of the crime by its victims, do not receive much support in empirical surveys. But one aspect of the Feminists’ perspective on rape—that rape is an act against both person and property—is substantiated by empirical analysis of UCR data. The data suggest that the crime of rape shares significant commonalities with the crimes of property, as well as crimes of violence, and rape statistics act to hold together these two, otherwise different, categories of crime.