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Exploring a Craft Learning Model for Reviewing Patrol Officer Decision-Making in Encounters with the Public

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2022

James J. Willis  and
Heather Toronjo
James J. Willis
Affiliation:
Professor of Criminology, Law and Society at George Mason University, Email: [email protected].
Heather Toronjo
Affiliation:
Research Faculty in the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

Since the 1960s, police departments have turned to rules and procedures to help control how patrol officers, as legal decision-makers, exercise their discretionary authority. The logic of the administrative rulemaking model depends on the development and enforcement of bureaucratic rules and regulations. The public outcry over high-profile incidents of police abuses of authority has renewed interest in this approach. This article conceptualizes a complementary craft learning model to supplement rulemaking. This model harnesses patrol officers’ knowledge and skills, learned through experience, to the development of criteria for assessing and guiding how they use their discretion in less dramatic encounters with the public. Using in-depth interviews with thirty-eight patrol officers reacting to a video clip of a fairly routine and low-key neighbor dispute, we derive seven evaluative standards (accountability, lawfulness, problem diagnosis, repair of harm, economy, fairness, and safety and order). We then explore how these standards could be used by first-line supervisors to structure reviews of patrol officer decision-making through a process of reflection-in-action. Our purpose is to imagine a reform strategy that tries to account for the complex technical and normative dimensions of everyday police work to facilitate more deliberate, transparent, and principled decisions.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 48 , Issue 3 , August 2023 , pp. 819 - 846
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful comments, and Drs. Richard Lippke, Allison Redlich, and David Weisburd for their helpful feedback on earlier drafts. The lead author would also like to acknowledge his intellectual debt to Dr. Stephen Mastrofski, whose ideas and insights over many years have contributed greatly to his understanding of the police craft.

References

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