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Implementing Legal Policies Through Operant Conditioning: The Case of Police Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

James P. Levine
James P. Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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One serious obstacle to the achievement of social change in America has been the intransigence of large bureaucracies toward changes in goals, procedures, and styles. Although programs ad infinitum to remedy evils such as poverty, segregation, crime, and pollution are proposed and even written into law, the day-to-day operation of our political institutions often fails to reflect these innovations. Thus we are unable to evaluate the merits of alternative solutions to such ills because they are never given the test of full-fledged implementation.

In this paper I am going to suggest various measures to modify the behavior of one important political institution which has been staunchly resistant to change—the police. Our under standing of police operations is still quite limited (due partially to the secretive nature of most departments), but as David Easton (1969) has argued, social scientists have an obligation to use whatever intellectual tools are at their disposal to obtain “quick, short-run answers” to questions of pressing social concern. To this end, what follows is an attempt to apply some principles of learning theory (developed largely in highly-structured psychology laboratories on infra-human subjects) to the chaotic environment of the cop on the beat.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 6 , Issue 2: Special Issue on the Police , November 1971 , pp. 195 - 222
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 by the Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Prepared for delivery at the 1970 meeting of the American Political Science Association, September 11, 1971, Los Angeles, California. The Graduate School of the University of Oregon provided financial assistance for this research. I would like to thank Richard Frey for bibliographic help.

References

Cases

Chimel v. California 395 U.S. 752 (1969).Google Scholar
Mapp v. Ohio 367 U.S. 643 (1961).Google Scholar
Miranda v. Arizona 384 U.S. 436 (1966).Google Scholar
Orozco v. Texas 394 U.S. 324 (1969).Google Scholar
Shipley v. California 395 U.S. 818 (1969).Google Scholar
Spinelli v. U.S. 393 U.S. 410 (1969).Google Scholar
U.S. v. Price 383 U.S. 787 (1966).Google Scholar

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