Police Organizations

Policing as a process of social regulation within industrialized societies is carried out by many organizations. The police organization is quite another matter, and typically people confuse policing, law enforcement, and the police organization. The confusion results from people thinking that the public police organization is the source of all legitimate policing (when in reality it is one of many policing organizations, public and private), equating policing with “law enforcement” (a small part of the policing role and mandate), and not including self-help and other forms of informal social control as part of the policing function.

Policing is done by groups as diverse as the armed services, Department of the Interior, reservation-based Native American police, special police for nuclear installations, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), private security organizations with international capacities (Wackenhunt, Wells Fargo, Burns, Pinkerton), private detectives, neighborhood associations, and clandestine paramilitary policing groups. These policing groups vary in complexity, legitimation, [Page 1171]location, mandate, strategy, and tactics. Police organizations differ along many social dimensions. Most significantly, the source of legitimation and the scope of accountability differ as one moves from federal to local public police and from large corporate security organizations to smaller, local, and often self-help-based groups. American policing reflects historical influences that shape what the police stand for, what they do, and how they do it (Reiss 1992). The United States is a revolution-born, frontier, violent society with an individualistic, pseudolegalistic culture focusing on victimization, individual rights, and legal protections. Finally, ideology and belief play a significant and often ignored “invisible” role in policing. American society denies inequality but is stratified by both race and class, and only occasionally does the actual focus on the poor, people of color, and the disreputable come to direct public attention. The recent concern with racial profiling is an example of public concern about undemocratic practices that are otherwise invisible.

The organization of public policing, as a social type, is the focus of this entry. Because most of it is investigatory in character, federal policing will not be discussed here. (It is best seen as one of a kind and as an evolved form that differs from other European-origin systems [Bordua 1968; Clark and Sykes 1974; Bayley 1975, 1985, 1992].) Much of what is known about American policing comes from studies of white patrol-men policing large urban centers. There is little research on state or federal police, specialized police and regulators, rural policing (whether small town or county sheriffs) (Weisheit, Falcone, and Wells 1998), or private policing (Johnston 1993; Jones and Newburn 1998). Because most of the research describes large, urban departments, in spite of their unusual size, politics, and media focus, this entry draws upon this research extensively, although not exclusively.