Agency Mission and Values, Changes in

The Evolution of Policing Toward a New Paradigm

Before the “professionalized” era of policing began, police values reflected political patronage and pre-bureaucratized municipal government. Starting at the turn of the 19th century, there was increasing clamor for reform of policing institutions, which were widely viewed as corrupt and ineffectual. The age of reform proceeded slowly, and did not gather steam until the late 1940s and 1950s. Before that time—like most government institutions of the day—police mostly concerned themselves with serving the political powers to which they owed their livelihoods, including overlooking (or even assisting in) officeholders’ crimes while punishing their opponents, even in the absence of wrongdoing. The values of fealty and malleability to political corruption defined the preprofessionalized policing era.

The values of policing began to change in the 1940s as cities instituted a number of reforms that began the move to more professionalized policing services. This included increased use of police vehicles, installation of radios for communication with headquarters, adoption of a military command structure, and an increasing recognition that the rule of law underlay effective policing. While corruption was still fairly widespread, it eventually became outside-the-norm as agencies shifted their mission to law enforcement. The new values for policing became adherence to the law, professional response to crime, and rapid response to citizen calls for service.

Subsequently, the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice (1967), responding to the increasing crime rate in the late 1950s and early 1960s, set forth a strategy for dramatically increasing police professionalism and effectiveness. Improvements to police professionalism meant education, and through federal funding, millions of police officers studied for college degrees. The commission also urged equal treatment of all persons regardless of race or ethnicity, competency in solving crimes, and adherence to the rule of law. [Page 2]Community relations became a priority, with police departments dedicating themselves to keeping their communities informed as to crime activities in their neighborhoods.

Amid the transformations of the professional era, police now comported themselves with higher professional standards, viewing themselves as representatives of the state whose primary function was law enforcement, and thus the only legitimate planners of crime-control policies and executors of anticrime actions (the professional era being characterized by reactive, incident-driven methods and emphases on quantitative results). Ordinary citizens were thus effectively shut out of dialogue on how to best police their own neighborhoods. This would change during the shift toward community-oriented policing in the late 1980s, when, despite half a century of its widespread adoption, the professionalized model was failing to control rising crime rates, and new sociological research challenged longstanding assumptions about policing best practices. Community policing would become the most significant reconceptualization of American policing since the early movement toward professionalization in the 1940s, and it required departments practicing it to commit to a new set of service-oriented values.

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