Police professionalism and the military model of policing became synonymous with police repression. The crime control tactics recommended by the professionalism movement, such as aggressive stop and frisk procedures, created widespread community resentment, particularly among young, minority males who were most frequently targeted. Professionalism antagonized tensions between the police and the communities they served and created rancor and dissension within the departments themselves. Police professionalism, however, did not turn out to be the panacea Wilson had envisaged. Closer supervision of police officers was recommended foot patrols were replaced by motorized patrols, precinct houses were consolidated and more central police facilities constructed and command functions were centralized in a headquarters staff (Uchida 1993). Central themes for police administration were to become crime control and efficiency in achieving crime control. Wilson argued for greater centralization of the police function, with an emphasis on military-style organization and discipline. Wilson set the standard for the professionalism movement when he published his book Police Administration, which quickly became a blueprint for professionalizing policing. Rather than spreading through an entire department, narcotics and prostitution operators could now corrupt a smaller, more discreet unit and still maintain a high level of immunity from police interference with their illegal businesses.īy the 1950s, police professionalism was being widely touted as better way to improve police effectiveness and reform policing as an institution.
One of the ironies of this reform effort was that the creation of centralized special squads such as traffic, criminal investigation, vice and narcotics, over time had the effect of reducing organized crime’s corruption costs. In this vein, many police departments added a middle-level of management to their organizational charts changed the geographic lines of police precincts so they would no longer be contiguous with political wards and created special squads to perform specific duties within the departments. Once again, the hope was to structurally isolate police officers from politicians. Similarly, reform-minded police executives began to try to restructure the department itself, making it more bureaucratic, with an internal clear chain-of-command.
If the recruitment, selection and promotions processes were housed within the department and governed by objective criteria, the hope was that officers would no longer owe their jobs and their ranks to political operatives. The hope of these reforms was to lessen the hold of politicians, and particularly ward leaders on police officers. Among the reforms instituted within police organizations were the establishment of selection standards, training for new recruits, placing police under civil service, and awarding promotion as a result of testing procedures.
Reform police commissioners and chiefs, often appointed in the wake of one or another scandals, made efforts to change the nature of the police bureaucracy itself. Other attempts to reform policing have come from within the ranks of the departments themselves. The police department continues on as a bureaucratic entity resistant to both outside influence and reform. As external organizations they report, recommend and dissolve. It is no accident that in looking at those issues, the Wickersham Commission also became the first official governmental body to investigate organized crime.Ĭommissions, while shedding light on the extent of corruption and serving to inform the public have little lasting impact on police practices. On a national basis, President Hoover appointed the Wickersham Commission in 1929 to examine what was perceived as a rising crime rate and police ineffectiveness in dealing with crime.
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