How ‘informal,’ veiled culture affects policing
There is considerable interest in how police culture affects police officers’ treatment of people.
Former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci addressed this topic in his 2014 report on police interactions with people in mental health crisis. And a few months ago, the Toronto Police Services Board’s Transformational Task Force devoted an entire chapter of its final report on culture change.
However, all these reports deal with the formal, visible aspects of culture. They ignore what I would call “informal” police culture, which is like the submerged part of an iceberg.
Developed through history, folklore, mythology, symbolic action and memorialization, it has a huge impact on officer behaviour. As the policing research by British academic Jerome Skolnick reveals, informal culture shapes the police officer’s “working personality.”
Two elements of this personality identified by Skolnick are danger and authority.
Though factually unsupported, the belief that a police officer’s job is dangerous, that every time an officer answers a call there is “potential for danger,” has a big impact on forming this personality.
Authority is the other element shaping this personality, that is, the power to enforce laws and rules.
We need to consider the subjective impact of the elements of danger and authority in forming a cop’s essentially conservative personality.
Police opposition to ending the practice of carding and legalization of marijuana are cases in point. We see in it the way in which the two elements of danger and authority influence response: they promote suspiciousness as a behavioural characteristic.
And that suspiciousness leads to the classification and labelling of people. From an extended field study of a large urban police force in the U.S., published in 2005, John Van Maanen concluded that police officers categorize people in three groups: “suspicious persons,” “know nothings” and “the a-holes.”
This classification is not based on any objective evidence but the result of informal police culture. All the same, it is the third group that is most interesting. As one veteran street cop said to Van Maanen: “I guess what our job really boils down to is not letting the a--holes take over the city. Now I’m not talking about your regular crooks . . . they’re bound to wind up in the joint anyway. What I’m talking about are those s---heads out to prove they can push everybody around . . . They’re the ones that make it tough on the decent people out there. You take the majority of what we do and it’s nothing more than a--hole control.” Who, then, are the a--holes? To quote Van Maanen: “The a--hole — creep, bigmouth, bastard, animal, mope, rough, jerkoff, clown, scumbag, wiseguy, phony, idiot, s---head, bum, fool, or any of a number of anatomical, oral, or incestuous terms — a part of every policeman’s world.”
A--holes, that is, are suspect not because of what they do, but who they are, how they look, dress, talk, walk, and where they live, etc. Van Maanen says keeping them under control in the name of protecting society is an important practical and moral justification for the police officer’s existence.
This task is fraught with potentially serious consequences because of the process involved in confronting the a--holes:
Affront: Some challenge to an officer’s authority, whether real or perceived.
Clarification: The officer determines the meaning of the affront. Remedy: The course of action that follows clarification. Looking at it this way, bias is built into the informal culture shaping police officers’ “working personality.” This is not an “unconscious” bias, as the classification of people is very much a conscious process.
The consequences of this informal culture run counter to all formal policies and practices, as well as community expectations. Yet, it is deeply entrenched.
Skolnick points out that two consequences of this personality shaped by the informal culture are a sense of solidarity (“we are in it together”) and social isolation (“it’s us versus them” and “they don’t understand what we do”).
As we think about some of the disastrous and deadly encounters between police and the public in our own city, we must ask whether, or to what extent, subjective interpretations of people or groups, danger and authority — based on informal police culture — played a role in their outcomes.
We must also question whether formal interventions alone — laws, rules, policies, training and education etc. — can get at this invisible phenomenon, the part of the iceberg that lies under water. Alok Mukherjee is a distinguished visiting professor at Ryerson University. He served as chair of the Toronto Police Services Board from 2005 to 2015.