Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

leadership. Increasingly, the police could follow their own lead, independentboth of the party organizations and the innovative administrations. (,(,Hence, while the new system of administration diminished the influence of machinebosses, it did so by bolstering the position of municipal bureaucracies as independentseats of power. While sometimes frustrating reform efforts, this arrangementwas not wholly disadvantageous for the city administrators, mayors, and politicians,as it let them disavow the police department's excesses without needing to do anythingto stop them. If authority was invested exclusively in the police chiefs, thenthe chiefs would also incur whatever blame was directed at the department, thoughthey faced few consequences of public disfavor.,,7 But even the position of the chiefof police was not necessarily as strong as it appeared, and discipline was generallylimited by the need to maintain the loyalty of those in his command.It is exceedingly rare that a ranking police officer can take positive chargeof police action, and even in the cases where this is possible, his power todetermine the course of action is limited to giving the most general kindsof directions. But like all superiors. police superiors do depend on the goodwill of the subordinates .... Thus. they are forced to resort to the only meansavailable to insure a modicum of loyalty, namely, covering mistakes. Themore blatantly an officer's transgression violates an explicit departmentalregulation the less likely it is that his superior will be able to concealit. Therefore, to be helpful, as they must try to be, superiors must confinethemselves to white-washing bad practices involving relatively unregulatedconduct, that is, those dealings with citizens that lead up to arrests. In otherwords, to gain compliance with explicit regulations, where failings could beacutely embarrassing, command must yield in unregulated or little regulatedareas of practice. 68The protection that the individual officer once received from his political patron.vas thus t.ralls[erreu lo his superior otficers. In a formal sense, the police facedmore discipline, while in practice they continued to engage the public-orcertain parts of it-according to their own judgment. Hence, bureaucratizationincreased the autonomy of the department as a whole and, ironically, preservedthe discretion enjoyed by officers at the lowest ranks.Yet this gap in accountability was not particularly worrisome to reformersof the time. The Progressive movement, while often credited with improving thequality of public services and reducing corruption, was not especially concernedwith protecting the rights of the poor. Reform efforts were not led by immigrantworkers, who constituted the usual victims of the police abuse, but by the businessand professional classes.69 The Progressive agenda reflected the ideologyand interests of this constituency.70 By promoting bureaucratic reform, these"respectable" classes sought to ensure their own control over the workings ofthe local governments. J W. Hill, an influential reformer in Des Moines, wrote:'The professional politician must be ousted and in his place capable businessmen chosen to conduct the affairs of the city." Likewise, 1. M. Earle, the generalcounsel of the Bankers Life Association and a reform advocate, explained,''When the plan [for a commission government] was adopted, it was the intentionto get businessmen to run it.''7lPut simply, the reformers hoped to break the machines and, at the same time,128