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

expanded in the pages that follow. For now, let's just notc that this view complicates Crouchand Dore's definition of a "corporatist arrangement," since they identifY "the state" as one partyin the arrangement, and overlook the possibility that the state itself may in part consist of suchcorporatist relations.164 Levi, Bureauaatic Insurgency, 9; and Center for Research on Criminal Justice, Iron Fist, 146.Levi examines the difference between private and public employees, but not between cops andother public workers. In fact, she takes the police to be paradigmatic. But as long as the policerepresent the coercive apparatus of the state, they must be understood as fundamentally differentthan, say, sanitation workers, firefighters, and teachers. Robert Reiner explains: "The determinantsof the policeman's economic situation are to an extent diametrically opposed to thosefor other workers. This is because, when governments attempt to implement policies of wagerestraint against union opposition, the police assume a peculiar importance due to their role insituations of industrial conf1ict. Then they will have to be treated as a most 'special case' in paynegotiations. Furthermore, their work situation, in particular when it involves confrontationswith trade unionists at pickets, inclines them towards a conservative world-view and a sense ofalienation from the labour movement. This conf1icts with pressure towards forms of organizationof a more or less unionate nature, deriving from their own concerns as employees." Reiner,Blue-Coated Worker, 4. Emphasis in original.165 "[T] heir efforts to serve 'the public' often reveal how divergent conceptions of 'the public' canbe. Police employee organizations demand the material and laws which enable them to protectworking- and middle-class homeowners [sid ; they are far less concerned with the protection ofghetto dwellers, hippies, and political activists. The radical caucuses of social worker and teacherunions tend to make the opposite choice; they are less interested in defining and containing aproblem population than in providing the impoverished and the rejected with new opportunities.The effect of batding over who is to be served-and how-is to undermine the ideology ofgovernment as a neurral serV'lnt of the citizens, ahle to bring together various interests under acommon and equally available set of services. Instead of acting [as] the arbiter above the politicalstruggles, the state becomes part of the fray." Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 154.166 Former Atlanta police chief Herbert Jenkins described that city's police nIl ion as "not a union atall, but in fact a thinly veiled cover for Klan membership." Herbert Jenkins, Keeping the Peace: APolice Chief Looks at His Jo b (New Yo rk: Harper & Row, 1970), 23.167 The Miami Police Benevolent Association had a constitutional provision requiring that membershipbe open only to "white members of the police force." That clause was removed in January1970, but when five Rlack officers applied for membership in December of that year, theirapplications were rejected. Dulaney. Black Police, 14'5. Black people were not the only groupsubject to discrimination like this. New York's Police Benevolent Association exclnded womenuntil 1968. l.evi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 27.168 Dulaney, Black Police, 21.169 Quoted in Wilson, "Enforcing Racism," 9.170 "Shooter Cop Reinstated; What's Wrong with This Picture?" Peoples Police Report (, (1995): 1-2.171 Wintersmith, Police and the Black Community, 66-67.172 "Before the seventeenth century, every large European state ruled its subjects through powerfulintermediaries who enjoyed significant autonomy, hindered state demands that were not to theirinterests, and profited on their own accounts from the delegated exercise of state power. Theintermediaries were often privileged members of subordinate populations, and made their wayby assuring rulers of tribute and acquiescence from these populations." Charles Tilly, Coercion,Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990 (Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 104.173 William A. Westley, "Violence and the Police," in Police Patrol Readings, cd. Samuel G. Chapman(Springfield, It: Charles C. Thomas, 1964), 289-290. This analysis is considered in chapter 1.174 The degree to which this is true may be indicated by union efforts to authorize the use of forcewhere it was prohibited by law or departmental policy. The most famous case, Cassese's ruleto "enforce the law 100 percent" (quoted in Gunther, "Cops in Politics," 65) has already beendiscussed, but other examples are available. For instance, in 1970, the Adama FOP voted toillegally carry their own guns while on duty. In Detroit, at around the same time, the DPOA wasencouraging its members to use hollow-tip bullets. Levi, Bureaucratic Insurgency, 141.175 Martin J. Smith, Pressure, Power and Policy: State Autonomy and Policy Networks in Britainand Ihe Un ited States (Pittsburgh: Univer ; ity of Pittsburg h Press, 1993), 2. This analysis hasclear implications for our undersranding of other concepts, including "state autonomy," "stateinterests," and "reasons of state." Clayton Szczech points out that "the state cannot effectivelypursue its self-interested agenda becanse no such unified agenda exists .... for example, what theDepartment of Defense wants and needs may not always coincide with what the Department ofCommerce wants and needs, and both of them must utilize networks with social groups, electedofficials and other bureaucracies to realize any goals at all." Szczech, "Beyond Autonomy or275