Christopher Stone on Policing

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) epitomizes American policing over the last half century—good and bad—in the eyes of ordinary people and political leaders around the world. In 2000, the United States Department of Justice entered into a consent decree with the LAPD, settling a lawsuit regarding an alleged pattern of civil rights violations.

Research by Christopher Stone and colleagues analyzes how policing has changed under the consent decree in Los Angeles and the situation's broader implications, nationally and globally. Stone is Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of the Practice of Criminal Justice and faculty chair of the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and faculty director of the university-wide Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations. He is also co-director, with HKS Dean David Ellwood, of the Acting in Time initiative.

Q. Please explain how and why consent decrees are used.

Stone: The civil rights consent decrees that govern a half-dozen police organizations in the United States are the product of a law that Congress passed in 1994. The law gives the Justice Department power to sue states and cities where local leaders have been unable or unwilling to eliminate persistent patterns of police misconduct – where the misconduct is not simply an individual incident, the shooting of a suspect or the abuse of some authority, but where a pattern and practice of misconduct is undermining the civil liberties and civil rights of people living in that area. When it sees persistent police misconduct, the Justice Department has the power to go to court and seek to restructure and reorganize the police agency in much the same way the federal bankruptcy courts have been overseeing the restructuring of automakers in the United States.

Bankruptcies don’t always come in financial form. Sometimes public agencies lose legitimacy, rather than money: legitimacy that is vital to their proper functioning. In the case of police agencies, a pattern of misconduct can erode public trust and confidence, damage morale, and destroy the ability of that agency to do its job within the law. Today in the United States, the Justice Department can go to court and seek federal supervision for the restructuring of that police agency. And when a police agency agrees to such restructuring under the supervision of the court, it signs a consent decree, which sets the terms of that restructuring. You can think of it as the equivalent of a corporate restructuring plan in a bankruptcy case.

Q. How does success or failure in Los Angeles affect the U.S. Department of Justice at this juncture?

Stone: Congress granted the Justice Department this power in 1994. The Department used that power extensively during the Clinton administration's second term, and continued to do so during the first term of the Bush administration, from 2001 to 2003. But since 2003, those powers have been dormant. Congress didn’t repeal them; they remain on the books, but the Department of Justice has not been using them. The Obama administration now has to decide whether or not to revive that program, and that depends in part on whether the Department’s intervention can really solve the problems in a police agency. So Los Angeles is a test of that question: a test of the efficacy of the Department’s powers.

If the effort to restructure the police department in Los Angeles does not succeed, then it’s very unlikely that these powers are going to be useful anywhere. The case in Los Angeles is the biggest ever brought against a city police department and has had the most resources devoted to it. It has also lasted the longest – it’s been 8 years now that the LAPD has been working under federal court supervision with leadership determined to comply with the consent decree. If that isn’t enough to turn around the Los Angeles police department, it’s hard to believe that the federal government will succeed anywhere. The good news is that the consent decree seems to have succeeded in Los Angeles, and that’s what our study describes.

Q. What methods did you use to try to evaluate success or failure in Los Angeles?

Stone: It’s complicated to evaluate the success of police reform anywhere. Is crime coming down? Are the police acting professionally? Is the public satisfied?

Those are all important questions when assessing comprehensive police reform, and they’re all important questions in Los Angeles. No single research method is going to tell you the answer to those questions. And so what we did in Los Angeles was use a multi-method design. We conducted surveys of the public; we conducted surveys of the police officers; we interviewed detainees who had been arrested, within the hour, to ask them about their experience with Los Angeles police. But we also made extensive use of administrative data, probably more use than has ever been made of a police department’s own data to assess its performance. In that respect, the research has lessons to teach police organizations and police reformers even outside of the context of a consent decree.

Q. Does the situation in L.A. have implications for police management across the U.S.?

Stone: The Los Angeles Police Department is the quintessential American police department. It may not be the largest – New York City’s police department is several times larger – but Los Angeles policing represents American policing through popular culture all over the world. We’ve seen positive representations in old television programs like “Dragnet” and “Adam 12” that made legends of L.A. detectives and patrol officers, but television also publicized the notorious Rodney King case in 1991 in which an African-American motorist was beaten by LA police officers. We all remember the terrible riots that erupted in Los Angeles the following year when the officers in that case were acquitted of the criminal charges brought against them. Another police scandal in 1999—when anti-gang officers in the Rampart Division of the LAPD were found to be engaged in persistent misconduct, including shootings, excessive force, corruption, and more—sent shock waves throughout the department and was dramatized in yet another television series, “The Shield.” All of that is to say that police managers across the U.S., like the public, keep their eyes on the LAPD.

So if reform efforts succeed in Los Angeles, the example travels. Police managers across the United States will hear about it, as will their counterparts around the world. But it’s also true that the specific reforms, the systems themselves, developed in Los Angeles are transportable. The technology that’s been deployed by the Los Angeles police department to track the conduct of individual officers, the data systems that have been developed, the capacity to conduct internal audits – all of these can serve as models for other departments.

Q. What impact, if any, does the reform of the Los Angeles Police Department have on police reform in other countries?

Stone: Police reform is a global imperative. In Western Europe, Australia, Japan, Canada – national governments struggle with their own policing problems, rarely as severe as the problems in Los Angeles, but occasionally more so. Those police agencies and their governments are looking for ways to improve police management, police leadership, police performance. Many of the improvements in Los Angeles may be directly applicable in these highly developed counties.

But there’s an equally important task in the reform of police agencies in middle-income and lower-income countries. In Nigeria, Sierra Leon, and Jamaica, the Kennedy School Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management is doing work with leaders in the justice system to improve policy and performance, and here, too, the lessons learned in Los Angeles can help. In Chile, Argentina, India, Russia, Turkey, and China, there are police reforms underway that seek to make the police more effective but also more respectful of citizens and more consistently within the rule of law. These are not reforms that any country pursues alone. The tools being developed in Los Angeles – indeed, some of the measurement tools that we developed for this study – may be directly applicable in rich and poor nations around the world.

Q. Any final thoughts?

Stone: I think some of the specific problems in Los Angeles are worth mentioning. The specific problems in Los Angeles were not just about poor and weak management. They were about the persistent patterns of excessive force, of corruption, and of racially biased policing. Those are hard problems to fix, and they’re hard problems to measure accurately while you’re trying to fix them. If you’re going to reform a police agency you’re also going to need to know how to see that reform. The tools we developed in this research not only helped the Los Angeles Police Department with that but could help other police departments as well. So finding ways to measure the quality, not just the quantity, of enforcement activity – how good are the stops, how good are the arrests -- not just how many of them does a police department engage in. What is the trust and confidence, how much trust and confidence do members of the public have in the police agency? How do you measure that? If you don’t benchmark that, if you don’t have some standard ways of assessing that over time, it’s very hard to know whether you’re improving, and I think one of the contributions of this research is the development of tools that allowed Los Angeles to measure those things, to improve them, and to allow other jurisdictions to do the same.

Interviewed by Molly Lanzarotta on June 11, 2009.

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Christopher Stone

Christopher Stone