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>> 99 5 The Real Reasons for Resistance Institutional and Political Barriers In chapter 4, we saw that much of the resistance to better methods of police investigative practice comes from cognitive barriers to change, such as cognitive dissonance, loss aversion, and status quo bias, the polarization of groups, and challenges to status. These explanations help us understand why police officers, prosecutors, their agencies, and their professional organizations resist the implementation of new methods, despite a strong scientific consensus on the benefits of virtually all of the changes that follow from the research. In this chapter, we explore another group of reasons for resistance : institutional and political barriers to change, which have a long reach in our political system. If one could read the message of chapter 4’s discussion of cognitive barriers as “police officers and prosecutors are people, and they suffer from the same cognitive shortcomings and limitations as the rest of us,” this chapter contains a different message: police and prosecutors are people acting within institutions and political frameworks. Police officers act as agents of the state, and as members of a government agency; the police department functions as the institution for the delivery of police services to 100 > 101 too, including promotions, more desirable assignments, greater responsibility , and status-enhancing titles or privileges. In law enforcement, these rules hold just as they do elsewhere. While neither police officers nor prosecutors receive cash bounties for getting the bad guys, the other types of incentives—promotions, raises, better assignments , and the like—surely form part of the occupational landscape. And beyond just denoting the types of behavior that bosses want, these incentives remain tightly interwoven with the culture of police and prosecutorial agencies. In other words, police and prosecutors do these things not just for personal advancement but because the cultures of these agencies consider these outcomes the highest and most valued achievements. Thus achieving them will gain the respect of one’s peers. For police, the institutional imperative is making arrests; an officer earns rewards by closing cases with arrests. For prosecutors, the institutional drive is to get convictions. The higher the conviction rate, the more one advances. Police: “Case Closed by Arrest” For police offices, the institutional Holy Grail has always remained the same: solving cases by arresting perpetrators. Police officers who make a lot of arrests become known as proactive, resourceful, take-charge officers—the ones who go out on the street and make things happen. An aggressive attitude toward making arrests earns them accolades from fellow officers, commanders , and others. They become known, in the parlance of the stationhouse , as “cop’s cops.” And the numbers of arrests they make sit at the core of what makes them the most admired, promoted, and rewarded members of the police departments in which they serve. Bob Stewart, who retired as a captain from the Washington, DC, police force and who has also served as chief in other police departments, works as an independent consultant and trainer for police departments all over the United States and the world. Stewart understands the central importance of arrests. “The way in which you get recognized and rewarded is to make arrests. It’s a prerequisite to transfer or promotion to [desirable positions]. It’s embedded into the police culture.”1 According to Samuel Serio, a lawyer and former police officer who represented the Fraternal Order of Police (one of the main police labor unions) for seventeen years, what makes for success in police work has little to do with the niceties of suspect interrogation or other legal requirements. What matters comes in a phrase known by police everywhere: “case closed by arrest.” Serio says, “The stats are, ‘Did you close the case,’ not ‘Was justice done.’ That’s not even on the [police report].”2 102 > 103 work, they are relatively safe.” These arrests result in lucrative overtime pay for officers and “also count toward promotions and choice assignments.”7 Given the pressure from political leaders and the public, these arrests make perfect sense for the police to pursue, and as long as the incentives remain and officers perceive that they will receive rewards for making drug arrests, the swelling numbers of drug arrests will continue. In a study of more than four hundred police officers in twenty-three police departments in the Cincinnati , Ohio, metropolitan area, officers understood the arrangement perfectly well: when an officer sees that his or her department rewards drug arrests, the officer makes more of them...

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