Book Review: Organizational Police Deviance: Its Structure and Control
| Author | Andrew Goldsmith |
| DOI | 10.1177/000486908301600414 |
| Published date | 01 December 1983 |
| Date | 01 December 1983 |
| Subject Matter | Book Reviews |
AUST
&NZ
JOURNAL
OF CRIMINOLOGY (December 1983) 16 (277·288)
BOOK REVIEWS
277
Organizational Police Deviance: Its Structure and Control, Clifford DShearing (ed)
Butterworths,
Toronto
(1981) ix and 208 pp.
American criminology has for some time displayed aparticular interest in
the
topic of police corruption. Indeed American police histories provide accounts of
innumerable examples of graft, bribery and partisan political involvment in law
enforcement over the years. Centremost in academic treatments of this topic has
been
aconcern with the abuse of public office for private gain.
The
tendency has
been
to focus attention on the individual engaged in such deviant behaviour. This
perspective is consistent with
"bad
apple" theory of police administration. Remove
the
obviously bad examples from the barrel and the rest will remain unsullied. It is
aconventional perspective which is reiterated commonly in the media. It avoids the
necessity for a comprehensive reappraisal and perhaps reformulation of existing
policing structures and practices.
This collection of essays from Canada can be viewed partly as a corrective to
the
limitations of this perspective. In choosing for its focus the characteristics of police
organizations which encourage or allow police misconduct either collectively or
individually, the
book
can also be seen as a timely response to the recent renewed
interest in the social sciences generally in macrostructural explanations for social
phenomena.
Either
way, the theme of the book is to examine various elements of
the
organizational context of police deviance. Whereas studies of police corruption
have
tended
to employ the language of personal motivation (greed, the lust for
power, etc) in advancing explanations for deviance, the majority of these essays
tend
to focus upon organizational imperatives for action, whether externally
imposed (as for instance, by law) or inherently bound up with the organization
(administrative guidelines, policy directives, informal practices of organizational
members, etc), and their implications for police misconduct.
Aside from the "Introduction", there are seven essays in all. With the exception
of
one
essay (the
one
by Turk), all the material in the
book
has not
been
previously
published. Most of the contributors would probably describe themselves as
sociological criminologists.
The
point is not especially relevant except inasmuch as
it does colour
the
treatment of some legal and
other
issues, a point to which I shall
return.
The
first essay, by John Hagan and Peter Morden, is an examination of
the
influence of early police bail decisions upon the likelihood of conviction and
sentencing severity. These influences are viewed in the context of the considerable
latitude existing in Canadian bail legislation, which it is argued, allows extra-legal
as well as legal considerations to determine police handling of bail procedures. In
the next essay, Clifford Shearing argues that through the device of
the
police
subculture, the police are able to manage the demands made of them by rules and
formal organizational objectives together with the demands made by police officers
of each
other
in day-to-day interaction. Four ideal-types of police officer are
identified, and, it is argued, it is through the selective deployment of these
subcultural types
that
the police are able to achieve both
order
and the appearance
of compliance to rules. Shearing's essay is distinguishable from the others in
the
degree to which the author seeks to invoke -general sociological concepts in his
explanation of the role of the police subculture claiming as he does
that
his
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