Its not about race, its about criminality.

Between the 1960s and 1970s, Jerome Skolnick wrote a couple of seminal books that have shaped sociological theories on policing. Skolnick’s theories were based upon field studies of American police officers. His recent work has focused on corruption, abuse of authority and excessive force — while his early work talked about the police culture and the daily work of police officers. I studied these theories as part of my academic studies and saw some of them play out in my own research while watching from an outsider’s perspective. More and more though, now that I’ve been doing police work for a few years, I’ve realized that the theory of symbolic assailant may have been applicable in the 1960s, but it now needs a bit of updating.

The best way to describe Skolnick’s symbolic assailant theory was: how officers associate a minority as a criminal. In Skolnick’s studies, he found that officers were more likely to single out a minority male as an offender (of some crime). However, from an updated perspective, I feel the symbolic assailant is now actually about characteristics and behavior. More simply, how officers find criminals and how officers categorize them for attention or future references. This translates into what police officers develop as a ‘mental shorthand’ or characteristic of those people that most relate to criminal activity. This is not to say that racism is absent from all policing, however, with the current standards of what’s acceptable in our society and Canadian culture, racism occurs at significantly lower amount than previously studied.

How does today’s symbolic assailant manifest itself? Whether by appearance, clothing or behavior, officers can identify criminal people from the rest of the citizenry. Although much different than other theories such as phrenology, I’ve found that officers do have a sense of ‘what a criminal looks like’ and develop cues based on their past experiences or clues learned from colleagues. These clues then make up part of an officer’s on-going investigative activities, basically how they look for ‘trouble’ in daily patrol. For instance, police officers often look for the people that stand-out amongst the regular public. Things such as dirty clothing, disheveled appearance may indicate someone who is living on the street. From there, inferences can be drawn from past experience that homeless people usually have some sort of substance abuse problems, which they turn to criminal activities such as minor thefts, frauds, etc, to provide for these addictions. Another inference may be drawn from someone with similar disheveled appearance with an over-abundance of tattoos, the sign of a rounder at local jails. All of these calculations are made over time through experience, but also occur in an instant — especially when confronting the particular person that has drawn your attention. I think it’s also important to make clear that identifying the symbolic assailant in my context does not involve a ‘race’ consideration. Although that may have been the case in the 1960s, nowadays, I would argue it is the characteristics of criminality that stand out to a police officer.

Moving away from people, the same inference can be drawn to cars for example. Police officers know that criminals use a variety of cars to do their criminal deeds. The wide majority of ‘crime vehicles’ usually fall into three categories: the shitbox, the stolen car and the gangster’s wheels. Each of these have their own characteristic giveaways, such as to name a few: the shitbox – rusted to the bone, plate falling off, parts not functioning; the stolen car – (sadly so obvious) 4 young adults in a Honda or Dodge product late at night; the gangster car – shiny wheels, jacked up, souped up engine, etc. All of these vehicles usually draw the attention of a police officer, whether the vehicle is stopped or checked — the clues are there for further investigation.

Sometimes, there are exceptions to an officer’s ’symbolic assailant’. But, despite the outliers, with good learned investigative skills, having a good sense of what a criminal looks like can give you opportunities for good police work.

On the other end of the scale, I have heard about some departments where the symbolic assailant theory has been taken to a whole new level due to human rights complaints. In one department, contact slips must be completed with ALL encounters with the public, in order to disprove any potential complaints that officers are only targeting one specific minority group. This is obviously an extreme case of risk management on the part of the department.

In the climate of more and more charter of rights violation decisions, officers must articulate correctly their reasons for stopping to talk to someone, both to the court and the individual. Cops are excellent observers of criminal activity, lets make sure that we demonstrate that to the public.

Partners

When comparing to other occupations, police partnerships are a unique characteristic of the job and an important aspect of doing police work. It would be rare to find another job where workers spend 10 hour days in a relatively small work environment such as the patrol car (as compared to a cubicle, office or ordinary workplace). Having a good partnership can make the job fun and exciting, but can create stress and difficulty should there be a personality or work-ethic conflict. From an administrator’s point of view, partnerships are crafted to ensure a balance in temperaments, such as a ‘laid back’ cop paired with a ‘hyperactive’ one (to the coppers out there, I’m sure you know of a few partnerships where you have two ‘hyperactive’ cops are put in the same car — it usually becomes a complaint-prone two-person wrecking crew).

In good partnerships and because of the amount of time together, officers come to ‘know’ what the other is thinking at a call, most specifically when your partner getting ready to move into action. This is an important part of a partnership and police work, as you don’t have the chance to discuss what you’re going to do next in front of the bad guy and you just have to rely on your partner knowing you well enough to react accordingly. Eventually, you have little ‘hints’ or ‘giveaways’ that only partners know and telegraph the next move.

Beyond the tactical stuff, what two officers experience on the job becomes exclusive to that partnership. In two years with my partner, we’ve been in situations that made us laugh, shake our heads in disgust, sit in quiet reflection or high-five, such as after a good arrest. In all of these situations, a bond between partners is built upon and we usually end up referring to these ‘memorable’ moments when reminded of them in the run of any given workday. Often, partners spend more time with each other during a work week than you do with your spouse during that same week. As a result, the shared time develops an interesting and unique connection between colleagues.

Before becoming a police officer and during my stress and policing research work, police ’solidarity’ was a subject that I often talked about as a method of coping ‘culturally’ with stress. However, what I’m realizing now after being on the job, is that the partnership bond is significantly more valuable to an officer than relationships with other colleagues. With their work partners, officers talk about personal matters, workplace difficulties, usually anything and everything. Also, eventually your workplace social identity is closely tied to your partnership as other co-workers refer to you as “Dan’n'Pete” almost as a singular person. Of course, I would have never been able to fully experience this as an outsider researcher.

What is unfortunate is that long-standing partnerships are rare nowadays, as police forces are hiring more and more recruits thus requiring new staff to be trained and mentored. As a result, partnerships are split up, putting senior officers with junior members in order to guide the new officer. This new partnership usually is short lived, as both officers gain more experience, move to other positions or begin the training cycle yet again.

In-security with Blackwater

A recent New York Times video report sheds more light on a disturbing incident which occurred in Iraq and involved the private military corporation (PMC) Blackwater. The company’s contractors are alleged to have fired unjustly and indiscriminately at civilians while traveling in an area of Baghdad, causing the deaths of 17 people.

What is most telling for me is the lack of oversight on the actions of military contractors operating in Iraq. Because of their quasi-military role, the private military contractors have relatively no supervision by the government and fall outside of normal military rules of engagement. Further, the US government has allowed any prosecution of Blackwater staff to be very murky and difficult. Aside from the company’s own disciplinary actions, it appears that the ’soldiers for hire’ have no legal controls.

From the initial beginnings of the Iraq War, it is easy to see that the use of PMCs has increased to expontential levels (some believe there are 100,000 private military contractors there, near the size of the official US presence). I wonder why is a special consideration or lack of judicial oversight given to private industry? Why is US government action on controlling these forces so slow? Oh yes, I forgot — the Bush family was involved with PMCs in the past and the current US vice-president was a former CEO of another PMC operating in Iraq, Haliburton.

Hyper-justice: The New OJ Simpson case

The paradigms of sociology, criminal justice, criminology and law were all greatly influenced by the first OJ Simpson case with the 1994 murder trial. New ideas of how justice operates in the media — how media can influence a criminal trial, were some of the major analytical outcomes. However, with the new charges against OJ — I couldn’t help but notice that the public trial has already begun in the Las Vegas robbery case, at a much faster rate due to the internet.

Media outlets were able to obtain and distribute transcribed audio recordings of the incident, a confession on a telephone answering machine and even covert audio of the pre-meditation to the incident at a party. These audio snippets were broadcast only days from the initial incident, possibly hours after the arrest of OJ and the supposed accomplices. With the rapidly accessed and distributed audio, we see an instant delivery of information in crime reporting, almost as if the investigation takes a life of its own through the public.  It is evident that the initial days of reporting on the case created a public trial with evidence, exhibits, confessions, witness statements, all of which were distributed before an investigation was completed by police. This ‘hyper-justice’ takes Jean Baudrillard’s theories to an extreme, where citizen-oriented surveillance, the legal system and media combine to create a public trial almost immediately after the crime had occurred. This is by far, unprecedented in criminal justice and will likely create a challenge for police and the courts in any upcoming ‘official’ legal proceedings.