Study: Bad cops immune to criticism, need greater oversight, accountability

At Texas Standard, we find a report on a new study by Shefali Patil out of the UT-Austin business school proclaiming that police accountability activism causes liberal cops to become dispirited and do a lesser job than their conservative colleagues.

Basically, Dr. Patil and her researchers created four datasets: 1) They surveyed 164 officers at two agencies, then 2) had veteran police managers review body cam footage from those officers and score them. 3) They examined supervisors' ratings of 82 officers across four agencies. And 4) they ran a "time-lagged survey of 184 officers in a single agency."

Leaving aside the small sample sizes described there, and the VERY small sample sizes from which the opinions of subsets of officers would be drawn, as it turns out, the peculiar definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" may underlie the conclusions in this study. Here's what they were measuring when they say "liberal" and "conservative":

More-liberal individuals believe in creating communal relationships between authority figures, like employees, and the people over whom they hold power, while more-conservative individuals believe in maintaining the dominance of authorities and us-versus-them power dynamics

This, my friends, is a weird definition for conservative and liberal in 21st century America. And in the context of policing as a profession, it's not really a distinction between liberal cop and conservative cop but "good cop" and "bad cop."

If you're a cop who believes the sum total of your profession amounts to "maintaining the dominance of authorities and us-versus-them power dynamics," you don't understand your job and probably should find other employment.

Meanwhile, show me the police chief who is not interested in "creating communal relationships between authority figures, like employees, and the people over whom they hold power."  That's the goal of every well run department and if it's not, WTF?

It should also be mentioned that the conservative/liberal axis used in the study is more or less foreign to any common, political context in which those words are used. For example, when I googled "conservative ideology" and "liberal ideology," here were the top-of-page definitions which came up:

As a general ideology, Conservatism is opposed to the ideals of Liberalism and Socialism. Conservatism generally refers to right-wing politics which advocate the preservation of personal wealth and private ownership (Capitalism) and emphasize self-reliance and Individualism. 

Liberalism, political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty.

One might bicker with the particularities of those definitions, but they certainly don't have much in common with the very particular axis of authoritarianism along which the study authors want to divide their research subjects.

The authors of the police study are describing an authoritarian mindset, not a "conservative" one. (Liberals, after all, can use government power to impose their authority, too.) On the "liberal" side, they're describing a "liberal" belief in civil society in the broadest, historical sense, not adherence to political liberalism, a Democratic voting history, etc.. They could have run voting records for their research subjects but did not. I'd be interested to learn how many "liberal" cops vote in Republican primaries.

So this study is really saying that authoritarians who have no business being cops in the first place don't really care when people criticize police, and it's only the folks who're trying to do a good job and feel unfairly criticized who become dispirited.

If true, that's still a problem. The police accountability movement needs to learn to create an atmosphere where good cops feel supported and the bad ones become dispirited and feel pressured to leave.

But failing to criticize bad cops won't change things, either, and neither will kowtowing to authoritarians who "believe in maintaining the dominance of authorities and us-versus-them power dynamics."

Neither does the study really tell us that "liberal" cops are more dispirited. Instead, the definition of "liberal" chosen is a euphemism for officers executing the mission statement of nearly every department in the country.

Instead, let me turn to where I agree with the study's authors: on what should be done to address the problem of authoritarian officers who are immune to public criticism. According to Ms. Patil:

“What I found in a related study is that when officers face these misperceptions, they actually perform better if they have standard protocols that they have to follow in specific situations.” 

But doesn’t giving workers more autonomy usually improve job performance? “Not in this case,” Patil insists. “Police officers with high autonomy often do worse.”

So less autonomy for police officers (read: stricter management, more oversight, greater accountability) is the researcher's prescription for solving the problem she's identified.

One doesn't have to buy into her definitions of "liberal" and "conservative" to agree with that. Campaign Zero and the Police Executive Research Forum think the same thing.