NCJ Number
84267
Journal
Contemporary Crises Volume: 6 Issue: 3 Dated: (July 1982) Pages: 241-266
Date Published
1982
Length
26 pages
Annotation
Critical theorists' argument that the police implement the desires of dominant socioeconomic classes is not empirically verifiable. Empirical analysis shows the police to be relatively autonomous in fulfilling multifaceted objectives and functions under a variety of external and internal influences.
Abstract
The willingness and ability of the police to resist outside control, their formal and informal powers of discretion in the enforcement of law and order as determined by personal, organizational, and ideological factors, and their interests as an organization and as individuals all point to the need for a reformulation of critical conceptions of the functions of the police. The police role is to provide one of the mechanisms for the protection of general and specific order. The police are neither necessarily repressive nor deserving of support as defenders of a universal consensus on the public good. What the police defend depends on the concrete situation in which they work and the degree of control, through ideology or power, by the state over them. The fundamental issue is what is being enforced in specific situations and for whom the police are acting as agents, whether for general order, specific domination, or their own interests. The range of activities which the police perform is not indicative of the same function. To be persuasive, a theory of the state must have the theoretical criteria to discriminate between those actions of the state which indicate domination and those which do not. A total of 98 notes are listed.