Reference no: EM133485168

Case: In the preceding chapter I concluded that police discretion could not be understood in terms of the highly routinized rules typical of many public organizations. Rather, decision making in street-level bureaucracies is to be understood in terms of a contradiction between the work environment of street-level bureaucrats and the rationalizing tendencies of reform governments. This conflict is manifested in police departments as a conflict between the values of the police culture and those of professionalism, a conflict that affects the impact of organizational constraints on patrolmen and the values they bring to bear on the street. It leads, on the one hand, to a radical autonomy on the part of patrolmen which permits highly distinctive approaches to police work operational styles--to flourish, and which has served, given the separation between police and commu-nity, to sustain if not broaden the wide latitude, of discretion possessed by patrolmen. On the other hand, patrolmen are not totally autonomous, as they are caught between the demands of an uncertain and ambiguous task and a demand for conformity to the desires of administrators. Many of their discretionary choices as well as the salience of the moral dilemmas patrolmen confront turn on resolving this conflict. The task before us now is to explore the nature and depth of this conflict in the three professional departments that are the subject of this study.

Question: How does this observation apply to the recent challenges and demands placed on the police in cities like Seattle, Portland, Austin, and Minneapolis? Given what is said in Klockar's readings, what results do you anticipate for these cities and their police departments due to these rapid and significant changes to their challenges and demands? What would Klockars add to Brown's observations?