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Representative Bureaucracy and Police Use of Force Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs Volume 3 Issue 2 Article 8 August 2019 No Easy Answer: Representative Bureaucracy and Police Use of Force Jacob Herrera University of Colorado,Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/hgjpa Part of the Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Herrera, Jacob (2019) "No Easy Answer: Representative Bureaucracy and Police Use of Force," Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs: Vol. 3: Iss. 2, Article 8. https://doi.org/10.15760/hgjpa.2019.3.2.8 This open access Article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). All documents in PDXScholar should meet accessibility standards. If we can make this document more accessible to you, contact our team. 2019 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 1 No Easy Answer: Representative Bureaucracy and Police Use of Force Jacob Herrera University of Colorado-Denver The theory of Representative Bureaucracy is a well-studied concept in Public Administration, positing that more representative government agencies will lead to greater equity for underserved groups. This paper is review of empirical applications of the theory to the use of force by police and it will show that the work does not support the idea that more representative police departments correlate with lower rates of use of force against minority groups. Implications for future studies are addressed at the end of the article. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. 10.15760/hgjpa.2019.3.2.8 Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 [2019], Art. 8 2 NO EASY ANSWER Vol. 3:2 Introduction he use of force by police is one of the most controversial forms of T government interactions in a democratic society. Police violence is laden with political saliency and represents a historical flashpoint between government and disadvantaged groups. Since the summer of 2014, public scrutiny of the use of force has created a cycle of scandal and reform that has tested the legitimacy of American policing. One approach that has been widely posited as a balm for strained community-police relations is the theory of representative bureaucracy. This paper will show that the findings related to the use of force and representative bureaucracy are complex and defy the popular notion that increased minority representation leads to lower amounts of force. This paper will begin with a brief overview of the theory of representative bureaucracy and how it intersects with policing in a broad sense before providing a detailed review of the literature on representative bureaucracy and the use of force. Representative Bureaucracy Most contemporary work on Representative Bureaucracy has been strongly influenced by Mosher’s Democracy and the Public Service, which argued that the demographic composition of bureaucracy could be harnessed as a force that helps government work on behalf of underrepresented groups via a process called passive representation.1 Passive representation is when bureaucrats mirror the demographic characteristics of a community.2 Passive representation leads to active representation. Active representation occurs when the representative bureaucrat exercises their discretion in such a way that it produces outcomes favorable to the represented. Active representation is a way of making the delivery of government service more equitable to non- dominant social groups. Scholars have identified several conditions that are necessary for passive representation to transform into active representation. First, bureaucrats must have discretion, they need enough procedural slack so that they have space to operationalize their values.3 Second, the bureaucrats must be in a policy arena that is important for the demographic group at issue.4 An archetype of this would be a Native American employee of the US Department of Interior with some decisional making authority related to the downsizing of protected monuments adjacent to tribal land. Herrera: No Easy Answer 2019 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 3 Representative bureaucracy has a strong empirical pedigree. Scholars have linked minority representation in government service to outcomes that benefit minority groups.5 As the theory has gained prominence, it has been widely applied to a multitude of government activities, including policing. This review seeks to answer the following question: Does increased representation lead to fewer instances of police violence? Representative Bureaucracy and Policing Police organizations offer rich hunting grounds to representative bureaucratic researchers for two principal reasons. First, the workaday experiences of police officers are infused with discretion which facilitates active representation. 6 Second, the overwhelming historical context of policing since the 1960s in the United States is centered around conflict between police and underrepresented groups. 7 Indeed, race is the most common demographic feature of representative bureaucracy scholarship and policing.8 Researchers have used the theory to hypothesize that greater diversity within police agencies will lessen the strain with minority citizens because minority officers will have shared life experiences, and values as those being policed.9 Calls for greater racial diversity in law enforcement are a familiar theme following popular protest directed at policing. Both the Kerner Commission in 1968 10 and the Presidential Task Force on 21st Century Policing11 in 2015 offered the increased hiring of minority officers as a means of improving relations between police and minority groups. Like work related to the use of force, broader applications of the theory have produced mixed results. In one study, citizens were more likely to perceive police as legitimate if they were carried out by officers of the same race, regardless of outcomes.12 Other work in the theory has produced an opposite result, showing that an increase in minority officers were associated with an uptick in traffic stops considered indicative of racial profiling.13 Moreover, an efficiency argument has been made in advance of the theory, as there is some empirical evidence suggesting that an increase in ethnic minorities contributes to a lessening of crime.14 Still another approach is that of Brown 15 who argues that minority representation does little to alter police behavior or institutionalized practices. Far from using active representation to further minority interests, minority officers are hired to democratize police misconduct and be made complicit in oppressive practices. Minority officers normalize harmful police activity rather than acting as agents of meaningful change that would benefit Hatfield Graduate Journal of Public Affairs, Vol. 3, Iss. 2 [2019], Art. 8 4 NO EASY ANSWER Vol. 3:2 underrepresented groups. For Brown, representation does not matter if the core task of the police is the control of minorities. A sterling example of how the theory does not provide easy answers can be found in a single study by Hong.16 He found that even though a small increase in the ratio of ethnic minority officers was associated with an 11 percent decrease in substantiated complaints of misconduct, as the proportion of ethnic minority officers increased, so did their share of citizen complaints. Hong attributed this to the fact that the cohort of diverse officers was less experienced or qualified than their white peers. Hong did not address the possibility that the uptick in police complaints against the minority officers were the result of discrimination. Use of Force in Brief The legal use of force by police officers is the definitive element of policing and perhaps its most studied.17 Related to representative bureaucracy, studies on race and police use of force have been prolific. Indeed, the first published account on police use of force by Robin18 centered around race, and criminal justice and various cognate fields have produced reams of scholarship with small nodes of consensus. Although it is widely accepted that there are racial disparities in police use of force, controversy is generally rooted on variations of whether the disparity is the result of legitimate factors- like behavior during police encounters, and rates of violent offending- or illegitimate factors like police prejudice. 19 The state of the field can be described as “murky” as there is empirical evidence supporting both positions. 20 One problem clouding use of force research is high political saliency, which has contributed to sloppy research being used to prop up ideological biases.21 A final impediment to research continuity is a lack of reliable data. The federal government does not mandate the reporting of use of force incidents from local departments, not even for police caused homicides. Representative Bureaucracy and the Use of Force Scholars have turned to representative bureaucracy to provide a stable theoretical framework for exploring use of force and race. The working hypothesis of works looking at representative bureaucracy and use of force is that a more representative police department will use less force, particularly excessive force towards minority residents. Proponents of the theory argue Herrera: No Easy Answer 2019 THE HATFIELD GRADUATE JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS 5 that
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