Shrinking the Police Footprint

The most influential agenda for progressive police reform today aims to shrink the police footprint by reassigning many problems they currently manage to other institutions. This paper argues that this agenda relies on faulty understanding of the police role, and that a more promising agenda based on a better understanding is available. Police are a residual institution, charged with managing the crises that other institutions cannot handle adequately on their own, and it is not easy to reassign that work to anyone else. In the course of doing it, however, they develop expertise in the nature and sources of these crises that positions them to identify and help repair the institutional failures that generate them. The paper illustrates these claims with case studies of the challenges that efforts to reassign police work elsewhere have encountered and the role that police have played in institutional repair. It concludes by considering he normative concerns that this important aspect of the police role raises.