Broken windows and police discretion

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Frank
Remington, Herman Goldstein, and others advanced
the notion that police departments are
comparable to administrative agencies whose
complex work is characterized by considerable
use of discretion. Moreover, they advocated
the development of guidelines to shape police
use of discretion. Their thinking and work
were ahead of their time; the field of policing
was simply not ready to consider seriously the
implications of this view. Policing was still
mired in the simplistic and narrow view of law
enforcement agencies as concerned primarily
with felonies—the front end of a criminal processing
system.


Today, the ideas regarding the complexity of
police work and the ubiquity of discretion that
are inherent in research conducted about police
functioning during the 1950s through the
1970s have permeated police and academic
thinking. Police culture and the profession
have changed dramatically as a result.
Nevertheless, discussions about substantive
police work continue to lag. We now understand
that telling officers only what they cannot
do, which is so typical of police manuals
and rules and regulations, has not improved
the quality of policing. We know as well that
the work world of police is too complex to tell
officers exactly what they should do in every
circumstance. The only alternative left for the
management of most police work is to teach
officers how to think about what they should
do, do it, and then talk about it, so that they
improve their practice over time and share
their emerging values, knowledge, and skills
with their colleagues and the profession.
This report proposes a model for helping
police officers think about their work while
practicing it.