essay

Angels and Assholes:

The Construction of Police Morality

We both deal with the evil in life—but the difference is, with priests, there’s a big distancing from evil. Priests only hear about it in the confessional and the office. For the priest, it loses about nine-tenths of its impact and its, its wham.

But with the police officers, with their experience of evil, there’s an immediacy. They stand in it. They touch it . . . they taste it . . . they smell it . . . they hear it . . . they have to handle it. The priest only knows about evil intellectually; the cop knows it in his gut (Fletcher, 1991:5).

In his vocabulary of good and evil, a priest accustomed to working with the police describes similarities between his and their work. Though police may describe their work in grittier terms than such elo- quent abstractions of good and evil, the sense of righteousness is present and clearly visible to those who work with and around them.

By morality, I mean that police see themselves as representatives of a higher morality embodied in a blend of American traditionalism, patrio- tism, and religion. As moral agents, police view themselves as guardians whose responsibility is not simply to make arrests but to roust out soci- ety’s trouble-makers (Sykes, 1986). They perceive themselves to be a superior class (Hunt & Magenau, 1993), or as Bouza notes (1990:17), people “on the side of angels.” Morality is the sentiment that transforms cops’ territories to dominions.

Cops’ morality sometimes carries with it a judgment of citizens as dif- ferent and sometimes childlike. Klein provides an example of an encounter

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that begins with a challenge to the authority of the police, and concludes with the moral authority of the police reasserted. The challenge begins during a normal tour of duty as a desk lieutenant.

One quiet Sunday afternoon I was the desk lieutenant on duty on a West Side precinct when a popinjay of a man of about 60 years of age came bounding into the station and up to the desk. “I want to file a complaint against Patrolman Santos,” he announced. Before the man could contin- ue, I interrupted with “Just a moment, please,” reached for my scratch pad, and then asked the man for his name and address, noting the time above the date on my pad. The man became livid, and the next few words he uttered were accompanied by an openhanded pounding on the desk that practically made them inaudible. . . . Fearing that the man was working up to a heart attack, I resorted to my most unctuous man- ner in an effort to calm him. That only seemed to infuriate him more, so I picked up the big ‘blotter’ that lay before me, brought it down with a resounding crash on the desk, and yelled, “SHUT UP!” at the top of my voice. It worked.

The story continues with a discussion of the alleged brutality carried out by patrolman Santos, in which it is apparent that the patrolman did his utmost to resolve an argument between the complainant, his girl- friend, and a rescuer.

After getting this part of the story, I told Mr. Serene he should be grate- ful to the officer, not complaining against him, for after all hadn’t Santos saved him from a likely beating at the hands of the would-be rescuer?

“Grateful! He took my girl away from me! I called her up this morning, and she says she never wants to see me again! Santos made me look like a bum, hauling me away in the police car!”

The officer informs the complainant that, under the circumstances he saw no basis for a complaint and was not going to file one, further inflam- ing Mr. Serene.

As Mr. Serene continued, fortissimo grosso, I walked out from behind the desk, grabbed him by the elbow, and propelled him toward the door, repeating firmly, “You will have to leave; you are interrupting and inter- fering with our duties.”

At this point in the encounter, Mr. Serene refuses to accept this out- come, thereby elevating the encounter to a new level.

I will not leave; you can’t make me. Where’s Santos? He made me lose my girlfriend; I won’t leave until you bring him in. I know the law; you can’t make me leave.

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I took him up on the last declaration, trying a new tack: “You’re absolute- ly right: I can’t make you leave. But if you don’t leave, I’ll arrest you for causing a disturbance and preventing the orderly business of the precinct.” The discourse ended a few minutes later with the arrest of my would-be complainant, who remained adamant to the bitter end, which consisted of an escorted ride in the patrol wagon to Night Court.

The story concludes with the acceptance of the moral authority of the police by the complainant.

Some weeks later, a very chastened Mr. Serene signaled a general release before a magistrate, and received a suspended sentence after apologiz- ing to the sergeant, the detective, the clerical patrolman, Patrolman San- tos, and this writer, all of whom had to appear in court before the judge could be convinced that this apparently sane man had caused so much trouble just because he had been embarrassed in front of his lady friend (Klein, 1968:37-38).

This story serves not only as an example of the assertion of police moral authority over a particular individual but of a particular kind of individual—the person who complains about the way in which police do their work. It is a story with archetypal dimensions—a citizen complains about the behavior of a cop, and a police officer uses both his formal and personal authority to reassert his authority, to make the malcontent acknowledge his uninformed and inappropriate behavior.1 The behavior of the citizen is shown to be child-like and in temper misdirected. The officer is wholly vindicated.

Morality as Dramaturgy: High-Mindedness

This narrative will, indeed, be one of progress. Starting from beginnings as humble as those of the infant city itself, it will, by an unbroken series of steps, arrive at a breadth and perfection of system commensurate with the modern glories of the American metropolis. This will be the most remarkable feature of the story, that—speaking broadly—there is neither defeat, failure, nor stagnation to be chronicled (Costello, 1972:1).

In these clear, simple terms Costello begins his chronicle of the his- tory of the New York City police department. First written in 1885, 15 years before the turn of the twentieth century, the spirit is noncritical, supportive without question. His 572-page history does not mention the rampant corruption that characterized police practices in New York City in this era, nor does he discuss the electioneering violence carried on by police throughout this period. The mood he conveys is not complicated,

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not disturbingly realistic. Its ardor is that of rallying around the flag, of the celebration of Fourth-of-July patriotism. It is 100 percent pure high-mind- ed morality.

Morality is sometimes viewed in noncritical, categorical ideas of right and wrong. In its simplest form, the evilness of those in the wrong—the other, evil—is under attack by the purity of the us, the angels (or vice versa). Possible taint of that which is good is not considered: if good is questioned, the credibility of the complainant is challenged. Fussell (1989), developing the idea of “high-mindedness,” captures the clear and wonderful simplicity of high-minded morality in his description of the nonjudgmental public declarations of support for the allies in the Second World War:

If elementary logic—the only kind that wartime could accommodate— required the enemy to be totally evil, it required the allies to be totally good—all of them. The opposition between this black and this white was clear and uncomplicated, untroubled by subtlety or nuance, let alone irony or skepticism (Fussell, 1989:164).

Fussell referred to this uncritical perception of forces of good and evil as the quality of “high-mindedness,” that is, a belief in the “successful pur- suit of uncomplicated High Purpose.”2 High-mindedness satisfied the wartime need of the home front to justify the slaughter of British troops on behalf of the “good cause.” Literary repositories of high-mindedness, he noted, tended to become so uncritical as to be banal in their simplis- tic acceptance of the virtue of the troops. In the press, the rhetoric of mil- itary leaders, and among the civilian population, the moralistic dualism was “total, without shading or complexity” (Fussell, 1989:164)

The thin art of high-minded rhetoric is often present in public descriptions of the police and their adversaries. It typifies the often uncritical way in which the police are presented to the outside world as good guys, waging a war against the bad guys, criminals, or whoever fails to unequivocally support the police. The common-place term “bad guy” reveals this high-mindedness. Lawbreakers are rarely perceived to be ordi- nary people that have committed bad behavior: they are themselves wicked. The label is harsh and uncompromising.

The high-mindedness that we witness so frequently, coming from leg- islators, from police executives, from other police representatives, from telephone salesmen for the police charity ball for handicapped children, and from city mayors and council, is dramaturgy. It is a way to gain the support of the police for groups and individuals who want or need their support. That high-minded rhetoric is vapid is not a weakness when one considers its intent. It is pure high-purpose uncomplicated by shades of moral uncertainty—a show of unwavering support.

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Morality is more than a dramaturgy of high-mindedness. Morality is also acted out daily by cops on the beat. The expectation that the police will control crime at the societal level is enacted at the individual level as the ability of the police officer to control his or her beat. The beat of an officer is thus transformed into a moral responsibility, the officer’s domin- ion. The notion of beat control is an imperative with a powerful moral thrust. Only an asshole could disagree with how a police officer does his or her job (Van Maanen, 1978).

The moral dimension of police practice is the heart of police culture (Caldero, 1995). Morality is the first theme of solidarity; it is the theme that energizes and makes imperative the aesthetic of coercive territorial control. It justifies all that police do to control their turf, including right- eous abuse of suspects and malcontents.

That the moral mandate and the use of coercive violence are inex- orably interwoven in the same social fabric—territorial control—is beyond question. The relationship between morality and coercion, how- ever, is perceived differently by the police and their various audiences. There has been an embarrassing though predictable tendency—some- times less pronounced among the police themselves than among their political advocates—to exploit the high-minded aspects of police morali- ty to justify the misuse of coercion and the abuse of police authority for political gain. The media are guilty of this (Ericson, 1991). Crime re-enact- ment television shows “which combine news films of events, re-enact- ment, voice-over narration by actors and actresses, and grainy video film- ing with handheld cameras,” profess to simulate reality. In pure high-mindedness we see television shows with titles such as “America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back” and “Cops.” Nowhere, of course, is mentioned the moral dilemmas engendered by the use of police violence in a democratic society (Manning, 1995:376). Media constructions are inevitably high-minded, offering simple contrasts between good and evil, black and white (literally and figuratively), us and them.

The police are implicated in the media’s narrow vision, of course, in that they tend to manipulate the flow of information to develop the good- bad contrast, revealing particular aspects of their work and obscuring others (Ericson, 1989:139-140). The police may manipulate the image of their work to fit supportive social sentiments.

Because society has come to learn that drug use is dangerous; that drug dealers are well organized and heavily armed; that certain deviant seg- ments of society are less deserving of the full protections of the law; and that undefined “others” present a threat to the social and moral order, casting police actions within the context of fighting these groups makes the concrete actions of police, even deviant actions, more acceptable to the audience . . . For the larger public, the victim of police violence must be cast in terms of dangerousness versus the stereotypic depiction of the police as the “thin blue line” between order and anarchy (Kap- peler, Sluder & Alpert 1994:106).

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Kappeler and his colleagues suggested that police condone the per- petuation of such high-mindedness to obscure a closer inspection of rough and brutal police behavior in police-citizen interactions. High- mindedness, with its hidden stigmatization of classes of citizens as bad guys, justifies over-aggressive police behavior and provides the police with retrospective justification for reprehensible behavior. Who can ques- tion heavy-handed police behavior when it is against some scumbag that probably deserves it anyway and just might think twice next time? Not considered is whether the scumbag actually did something that broke the law, threatened the public peace, whether the law itself should be ques- tioned, or if the police should have free-wheeling authority to use vio- lence at whim.

Police executives, speaking to a public audience and to the troops themselves, frequently implore such high-mindedness. Through moralis- tic exhortations, they try to show that they are “one of the boys.” Consid- er former Chief (of the Los Angeles Police Department) Daryl Gates’ speech to graduating recruits.

“I have chiefs all over the country with these badge collections,” says Daryl Gates, now nearly shouting as he reaches the apex of his address. “And they’re forever coming up to me and saying, “Hey! Can I get a badge from the LAPD? It’s the only one I don’t have.” And I tell them proudly, “That’s the only one you’re not going to get. Unless,” says Daryl Gates, pounding the podium, “you wanna go through the Los Angeles Police Academy—If-You-Are-Qualified-Chief! . . . If you are qualified” (Domanick, 1994:17).

Such exhortations are not wholly innocent of underlying motive. That chiefs have limited control over the day-to-day behavior of line officers has been widely cited. As Chief Gates was to discover in early March of 1991, when the first news of the Rodney King police brutality case splashed across the nation’s airwaves, the way a chief finds out about what officers are doing is often like the rest of us—through the newspa- pers. Control over the behavior of line personnel during field duty is mea- ger at best, and the wide influence of police labor representation has given them a means to resist bureaucratic oversight. Chiefs have to dis- play their loyalty to the troops in appropriate ways to insure support:

The modernizing chief is constrained, therefore, to make at least sym- bolic obeisance to police solidarity by demonstrating that (he) is a “cop’s” cop, as well as a devotee of systems analysis . . . One of the ways he does this is by emphasis in his dress and bearing—the policeman’s chief social tool—the ability to command personal respect (Bordua & Reiss, 1986:34).

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Muir: Maturity in the Face of Paradox

In spite of the high-mindedness of police advocates, the police them- selves wrestle with a morality substantially more complex than good-guy bad-guy distinctions. Morality is easy in the abstract and in the extreme case, when the bad-guys are known and what they have done is clearly reprehensible. Such post-hoc arm-chair moralizing, however, is no pre- scription for the bulk of police-citizen encounters. Police-citizen encoun- ters are not characterized by certainty, but uncertainty. Offenders do not advertise their identity to the police. Police-citizen interactions, in which the citizen may also be an offender, are characterized by secrecy, suspi- cion, and unpredictability.

Most bad guys are not heavyweight predators, but bantam-class mis- demeanants and, to use Van Maanen’s (1978) terminology, viewed as “ass- holes” whose culpability lies in an officer’s interpretation of vague laws such as interfering with an officer or creating a public nuisance. In such encounters, where and when is the use of coercion morally justified? This is a more difficult question, yet an everyday one that defines much of the police culture. To ponder morality at this level is to begin to understand what the police are about.

Muir (1977) has put forth an eloquent model of police morality. Muir recognized that police confronted situations that did not fall neatly into fixed moral categories. Simple ideas of good and bad provided little direc- tion for officers, who frequently had to balance their moral convictions against the ordinary problems that overwhelmed many of the people with whom they came into contact. Categoric codes of right and wrong, conceptualized as officer safety, might justify the use of deadly force in a confrontation with an armed bank robber, but such principles provided little insight into, for example, more common family conflicts, where out- comes were unpredictable and simple ideas of right and wrong provided scant direction on what to do. A more complex idea of morality was needed to help cops think about such encounters.

Muir created a model of police use of force that he called the extor- tionate transaction. In a brilliant epiphany, he manipulated the model into four incongruities he named the “paradoxes of coercion.” The first of these is the paradox of dispossession. “The less one has, the less one has to lose.” The paradox in an antagonistic encounter is that the victim with nothing is less vulnerable to coercive threats: “In bargaining, weakness is often strength” (Muir, 1977:38-39).

The second, “the paradox of detachment,” states that “the less the vic- tim cares about preserving something, the less the victimizer cares about taking it hostage.” This paradox deals with the victim and reveals the problematic nature of unfolding contingencies in an encounter: A victim- izer “can’t always perceive clearly what value a victim places on his own possessions” (Muir, 1977:40-41).

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The third is the paradox of face: “the nastier one’s reputation, the less nasty one has to be.” This paradox is “elementally psychological. The suc- cessful practice of coercion is not to injure but to employ the threat to injure.” Paradoxical is that violence is effective, not in its presence, but in its absence. All is threat and bluster. The risk, of course, is that someone will call the bluff. Unfortunately, this can destroy either party: to save face in the calling of a bluff “is to manifest malevolence and respond cruelly and destructively, even if it means risking one’s own destruction” (Muir, 1977:42). The paradox is based on the threat of behavior that, if carried out, destroys the extortionate transaction.

The fourth is the paradox of irrationality: “The more delirious the threatener, the more serious the threat: the more delirious the victim, the less serious the threat.” The paradox is that “being sensible and appearing so may be a liability in an extortionate world, and not knowing enough to know better may be an asset” (Muir, 1977:43).

Muir observed that these four paradoxes turn conventional ideas of morality on their head. Categoric ideas of right and wrong became prob- lematic. Where is morality to be found, if the simple use of coercion to achieve good ends is thwarted by circumstances that contradict its effec- tiveness? Morality was to be found in an officer’s talent in manipulating coercive authority to achieve good ends, without being overwhelmed by either the passionate pursuit of good ends or by an overwhelming sensi- tivity that he called perspective and that turned all issues of right and wrong into shifting shades of uncertainty.3 Passion, he argued, enabled officers to integrate coercion into their morals. The limits of moral pas- sion were in the unprincipled abandonment of ethical concerns of civi- lized life. Without guilt, he noted, there could be no conscience. Officers, he admonished, also needed to develop perspective, “a comprehension of the suffering of each inhabitant of the earth, and a sensitivity of man’s yearning for dignity . . .” (Muir, 1977:50). The principled balance of pas- sion and perspective promoted maturity, a moral balance that reflected an officer’s ability to reconcile himself to the use of force without being overwhelmed by its corrupting effects.

The strength of Muir’s formulation is linking the four paradoxes to his adaptation of Weber’s professional political model. The use of paradox was an eloquent statement of the unpredictability in police-citizen con- tacts. One of Muir’s underlying themes, the ability to envision outcomes precisely the opposite than intended, was a skill that enabled an officer to adapt to the cascading contingencies that characterize many police-cit- izen encounters. Muir’s paradoxes were ironies. They implicitly asked “Is there a way in which what I am doing is going to have precisely the oppo- site effect from what I intend?”

Morality flows from police officer’s abilities to adjust their use of coer- cion to these paradoxical encounters. Morality, like heaven, is in the details, in the moment-by-moment adjustment to changing circum-

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stances, without losing control in an explosion of coercive force. Morali- ty is played out as gamesmanship, and officers develop strategies to min- imize their use of force in order to maximize their effectiveness.

Muir’s model is a powerful heuristic, strong medicine for advising future officers about the corrupting effects of power. It is also an admo- nition for cops to sharpen their senses for ambiguity, misunderstandings, the unpredictable, and the ironic. Ultimately however, Muir’s model fails as a guide for understanding police culture. His model is intended to teach officers how to think about their use of coercion in terms different from simple ideas of right/wrong, moral superiority, good guy/bad guy imagery. But the morality is post hoc, constructed in the replay of events past. When officers approach an ambivalent encounter, their behavior is not conditioned by paradoxical ideas of morality. It is conditioned by edge control, minimizing threats to personal danger, resolving the encounter, avoiding excessive paperwork, and getting on with something more interesting. Police work is more righteous than Muir’s typology sug- gests, as Van Maanen (1978) recognized in the following article on a topic of eternal police interest: what to do about assholes. Muir sought an ide- ally moral officer, comfortable yet hesitant to use force when other solu- tions would achieve the same goal. Van Maanen (1978) recognized the rit- ualistic aspects of the use of force, and gained a better understanding of police culture.

Van Maanen: Righteousness and the Asshole

Van Maanen’s classic paper titled “The Asshole” (1978) represented a fundamental rethinking of police use of coercive force. Van Maanen chal- lenged the prevailing belief at the time that police use of force was direct- ed primarily at criminal suspects. In his analysis of police overuse of coer- cion, he noted that police tended to focus, not on suspects, but on big-mouths, individuals who had not committed a legal violation but who, in their behavior, displayed resentment about the intrusion of the police into their affairs. His seminal paper captured the moral dimension of the use of coercion—police believe that they exist, in part, to protect the world from assholes.

Assholes, Van Maanen argued, represented a type of individual that organized a great deal of police activity. But a cop could not know who an asshole was until he encountered him or her. The process of labeling someone an asshole emerged in concrete encounters with citizens. The consequence of the label was an increased likelihood of street justice.

Van Maanen argued that the label “asshole” arose in the context of immediate situations, and was tied to observable social action. These sit- uations were everyday police-citizen encounters. The stigmatization process—by which individuals were stigmatized as assholes, had three

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phases. The first phase was called affront and occurred when a police officer’s authority was questioned by a citizen. A beer-guzzling citizen in a city park that responds to a police order to pour out the beer by pour- ing it over the officer’s shoes, for example, has initiated a process that car- ries the risk of being labeled an asshole. This is a critical juncture in the labeling process:

any further slight to a[n] officer, however subtle, provides sufficient evi- dence that he may be indeed be dealing with a certifiable asshole, and the situation is in need of rapid clarification (Van Maanen, 1978:229).

The second stage, clarification, represents the officer’s effort to deter- mine what sort of individual they are dealing with. Clarification involves the resolution of two implicit questions: (1) does the citizen know what they are doing? and (2) could they have acted differently under the cir- cumstances? If the answer to both of these questions was yes, the person risked being labeled sub-human in a scatologically specific way, and became vulnerable to street justice. The third stage, remedy, was a typol- ogy of police behavioral responses that flowed from the clarification of the incident. Those that were labeled assholes were the most likely recipients of street justice, by which Van Maanen meant placement under question- able arrest, violence, and other rude attention-getting behaviors.

The asshole, Van Maanen argued, was a term that contained a great deal of meaning for the police. The label emerged from the need to main- tain control in street encounters, and from a moral imperative to assert the authority of the state when it was questioned. The asshole thus orga- nized much police work, and provided police with an expressive outlet in the absence of so-called “real” police work.

The term asshole may be the most ubiquitous celestial body in a cop’s gritty cosmology. A major city in the southwest maintains a list of indi- viduals that are perceived to be troublemakers on police calls for service. This list is located in the filing cabinet under the letter “A.” Can you guess why? Bouza (1990) also noted the special utility of disorderly conduct statutes for those whom the police have defined as “assholes.” One would be hard-pressed to encounter officers from any city in the United States that did not share a common vision of who assholes were.

I have frequently described to students Van Maanen’s (1978) vision of the concrete way the label “asshole” arises in street encounters. I have been as frequently chastised by student-cops for failing to understand the term. I now suspect that Van Maanen, while providing an excellent (and titillating) example of ethnography, subtly missed an important aspect of the labeling process. Van Maanen’s ideas of the process by which citizens are labeled assholes makes perfect sense, but only under the condition that an officer begins an encounter with a naïve or neutral state of mind. Officers, however, do not do this. When they enter into a situation involv-

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ing a citizen, they already have a pretty good idea about who is an asshole; more than likely they had this idea before they became cops. Nor are police-citizen encounters neutral events; police talk to citizens because something has gone sour and the police want something they think the cit- izen has; witness testimony or criminal involvement, for example.

Van Maanen, I think, overlooked the way in which police culture rein- forces a common moral sensibility in a circular logic of asshole identifi- cation and subsequent retaliatory action that verifies that the individual was indeed an asshole. Some cops may wait and see what citizens do before labeling them in some way. However, after thousands of encoun- ters cops have a pretty good read of citizens. Many citizens are labeled assholes before the encounter even begins, and a self-fulfilling logic will verify at some point in the encounter that they indeed are assholes.

Van Maanen suggested that wrongdoers were not necessarily ass- holes; they frequently wanted to minimize problems with the police. Yet the police frequently treat lawbreakers roughly, justifying abusive treat- ment of suspects in terms of police officer safety. Anyone that has wit- nessed a police bust of a so-called drug house could not conclude that the police were treating inhabitants any kinder than Van Maanen’s police treated assholes. What Van Maanen missed is that all lawbreakers are ass- holes, not just those who disagree with an officer’s definition of a situa- tion. Because an offender has violated the law, they have pretty much established that they have a different idea of appropriate behavior from the legal ideal cops are expected to uphold.

As a colleague pointed out, “people don’t end up being assholes. Every- one starts out as an asshole, and cops will let some people off the hook, depending on their behavior.” In other words, Van Maanen (1978) had the labeling process backwards. Within a few years after joining the force, some cops will see all citizens as assholes. Every situation is confronted with the presumption that an officer is dealing with an asshole. One of Fletcher’s confidants captures this sentiment in the following comment:

People lie to us eight hours a day. Everybody lies to us: offenders, vic- tims, witnesses. They all lie to the police. It gets so bad, you go to a party, somebody comes up to talk to you. You’re thinking, “Why is this guy saying this to me? What’s his game?” You can’t turn it off (Fletcher, 1991:278).

Before long, other police officers are assholes too. You are at roll call and hear your buddy make the same wisecrack for the one-thousandth time, and you think “Jeez, that guy’s an asshole.” One morning you look at yourself in a mirror and you realize that there is an asshole looking back at you. At this point the term asshole becomes so universal that it loses all meaning. Even the angels are assholes. So what.

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Endnotes

1 The Lieutenant in this example noted that there were valid incidents of police abuse, but that they were in the statistical minority. Generally, I have observed that officers will acknowledge the existence of police abuse in the abstract, but specific incidents that implicate known officers are generally denied or questioned.

2 Quoting Eric Severeid 20 years later, Fussell (1989:163) notes that the high-minded spir- it continued unabated: “If that fight was not holy, if it was not absolutely true that the con- test was between good and evil, then no battle ever was such.”

3 Muir adopted this perspective from Weber (1946).

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