Week 1.2

3.2 Street-Level Bureaucracy

In 1980, Michael Lipsky coined the phrase street-level bureaucrat, which he defined as “Public service workers who interact directly with citizens in the course of their jobs, and who have substantial discretion in the execution of their work” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 3). Lipsky argued that beyond simply implementing public policy, bureaucrats make policy at the street level in two ways. First, they exercise wide discretion when interacting with citizens, and second, when individual actions of street-level bureaucrats are taken together, they have the effect of becoming agency policy. The two keys to their policy-making role are their bureaucratic discretion and their autonomy from the authority of their agency hierarchy. These two characteristics of the street-level bureaucrat are discussed in more detail below, as are the implications of street-level policy making in a democracy.

In addition to the commonalities of direct citizen interaction, bureaucratic discretion, and relative autonomy, Lipsky noted that street-level bureaucrats typically experience five additional factors that shape the way they implement policy. First, they are faced with chronically inadequate resources to perform their tasks. For example, public defenders’ offices are consistently underfunded in the United States, with average spending just $10 per defendant; for comparison, data indicate that in the United Kingdom spending is $34 per defendant (The Sentencing Project, 2007). Underfunding leads directly to understaffing, which affords the average public defender very little time to interview clients before going into the courtroom (Mounts, 1982; The Sentencing Project, 2007; Weitzer, 1996). The Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that in 18% of state court cases, the defendant did not speak to a public defender before the day of trial; among defendants with private attorneys, this was 5.4% (Harlow, 2000). The result is that public defenders are often less familiar with the details of the clients and cases that they represent, and therefore have strong incentives to seek plea bargains in order to quickly process their clients through the system. This can have very serious negative consequences for defendants who rely on public defenders. Studies indicate that these clients are less likely to be given pretrial release, are far more likely to accept plea bargains, and are much less likely to have their cases dismissed than defendants with private attorneys (Champion, 1989; Harlow, 2000). This example is not unique; inadequate public budgets are commonplace for street-level bureaucracies, thus they often lack essential resources and sufficient numbers of staff to appropriately attend to the needs of their clients.

Second, the demand for the services provided by street-level bureaucrats has a tendency to increase to meet the supply; therefore, even if more resources are provided the demand increases to exceed those resources. In the criminal justice bureaucracy, two examples are the introduction of 911 emergency services and public defenders to provide legal aid to the poor. In both cases, the needs for these public services far outweighed the supply—even before policies and programs were created—therefore both programs were initially inundated by citizens desirous of services, and regardless of the growth of these programs, they continue to experience more demand than they can meet (Gorman, 2012; Lipsky, 2010).

A third common characteristic of street-level policy implementation is that work goals are typically vague, often ambiguous, and sometimes contradictory. Consider the example of a public defender, a position that frequently involves role ambiguity: Is the primary goal to get an innocent verdict for the client?; is it to do what is in the best interest of the client, such as negotiate a plea agreement that provides the client with much needed drug treatment?; or is it to ensure that justice is served? A complex example of contradictory goals for street-level bureaucrats comes from the trend over the past 30 years to move away from rehabilitation of prisoners and toward stricter punishment, prevention, and deterrence of crime (Pizarro, Stenius & Pratt, 2006). While this trend corresponds with the current “tough on crime” attitude of policy makers and the public, it also runs counter to the goal of reducing prison overcrowding, an important problem in most states. Therefore, legislatures that require felony prosecutions in certain drug cases, or impose determinate sentencing laws, leave prosecutors and judges with little of the discretion that allows them to seek alternatives to incarceration that could curb the growth of the prison population (Miller & Sloan, 1994).

Related to this ambiguity and contradiction is the fourth facet of street-level bureaucracy: Performance toward goal expectations is difficult if not impossible to objectively measure (Lipsky, 2010). Consider a police agency with goals to ensure citizen safety and reduce levels of crime. Although crime statistics are collected, analyzed, and retained, it is impossible to assess the impact of a single officer on community crime rates. In fact, given the nature of crime (often dependent on many extraneous variables, including the state of the economy, the unemployment rate, and regional demographics like age), it is typically difficult to assess the impact of an entire police force on the relative crime rate.

The fifth characteristic experienced by street-level bureaucrats, especially those in the criminal justice system, is that clients are often not voluntarily involved in services. No one chooses to be victimized, offenders do not want to be imprisoned, those driving while under the influence do not volunteer to take Breathalyzer tests. Most people who find themselves interacting with officers of the law or the court system are forced to do so, and this has important, often negative, implications for the tenor of their interactions with street-level bureaucrats.

A final characteristic of importance to policy implementation at the street-level is public accountability. In a representative democracy like the U.S. system, citizens are granted the right to elect the representatives that they believe best reflect their interests on public funds expenditures, policy decision making, and important pieces of legislation. We do not elect bureaucrats. Instead, based on education, training, and scores on civil service exams, public servants are hired by the state to implement the policies enacted by elected officials. It is this point—the power of the street-level bureaucrat to implement and make public policy as well as to profoundly affect the lives of individual citizens—that makes the maintenance of public accountability imperative. Their use of public funds and other taxpayer-provided resources; the fact that they represent the government in hundreds of millions of face-to-face interactions with citizens each day; and, especially for those in the criminal justice system, their coercive power, including the right to kill, make accountability of crucial importance for street-level bureaucracy.

These six factors have important consequences for the way in which those at the front lines of the criminal justice system perform their duties. Attempting to carry out the mandates of public policy while faced with inadequate resources, ever-increasing demands for services, work goals that are vague and difficult to objectively measure, and clients that do not want to be involved with the system while being held accountable to the public creates an extremely difficult set of tasks for those implementing criminal justice policies. In order to best serve and remain accountable to the public, street-level bureaucrats are governed by many rules and regulations as they implement public policy. At the same time, because of the difficult conditions under which public servants operate, they seek to maintain and enhance their own levels of discretion and autonomy.

Rules, Regulations, and Professional Norms

As discussed above, every public bureaucracy is filled with rules, regulations, and standard operating procedures to ensure that policies are implemented uniformly, public money is spent wisely, and citizens are treated equally. These rules begin with the laws, statutes, and programs implemented, all of which are public record, and the specifics of which are typically contained in manuals and standardized forms. The public accessibility of laws, rules, and procedures, known as transparency, allows both street-level bureaucrats and their clients to understand the policies and procedures and helps to ensure that they apply equally to everyone. For example, when making an arrest there are standard protocols and paperwork that must be filed by officers to ensure due process; charges can be dropped against a defendant, or a case can be thrown out of court if officers fail to follow proper procedures. In the courts, legislatures have created determinate sentencing laws that require judges to impose mandatory prison sentences for certain classes of criminals, lengthening the time they serve (Kessler & Piehl, 1998). In addition to facilitating fair and transparent implementation of public policies, these regulations and procedures are a way to manage large workloads and to limit the discretion of street-level bureaucrats.

Beyond the rules and regulations imposed by policy makers and supervisors, there are a host of occupational, professional, and community norms under which public servants operate. Street-level bureaucrats typically consider themselves professionals whose discretion should be trusted and whose professional training and associations often dictate rules on administrative behavior (Hupe & Hill, 2007). Minimum standards of professional behavior, for example, codes of conduct and ethics, oaths of loyalty, and state-sanctioned licenses and certifications are common for those working in the criminal justice system. While professional norms and licensing act as constraints on bureaucratic behavior, they also promote an aura of expertise that street-level bureaucrats fully embrace. Further, by virtue of their direct interaction with citizens, those at the front lines of public service gain a great deal of experience and a level of mastery over their duties that cannot be learned from books or in training. For instance, studies show that experienced police officers often learn how to detect cues of suspicion that lead them to successful discovery of contraband during discretionary citizen searches (Tillyer & Klahm, 2011; Tillyer, Klahm, & Engel, 2012). This hint of suspicion was referred to as “occupational common sense” by Grimshaw and Jefferson (1987), or “street-level realism” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003), and it can often be at odds with the rules and regulations set down by elected officials, agencies, and managers.

In practice, the street-level bureaucrat uses both realism and rules by dividing work into job parts: one part where decisions can be made using occupational common sense, and another part where decisions are made through regulations and standard operating procedures. A police officer has “an obligation to uphold the law in his area, yet due to finite knowledge, time and resources cannot possibly do so absolutely, a process of selective law enforcement is inevitable” (Grimshaw & Jefferson, 1987, p. 292). For example, an officer could not write a ticket or make an arrest for every infraction he observes in the course of a day, which is why it is likely that you have exceeded the speed limit at least once and yet been passed by a highway patrol officer without being pulled over. By necessity, street-level bureaucrats rely on both formal rules, which “specify the duties and obligations of officials,” and bureaucratic discretion which “allows them freedom of action” (Hupe & Hill, 2007, p. 281). It is the important element of discretion to which we now turn.

Discretion

Bureaucratic discretion involves using one’s own judgments, opinions, or reasoning to make decisions in the course of carrying out public policies. No policy, rule, or law can execute itself, and those tasked with policy implementation often face situations in which the formal rules are ambiguous, contradictory, or nonexistent. In these cases, street-level bureaucrats use their discretion—based on their training, education, experience, community norms, and moral judgments—to carry out policy. Discretion is evidently in play when a prosecutor decides to file charges against a 16-year-old as an adult versus a juvenile, or when a judge sentences someone to the minimum rather than the maximum term in prison. Discretion occurs when prison guards “file injurious reports on inmates whom they judge to be guilty of ‘silent insolence.’ Clearly what does or does not constitute a dirty look is a matter of some subjectivity” (Lipsky, 2010, p. 14).

The use of discretion by street-level bureaucrats is a complex and sometimes controversial phenomenon. In their study, Cops, Teachers, Counselors, Stories from the Front Lines of Public Service, Steven Maynard-Moody and Michael Musheno (2003) discuss two narratives of the street-level bureaucrat: the state-agent narrative, which assumes that public policies are carried out through abidance to the laws, regulations, and standard operating procedures of the bureaucratic agency and the bureaucrat’s profession; and the citizen-agent narrative, which involves the judgments that street-level bureaucrats make about the characters, motives, and identities of the citizens with whom they come into contact. Maynard-Moody and Musheno note that both of these narratives, the law abidance of the state-agent and the cultural abidance of the citizen-agent, occur within every street-level bureaucrat at different times. As they note, there are many situations in which “law, public policy, and agency procedures provide a good match with the street-level workers’ views of the people they encounter,” but at other times, law, policy, and procedure may be “ill matched to the workers’ views of fairness and appropriate action” at which point “street-level work smolders with conflict over what is the right decision and what is the right thing to do” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003, p. 9).

In their study, Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) illustrate the use of the state-agent versus citizen-agent model in a case that involved two small-time drug dealers who turned a gun on their former partner, Francisco. In the course of the fight that ensued, Francisco managed to grab the gun and pursue the other two on foot. During the pursuit, he fired at the pair, hitting one, but also lodging several bullets into a neighboring home. The police officer in the case, relying on his judgments about each of the drug dealers decided not to file any charges against Francisco. On the other hand, the first two dealers were charged, convicted, and served time in prison. The officer explained that he gave Francisco a second chance because he was otherwise hardworking and “he had come clean with us” (p. 101). The other two dealers were judged more harshly by the officer; he described them as trouble-makers, who never did “anything that was aboveboard” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003, p. 99). In this and other cases, police officers use their discretion to make important judgments about the citizens with whom they interact and to whom public services are delivered.

The example of Francisco and the two drug dealers begs a few important questions about how judgments are made and when discretion is used to benefit rather than hinder citizens. In his discussion of these street-level interactions, Lipsky (2010) focuses on factors like control over clients and rationing of services, but introduces the other side of bureaucratic discretion which involves giving citizens the benefit of the doubt, cutting them a break, or not charging them with violations they clearly committed, as in the case of Francisco. These two facets of judgment are often based on the perceived worthiness of the citizen in question (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Maynard-Moody and Musheno note that there are four ways in which street-level bureaucrats typically respond to their clients: (a) in some cases, bureaucrats offer “the normal, routine bureaucratic treatment” which “is good treatment” (p. 94) in most cases; (b) other times, when citizens are deemed particularly worthy, the street-level bureaucrat may provide extraordinary treatment to clients, going beyond the rules to secure the best outcome for someone perceived as deserving special treatment; (c) sometimes, particularly in the criminal justice system in which officers must gain the compliance or cooperation of citizens, bureaucratic response is about making the most practical decision rather than the ideal; and (d) in some situations, citizens are deemed unworthy by street-level bureaucrats and they respond to those clients with strict adherence to the rules, providing nothing more than a minimal, “by-the-book” response.

Perceived worthiness is clearly an important factor in bureaucratic treatment of clients and citizens. In the eyes of most street-level bureaucrats, worthy clients have several characteristics: first, the client is deserving of help and has not caused their own trouble; second, an assessment that the client, with help, will be successful; third, the client is respectful and appreciative of the bureaucratic intervention; fourth, the client is contrite, apologetic, repentant, and/or expresses sorrow for his or her transgressions; finally, clients are more likely to be deemed worthy when the street-level bureaucrat can personally identify with them (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). In Francisco’s case, the officer considered him worthy for many reasons: he admitted that both he and his wife had jobs, but he began dealing drugs when his family started having trouble making financial ends meet; the officer also believed that Francisco was afraid that his former partners were going to kill him, thus he only pursued and shot at them out of self-defense; additionally, the damage to his neighbor’s house was viewed as purely accidental. The officer in this case identified with Francisco whom he considered to be a hardworking husband and father, and whom he believed would stay on the straight and narrow after this incident, if only given the chance.

Street-level bureaucrats make these assessments about citizens every day. While most of the time the normal, routine bureaucratic response is warranted, sometimes the client is deemed worthy of the benefit of the doubt, as in Francisco’s case. Certainly, in other cases the client may be deemed unworthy by displaying characteristics opposite to those of the worthy: they are disrespectful and challenge the authority of the street-level bureaucrat; they are considered “bad” people who are not likely to change their behavior; the street-level bureaucrat cannot identify with their immoral and different behaviors; they are often considered irresponsible or lazy, and therefore the cause of their own problems; finally, even if given a chance, the street-level bureaucrat does not believe this client will ever make good (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003).

When clients are judged unworthy, those working on the front lines often see themselves as enforcers of moral codes, not just rules and regulations. In these cases, citizens “may receive minimal, even harsh, treatment and, when available, severe punishment” (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003, p. 144). This is evident in another case detailed by Maynard-Moody and Musheno where two 17-year-old girls used a stolen credit card to go on a spending spree at local boutiques and restaurants, racking up $12,000 in charges. While both girls initially denied any knowledge of the crime, the parents of one of the girls eventually convinced her to go with them to the police station and confess; the second girl continued to deny any involvement. At this point, the officer on the case began to view the girls differently, judging the first to be worthy, and the second unworthy. He described the first girl as repentant and changed; her parents, a married couple, were described as “so cooperative” with the police. The second girl’s parents were divorced, causing the officer to “always have to see them separately;” the girl was judged to have “really no sense of right and wrong” (2003, p. 109). In the end, the officer recommended juvenile court for the first girl, but adult court for the second. Although they were partners in the same crime, being deemed worthy meant that the first girl’s juvenile record remained permanently sealed, she went off to college, “and was doing really well” (p. 109). Neither the second girl, nor her uncooperative, divorced parents ever admitted her guilt; she ended up with a felony police record, and never graduated from high school (Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003).

It is situations like this, where two equally guilty teenagers are treated so unequally, that create controversy over bureaucratic discretion. When police, prosecutors, judges, and corrections and parole officers have such power over the lives of citizens, especially in the criminal justice system, discretion can be seen as discriminatory, unfair, and even political. In an early study of California’s Three Strikes Law, for example, it was found that district attorneys and judges at the local level played an important role in implementation of the law, as they were granted a fair amount of discretion over how prior “strike” violations were treated. Consequently, in politically liberal regions of the state in which voters were less supportive of Three Strikes, such as the San Francisco Bay area, there were lower levels of compliance with the law than in more politically conservative areas (Gerber, Lupia, McCubbins, & Kiewiet, 2001). Some would argue that differing rates of compliance based on political ideology is a clear misuse of bureaucratic discretion.

Although discretion can lead to inequities in policy implementation, and fears that laws enacted by elected officials are being thwarted by bureaucrats, those at the street level are granted discretion for a variety of reasons. First, as discussed earlier, in complex work situations where programmed decisions are simply inadequate, discretion allows bureaucrats the freedom to take action to carry out their duties and obligations (Hupe & Hill, 2007; Lipsky, 2010). Detailed instructions to a police officer on how to deal with a suicidal individual or a domestic violence case are fruitless, and as Lipsky points out, if required to use strict operating procedures, most officers “would refuse to intervene in potentially dangerous situations” (2010, p. 15). Rather, street-level policy implementation often requires the sensitive observations and judgments about individuals detailed in the Maynard-Moody and Musheno (2003) study.

Further, discretion is a key to the legitimacy of the individual street-level bureaucrat; because the state has entrusted this person with authority and discretion over citizens, they are perceived as a legitimate agent of the state. Finally, it is important to note that while statutes, legislation, and regulations are often lengthy, they are also typically vague. Members of federal, state, and local legislative bodies are not experts on all matters. Instead, they and their supporters have ideas about the direction they wish for society, and write legislation and policies to reflect those preferences; the details are left to be determined during implementation, which often translates to the street-level through agency or individual decisions. Therefore, gaps between the “law-on-the-books” and the “law-in-action” abound in the criminal justice system (Jenness & Grattet, 2005).

Autonomy

In addition to discretion, street-level bureaucracy is characterized by fairly high levels of autonomy as a result of little direct supervision. Prosecutors and public defenders do not interview clients and witnesses or build their cases while being constantly monitored; police officers are frequently in the field, far from supervisory control; parole officers often meet their clients outside of an office setting, away from direct monitoring. Street-level bureaucrats use their autonomy in conjunction with their discretion as a way to carry out their work under the constraints of public service, which include large caseloads, inadequate resources, public scrutiny, and vague, often unachievable goals. They do this by using both the rules and regulations of their occupations and agencies and their bureaucratic discretion. Street-level bureaucrats, therefore, work to protect and expand their autonomy. Indeed, because they consider themselves professionals with vast amounts of direct client experience, those on the front lines often view managers and policy makers as out-of-touch with the reality of street-level bureaucracy and see efforts to dictate the parameters of service delivery as illegitimate or overbearing (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Studies indicate that implementation of law enforcement innovation, for example, has a varied record of success. Innovative polices have been ignored, delayed, or selectively enforced because officers and the agencies for which they work often see “the flood of innovative policies as a reflection of political whims, the politicization of law enforcement, and a distraction from basic ‘good police work’” (Jenness & Grattet, 2005, p. 337).

Another aspect of the high level of autonomy exercised by street-level bureaucrats is their potential to avoid their duties rather than work—the classic image is of the police officer killing time in the donut shop rather than working in the field keeping the streets safe. Social scientists looked at this problem from the perspective of principal-agent theory, which refers to the relationship between the actor that creates the work (the principal) and the actor that carries out the work (the agent). In the classic conceptualization, the principal must use a series of strategies, including rule setting, monitoring, and evaluation, to ensure that the agent is carrying out the work of the principal as expected and not engaging in opportunistic behavior like wasting time or abusing the power of their positions. In the language of principal-agent theory, principals (supervisors and elected officials) must find ways to ensure that their agents (street-level bureaucrats), whose autonomy precludes close monitoring, are not engaged in either shirking—hanging out in the donut shop—or sabotage—undermining criminal justice policy objectives.

It is probably obvious that principal-agent theory assumes a model of conflict between superiors and subordinates where both supervisors and elected officials need to impose ever more rules and monitoring strategies to ensure that bureaucrats appropriately implement public policies. In addition to rules, regulations, and standard operating procedures that help to ensure compliance with policy mandates, supervisors use other tools to encourage working rather than shirking or sabotage. These inducements include both rewards like better shift assignments and sanctions, such as assigning a patrol officer to desk duty. Lipsky (2010) notes that although under civil service and union rules, managers have the ability to demote or fire, the costs of using these sanctions, such as prolonged periods of arbitration, are often greater than supervisors are willing to bear. In these cases, managers are more likely to use their ability to define the work environment—shift assignments, including geographic areas, and their influence over promotions and transfers—to control street-level bureaucrats in the field.

Brehm & Gates (1997) examined the principal-agent model in police departments using data from field observations and attitudinal surveys of officers. They analyzed the tendencies for officers to use their autonomy to shirk rather than work by examining police relationships with peers and supervisors, their level of professionalism, and the organizational cultures of individual police departments. As expected, they found that when officers and their departments are more professional, they are more likely to work than shirk; that operating within networks of hard-working peers encourages working over shirking, and that officers who like their jobs are far less likely to shirk. These results comport nicely with the concept of public service motivation, which posits that people seek occupations in fields like criminal justice out of an affinity for their public missions and a desire to serve the public interest (Perry & Recascino Wise, 1990). Public service motivation is an intrinsic factor that attracts people to public service professions, and individuals with high levels of public service motivation work harder in organizations that meet public needs (Frank & Lewis, 2000; Wright, 2007). These findings are consistent with Brehm & Gates’ conclusion that police officers are “highly professional and strongly influenced by principles that cohere to the mission of their organizations” (1997, p. 202).

In a second study that looks beyond shirking behavior, Brehm & Gates (1997) examined instances of sabotage of agency policies by police officers, specifically, police brutality, including threats, ridicule, unnecessary searches, and use of excessive force against citizens. Importantly, the data indicate that most officers do not abuse their autonomy and power and that incidents of misconduct are most likely to occur only when an officer is predisposed to such behavior. Further, these forms of police brutality are rare, occurring in about 7% of encounters with citizens; the most egregious, excessive force, occurred in just over 1% of encounters. Interestingly, officers investigating violent crimes were 8% more likely to defect from stated agency policies and engage in one or more of these forms of brutality (Brehm & Gates, 1997). This finding coincides with the idea that street-level bureaucrats treat citizens differently depending on their judgments of them; in these cases, police officers appear to judge violent offenders as less worthy of standard methods of policing (Lipsky, 2010; Maynard-Moody & Musheno, 2003). Similar to their findings on shirking, Brehm and Gates (1997) concluded that factors that restrain police brutality are officer professionalism, liking one’s job, and working in a departmental culture in which misconduct is less tolerated. Finally, they found that incidents of police brutality increased when there were more officers at a scene. They offer two possible explanations for this result: (a) officers may feel pressured toward brutality by the presence of other officers, and/or (b) the nature of the situation in which a large number of officers are present is unusual in itself, facilitating the use of tactics outside the normal parameters of law enforcement (Brehm & Gates, 1997).

Both incidences of shirking and sabotage can occur in the work of street-level bureaucrats because of their high levels of autonomy. Police officers on patrol are among the best examples of both shirking and sabotage behaviors because while in the field they are far from direct supervision. Although police logs are kept, cameras are often placed in patrol cars, and the number of tickets issued or arrests made are monitored by managers, most of the decisions made by bureaucrats in the criminal justice system are made outside of public view and are therefore subject to evaluation only after the fact. In this way, street-level bureaucrats are not simply agents carrying out policy mandates, but are part of a process in which policy is made both from the top down and the bottom up (Lipksy, 2010).

Accountability

In addition to the problems with discretion and autonomy, a variety of other factors make accountability vitally important to the work of street-level bureaucrats. First is the fact that street-level bureaucrats earn their livings and carry out their duties using tax dollars; second is their power to implement and make public policy which can profoundly affect the lives of individual citizens; third, for those in the criminal justice system, such as police, corrections, parole and probation officers, the coercive power of the state requires monitoring of bureaucratic activities to ensure due process and equal treatment of citizens; finally, and fairly unique to the criminal justice bureaucracy, the right to take a life, either in the course of ensuring public safety or in the ability to seek, impose, or carry out the death penalty, requires a very high level of public accountability.

Accountability is often considered to be a top-down exercise, as when viewed through the lens of principal-agent theory; however, accountability is actually much broader and includes both professional accountability and participatory/citizen accountability (Hupe & Hill, 2007; Lipsky, 2010). Professional accountability is horizontal in nature, including both the behaviors that are shaped by one’s peers and the ethical norms of one’s profession. Brehm and Gates (1997) found that police officers in departments in which other officers disapproved of shirking were less likely to shirk themselves. In the court system, public defenders, prosecutors, and judges are all bound to the same ethical dictates of the legal profession and can be removed and even disbarred for transgressions.

Participatory accountability is from the bottom up and involves clients and other members of the public using their citizenship responsibilities to influence the behavior of street-level bureaucrats (Hupe & Hill, 2007). This accountability is evident in the existence of citizen oversight committees assigned to monitor police agencies. On the other hand, especially for those in the criminal justice system, certain paradoxes are created for street-level bureaucrats when responsiveness to the public is part of accountability (Lipsky, 2010). For example, it is difficult to reconcile the protection of privacy and anonymity for victims of violent crimes while maintaining public accountability through a transparent criminal justice system. Similarly, while the general public and those within the justice system wish to see batterers prosecuted, women in violent relationships are sometimes reluctant to press charges against their partners because they fear the effects that incarceration will have on both their children and their family’s economic stability (Hart, 1993). These conflicts between differing yet legitimate public concerns can complicate determinations of accountability and leave policy makers and street-level bureaucrats in the difficult position of prioritizing some public values over others as they formulate and carry out public policy.

Finally, there is top-down or political accountability, which is considered the essential link between bureaucracy and our representative system of democracy (Lipsky, 2010; Hupe & Hill, 2007). Public servants are hired by the state to implement the policies enacted by elected officials, and while there are rules and procedures to follow, the unavoidable discretion and autonomy afforded street-level bureaucrats means that they must be held accountable for their day-to-day work. Particularly in recent years, managers seek objective, quantitative measures of individual performance as a tool for keeping bureaucrats accountable. Street-level work, however, is often not amenable to this kind of accounting; remember the vague and difficult to measure goals of the street-level bureaucrat. Keeping track of the amount of time a parole officer spends with clients tells us nothing about the quality of those interactions, and asking a parolee to evaluate officer performance might be useful, but would have to be regarded with some amount of skepticism. In addition, quantitative assessments can actually lead employees away from agency goals. For example, if the performance of a patrol officer is evaluated based on traffic tickets, it follows that the officer increases his efforts to write traffic tickets, which in turn can become a serious problem if he increases those efforts at the expense of other aspects of his job. This is not to imply that street-level bureaucrats should not be held accountable for their work, but simply to point out that performance assessment is a complicated matter.

As noted earlier, elected officials have to know that the laws they create are implemented as intended; therefore, another aspect of top-down accountability is linking bureaucracy to democracy by holding bureaucrats responsible for compliance with policy directives. Maynard-Moody and Musheno’s (2005) characterization of the state-agent versus the citizen- agent narrative is important here. In the state-agent narrative, accountability is about carrying out public policies through abidance to the laws, regulations, and the standard operating procedures of elected officials and agencies. When these are breached, the desire to control bureaucratic behavior and ensure stricter compliance typically results in the enactment of more rules. On the other hand, in the citizen-agent narrative, street-level bureaucrats make judgments about the characters, motives, and identities of citizens, often with the view that strict rules and supervisors can impede doing what is right and fair for citizens (Maynard- Moody & Musheno, 2005). These are the cases in which Lipsky (2010) notes that frontline public servants should be open to the possibility that every new client may present a case unique enough to warrant a flexible, innovative approach. His suggestion is that street-level bureaucrats should be considered accountable to their clients as well as to their agencies and policy makers.

As is true of so much of street-level bureaucracy, accountability is a complicated issue. While complying with the laws, court directives, and policies promulgated by elected officials, policy makers, and their managers, delivering services to citizens through the criminal justice system often requires far more complex and nuanced decision making than anticipated by those making the rules. This can and does lead to abuse in some cases. Instances of violence and charges of excessive force at the hands of prison guards or police officers are not uncommon, nor are examples of discrimination or racial profiling. Too often the “code of silence” among police officers still protects those who engage in misconduct (Carlson, 2005; Greene, 2007). Two well-known examples of such abuse are the videotaped beating of Rodney King by Los Angeles Police Department officers in 1991 and the shooting death of Amadou Diallo in 1999 by four members of the New York Police Department. After such incidents of misconduct, calls for greater accountability and policy reform come from both the bottom up and the top down. Members of the public and elected officials typically seek to check the power of the police through such mechanisms as creation of citizen oversight committees, introduction of new training procedures, and increased hiring of minority officers (Weitzer, 2002).

It is important to remember that accountability for those serving in the criminal justice system involves being accountable to many different groups: to the victims of crime who expect justice to be served, to the felons in their care; to their fellow officers, and the professional associations to which they belong; to the elected officials who write the laws, and their supervisors who review their personnel files. As discussed, members of these groups may have different and contradictory views about what successful implementation of criminal justice policy means. In the end, discretion and autonomy must exist, side-by-side with rules and accountability in order for street-level bureaucrats to best serve the public.

3.2 Street-Level Bureaucracy

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