Exploring a Craft Learning Model for Reviewing Patrol Officer Decision-Making in Encounters with the Public

Abstract

Since the 1960s, police departments have turned to rules and procedures to help control how patrol officers, as legal decision-makers, exercise their discretionary authority. The logic of the administrative rulemaking model depends on the development and enforcement of bureaucratic rules and regulations. The public outcry over high-profile incidents of police abuses of authority has renewed interest in this approach. This article conceptualizes a complementarycraft learning modelto supplement rulemaking. This model harnesses patrol officers’ knowledge and skills, learned through experience, to the development of criteria for assessing and guiding how they use their discretion in less dramatic encounters with the public. Using in-depth interviews with thirty-eight patrol officers reacting to a video clip of a fairly routine and low-key neighbor dispute, we derive seven evaluative standards (accountability, lawfulness, problem diagnosis, repair of harm, economy, fairness, and safety and order). We then explore how these standards could be used by first-line supervisors to structure reviews of patrol officer decision-making through a process of reflection-in-action. Our purpose is to imagine a reform strategy that tries to account for the complex technical and normative dimensions of everyday police work to facilitate more deliberate, transparent, and principled decisions.