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Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform
The current crisis in policing can be traced to failures of reform. “Sparrow surely is right to condemn policing directed only at crime rates rather than community satisfaction.”
– The New York Times Book Review In the past two years, America has witnessed incendiary milestones in the poor relations between police and the African-American community: Ferguson, Baltimore, and more recently Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas. Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation. Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic stops, or arrests made for petty crimes. Sparrow's analysis shows what it will take for police departments to escape their narrow focus and perverse metrics and turn back to making public safety and public cooperation their primary goals. Police, according to Sparrow, are in the risk-control business and need to grasp the fundamental nature of that challenge and develop a much more sophisticated understanding of its implications for mission, methods, measurement, partnerships, and analysis.
– The New York Times Book Review In the past two years, America has witnessed incendiary milestones in the poor relations between police and the African-American community: Ferguson, Baltimore, and more recently Baton Rouge, St. Paul, and Dallas. Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard Kennedy School of Government and is a former British police detective, argues that other factors in the development of police theory and practice over the last twenty-five years have also played a major role in contributing to these tragedies and to a great many other cases involving excessive police force and community alienation. Sparrow shows how the core ideas of community and problem-solving policing have failed to thrive. In many police departments these foundational ideas have been reduced to mere rhetoric. The result is heavy reliance on narrow quantitative metrics, where police define how well they are doing by tallying up traffic stops, or arrests made for petty crimes. Sparrow's analysis shows what it will take for police departments to escape their narrow focus and perverse metrics and turn back to making public safety and public cooperation their primary goals. Police, according to Sparrow, are in the risk-control business and need to grasp the fundamental nature of that challenge and develop a much more sophisticated understanding of its implications for mission, methods, measurement, partnerships, and analysis.
- GenresNonfiction
270 pages, Hardcover
First published April 26, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
August 9, 2017
I remember first speaking with graduate history students about how best to approach book-sources for my research and thesis papers. They had two suggestions:
(1) Read the introduction and conclusion to the book in their entirety. Then read the first couple of pages and last couple of pages of each chapter - it will tell you whether there is relevant material in there that you need.
(2) The Index is your friend. Search out your specific terms of interest and read around them.
Handcuffed would be an EXCELLENT example of when these tactics should win the day. The Intro had me amped up to read - I was loving it - but there was a slow ramp down; the deeper I got into the book, the more that I realized that its argument isn't aimed at the layman at all. It was dense and not particularly useful for me.
With that in mind, I think there's a lot of great info in here for a student/practitioner of police/public safety executive roles. I disagree to some extent on the author's aversion to social science's ability, but I do see the value in a lot of his arguments as well.
My suggestion for interested parties is to read chapters 1,2, & 3. As I finished chapter 3 I expected to be giving this 5 stars. Leave the rest for those who are specifically being addressed by the author.
(1) Read the introduction and conclusion to the book in their entirety. Then read the first couple of pages and last couple of pages of each chapter - it will tell you whether there is relevant material in there that you need.
(2) The Index is your friend. Search out your specific terms of interest and read around them.
Handcuffed would be an EXCELLENT example of when these tactics should win the day. The Intro had me amped up to read - I was loving it - but there was a slow ramp down; the deeper I got into the book, the more that I realized that its argument isn't aimed at the layman at all. It was dense and not particularly useful for me.
With that in mind, I think there's a lot of great info in here for a student/practitioner of police/public safety executive roles. I disagree to some extent on the author's aversion to social science's ability, but I do see the value in a lot of his arguments as well.
My suggestion for interested parties is to read chapters 1,2, & 3. As I finished chapter 3 I expected to be giving this 5 stars. Leave the rest for those who are specifically being addressed by the author.
December 30, 2019
A great read for #police leaders to enable critical thought on police reform. I recommend this book to police executives that seek to advance policing forward into the 21st century. Also, if you are an advocate of problem-oriented policing, this is your book.
Sparrow makes some interesting points on the limitations of Evidence-Based policing, but, I cannot fully agree with his view that social science and Evidence-Based policing play a minor, almost insignificant role in police departments’ operations. His portrayal of social scientists as somewhat elitist also runs contrary to my experiences working with many of them in the field.
Sparrow makes some interesting points on the limitations of Evidence-Based policing, but, I cannot fully agree with his view that social science and Evidence-Based policing play a minor, almost insignificant role in police departments’ operations. His portrayal of social scientists as somewhat elitist also runs contrary to my experiences working with many of them in the field.
February 13, 2017
As mentioned by another reviewer, this book is aimed at police managers, not the general public. The author has a point of view worth considering. He backs it up with a lot of solid data, too. I'm a retired FBI agent, and the FBI mission is quite different from that of police departments, but I have some familiarity with the issues dealt with in the book since I've worked with police many times and also investigated them in civil rights cases.
I did not know until this book that the Ferguson, MO police department's main mission was revenue generation and that contributed heavily to the problems that led to the riots. That's one of several interesting facts set forth in the book, but there is also a great deal of repetition and empty bureaucratic jargon that tells you what not to do without really providing a clear method for stopping those behaviors. It reminded me of those excruciating lessons the California bar requires of lawyers every three years on substance abuse and sexual harassment. I wrote a scene spoofing those in one of my books. You're going to find bad cops (and bad managers and bad FBI agents) in every large department. They're the exception, though. You just have to weed them out either during recruitment and training, or, unfortunately, after a bad incident happens. I don't think the author has provided a clear path to avoid them altogether. He has provided some good food for thought, though, and the book may be useful to some police officials.
I did not know until this book that the Ferguson, MO police department's main mission was revenue generation and that contributed heavily to the problems that led to the riots. That's one of several interesting facts set forth in the book, but there is also a great deal of repetition and empty bureaucratic jargon that tells you what not to do without really providing a clear method for stopping those behaviors. It reminded me of those excruciating lessons the California bar requires of lawyers every three years on substance abuse and sexual harassment. I wrote a scene spoofing those in one of my books. You're going to find bad cops (and bad managers and bad FBI agents) in every large department. They're the exception, though. You just have to weed them out either during recruitment and training, or, unfortunately, after a bad incident happens. I don't think the author has provided a clear path to avoid them altogether. He has provided some good food for thought, though, and the book may be useful to some police officials.
July 13, 2016
A nonfiction book that examines various problems with current policing theory, implementation, and practice. I was quite interested to get a more in-depth look at this topic (particularly as it regards community policing), and while this was a good book for learning some of the history and ideas behind current policing, ultimately it was mostly aimed at police managers, not lay people. For example, the chapter on how to manage interactions between public police and private security was interesting enough, in a theoretical sort of way, but I doubt I'll find much use for the suggested ways to practice such engagements. Which isn't really a critique of the book – it seems very successful at what it's doing! I'm just not the intended audience.
I do have to gripe about the chapter in which Sparrow attacks social sciences as a general concept though. He argues that policing probably isn't a great environment in which to conduct randomized, controlled experiments – sure, that seems logical enough to me. But Sparrow has a bizarre idea of what constitutes the difference between natural and social sciences. He seems to believe that social science consists solely of statistics and highly standardized experimentation, while natural science is... well, basically everything else.
For example:
My purpose [is] to press the point that social-scientific experiments and evaluation constitute a relatively small and very particular subset of the relevant inquiry tool kit.
We should at least consider which natural science inquiry methods might turn out to be relevant or important for policing. A great many of them, I would suggest. Most of what we know about social problems and most of the knowledge already accumulated by police stems from the mindset and methods of natural science inquiry: observation, inspection, investigation, and diagnosis, leading to the development of ideas about the scope, nature, and dynamics of various dysfunctions and breakdowns in the social order.
He then goes on to cite Newton, Galileo, and the entire medical field as examples of people who have learned a lot without worrying too much about experiments. To which I say, WTF.
Perhaps it is worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of modern medical knowledge has accumulated without the use of this elite tool kit. [...] It would be strange, indeed, if Galileo and Newton, who have taught us so much about the way the universe works, were deemed not to have engaged in “high science” simply because their methods did not rely on randomized experiments or program evaluation techniques.
(He's using here the terms "elite" and "high" science to describe social science, which he apparently seems to think is better regarded than natural science? That, uh, seems to be the exact opposite conclusion of nearly everyone else, as explained by this XKCD strip.)
And then it gets even crazier:
There is no prima facie reason why the ratio of natural science methods to social science methods applicable to policing should differ markedly from this ratio in other areas. One can obtain a rough sense of where that ratio lies, in general, by comparing the rate at which new articles are abstracted into various academic citation indices. For the United States, the rate at which articles are being added to the general science citation indices runs at roughly five times the rate at which articles are being added to equivalent social science citation indexes. Across a range of industrialized nations, this ratio varies between 5:1 and 10:1. In other words, social science may account for no more than 10 to 20 percent of new science. Given that the elite tool box and preferred methods of EBP [Evidence Based Policing; the application of his reviled "social science" methods to policing] represent a relatively small subset of the overall social science tool kit—certainly less than half—then it might be reasonable to guess that EBP should represent no more than 5 to 10 percent of the investments the police profession could usefully make in scientific inquiry.
THERE IS SO MUCH CRAZY IN THIS PARAGRAPH THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START.
Anyway, if you happen to read this, you might just want to skip Chapter Four. The rest of the book is fine.
I do have to gripe about the chapter in which Sparrow attacks social sciences as a general concept though. He argues that policing probably isn't a great environment in which to conduct randomized, controlled experiments – sure, that seems logical enough to me. But Sparrow has a bizarre idea of what constitutes the difference between natural and social sciences. He seems to believe that social science consists solely of statistics and highly standardized experimentation, while natural science is... well, basically everything else.
For example:
My purpose [is] to press the point that social-scientific experiments and evaluation constitute a relatively small and very particular subset of the relevant inquiry tool kit.
We should at least consider which natural science inquiry methods might turn out to be relevant or important for policing. A great many of them, I would suggest. Most of what we know about social problems and most of the knowledge already accumulated by police stems from the mindset and methods of natural science inquiry: observation, inspection, investigation, and diagnosis, leading to the development of ideas about the scope, nature, and dynamics of various dysfunctions and breakdowns in the social order.
He then goes on to cite Newton, Galileo, and the entire medical field as examples of people who have learned a lot without worrying too much about experiments. To which I say, WTF.
Perhaps it is worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of modern medical knowledge has accumulated without the use of this elite tool kit. [...] It would be strange, indeed, if Galileo and Newton, who have taught us so much about the way the universe works, were deemed not to have engaged in “high science” simply because their methods did not rely on randomized experiments or program evaluation techniques.
(He's using here the terms "elite" and "high" science to describe social science, which he apparently seems to think is better regarded than natural science? That, uh, seems to be the exact opposite conclusion of nearly everyone else, as explained by this XKCD strip.)
And then it gets even crazier:
There is no prima facie reason why the ratio of natural science methods to social science methods applicable to policing should differ markedly from this ratio in other areas. One can obtain a rough sense of where that ratio lies, in general, by comparing the rate at which new articles are abstracted into various academic citation indices. For the United States, the rate at which articles are being added to the general science citation indices runs at roughly five times the rate at which articles are being added to equivalent social science citation indexes. Across a range of industrialized nations, this ratio varies between 5:1 and 10:1. In other words, social science may account for no more than 10 to 20 percent of new science. Given that the elite tool box and preferred methods of EBP [Evidence Based Policing; the application of his reviled "social science" methods to policing] represent a relatively small subset of the overall social science tool kit—certainly less than half—then it might be reasonable to guess that EBP should represent no more than 5 to 10 percent of the investments the police profession could usefully make in scientific inquiry.
THERE IS SO MUCH CRAZY IN THIS PARAGRAPH THAT I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHERE TO START.
Anyway, if you happen to read this, you might just want to skip Chapter Four. The rest of the book is fine.
April 30, 2020
A thought provoking book that will most definitely get you thinking about what it means to police a free society. For police it will get you to consider the strategy tactics and operations we use and how they affect the moral mental and physical levels of conflict, violence and the social effect of policing. Times have changed and policing must evolve as well. This book will get you to think about how too!
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews