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Above the Law Police and the Excessive Use of Force
The now-famous videotape of the beating of Rodney King precipitated a national outcry against police violence. Skolnick and Fyfe, two of the nation's top experts on law enforcement, use the incident to introduce a revealing historical analysis of such violence and the extent of its survival in law enforcement today.
- GenresNonfictionLaw
336 pages, Paperback
First published February 8, 1993
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September 28, 2020
This is, sadly, a very timely book, coming out as it did after the beating of Rodney King in L.A. nearly thirty years ago. It also happens to be very well written.
Above the Law is a good history of the police, going back to the original Bobbies in England, of police philosophies, and of police violence. Skolnick and Fyfe provide useful context for everything that is being discussed today, but their focus is not on race. In fact, minorities are only one group that has been on the wrong side of police violence. The authors also do a good job of distinguishing between police brutality and excessive violence. The only negative is that too much of the book is focused on L.A.
Above the Law is a good history of the police, going back to the original Bobbies in England, of police philosophies, and of police violence. Skolnick and Fyfe provide useful context for everything that is being discussed today, but their focus is not on race. In fact, minorities are only one group that has been on the wrong side of police violence. The authors also do a good job of distinguishing between police brutality and excessive violence. The only negative is that too much of the book is focused on L.A.
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April 6, 2023 Although there is public demand for simple solutions, the solution for police brutality proves to be complex. Jerome H. Skonick and James J. Fyfe thoroughly examine police’s use of force in Above the Law: Police and the Excessive Use of Force following the acquittal of Los Angeles police officers who were caught on tape beating Rodney King. Through an examination of occasions of policing, explanations of police affairs, and remedies to the weaknesses that perpetuate police brutality, Skolnick and Fyfe paint a picture on how police seem to float above the laws and ideals of justice that they swear to protect.
Published in 1993, Above the Law served, and no doubt still serves, as a much-needed explanation to puzzled citizens for how policing can both aim to protect citizens and dominate them with virulence. Though public opinion can swing wildly between assumptions that police officers are inherently racist, that every brutal incident is perpetrated by bad apples who slipped through the cracks, or that policing bodies systematically aim to keep minorities under, the authors seek to ground these soundbites in an accurate depiction of policing in America.
The authors introduce this issue with a recap and aftermath of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. The event garnered worldwide attention because of the infamous camcorder video forever associated with the event. Skolnick and Fyfe contextualize the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) by pulling from aspects of each of the book’s three parts as it relates to the case of Rodney King. They give a brief history of the LAPD, specially focusing on more brutal moments that have similarities to the King incident. One such example was the “no knock” entry of Jessie Larez’s residence in search for a gun, where an LAPD CRASH unit forcibly entered Larez’s home and violently assaulted him and his family without ever turning up with the gun they had expected to find (4-5). Skolnick and Fyfe introduce some of the more alarming by-products of culture among large police departments. In reference to the King footage, where the bystanding officers were seen as enablers of unjust brutality, the authors point out the organizational tradition of “cops [protecting] other cops” (7). Implicating the justice system, the authors mention the difficulty of practically bringing this behavior to justice in absence of the offense of specific statutes despite public outcry demanding that those who protect us act more like good samaritans and less like silent justifiers. Not only is the urgency of the topic sufficiently introduced using only facts of the situation, testimonies, and reasonable conclusions, much of the general topics Skolnick and Fyfe introduce in this chapter recounting the Rodney King incident are elaborated thoroughly throughout the text.
Emphasizing the racial dimension of the Rodney King beating and other police acts of violence against black Americans since then, they consider the history of the U.S. and how policing bodies conformed to a societal hatred of black Americans since emancipation. Resisting the notion that King’s beating was a situation that unexpectedly got “out of control,” the authors interject that the incident was a “symbolic lynching.” Skolnick and Fyfe challenge readers who believe lynching to be a veangeful relic of a past we would rather forget, breaking the schema by re-stating its sinister function: “[controlling] a population thought to be undesirable… and underpunished by established law” (23-24).
The authors legitimize their points about the aspects of policing that rhyme with that of a less equal society by identifying a few ways that policing has changed, the largest of which has been the establishment of more legalizing policing bodies since the 19th century. They dedicate a chapter to the evolution of the “third degree,” referring to harsh questioning by the police where there is opportunity for physical or psychological abuse. Although this aspect of policing has increased its standards for detainee treatment, the improvement was facilitated by procedural means to avoid treatment usually reserved for terrorists today rather than a gradual change in fundamental police attitudes. Police practices met unwelcome restraint from the Supreme Court during the Due Process Revolution of the Earl Warren era, such as with the Gideon v. Wainwright (1964) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) decisions which ensured that the accused would be granted counsel and hear their rights before an avoidable confession, respectively. While it threatened the agenda of police operators who hoped to engage in gatehouse justice, the Skolnick and Fyfe temper the readers’ expectations on the might of the court to change policing, noting that it is regularly a force that is publicly overestimated. After all, resentful cops who would rather continue “street level justice” probably won’t adhere to rules made by those who surely don’t understand the job, especially when there is not a culture of accountability within their department (195). While there was a clear decreasing trend, the U.S. culture legitimized extralegal policing both before and after emancipation, which clearly supports brutality especially against minorities.
From their introduction of historical and contemporary policing, Skolnick and Fyfe focus their attention to factors and concepts that directly and indirectly affect the conduct of police departments to answer the question of how police can heroically serve the public one day, then proceed to beat citizens and lie about it the next. The authors run through many surface-level shortcomings of police departments such as lifetime appointments of chiefs, lack of accountability, and lack of representativeness. While these certainly perpetuate poor policing and are strongly related to more fundamental explanations of poor policing, removing these shortcomings does not prevent the primary issues with policing that lead to abuse (170). By recognizing the fundamental issues of policing, the authors seek to prevent surface-level blemishes by introducing more intelligent reforms.
Skolnick and Fyfe introduce the perception of cops as soldiers as a fundamental failure of policing. This perception proves to be harmful whether it stems from the public or from cops: antagonism grows if citizens perceive themselves on one side of a war against the police, and cops have to accept their role as frontline soldiers in a “no-win” conflict with cynicism and passivism. Not only does this idea encourage violence toward the citizenry, it “diverts attention from more effective strategies for crime control.” (114-115). The authors connect the military culture to the tendency of measuring success quantitatively, as when Vietnam soldiers were valued based on how many men they killed. In the obsession with quantitative results, cops are less likely to be valued as more than those who do grunt work, and traits of being a good cop, such as solution building and level-headedness, are hardly acknowledged and rarely rewarded (126).
If there is a single concept that might explain much of the downfalls of policing, it would have to be insularity because of its status as a root cause of how the police system operates. Though police’s closed-mindedness might be seen as an obvious vice for a department aimed at serving the public, insularity in practice has the effect of enhancing “group loyalty,” which is not inherently undesirable. However, the same insularity is likely to “breed abuse, violence, and secrecy” (134). Skolnick and Fyfe find that the insulated professional environment of police shapes their distinct world view, just as it would for insulated doctors and lawyers. Naturally, it is impossible to ignore the vital role of police in society, and how it is often different from other professions whose clientele are rarely unwilling participants. The adversarial environment seen often by field officers breeds the paranoid一but valid一concern that anything can happen at any time for any reason. The authors’ input of a balanced and understanding review of policing not only informs readers of the whole issue, but also on the necessity to address the cause at its root.
Through observing efforts of police reform, Skolnick and Fyfe emphasize the entrenched nature of policing. Through examples of reform failures, they show how many direct and indirect barriers exist to progressive reform, such as politics, poor leadership, and due process failures. Despite the hopes of the public for a simple solution to police brutality, Skolnick and Fyfe do not credit a single reform that would set policing straighter than it was yesterday. Using the success stories of Murphy’s anti-corruption reforms in New York City and the Dade County reforms, a plurality of reforms were not only successful because they responded to specific issues, but also in their loud condemnation of a harmful culture.
Concluding their findings, Skolnick and Fyfe emphasize the overlooked necessity of defining police work by stating that this ambiguity carries strong consequences for police and the public alike. In opposition against defining police tasks purely by number of arrests, the authors base an appropriate definition in one bound to “to protect life,” considering that policy implementation with this emphasis have been successful in the past (245-6). Additionally, the authors state that the police role should be centered about the public whom they serve. From this, the police should proactively mobilize community resources, seek long-term solutions to crimes, and display representativeness that reflects the social change in their society (257; 241). With a proper definition of good policing and acceptance of internal rather than external checks, accountability systems can more practically work as reward systems for cops who do good police work (218; 236). Just as insularity is the fundamental problem with police abuses, openness might be seen as the fundamental solution.
While Skolnick and Fyfe engage the issue thoroughly, one might argue that their likeness to layering the major subjects at hand can decrease the text’s accessibility with casual readers. Following an introduction to the King beating, the book is divided into occasions, explanations, and remedies as they relate to policing. While absolutely strict adherence to these topics within their section could only be promised in reference books, one might argue that their layering of these sections sacrifices the organization of this information-dense book. For example, Skolnick and Fyfe seem to offer a remedy in the explanation section of the text when insisting that police ought to be considered “valued members of the communities” in which they serve, and “prized members of their departments” for which they work (133).
However, these criticisms are likely to only strike a chord with readers who prioritize strict categorization of information over strong arguments, if such a reader exists. In truth, their reference to occasions, explanations, and remedies outside of their respective sections serves an important role in the discussion of the topic. Naturally, using specific historical examples of policing within a discussion of remedies only seeks to strengthen the arguments made at that stage, such as when the authors continue the Philadelphia narrative after Mayor Frank Rizzo to show the fallibility of sweeping philosophical changes within a department (178). Examples like this one are clearly very deliberate and focused on the points of the author at that point. This is not to say that organization is ideal within the text. Certain large ideas, such as the tenures of police chiefs, are spread between the parts of the book without a clear, cohesive development or dedicated discussion of it. However, the problems with the example of tenure are not self-contained; tenure has implications for accountability, tyranny, and departmental ethos, which spring up periodically throughout the text. The authors simply worked to relate a plurality of interwoven factors, and inevitably tenure comes up.
Far from being a book tied to emotive calls for a system that treats every person as equals, Above the Law provides a thorough picture of the legal, historical, and societal context in which the critical tasks of American police meet street-level practice. Skolnick and Fyfe’s work give any interested reader thorough knowledge and understanding of the complexity of policing and the plurality of factors that both shape and rigidify it. Within an issue that invites knee-jerk reactions on both sides, Above the Law provides an accessible resource to the incredible amount of considerations necessary in understanding the failures of policing, and a path for a better future. Although the incredible volume of examples and demand for explanation means the organization of the text may strike some readers as difficult, the relevance of these sections makes them a necessary part of explaining the important parts of the book. Above the Law proves to be a valuable work because of the incredible breadth and depth of coverage of issues most readers would not believe relate to policing, and its occasionally complex organizational patterns might be said to represent the complexity of police violence today. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in an institution rarely understood by the public.
Published in 1993, Above the Law served, and no doubt still serves, as a much-needed explanation to puzzled citizens for how policing can both aim to protect citizens and dominate them with virulence. Though public opinion can swing wildly between assumptions that police officers are inherently racist, that every brutal incident is perpetrated by bad apples who slipped through the cracks, or that policing bodies systematically aim to keep minorities under, the authors seek to ground these soundbites in an accurate depiction of policing in America.
The authors introduce this issue with a recap and aftermath of the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles. The event garnered worldwide attention because of the infamous camcorder video forever associated with the event. Skolnick and Fyfe contextualize the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) by pulling from aspects of each of the book’s three parts as it relates to the case of Rodney King. They give a brief history of the LAPD, specially focusing on more brutal moments that have similarities to the King incident. One such example was the “no knock” entry of Jessie Larez’s residence in search for a gun, where an LAPD CRASH unit forcibly entered Larez’s home and violently assaulted him and his family without ever turning up with the gun they had expected to find (4-5). Skolnick and Fyfe introduce some of the more alarming by-products of culture among large police departments. In reference to the King footage, where the bystanding officers were seen as enablers of unjust brutality, the authors point out the organizational tradition of “cops [protecting] other cops” (7). Implicating the justice system, the authors mention the difficulty of practically bringing this behavior to justice in absence of the offense of specific statutes despite public outcry demanding that those who protect us act more like good samaritans and less like silent justifiers. Not only is the urgency of the topic sufficiently introduced using only facts of the situation, testimonies, and reasonable conclusions, much of the general topics Skolnick and Fyfe introduce in this chapter recounting the Rodney King incident are elaborated thoroughly throughout the text.
Emphasizing the racial dimension of the Rodney King beating and other police acts of violence against black Americans since then, they consider the history of the U.S. and how policing bodies conformed to a societal hatred of black Americans since emancipation. Resisting the notion that King’s beating was a situation that unexpectedly got “out of control,” the authors interject that the incident was a “symbolic lynching.” Skolnick and Fyfe challenge readers who believe lynching to be a veangeful relic of a past we would rather forget, breaking the schema by re-stating its sinister function: “[controlling] a population thought to be undesirable… and underpunished by established law” (23-24).
The authors legitimize their points about the aspects of policing that rhyme with that of a less equal society by identifying a few ways that policing has changed, the largest of which has been the establishment of more legalizing policing bodies since the 19th century. They dedicate a chapter to the evolution of the “third degree,” referring to harsh questioning by the police where there is opportunity for physical or psychological abuse. Although this aspect of policing has increased its standards for detainee treatment, the improvement was facilitated by procedural means to avoid treatment usually reserved for terrorists today rather than a gradual change in fundamental police attitudes. Police practices met unwelcome restraint from the Supreme Court during the Due Process Revolution of the Earl Warren era, such as with the Gideon v. Wainwright (1964) and Miranda v. Arizona (1966) decisions which ensured that the accused would be granted counsel and hear their rights before an avoidable confession, respectively. While it threatened the agenda of police operators who hoped to engage in gatehouse justice, the Skolnick and Fyfe temper the readers’ expectations on the might of the court to change policing, noting that it is regularly a force that is publicly overestimated. After all, resentful cops who would rather continue “street level justice” probably won’t adhere to rules made by those who surely don’t understand the job, especially when there is not a culture of accountability within their department (195). While there was a clear decreasing trend, the U.S. culture legitimized extralegal policing both before and after emancipation, which clearly supports brutality especially against minorities.
From their introduction of historical and contemporary policing, Skolnick and Fyfe focus their attention to factors and concepts that directly and indirectly affect the conduct of police departments to answer the question of how police can heroically serve the public one day, then proceed to beat citizens and lie about it the next. The authors run through many surface-level shortcomings of police departments such as lifetime appointments of chiefs, lack of accountability, and lack of representativeness. While these certainly perpetuate poor policing and are strongly related to more fundamental explanations of poor policing, removing these shortcomings does not prevent the primary issues with policing that lead to abuse (170). By recognizing the fundamental issues of policing, the authors seek to prevent surface-level blemishes by introducing more intelligent reforms.
Skolnick and Fyfe introduce the perception of cops as soldiers as a fundamental failure of policing. This perception proves to be harmful whether it stems from the public or from cops: antagonism grows if citizens perceive themselves on one side of a war against the police, and cops have to accept their role as frontline soldiers in a “no-win” conflict with cynicism and passivism. Not only does this idea encourage violence toward the citizenry, it “diverts attention from more effective strategies for crime control.” (114-115). The authors connect the military culture to the tendency of measuring success quantitatively, as when Vietnam soldiers were valued based on how many men they killed. In the obsession with quantitative results, cops are less likely to be valued as more than those who do grunt work, and traits of being a good cop, such as solution building and level-headedness, are hardly acknowledged and rarely rewarded (126).
If there is a single concept that might explain much of the downfalls of policing, it would have to be insularity because of its status as a root cause of how the police system operates. Though police’s closed-mindedness might be seen as an obvious vice for a department aimed at serving the public, insularity in practice has the effect of enhancing “group loyalty,” which is not inherently undesirable. However, the same insularity is likely to “breed abuse, violence, and secrecy” (134). Skolnick and Fyfe find that the insulated professional environment of police shapes their distinct world view, just as it would for insulated doctors and lawyers. Naturally, it is impossible to ignore the vital role of police in society, and how it is often different from other professions whose clientele are rarely unwilling participants. The adversarial environment seen often by field officers breeds the paranoid一but valid一concern that anything can happen at any time for any reason. The authors’ input of a balanced and understanding review of policing not only informs readers of the whole issue, but also on the necessity to address the cause at its root.
Through observing efforts of police reform, Skolnick and Fyfe emphasize the entrenched nature of policing. Through examples of reform failures, they show how many direct and indirect barriers exist to progressive reform, such as politics, poor leadership, and due process failures. Despite the hopes of the public for a simple solution to police brutality, Skolnick and Fyfe do not credit a single reform that would set policing straighter than it was yesterday. Using the success stories of Murphy’s anti-corruption reforms in New York City and the Dade County reforms, a plurality of reforms were not only successful because they responded to specific issues, but also in their loud condemnation of a harmful culture.
Concluding their findings, Skolnick and Fyfe emphasize the overlooked necessity of defining police work by stating that this ambiguity carries strong consequences for police and the public alike. In opposition against defining police tasks purely by number of arrests, the authors base an appropriate definition in one bound to “to protect life,” considering that policy implementation with this emphasis have been successful in the past (245-6). Additionally, the authors state that the police role should be centered about the public whom they serve. From this, the police should proactively mobilize community resources, seek long-term solutions to crimes, and display representativeness that reflects the social change in their society (257; 241). With a proper definition of good policing and acceptance of internal rather than external checks, accountability systems can more practically work as reward systems for cops who do good police work (218; 236). Just as insularity is the fundamental problem with police abuses, openness might be seen as the fundamental solution.
While Skolnick and Fyfe engage the issue thoroughly, one might argue that their likeness to layering the major subjects at hand can decrease the text’s accessibility with casual readers. Following an introduction to the King beating, the book is divided into occasions, explanations, and remedies as they relate to policing. While absolutely strict adherence to these topics within their section could only be promised in reference books, one might argue that their layering of these sections sacrifices the organization of this information-dense book. For example, Skolnick and Fyfe seem to offer a remedy in the explanation section of the text when insisting that police ought to be considered “valued members of the communities” in which they serve, and “prized members of their departments” for which they work (133).
However, these criticisms are likely to only strike a chord with readers who prioritize strict categorization of information over strong arguments, if such a reader exists. In truth, their reference to occasions, explanations, and remedies outside of their respective sections serves an important role in the discussion of the topic. Naturally, using specific historical examples of policing within a discussion of remedies only seeks to strengthen the arguments made at that stage, such as when the authors continue the Philadelphia narrative after Mayor Frank Rizzo to show the fallibility of sweeping philosophical changes within a department (178). Examples like this one are clearly very deliberate and focused on the points of the author at that point. This is not to say that organization is ideal within the text. Certain large ideas, such as the tenures of police chiefs, are spread between the parts of the book without a clear, cohesive development or dedicated discussion of it. However, the problems with the example of tenure are not self-contained; tenure has implications for accountability, tyranny, and departmental ethos, which spring up periodically throughout the text. The authors simply worked to relate a plurality of interwoven factors, and inevitably tenure comes up.
Far from being a book tied to emotive calls for a system that treats every person as equals, Above the Law provides a thorough picture of the legal, historical, and societal context in which the critical tasks of American police meet street-level practice. Skolnick and Fyfe’s work give any interested reader thorough knowledge and understanding of the complexity of policing and the plurality of factors that both shape and rigidify it. Within an issue that invites knee-jerk reactions on both sides, Above the Law provides an accessible resource to the incredible amount of considerations necessary in understanding the failures of policing, and a path for a better future. Although the incredible volume of examples and demand for explanation means the organization of the text may strike some readers as difficult, the relevance of these sections makes them a necessary part of explaining the important parts of the book. Above the Law proves to be a valuable work because of the incredible breadth and depth of coverage of issues most readers would not believe relate to policing, and its occasionally complex organizational patterns might be said to represent the complexity of police violence today. I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in an institution rarely understood by the public.
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