Racism and the Challenge of Implementing Systemic Change after Black Protest

• In Event: Black Lives, Black Deaths, and Black Protest: Political Scientists Respond (Anew) to a Persistent Challenge: Policy Implications of the Black Lives Matter Protests

Abstract

Police reforms since at least the Kerner Commission have repeatedly failed to address the brutal treatment of Black Americans in neighborhoods across the US. Past reforms have tended to be small fixes to big systemic problems; routinely failing to change the nature of policing or its deadly outcomes.

Today, a new wave of protests led by a very different set of movement leaders aim to create the programs and policies needed to keep communities safe from historic patterns of violence and new forms of abuse. As opposed to the changes advocated for in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and others just five years ago--which included mandatory body-worn cameras and officer bias training--protesters are pushing for systemic change, not just policy change. These calls for police defunding, dismantling, or abolition represent a new challenge for scholars with few historical precedents.

Scholars of public organizations and the study of implementation, in particular, offer several theoretical approaches to understanding how and why policies fail or succeed. Unfortunately, the entire study of implementation has often faltered over the inability to conceptualize and measure the pernicious role of racism. We argue that a starting point to evaluate the potential outcomes of recent protests and calls for systemic change is to better situate racism in the study of policy implementation. This is especially important for understanding why past incremental changes to policing--many well-resourced and nominally supported by police leadership--have not ultimately changed police officer behavior. If racism is to be taken seriously by public administration scholars, then a new conceptual understanding is called for along with better efforts to operationalize the crippling impact racism has on public organizations.

In our paper, we make an initial effort to do just this by contrasting lessons from failed police reforms of the past with the new calls for system-wide changes to policing. We focus primarily on two dimensions of institutional-centered change that is: (1) implementation through the courts and consent decrees; and (2) implementation through collective bargaining and unions. In each case, we identify aspects of the literature that can inform what is to come next, as well as limitations of existing research that must be addressed, to better understand change in policing.

Authors

• Fernando Arturo Tormos Aponte, University of Maryland Baltimore County

• Heath Brown, City University of New York, Graduate Center and John Jay College

• James E Wright II, Florida State University Askew School of Public Administration and Policy