The Speaker

The Workshop

The Good Cop: Knowing the Difference Between Lawful or Effective Policing and Rightful Policing — And Why it Matters : Wednesday, September 29, 2021 09:00A

There are two dominant ways to evaluate the police. The first is whether their conduct comports with the law. The second approach assesses whether they are effective crime fighters. But the assumption no matter the body of law is that more lawfulness is the ideal goal. Effectiveness at crime fighting has become the other police evaluation metric. This yardstick is of newer vintage than lawfulness, and those who wield it are primarily social scientists—criminologists and economists —who attempt to find causal connections between various police practices and crime statistics.

Rightful policing attempts to account for what people say that they care about when assessing police agent behavior specifically and police agencies in general. It is different from lawful policing and efficient policing in at least two ways. First, rightful policing does not depend on the actual lawfulness of police conduct. Instead, rightful policing depends primarily on the procedural justice or fairness of police conduct. Second, rightful policing does not depend on an assessment of police as ever more effective crime fighters, although it turns out that rightful policing often leads to more compliance with the law and therefore lower crime rates. Additionally, and critically, it is likely this way helps us move toward police governance that is substantially, as opposed to rhetorically, democratic.

This presentation will proceed in three parts. It will lay out the two often-used metrics of police evaluation, lawfulness and crimefighting effectiveness; explain the theoretical foundation underlying what may be called rightful policing; and conclude with some implications of both the theory and the empirical results for governing police in a way that is meaningfully democratic. In short, it will sketch out what it could mean to produce the Good Cop.