UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines the changing relationship between democracy and the police in the last half-century of police form. Specifically, it offers a genealogy of the concept of police discretion in several foundational texts in police science and explores the ways in which the shifting meaning and dangers of police discretion have mediated that relationship. Beginning with President Johnson’s Crime Commission, the dissertation charts how police discretion transformed from the central dilemma of policing in a democratic society to near total disappearance as an object of police reform. In so charting, it shows how the Crime Commission’s preference for controlling discretion through administrative legalism was replaced by a concern for squaring discretion with the norms and standards of legitimacy that underwrite law. That concern is evidence not only in academic studies of police behavior like those developed in the works of Jerome Hall, Jerome Skolnick, James Q. Wilson, and Egon Bittner, but appears as well in the Supreme Court’s Due Process Revolution cases. The dissertation submits that police discretion is best understood in terms of political decisionism, and it argues that these transformations are the result of liberalism’s failure to coherently account for decisionistic power. Consequently, the dissertation contends, police reform has expanded rather than curtailed police discretion and its attendant violence. Moreover, it demonstrates how discretion is reprogrammed in the era of community policing, and it argues that not only is the impasse between police abolition and police reform best understood as a result of liberalism’s faults, but that community policing’s moral-political rationality complicates the prospects for both.