Our article on why it's hard to reform the police in the U.S.. Instead of focusing on how militarization affects police-public interactions, we focus on how it affects police-city government relations via comparative politics insights on civil-military relations. 1/n doi.org/10.1177/1369...
Why has it been so difficult to reform U.S. policing? We provide a theoretical argument that understanding of the entrenched militarisation and accountability p...
“Leaders create culture; culture drives behavior; behavior produces results” encapsulates what is needed better, I would submit. Derek Chauvin was a known very bad egg. Getting rid of him, though, would have been nearly impossible.
"police forces are likely to undermine civilian authority and proceed unchecked by their putative political superiors: (1) low public legitimacy of civilian government; (2) weak local institutions; and (3) unmet military (police) demands." 2/n
The press also plays a major role. In my city, one of our city council took mild umbrage with the local police for opening fire, unprovoked, as a gay club. Two days later, the paper dropped a sex scandal they'd been sitting on for years. Four days later, he was on a one-way flight San Francisco.
Thank you for working on this and for posting it here. There was a good bit of discussion of the philosophy of civil-military relations at West Point, and it struck me during the police riots in 2020 that I've rarely heard the same discussions around law enforcement.