Introduction

The American policeman regards himself as the embodiment of society's legitimate power of violence. When in uniform, he carries a billy-club, he wears an ammunition belt and a holster with a gun in it, his handcuffs dangle from the belt, he frequently sports a crash helmet, and he carries mace and other incapacitating chemicals.

Aggression and violence probably mean about the same thing to most people, but dic­tionary definitions say that the former indicates commencing an attack, an assault, an in­vasion, or more generally, hostile actions not necessarily involving the use of physical force, while the latter means physical force exerted for the purpose of violating, damag­ing, or abusing. We tend to conceptualize the origins and functions of aggressive or vio­lent behavior in similar ways, too. Theories range along the traditional nature-nurture continuum and attribute aggression and violence to variable individual genetic predispo­sitions, a natural response to certain stressful stimuli, to socialization, or to a combination of these factors (e.g., Myers 1993).

Our look at police violence and police uses of force policies will show considerable evidence to suggest that both are very much shaped by historical, social, and cultural contexts. So much diversity in types and frequency of “legal force” by police or analo­gous social actors exists that we are compelled to admit significant social and cultural mediation of whatever else may be going on when violence is wrought. Police use of force policies also varies between jurisdictions and across time, and so does the extent to which actual practices conform to formal policies, randomly deviate from the norm, or suggest covert shaping by informal policies.

Today, use of force incidents in the United States often precipitate controversy.

Our perspective on lawful violent behavior starts from Bohannan's concept of legal systems as doubly institutionalized norms and customs and in terms of what he labels “colonial law.” Bohannan (1967: 51-52) considered colonial law to be the result of a pe­culiar and passing situation characterized by a unicentric power system controlling popu­lations with two or more distinct legal cultures. For him, the defining traits of colonial law are a “systematic misunderstanding” between the two cultures within the single power system, with constant revolutionary proclivities resulting from what is, at best, a “working misunderstanding.” Bohannan distinguishes the contradictions or disjunctions of colonial law from problems of “phase” which seem to be similar in nature and out­come but are more properly characteristic of modern, unitary municipal systems of law:

A legal culture, for the present purposes, is that which is subscribed to (whether they know anything about it or not, and whether they act within it or “agree” with it or not) by the people of society... Municipal systems, of the sort studied by most jurists, deal with a single legal culture with a unicentric power system. Subcultures in such a society may create vast problems of law's being out of phase with the customs and mores of parts of the society, but is a problem of phase.

There are implicity evolutionary assumptions in Bohannan's typology, for example when he (1967: 52) relegates the colonial pattern to the dustbin of history and observes:

We are only now far enough removed from colonies—now that they are obsolete—to begin a thorough examination of the effect that colonial powers had, via such a system, on the legal systems of the countries in which they were found.

Police agencies are a part of our legal system, and the system is organized along clas­sic bureaucratic lines (e.g., Weber 1964: 329-341). Particular bureaucracies can be looked at as institutions with the usual array of structural-functional features such as charter, rules, staff, and the like. Neither real bureaucratic organizations nor the extent of bureaucratization of some aspect of human life are unchanging or constant. Recent trends in our legal system and institutions run toward increased bureaucratic complexity and in­creased applicability to a growing list of human relations. For example:

The transition of nineteenth-century civil law systems into the twentieth century is closely tied to the transformation of liberal laissez-faire governments into modern social welfare states with planned or regulated economies...the gradual shift away from nineteenth-century liberalism and the market economy has meant a shift in emphasis from private or civil law to public law The legal order has begun increasingly to take on the

characteristics of a bureaucratic, or administrative order (Glendon, Gordon, and Osakwe 1982: 47).

Both in relation to legal institutions and other formal or intentional groupings, we explore the occurrence and effects of two varieties of bureaucratic organization: mock bureaucracy (Gouldner 1964) and the administered community (e.g., Kushner 1973). The first is conceptualized as an explicitly pathological or dysfunctional condition of af­fected organizations, the second implicitly so, at least, due to an assumed decoupling ef­fect whereby various societal subgroups are estranged not only from meaningful partici­pation in governance and control over relations of production, but also lose much of their autonomy over their neighborhoods, child-rearing and education practices, and many other “intimate” activities that traditionally were regulated mostly by custom as inter­preted within a local group.

Concurrent with these changes has been an elaboration of and increased ideological and practical focus on persons' rights to due process of law and freedom from unreason­able search or seizure and cruel or unusual punishment. What is unreasonable or cruel or unusual are in particular not static concepts and have been changing or vacillating a great deal over the last five decades. We propose, in general, that the dominant legal cultural perspective has tended to shift towards opposition to corporal punishment in sentencing and use of force in law enforcement.

The changes discussed above reflect a movement to bring equality to the legal stand­ing and treatment of persons as individuals. At the same time, increased immigration, and perhaps internal differentiation (e.g., Green 1981), have resulted in growing cultural and social diversity, especially with the surge of immigration after the early 1970s and changes in the cultural and socio-economic composition and background of new arrivals. We have recently attempted to deal legally with groups in much the same way that we have dealt with individuals. Treatment of immigrant groups-qua-groups, and of newly incorporated peoples (e.g., the Chamorros of Guam after the island's acquisition from Spain), has in many ways paralleled the treatment of our indigenous Indian populations with shifts in policy and practice that emphasize separation (e.g., exclusion in enclaves), coercive assimilation, restoration or recognition of special groups status, and termination of special groups statuses previously restored or recognized (Spicer 1980: 178-195). The current dominant philosophy seems to promote policies tolerant of multiculturalism, cul­tural pluralism, or general diversity. Because the political discussions and debates on both sides of the issue tend to be venomous and muddled, it is sometimes difficult to guess what someone who supports or opposes multiculturalist policies has in mind.

If police violence and reactions to it are mostly dependent variables shaped by cul­ture and social context, some cultural and social variables identified above are, in our thinking, at the root of what has been going on in the world of police-violence-as-public- issue, and the product is probably somewhat indicative of what is to be expected if this community of trends persists.