PART I: Opening
Chapter 4. The view from the top: Doing it correctly
As I engaged in conversations and worked together with police officials across hierarchical strata, it became evident that individual concerns, practices and power privileges associated with innovation and creativity within the police are, in fact, disciplined by the impact of hierarchy. It became clear that this was the most critical theme to engage with here.
police that could compromise public appreciation of the police while at the same time making it possible for everyone to act creatively.
I would argue that the way that top managers deal with this dilemma is by
‘nesting’ innovation, that is, by using and inventing managerial techniques, such as advanced suggestion boxes, that invite ideas from their employees but do not compromise top-managerial control, supervision, or other parts of the disciplinary apparatus.
By inventing such techniques (which let the rank and file disclose ideas to management, and let managers evaluate and use them as they wish), top managers assure that they retain control of what happens with the ideas that the rank and file suggest.
Concerns of legitimacy
Top managers at the district level and in the National Police are strongly motivated to keep the police force on track in responding to both demands for reform and other urgent strategic or spontaneous demands. Top managers also have direct responsibility and are obliged to answer parliamentary questions through the legal committee of the Ministry of Justice and to be readily available to the press.
Thus, top-managers have to maintain a delicate balance between external and internal communication and decision making in support of a legitimate, responsible, and modern organization, an organization that at the same time relies heavily on culturally embedded practices and perspectives.
Therefore, what seems to dominate the view from the top of the hierarchy are concerns about the external and internal legitimacy of the police and how it is managed. In this process, top management has taken up innovation and inscribed it into an overall strategic plan for the National Police and prosecution for 2011-2015. Innovation thus serves top management as a political discourse and a rhetorical signal to internal and external audiences that the police will ‘strengthen the organization from within’ as the police commissioner has emphasized on different occasions.
The macro-political discourse of innovation mirrored in the joint strategy installs entrepreneurial ideals that empower every individual to contribute to the fulfillment of ideas within the organization, increase creative performance, and thereby ensure the national welfare.
The strategy is issued as “… a natural step in the midst of our change process and which should result in a better and more effective business”, and strategic innovation is emphasized as one of six strategic responses to a range of growing internal and external challenges. In the strategy, strategic innovation is operationalized as follows (my translation):
“We must ensure that we have the capacity to adapt in line with emerging new technologies, types of crime, patterns of crime and the overall development of society. This demands that we constantly - at all levels and together with our partners – challenge the possibilities to develop and diffuse new methods and approaches to solve our tasks while to an even greater extend draw on international experiences. We will be working with initiatives within the following areas:
Innovation inspired by managers, employees and external partners
Diffusion of “best practice”
Systematic evaluation of solutions and results
Technologization (teknologisering) and IT-support”
For the first time innovation is cited as a separate strategic objective for the Danish police. In describing police as a business (virksomhed), the strategy echoes the discourse of enterprise (see chapter 1). In response to the tendency for reform rhetoric to focus on the faults and dangers of public institutions (Miller & Rose, 1990) and in line with the set of strategies developed by the government and other public agencies, innovation is staged as an abstracted and universal solution to a complex of societal challenges.
More specifically, innovation, as presented in the strategy and signed onto by the national police commissioner and the head of prosecution, is rooted in the aim of top management to have the police force perform according to the ideals of a lean and profitable enterprise. Mirroring the ideal of the enterprise, the strategy rhetorically subjects individual organizational members ‘at all levels’ and external partners of cooperation to the politics of innovation.
On several occasions, the national police commissioner has repeated his invitation to innovate at ‘all levels’ and to ‘make ideas penetrate through the Rockwool20 layers in the organization’ (få ideer til at trænge igennem organisationens Rockwool lag).
Many public and private executive boards have appointed an ‘innovation manager’, established a ‘center of innovation’ or, in the case of the police, a
20 Rockwool refers to isolation for buildings and is the name of the Danish isolation company that produces it.
department of ‘Business Development’ (Da. Forretningsudvikling) led by a
‘business development manager’ (Da. forretningsudviklingschef).
When one of the top managers presented this new department to some of the employees in the National Police, he suddenly fell silent for a moment, looked down, and said: “Frankly, I really don’t like the new name of the department. I believe we are offering a public service, not products produced in an assembly line. But the reason for getting a business development department is that this is what others have outside [of the police organization].”
Even if this particular comment may have been made to make the manager look good in the eyes of his staff, this skepticism toward politically driven
‘privatization’ of the police in conformity with rational economic thinking is widely shared by the Danish police. At least at this point, they complain that such rhetoric undermines the unique and proud tradition of their work, which in many other respects, is constantly threatened by external critique.
The shift in rhetoric also reflects neo-liberal governmentality, and its push for public sector agencies to prove their market value and optimize their value to stakeholders in the society at large (see also Dean 2010a).
Top police managers describe ‘strategic innovation’ in internal and external media, conversations and interviews as new (or at least different) ways of formulating strategies, announcement of new standards and conceptual programs (such as crime prevention guidelines), new educational reforms, new managerial concepts, policing paradigms, policing programs, and other initiatives that encompass a broad scope of change.
Innovation works as a discursive means of meeting the demands and expectations of politics and the public as top managers make an effort to justify the police force
as a responsibly managed government agency. However, this message does not achieve an easy landing as it hits the institutional ground.
For example, the delegation of responsibility to innovate is an implicit departure from the culturally embedded privilege of management to know and to know best, which has continued to be cultivated in police management training to this day.
The power to know and to know best
In his presentation of governmentality in 1973, Foucault proposed, with reference to Nietzsche, that ‘if we truly wish to know knowledge… we must look not to philosophers but to politicians - we need to understand what the relations of struggle and power are’ (Foucault 1978a).
The ways that knowledge works as a managerial privilege was a recurrent theme for the people I encountered in the police force, including the managers themselves. As an ironic police saying goes: “your knowledge shows from the number of stars on the shoulder” (din viden fremgår af antallet af stjerner på skulderen).
Top managers act as final judges between good and bad suggestions and initiatives that fall within their domain of responsibility. And the cultural practices surrounding hierarchical privilege play a significant role in shaping how top managers understand, practice, and discipline innovation down the ranks.
One particularly noteworthy power struggle plays out between police and lawyers, as was earlier emphasized in the outline of the history of the modern institution of the police in Denmark. As we saw in chapter 2, lawyers have historically been assigned exclusive hierarchical privileges, and have managed to maintain this
position until this day, despite the external Vision Committee’s statement that a higher degree in Law does not necessarily make a competent manager.
Until recently, it has been a legal requirement that top police managers must have a master’s degree in law, something which has not been the case in other Scandinavian countries. However, this requirement has recently been changed in response to a statement by an external review committee that a higher degree in law does not necessarily make for competent leadership.
One argument for placing legal experts in top positions is the value of their in-depth legal knowledge when dealing with affairs of state, including the monopoly on, violence and deprivation of personal liberties.
Knowing the legal framework, specifics and innovation of law and ethics is a fundamental aspect of contemporary, just policing. Therefore, knowledge about legal practices and systems of disciplinary means of control and inspection do serve ‘higher’ principles of disciplinary and democratic governmentalities, such as transparent and just means of policing.
However, because top managers are hierarchically granted the right to know, this right automatically colonizes other areas of expertise.
In the case of the Danish police, lawyers have, at least until recently, been granted the privilege to know about a wide range of subjects, including the law, human resources, and finance. De Certeau explained this as a dynamic of knowledge displacement. The privilege to know and to know best goes beyond the expertise of an authority, which can result in ‘mistaken identity’. In the police force, where a manager assumes the role of expert qua his or her position within the hierarchy
‘He misunderstands the order which he represents. He no longer knows what he is saying’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 8).
Hence, those areas of knowledge that lie beyond an authority’s actual knowledge, are at risk of being neglected, as de Certeau pointed out: ‘Since he cannot limit himself to talking about what he knows, the Expert pronounces on the basis of the place that his specialty has won for him’ (De Certeau 1984, p. 8).
Confrontations arise especially when legal experts interfere with professional assessments that lie beyond their area of expertise. This is a common frustration throughout the police organization, expressed in the phrase, ‘at university, law students get a chip operated into their brain programming them to think they know it all’.
As de Certeau makes clear, however, the managerial privilege to know more than one actually knows is a general theme, and this also applies for managers with a background as police officers. For example, in an interview, a rank and file police officer in his early thirties expresses his frustrations with a managerial decision to organize patrol officers into larger units:
“So, there is no doubt that this idea comes from the very top; but I mean, to cops, trust is crucial. In large units you can’t know everybody. And there are certain situations when you need to know your partner to feel safe if all hell breaks loose.
If a colleague you don’t know sits in a corner and looks like shit, you don’t just go to him and say: “Hey, what’s up? Do you want to talk about it?” Maybe he is just weird or something and the next thing you know, you end up on a shitty job with him where he might put you in a bad and dangerous situation… But in order to satisfy some duty management system or something, top managers decide about stuff they don’t know anything about. I mean, if they ever arrested someone themselves you can be damn sure they forgot everything about what life is like on
the streets by now. And things have changed. But who cares but us who have to do the job?”
Due to concerns of efficiency, the sense of safety that younger uniformed officers in particular derive from knowing their partners well is overruled. When I confronted police managers with this issue, some responded that this happens because managers who have not been ‘on the street’ themselves micro-manage without knowing what it really means in practice. One police manager, however, responded that ‘this is just some sort of ‘touchy feely stuff’ from the young colleagues’ implying that there is no need to take their concerns into considerations in regards of this matter.
Legal expertise is often regarded as more sophisticated than the expert knowledge of police, whereas some police professionals tend to consider their knowledge to be better grounded in ‘reality out there’ (virkeligheden derude) and the ‘dirty job’
it sometimes involves. Although some lawyers and police officers are able to distance themselves from this divide, it is repeatedly staged in everyday scenarios, as indicated by the following story.
At a Christmas party in the National Police, people would first meet in their departments and then congregate in larger rooms. As we started to gather, the lawyers would herd together in a hall where they socialized in a loud and stiff manner, primarily with each other, while drinking alcohol (probably cognac) from small glasses. The police officers, on the other hand, moved around talking to almost everyone they knew or wanted to know, while drinking draft beer from large plastic cups; as they drank more beer, some of the male cops hit on the young and stylish female lawyers who clustered together in the
bar, often with no luck. One cop vomited against the wall in the hall right behind a group of head-shaking lawyers, and had to be carried out and put in a taxi to drive him home.
Police are notorious for their wild partying, and lawyers enjoy pointing out that characteristic of cops.
Until recently, legal knowledge has also dominated police management recruitment and training.
A rank and file officer describes how he opted out of earlier management training opportunities in response to that same divide:
“I was asked if I wanted to be a manager, and I thought: why not? Then I joined a course on police knowledge (politikundskab). They wanted me to write twenty assignments, pure police stuff. This is twice as much as what you write during PG3 [last year of basic training for recruits]. I was supposed to sit and read stuff about a case from the eighteen-hundreds, something about a dad who wanted his money back because his son had lost too much money in Tivoli [a Danish amusement park] without his dad’s approval. I mean, I was thinking: this is really far out! What the fuck am I doing here? This has nothing to do with leadership;
this is basic police knowledge. They [those who were in charge of the training]
truly believed that a manager is someone who knows everything about the law! I knew it was like that, that knowledge is power in the police, but if this was really how they trained their managers I didn’t want to be one. So I told them that I didn’t want to do it. To me, leadership is about managing and distributing work and to motivate your employees by asking: “How was it with the foreigner proceedings (udlændingesagen). I don’t know about the specifics, I take care of general stuff”. As a result managers today just look at the stars on their own
shoulders counting ‘one-two-three’, “oh I am the expert here!” There is no involvement of other people’s knowledge because who is there to learn from when you have been fooled to think that you are the king of knowledge?”
Apparently, knowing ‘everything about the law’ has been a criterion for access among police professionals who had the ambition to climb up the ranks.
This is supported by a member of a group of district top managers who explained how selection and motivation of police professional talents used to be based on legal expertise:
“One of my former team leaders was a fabulous administrator and a lousy manager. But this was the only means available for us to reward talented employees: by promoting them to managers so that they could get a higher salary.
I don’t think that it’s quite like that today, but it means that we still have a great number of those people in charge.”
As a professional field, policing is governed by legal expertise. To promote justice, as this notion has evolved particularly over the past two centuries, legal scrutiny should weed out any initiative that would compromise justice. Therefore, in the process of approving any new practice, technology or other means of policing, it needs to pass through a review by legal experts to make sure that it is proper and right to use. This is an important procedure for securing both legal and ethical principles, such as the protection of human rights and personal data. But to police officers and middle managers, who often think that their pragmatic concerns are being overruled by legal and financial arguments, some of which make no sense to them, the privilege of legal knowledge over police knowledge can cause many frustrations.
And in some cases, the principle of ‘any lawyer will do’ does not match the particular demands of new practices, technology, weapons or other material, which 1) call for highly specialized legal competencies 2) call for a certain level of authority because they potentially lead to modifications in law and regulation 3) call for interdisciplinary collaboration and complex process development;
something that might be difficult to achieve in a setting with very limited diversity of professional perspectives.
As a result, lawyers are notoriously known as ‘nay sayers’ (nej sigere) and ‘party spoilers’ (lyseslukkere) when it comes to seriously considering the merits of suggestions from other domains of the organization. Some of the lawyers I spoke with pointed out that they do not necessarily see it as part of their job to get involved with the time-consuming process of solving these complicated but often low status issues.
Thus, as we have seen, the privilege to know has primarily been granted historically to legal experts, who have also been granted the privilege of appointment as top managers.
But as Foucault points out, power is not something that one possesses, it is enacted. ‘The more one possesses power or privilege, the more one is marked as an individual, by rituals, written accounts or visual reproductions’, he wrote (Foucault 1977, p. 192).
The techniques used by top managers to sustain their privilege to know have a major effect on the disciplinary setting that one experiences in everyday life in the police force.
For example, the power to know among top managers is closely related to being excused for failure, as suggested by common sayings among employees and
managers, such as ‘shit runs down-hill’ (lort glider nedad), ‘chief superintendent is difficult to become but easy to be’ (politiinspektør er svært at blive men nemt at være) and ‘a police inspector never fails’ (en politiinspektør fejler aldrig).
When I participated in a management meeting where the discussion was how to implement a politically chosen new means of evaluation that the managers knew would be highly unpopular among their staff, a police manager who had recently been promoted leaned back in his chair and said:
“That is not our headache. We who sit around this table decide everything. Luckily we still live in a system in which we can still kick down through the ranks and if they don’t eat what we serve them we just kick harder”.
Although this remark was received with varying degrees of support from the other managers, it echoes a legacy that is evident among some managers, of having a sovereign power to know what is best to do, irrespective that those at lower ranks might know differently.
When I talked to top managers who were known among their staff and other colleagues to be particularly open to modern ideas in their management style, they would often still reserve to themselves the privilege that their knowledge, and hence their authority, should never be directly challenged. When I asked a well-liked top managers about how he would advise a young recruit to present his or her ideas to their managers he replied:
“Most importantly, you must not be ‘Mr. or Mrs. know it all’. It is okay to contribute with good ideas. However, you need to be convincing and what you present should of course make sense. We are talking here about something which in reality seems like a good idea and will benefit and move the organization”.