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Making sense of police reformsJanet Chan

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Vol. 11(3): 323–345; 1362–4806

DOI: 10.1177/1362480607079581

Making sense of police reformsJ A N E T CHAN

University of New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

Sensemaking is an ongoing process members of organizations engage in to explicate their world. When faced with changes in their environment, members try to make sense of uncertainties and disruptions and ‘enact’ their interpretations into the world to give it a sense of order. This article draws on a longitudinal study of police recruits to describe how officers make sense of reforms that haveconsiderably altered the field of policing. It argues that sensemaking provides a processual frame that helps connect Bourdieu’s concepts of field and habitus: it describes how agents translate changes in the field into shared understandings and values that inform the occupational habitus. Sensemaking is thus an important element forthe theorizing of police culture and practice.

Key Words

occupational habitus • organizational change • police culture •police reform • sensemaking

Police reform, culture and practice

The past two decades have seen a flurry of activities in policing to ‘reform’ public police organizations. While much of the reform impetus has come from structural sources such as a neo-liberal mode of governance (O’Malley and Palmer, 1996), recurrent tinkering of police administration and accountability structures has often been the direct consequence of embar- rassed governments reacting to scandals involving police misconduct or corruption (Chan, 1999; Dixon, 2004). Inevitably, part of the reform package involves organizational restructuring, even a change of police leadership, new training initiatives, additional external oversight, changes in policies

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324 Theoretical Criminology 11(3)

and procedures or the establishment of other accountability measures (for Australian examples, see Fitzgerald Report, 1989; Wood Report, 1997; Kennedy Report, 2004). Yet organizational change is notoriously difficult to achieve, especially when it is imposed from above or by external bodies (Chan, 1997; Marks, 2005).

Culture as obstacle

The idea of a recalcitrant police culture being an impediment to reforms is one that has general currency (see, for example, Manning and van Maanen,1978: 267; Brogden and Shearing, 1993: 96). Yet, as argued in ChangingPolice Culture (Chan, 1997), without a closer scrutiny of the concept of‘police culture’, we are no wiser about why reforms fail. To understand the relationship between planned reform and resultant practice, it is vital to examine the complexity of culture, its genesis and institutionalization, its variations within and between organizations, its relationship with the external environment and its capacity to change over time.

I have found it useful to adopt Bourdieu’s (1990, 2000) framework for understanding police culture (see Chan, 1997; Chan et al., 2003; and a similar approach to the theorizing of organizational culture by Hallett, 2003). According to this formulation, social practice is a product of the interaction between the field, the structural environment external to the actor and the habitus, the set of physical, cognitive and emotional dispositions an actor has acquired through individual or group socialization. For policing, the habitus incorporates various dimensions of cultural knowledge, including unexamined assumptions, accepted definitions, tried-and-true methods, shared values, as well as bodily display and physical deportment. The framework allows for the presence of multiple cultures within one organization as well as the possibility of cultural change. This is where Bourdieu’s concept of field and the related notion of capital become crucial: external changes such as a drop in public support as a result of corruption revelations can impact on the values of different forms of capital as well as what counts as symbolic capital.

What happens when a police organization undergoes dramatic ‘reforms’ that substantially alter the distribution of power and symbolic capital? Bourdieu’s framework suggests that when the field is changing, the organizational habitus must adjust. As a result, officers whose habitus is the product of a different field feel like a ‘fish out of water’ in the changed field. Unless they can find an enclave of the organization where change has not occurred, they may have to leave the organization or ‘drop out’ by becom- ing one of the disgruntled officers. Yet the relationship between field and habitus is not well understood. Recent studies of educational reform and technological change suggest that the policing field can be a lot more unstable than previously assumed but aspects of the habitus can be quite recalcitrant (Chan, 2001, 2003; Chan et al., 2003). Bourdieu suggests that any change in habitus in response to its environment is usually incremental:



Chan—Making sense of police reforms 325

Habitus change [sic] constantly in response to new experiences. Dispositions are subject to a kind of permanent revision, but one which is never radical, because it works on the basis of the premises established in the previous state. They are characterized by a combination of constancy and variation which varies according to the individual and his [sic] degree of flexibility or rigidity.

(2000: 161)

This raises the issue of whether more attention should be paid to the emergent qualities of both the field and the habitus at times of change. Terms such as ‘capital’ and ‘dispositions’ seem to imply that a process of congelation has already happened when in fact they may have been‘unfrozen’ by the change and become more fluid and malleable than before. The ‘permanent revision’ that Bourdieu suggests is an important process that requires greater attention: it provides important clues for understanding the recalcitrance or malleability of police culture in the face of change and its attendant consequences. There is a need for a processual analysis that describes how agents translate changes in the field into shared understandings and values that inform the occupational habitus. I believe that sensemaking provides a useful frame for analysing this process.

Sensemaking

Sensemaking—a concept made famous by Karl Weick—has generated a substantial literature and its special place in organizational theory is well acknowledged (see 2006 Special Issue of Organization Studies). In essence, sensemaking is an ongoing process members of organizations engage in to explicate their world (Weick, 1995). When faced with rapid or constant changes in their environment, members try to make sense of uncertainties and disruptions and ‘enact’ their interpretations into the world to give it a sense of order. In Bourdieu’s terms, when the field is changing, members whose habitus was shaped by the previous state of the field may find that they can no longer continue with the ‘game’ they have been used to playing. The question becomes ‘What is the new game?’ or ‘What’s the story here?’ (Weick et al., 2005: 410).

Sensemaking in organizations has a number of distinctive features (Weick,1995). It is intimately connected with identity and identity construction. When an organization’s image or reputation is under threat, individuals within it are ‘personally motivated to preserve a positive organizational image and repair a negative one through association and dissociation with actions on issues’ (Dutton and Dukerich, 1991: 548, cited in Weick, 1995:21). In this way, sensemaking is important for the preservation of self-esteem and the organization’s public presentation. Sensemaking creates meaning retrospectively, so that ‘whatever is occurring at the moment will influence what is discovered when people glance backward’ (Weick, 1995: 26). Thus, people at different points in time or occupying different roles in organizations may read ‘the same events’ differently. Sensemaking organizes chaos or




flux—it helps members come to grips with confusion or complexity. However, once a feeling of ‘order, clarity and rationality’ is achieved, people often stop this process of retrospective processing (Weick, 1995: 29). The act of ‘making sense’ creates (‘enacts’) the environment people face. In the same way that in Bourdieu’s theory the habitus ‘contributes to constituting the field as a meaningful world, a world endowed with sense and value’ (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992: 127), sensemaking ‘creates objects for sens- ing or the structures of structuration’ (Weick, 1995: 36). Thus, through making sense of their world, agents socially create a world that in turn becomes a ‘real’ world that ‘constrains actions and orientations’: as Weick sees it, sensemaking is ‘the feedstock for institutionalization’ (1995: 36).

Sensemaking in organizations is a social process. It does not happen just within a member’s head; it changes through discussions and interactions among members and is influenced by other social and organizational factors. Sense is communicated to other members of the organization and it is through this articulation and sharing that tacit knowledge becomes part of the new occupational habitus. However, Weick warns against assuming that ‘shared understanding’ is the only outcome of social sensemaking; it is the ‘experience of the collective action that is shared’ (Weick, 1995: 42). In fact, as Hallett points out, members of organizations have differential access to ‘symbolic power’ (which he defined as the power to define the situation) and there may be ‘competing pockets of symbolic power … tied to different audiences who draw from different sources of legitimacy’ so that both consensus and conflict are possible outcomes of ‘negotiations’ (2003: 135).

Sensemaking is ongoing. This is similar to Bourdieu’s ‘permanent revision’ quoted earlier, but Weick suggests that sensemaking ‘never starts’ because people ‘are always in the middle of things, which become things only when those same people focus on the past from some point beyond it’ (1995: 43). However, the ongoing flow of experience is sometimes inter- rupted, and interruptions can induce an emotional response. Although positive emotional responses are possible, organizations are typically more conducive to negative emotions since members usually have little control over interruptions which happen frequently in the form of organizational change, budget cuts, restructuring and so on.

Sensemaking is also focused on ‘extracted cues’. It begins with ‘noticing and bracketing’—members are guided by their acquired habitus to interpret the situation they are faced with. It is also about labelling; the ‘dictionary knowledge’ (Sackmann, 1991) of the occupational habitus provides categories for members to stabilize the meaning of their experience. Sensemaking links the local and concrete with the abstract and is also about action; members do not just form interpretations and assign categories to their experience, they also ‘act thinkingly’: ‘they simultaneously interpret their knowledge with trusted frameworks, yet mistrust those very same frameworks by testing new frameworks and new interpretations’ (Weick et al., 2005: 412). But extracted cues often have a quality of self-fulfilling prophecy, so that they can become‘acts of faith amid interdeterminacy that set sensemaking in motion’ (Weick,




1995: 55). The process of sensemaking, as Weick points out in a story about soldiers lost in the Alps finding their way out of a snow storm using a map of the Pyrenees, tends to be forgiving: it seems that ‘when you are lost, any old map will do’ (1995: 54). This explains the ‘success’ of much strategic planning in organizations: it is not the planning per se that leads to success, but the direction setting, confidence and continuous adjustments that flow from the initial act of ‘following’ a plan.

Finally, sensemaking is driven by plausibility rather than accuracy. Weick has argued that with sensemaking, ‘accuracy is nice, but not necessary’ (1995: 56). The story about the use of the wrong map partly supports this argument. There are many reasons why accuracy is not necessary for sensemaking in organizations. For example, people need to filter and sim- plify information in order not to be overloaded, and knowing the ‘full picture’ can immobilize decisionmakers rather than generate solutions. What makes a story plausible is not its accuracy per se, but its ability to convince either through ‘an aura of accuracy’, consistency with other available information or compatibility with current sensibilities (Weick, 2005: 415). The importance of stories in the constitution of police culture has been bril- liantly explored by Shearing and Ericson (1991). Their analysis explains why accuracy is never a test of a story’s utility:

In their street talk police officers use stories to represent to each other the way things are, not as statements of fact but as cognitive devices used to gain practical insights into how to do the job of policing. For them the appropri- ate criteria for evaluating stories is not their truth value in a scientific sense but rather whether the knowledge they capture ‘works’. Such stories, be they told in words or in action or via spectacles, capture the sedimented residue of generations of police experience and convey it in a form that police officers can capture and use to construct their actions on an ongoing basis.

(Shearing and Ericson, 1991: 491–2)

Stories bring our attention to a crucial point of sensemaking analysis: it is not just the process, but also the content or substance of what is being processed that matters. Theoretically, members of organizations can draw on any information or cue to make sense of what is happening, but in practice, the content of sensemaking is embedded in the ‘frames and categories that summarize past experience, in the cues and labels that snare specifics of present experience, and in the ways these two settings of experience are connected’ (Weick, 1995: 111). In other words, cues are found among ideologies, assumptions, standard procedures, theories of action, traditions and stories that are salient in organizations. But the selection of cues, labels and stories is not a random process. It is therefore important to investigate the role of sensegivers in organizations. Very often, the most influential sensegivers are those with political or symbolic capital. At a time of externally imposed or internally initiated change, organizational leaders play a primary role in sensemaking as well as sensegiving (Gioia and Chittipeddi, 1991).




Although sensemaking is ongoing, interruptions or shocks create ‘occasions’ for a new focus for sensemaking (Weick, 1995). Sensemaking in organizations is often triggered by feelings of ambiguity or uncertainty. Organizational change, for example, can create a sense of uncertainty and disruption, so that sensemaking is crucial for the ability of organizational members to‘move on’ and for organizations to continue to function. But as Weick points out, sensemaking is not merely about interpretation: it is both about‘authoring’ and ‘reading’ (1995: 7). In fact, to ‘engage in sensemaking is to construct, filter, frame, create facticity …, and render the subjective into something more tangible’ (Weick, 1995: 14). To go back to Bourdieu’s ter- minology, sensemaking is the process through which the habitus constructs and interprets changes in the field.

Structure of the article

This article draws on a longitudinal study of Australian police officers to describe how officers make sense of police reforms that have considerably altered the field of policing. Section two provides details of the sources of data used for the analysis. This is followed by a discussion of police reform as an occasion for sensemaking and officers’ perception of the nature and impact of changes. Section four analyses how government and police leaders, rank-and-file officers and key informants made and gave sense about police reforms. The final section discusses the implications of the findings.

Sources of data

Data are drawn from a follow-up study of a class of police recruits in New South Wales, Australia, who originally took part in a longitudinal study of police socialization from 1995 to 1997 (Chan et al., 2003). The follow-up study, conducted between 2004 and 2005, revisits the class 9 to 10 years after they entered the police academy using both a mail-out questionnaire survey and face-to-face interviews. Only 118 of the original 150 recruits were still employed by the police in 2005. These officers were invited to participate in the study. A total of 42 questionnaires were returned and 44 face-to-face interviews conducted. The response rates were 34 and 36 per cent respectively.1 Even though the response rates for the follow-up study are low, the survey sample is fairly similar to the population of the remain- ing cohort in demographics, rank, duty and current location. Younger officers (28–30 years of age) are somewhat over-represented in both the survey and the interview samples. Officers located in country/rural areas and those in criminal investigation are over-represented in the interview sample.2

In order to identify the changes to policing over the 10-year period, we also consulted official reports and news media stories and interviewed 11 key informants between 2005 and 2006 who were knowledgeable about policing and the history of NSW Police. Six of these informants came from




within the police and five from government and non-government organizations including watchdog agencies.

Police reform as an occasion for sensemaking

The New South Wales Police (NSWP) is the oldest and largest police force in Australia, with over 14,000 sworn officers (NSWP, 2005). It serves the State of New South Wales, which has a population of around seven million. Two major waves of reform took place in the last two decades. In the mid-1980s, following a wide-ranging judicial inquiry (Lusher Report, 1981), the organization went through a number of significant and fundamental changes to the philosophy, organization and operation of policing (Chan,1997: 129–36). The most significant event that marked the second wave of reforms was the Wood Royal Commission. After a period of investigation and high-profile public hearings, the Commission concluded that a state of‘systemic and entrenched corruption’ existed in the Police Service (Wood Report, 1997). In response to the Commission’s findings, major reforms were introduced. There was a shake-up in external scrutiny: the establishment of an independent Police Integrity Commission (PIC) that continued the work of the Royal Commission in relation to serious police misconduct, complementing the Ombudsman’s Office which oversees the handling of less serious complaints. An amendment of the Police Services Act 1990 (s. 181D) was introduced in 1998 to streamline the procedure for dismiss- ing corrupt or incompetent officers. In addition, the police organization went through two changes in police commissioners and several changes in police ministers. It also implemented two major restructurings, a total revamp of recruit education and the word ‘Service’ was dropped from its name (with the word ‘Force’ reinserted in 2006). There was a new focus on crime management and a devolved complaint management system was introduced.

The field of policing in New South Wales has changed dramatically since the cohort entered the police academy in 1995. In the follow-up survey, respondents were asked their opinion on various organizational changes (see Table 1). Basically, almost everyone thought that the organization had changed. Six in ten thought that the change had been substantial. Respondents were quite divided about the pace of change: half thought it was about right, about one-quarter thought it was far too rapid and another quarter thought it was far too slow. Attitudes to change also var- ied: almost half were indifferent; about one in five were quite satisfied, but31 per cent were dissatisfied with the changes.

Respondents were also asked whether organizational changes had affected the way they carried out their duties. Table 2 provides a detailed breakdown of the responses to the nominated aspects of change, sorted by percentage of respondents who perceived ‘some difference’ or ‘a great deal of difference’. The organizational changes rated to have the most impact were related to the day-to-day practice of policing. The Police Assistance




Table 1. General opinion on organizational change (Questionnaire survey n = 42)

Question Response Frequency %

Has organization changedQ29. Do you think Yes, a lot 25 60 that the NSW Police as an Yes, somewhat 16 38 organization has changed since you joined? No 1 2

Pace of changeQ30. If you answered ‘yes, a lot’, or ‘yes, Far too slow 9 23 somewhat’ to the above question, please About right 21 53 indicate below your attitude to the pace Far too rapid 10 25 of change.

Satisfaction with change

Missing = 2

Q31. If you answered ‘yes, a lot’, or ‘yes, Quite satisfied 8 21 somewhat’ to Q29, overall, to what extent Indifferent 18 46 are you satisfied with the changes that Quite dissatisfied 11 28 have occurred? Very dissatisfied 2 5

Missing = 3

Line3 was rated by 86 per cent of respondents as having made a difference to how police carried out their duties. The 12-hour shift was rated by 81 per cent of respondents as having an impact on police work. An increased focus on forensics in investigations was also rated by 81 per cent of respondents as having changed police practice.

Other changes rated by more than half of the respondents as having made a difference include the change of police commissioner in 2002 (69%) and the introduction of a new recruit training system in 1998 (62%). Changes rated by between one-third and half of the respondents as having made a difference include the introduction of the crime management (CM) model in Local Area Commands (45%), the focus on crime reduction and fear of crime (41%), change of Police Minister in 2001 (38%), the establishment of the PIC in 1996 (36%) and the restructuring in 2002 that reduced the number of police Region Commands from 11 to 5 (34%). Other organizational changes, such as the establishment of professional standards councils, the introduction of a Code of Conduct, the change of name to NSW Police, changes in senior command structure and the introduction of community accountability panels, were rated as having an impact by less than one-third of the respondents.

These data suggest that among mid-career officers who took part in the follow-up study, nearly everyone acknowledged that the police organization had changed since they joined in 1995, but opinions were divided about the pace and nature of change. Changes regarded as having had the most impact on these officers were those related to the structuring of day-to-day policing tasks. Changes in leadership, education, management,




Table 2. Impact of change on practice—sorted by percentage of Yes (Questionnaire survey n = 42)

% Yes—Some differenceItem or A great deal of difference

Introduction of Police Assistance Line 86

Introduction of 12-hour shifts 81

Increased focus on forensics in investigations 81

Change of commissioner [in 2002] 69

Introduction of Diploma of Policing Studies 62

Introduction of Crime Managers and the CM model in LACsa

45

Changes to focus on crime reduction and 41fear of crime

Change of Police Minister [in 2001] 38

Introduction of Police Integrity Commission 36

Reduction in number of Regions 34

Introduction of professional standards 29councils in LACs

Introduction of a Code of Conduct 26

Change of name to NSW Police 21

Changes in senior command structure 19

Introduction of Community Accountability Panels 17

Change of Police Minister [in 2003] 7

aLAC: Local Area Command.

accountability and organization structure were seen to have less substantial impact, while certain new initiatives to improve professionalism and community accountability were thought to have negligible impact.

Making sense of reforms

One surprising result that stood out was the fact that a major reform such as the establishment of the Police Integrity Commission was rated by 64 per cent of the respondents as having made ‘no difference’ to the way they carried out their duties. To understand how such a key reform could have been perceived as having so little impact, it is important to examine how post- Royal Commission reforms are perceived and constructed by the police. In other words, we need to understand the sensemaking and sensegiving processes both at the leadership and the rank-and-file levels within the police organization.




Sensegiving by government and police leaders

How government and police leaders made sense of the recommendations of the Royal Commission determined the sense they gave to rank-and-file officers about police reforms. Although the Government publicly embraced many of the Commission’s recommendations, a series of independent assessments commissioned by the PIC—known as the Qualitative and Strategic Audit of the Reform Process (QSARP)—painted quite a negative picture of the reform process up to 2002 (Hay Group, 2000, 2001, 2002). The first audit found that the progress of reform was ‘systematically limited’ by the police organization’s decision to pursue a crime reduction agenda instead of the Royal Commission’s reform agenda, poor implementation of reforms, a fragmented and uncoordinated approach to change and the police commissioner’s view ‘that the reform is near completion’ (Hay Group, 2000: i–ii). It found that cultural change was not regarded as a priority by the organization, which preferred to rely on the Operations and Crimes Review (OCR) process—a variation of the New York City Compstat process—to achieve accountability. The OCR, however, adopted‘an adversarial approach’, paying attention only to ‘hard data’ and crime statistics as measures of effectiveness (Hay Group, 2000: v–vi).

The second audit (Hay Group, 2001: 248) noted some positive initiatives and evidence of ‘innovative, open and participative leadership’ in some areas. It was once again highly critical of the management of reform, especially the‘reactive positioning’ of the leadership which ‘has fostered the continuation of a mindset in the Service that an initiative, once described and delegated, is in itself a completed reform’ (2001: 248–9). This mindset had led to ‘a pattern of counter-productive behaviours around implementation’ of reforms which includes inadequate resourcing, fragmentation of reform efforts and an ‘obses- sion’ with quantity, rather than quality, of initiatives (2001: 249). The audit highlighted the need for an integrated plan and strong leadership committed to ‘drive change throughout the organisation’ (2001: 250). In effect, the audit found that ‘obstacles to reform are the same as they were one year ago … the need for its effective integration and implementation’ (2001: 252).

The third and final audit covered a year of ‘unstable leadership at Executive level’, which culminated in the appointment of a new police commissioner and various changes to the top tiers of police leadership (Hay Group, 2002: ii). By this time the organization had also dropped the word‘Service’ from its name. The audit report continued to be critical of the reform process within the organization, especially the lack of leadership commitment to the Royal Commission’s reform agenda. In particular, the auditors found that the ‘reform messages’ were not effectively communicated to rank-and-file police:

Staff mostly spoke of being confused or hostile to ‘reform’. They had been deluged with information but had not been consulted and, as a result they equated reform with an unsettling state of continual change which they had experienced in Commands.

(2002: 112)




The new leadership team decided to drop the word ‘reform’ from corporate objectives altogether, citing ‘reform weariness’ among staff as a reason. Instead, the organization wanted to pursue ‘continuous business improvement’ as its management framework (2002: 112). The auditors regarded this framework as unsuitable for transformational change and restated the need for continuous scrutiny of the police organization.

The reaction of the police and the Government to these critical reports was to manage the negative messages as they would any ‘bad news’. The first QSARP report was ‘not at all welcome by the Police Service and the government’ (Dixon, 2001: 210). The report was released in a low-key and limited way. Its content was ridiculed by the then police commissioner, dismissed by the Premier as ‘management jargon’ and relegated to a marginal status by the Police Ministry (Dixon, 2001: 211). In fact, the response to the first two audit reports ‘appears quite discouraging in terms of reform direction, leadership, commitment and progress’ (Crawford, 2003: 153).

With the conclusion of the third audit, the formal role of the PIC in over- seeing the audit of reform progress ended. The Police Executive approved Change Strategy 2003–2006, which was ‘a blueprint for transformational change throughout NSW Police’ (NSW PIC, 2003: 32). The 2003–4 NSW Police Annual Report replaced the objective, ‘Reform NSW Police to attain a high level of public trust and confidence in police integrity’ (NSW Police,2003: 44) with ‘Improve and maintain a high level of public trust …’, thus rendering reform totally invisible to the organization (NSW Police, 2004: 6).

The response of the Government and the police to QSARP’s criticisms was consistent with the increased politicization of policing in New South Wales, an issue raised by all 11 key informants. The police organization’s loss of operational independence from government was highlighted as a significant development in the 10-year period since the Royal Commission. Although policing has always been political, and police have traditionally been industrially stronger than other professions in gaining resources and improving working conditions, the politicization of policing has become more serious with law and order being a key focus of election campaigns and the power of popular media in setting policing agendas (see Dixon,2001). Politicization was manifested in the past few years by the appointment of police ministers that were ‘interventionist’ and had a tendency to‘micromanage’, with the result that police operational decisions were no longer independent of political interference. Police numbers, in particular, had become a political symbol, with the Government committing to increase numbers by 2000 as one of the law-and-order campaigns. The impact of this policy, according to at least two key informants, was to lower policing standards, both in recruitment and in training, and to create problems of integrity and professionalism in the longer term. The abolition of the Police Board since the Wood Royal Commission had removed any ‘barrier’ there was in maintaining the separation of powers. Apart from direct ministerial interference, the politicization of policing has been amplified by popular media commentators who exert considerable influence on government policy. Media commentary can alter policing priorities in relation to high-profile issues




such as drugs and public order. A number of key informants expressed the view that political interference has been detrimental to the autonomy and professionalism of the organization.

It appears from the above that the Government and police leaders respon- sible for implementing police reforms had constructed a different agenda and direction from those intended by the Royal Commission’s recommendations. The sense they conveyed to rank-and-file officers was that police reform was either not important or it had already been completed; police should concen- trate on crime fighting which was (and still is) in line with the Government’s law-and-order agenda. These messages helped frame and define the meaning of reforms; they provided the cues and labels that rank-and-file officers could draw upon for making sense of organizational changes.

Sensemaking by rank-and-file officers

How did rank-and-file officers make sense of these reforms? Some of the features of sensemaking highlighted by Weick (1995) are evident from interviewees’ responses to our question about whether police reforms, particularly the changes in accountability, had affected the way they performed their job.

Framing

Organizational changes are inevitably viewed through the lenses of the police occupational habitus. The tendency for ‘street cops’ to feel cynical about ‘management cops’ (Reuss-Ianni and Ianni, 1983) and the ubiquitous complaint of police about the burden of ‘paperwork’ (see, for example, Ericson and Haggerty, 1997) provide ready-made frameworks for understanding such changes. This cynical attitude towards management was developed quite early on among the cohort (Chan et al., 2003: 224–31). During the third interview (18 months after entry), 65 per cent of interviewees told us that their opinion of the NSW Police had become more negative. Among their criticisms of management were their lack of support for‘front-line’ police, their concern to cover themselves rather than protect rank-and-file officers against citizens’ complaints, their excessive concern with paperwork and accountability and the constant organizational changes that were ill-conceived and creating extra work for operational police. Nearly half of the interviewees (48%) told researchers that the Royal Commission had negatively affected policing. Some blamed the Commission for the loss of public respect for police and for low morale among officers. Others thought that the Commission’s findings had led to the excessive paperwork and accountability already mentioned. They felt that police had become ‘too scared to do their job’ for fear of complaints being made against them, and management had also become afraid to make decisions or support the lower ranks.




Although the need for police to be accountable was not challenged, interviewees in the follow-up study repeatedly linked accountability with management’s excessive concern with reporting. The following comments are quite typical of the responses to questions about accountability:

Yep, this accountability bull crap has just gone way too far … It’s the most inefficient organization known to mankind … Inefficient because they’ve got… most of the senior sort of people butt covering exercises, the accountability and all that sort of stuff and … trying to stamp out corruption and taking measures to, anti-corruption measures and it’s just all garbage. You know, it’s just all garbage.

(A male sergeant)

Certainly one of the things that drove me out of general duties … was that you were at the point where you had to account for nearly every second of every day and you weren’t really treated like an adult ... I found [this] quite insulting actually.

(A male senior constable)

Officers also saw accountability through the lenses of their personal belief systems and theories about ethics. Many did not believe that tighten- ing accountability could bring about a change in behaviour, because in their view ethics was not something that could be taught:

My personal opinion is you either have ethics or you don’t … and I can’t teach someone ethics. I can tell them what’s going to happen if they choose not to be ethical but I cannot teach them to be ethical. They either are or they aren’t.

(A female senior constable)

One way of keeping organizational changes manageable is to make them intelligible in terms of familiar categories. By reducing accountability to‘paperwork’, officers often saw it as a distraction from doing ‘real’ police work such as responding to calls for service and crime fighting.

Basically it meant that police aren’t getting out there doing too much police work because we’re too busy … making sure the accountability stuff is done.… Yeah, it’s gone crazy … basically inspectors spend most of their time doing all the accountability stuff. They’re not doing police work like they should be and they wonder why you know the crime rate’s the way it is and you know they just tie our hands more and more with accountability and forms and it’s a joke, an absolute joke. It’s a crock of S-H-I-T and it’ll have to turn around, it can’t keep going the way it is because we’re just being bogged down.


The time-consuming aspect of ‘paperwork’ was seen as the worst part of the job by a male senior constable. In spite of this, he could see the advan- tage of keeping good records in ‘duty books’ because they might ‘come in handy’ if he were asked to report what he was doing on a certain date at a certain time.




Creating meaning

Making sense of police reforms involves casting an abstract concept (such as accountability) in a concrete event or experience. Thus in answer to our questions about the impact of various reforms and accountability measures, interviewees rarely spoke about them in terms of abstract principles, but always in terms of concrete and personal circumstances. For example, in the following excerpt from one of the interviews, the officer used his own experience with the Complaints Management Team as an example of how the reform had affected him personally. The underlying theme seems to be that the new system recorded trivial matters. It did not represent the views of‘street cops’, nor did it take into account the realities of operational policing. This experience once again reaffirmed the ‘coppers versus admin’ divide.

I guess the Complaints Management Team is an issue because it can be a per- sonality clash. Again comes back to the coppers versus admin issue … there’s no GDs [General Duties officers], no detectives, there’s … none of the guys that are out there doing it and there’s a lot of stuff that goes on to people’s files … You know, we’re out there in the real world, we’re doing the real work and you guys are sitting in your offices … you’ve never seen an angry person in your life.


The wave of reforms implemented following the Royal Commission had had considerable impact on the attitudes of the cohort on the reporting of misconduct. The introduction of the Commissioner’s Confidence provision was particularly salient in the interviewees’ minds at the fourth interview,24 months after entry. Many saw the risk of being charged or losing one’s job as a deterrent against covering up misconduct (Chan et al., 2003:270–2). At the follow-up interview, an officer made a similar point by relat- ing reforms to his own personal situation. Increased sophistication and rigour of surveillance and investigation explained why covering up misconduct was no longer viable under the current system:

Nobody is prepared to put $70,000, a house mortgage and their family on the line for anybody else any more … Yeah, if someone stuffs up, they take responsibility for it because they know full well that these days you can’t afford to get involved in something that’s not right … with the investigation techniques they’ve got nowadays, you know, the covert surveillance, the lis- tening devices and all that, it’s going to come out … I make that fairly clear to everybody I work with that I don’t put myself on the line for anybody … I’ve got a house, mortgage, and you get 70 grand a year to do this job, you get sacked from the coppers, there’s not too many other people that are going to employ you.


In spite of this, a common response among interviewees was to show a lack of personal interest or involvement in any of the accountability bodies:




they had no effect on their work because they had done nothing wrong. The explicit ‘theory’ espoused by officers was that only corrupt officers needed to worry about such watchdogs. This attitude seems to imply that display- ing any interest in these bodies would somehow give the impression that the officer was not beyond reproach. The following are typical answers:

Absolutely they don’t affect me … Like I say, I know as long as I live by my values … everything’s fine … yeah, they have no impact on how I do my job, nothing at all.


I’ve got no views on them whatsoever. They’re irrelevant to me because Iknow I do my job properly and I act in good faith, so.

(A male sergeant)

Sensemaking is initially tentative, but with time and accumulated experience, interpretations are sometimes revised and eventually become more or less settled. Reforms can be perceived in a different light with the passage of time and the interviewee’s own experience within the organization. As an interviewee pointed out, when revelations of police corruption first went public through the Royal Commission hearings, she equated the Commission with a negative public image of the police. Years later, she revised her views about bodies such as the PIC:

PIC—the Police Integrity Commission, I think that brought out a lot of good things. And it basically meant that we weren’t bullet-proof … I think it’s changed a lot of the attitudes of police … which in my mind was a good thing, like the Wood Royal Commission. [Q: Was that a good thing too, was it?] It wasn’t … when we were just coming out and everyone was going you’re corrupt, you’re corrupt, you’re corrupt, that’s when I was first attested … We walked straight out into it, and I—‘Oh that’d be right, how do you go with this?’ You know, but I don’t know, I think you learn.


This officer was not the only person who spoke positively of the reforms: nearly one-third of the interviewees regarded a better accountability system as necessary for the legitimacy and efficiency of the organization.

Sharing experience and stories

Obviously, sensemaking does not just happen within individual officers’ minds; it is influenced by social interactions within the organization. It has been part of the accepted wisdom of the occupational habitus that police are overly accountable and there are too many watchdogs. This accepted wisdom is continually reinforced through discussion among officers and through personal anecdotes. The following is a typical example of an officer who did not seem to be aware of the division of responsibilities among the watchdog agencies:




I think there’s too many … Just from reading and speaking to police, reading articles, I think … too many [watchdog] organizations. I think they want their bit and there’s no sort of clear line, if there’s a complaint you go here, here, here, here, so it would just go everywhere.


A similar sentiment was expressed by another interviewee, although she was positive about the existence of independent, external oversight:

Yes I think the accountability is far higher than it was before. People are conscious of it. I think it’s a positive for the organization, I think that it ensures that you do your job thoroughly, which is what you’re getting paid for and you should do that anyway … I think that the accountability now is proba- bly at a point where it needs to perhaps turn around a bit on itself and reduce a bit … I still think that you need the Police Integrity Commission. But I sort of don’t see where their role and the Ombudsman’s role is different. I sort of think there’s a bit of duplication there. There’s still a need for external agencies to look into what we’re doing and as well as internal agencies as well.

(A female sergeant)

Members of organizations often ‘talk a situation into existence’ (Weick et al., 2005: 413). They share understandings by lifting ‘equivocal knowledge out of the tacit, private, complex, random, and past to make it explicit, public, simpler, ordered, and relevant to the situation at hand’ (Weick et al.,2005: 413). One example is the portrayal of the PIC as an organization that was more or less anti-police. This was based on a high-profile incident where a police sergeant was charged after shooting a fleeing robber. The charges were later dismissed (Sydney Morning Herald ‘Cop Won’t Stand Trial for Ramraid Shooting’, 26 July 2004), but the fact that serious charges were dropped against the robber following his giving of information to the PIC had created outrage among police officers and the police union:

[The sergeant] followed a stolen WRX that had just done a ram raid at a service station or something along those lines, he followed it into under- ground parking … and he basically got out of the vehicle and … the vehicle’s driven at him. Now this would have killed him if it had had hit him but he fired shots and actually hit the offender … and the offender was offered to have all the charges dropped and all the rest of it from PIC if he testified against the police officer so that’s just … rubbish. That’s rubbish, you can’t do your job and then, you know, like he’s got—obviously the offender’s got the upper hand ’cause he’s got PIC in his pocket saying, you know, well, we’ll drop all these charges if you … go and give evidence against the police officer …[Q: You feel a bit cynical about this?] I do now, yeah, I’ve never had much to say about them but up until recently when I’ve started reading into that case I just think … how can they? … [Q: And it’s that incident that’s … changed your views?] Yes, definitely. And I think I’m not the only one from the talk that we’ve been having around the station about it. [Q: So it gets talked about a lot?] Yeah, things like that do, but when you hear it’s just an outrage when they let people off for serious things like that.





As Weick et al. (2005) observe, sensemaking is not about truth finding; the plausibility of information was sufficient for it to be accepted and given some sort of factual quality. Thus, this story about unfair treatment of police by an external watchdog became part of the folklore. As a result, the sense of cynicism about external oversight was reinforced.

Taking action

As Weick et al. (2005) point out, sensemaking is also about taking action:‘What do I do next?’ Although most interviewees told us that the accountability measures did not affect their work, quite a few admitted that in fact they had led to people being more concerned with covering themselves so that they were less vulnerable if anything went wrong. The following interviewee was quite frank about this:

I think everybody is more concerned about covering their own bottoms as opposed to getting the job done, you know, and just everyone’s worried about the potential outcomes rather than, you know, the present … I think accountability is a major … catchphrase in the police, you know … CYA … Cover your arse [Laughter] … basically so you don’t get a complaint. So you don’t look like you’re incompetent.


The problem with CYA as a strategy, of course, is that it can put off the possibility of ‘testing new frameworks and new interpretations’ (Weick et al., 2005: 412), so that police can be trapped in a ‘mistake-avoidance’ framework (Schein, 1985) of learning.

The above interview excerpts indicate that rank-and-file officers in the follow-up study responded to the ‘disruptions’ caused by the Royal Commission and subsequent reforms by trying to make sense of them through the familiar frames of the ‘street cop’ habitus and personal belief systems and theories. Hence, accountability became synonymous with ‘paperwork’ with its negative connota- tion of being a distraction from ‘real’ police work. Officers drew on their own stock of concrete experiences and personal circumstances to make sense of the reforms. Many denied being affected by increased accountability because they had done nothing wrong. Some acknowledged that the more sophisticated surveillance and accountability mechanisms had made any covering up of misconduct a highly risky and irrational act, given that they could lose their job. Accepted wisdom about watchdog agencies was reinforced through anecdotes and stories, so that the sensible course of action to take was self-protection. While officers made sense of police reforms through these lenses, their view of reform was not uni- formly negative; nearly one-third of the interviewees spoke about positive aspects of accountability, and the need for accountability was not challenged.

Sensemaking by key informants

Since the key informants were interviewed some 10 years after the RoyalCommission, they were mainly asked to comment on the impact of reforms.




Because they came from different units and organizations both within and outside of the police, their sensemaking would have occurred in different contexts and been affected by different factors and processes.

Informants were not unanimous about the impact of the PIC. Their opinions range from the view that the PIC has had a deterrent effect on corruption, to one that external oversight bodies are counterproductive because they‘neuter management’. The latter view sees bodies such as the PIC as destabi- lizing for the organization because they do not allow the organization to deal with its own problems. However, the approach of the watchdog has broad- ened in recent years to look beyond complaints processing towards systemic and process issues. This new approach complements the Ombudsman’s strategy to work with police commanders to identify ‘officers of concern’ proac- tively and deal with problems before they show up in complaints. One informant suggested that over the 10-year period, a working relationship between the PIC and the police was established; in particular, the police union, though initially ‘very hostile’ towards external control of police misconduct, had ‘built a more positive relationship’ with the PIC.

The ‘Commissioner’s Confidence’ provision was meant to be an effective and swift method of removing corrupt or incompetent officers, bypassing the many layers of appeal described in the Wood Report (1996). By all indica- tions this provision was taken seriously by rank-and-file officers as a deterrent against both misconduct and its cover-up (Chan et al., 2003). Early statistics suggest that this power was exercised quite diligently: by the end of January 1998, 380 police officers had been listed for consideration for dis- missal under the Commissioner’s Confidence provisions (Moss, 1998: 7). According to one key informant, this provision is still used ‘quite a bit’, but the process has become bogged down by the availability of appeal to the Industrial Relations Commission, a concession successfully fought by the union, but it has led to substantial delay and some inappropriate decisions.

Several informants pointed to a more professional culture and less corruption as a result of the reforms: evidence of this includes the high rate of reporting of misconduct by police officers4 and the fact that recent PIC investigations only found incidents of corruption that were ‘isolated’ rather than ‘systemic or ingrained’. Such a fundamental cultural change was possible, in the view of some informants, because of the Royal Commission, the ‘hard work’ of bodies like the Ombudsman and the PIC to promote ethics in policing, the change in police education and the entry of new recruits that have a different attitude to policing. In particular, the Royal Commission had made it possible for ‘good cops’ to make a difference.

Conclusion

Stenning and Shearing have observed that: ‘Even with the best will in the world, those who seek to reform policing frequently face substantial challenges and obstacles’ (2005: 171). One of the obstacles frequently cited




is the recalcitrance of ‘police culture’. This article is an attempt to extend the Bourdieuian framework previously adopted for theorizing culture (Chan, 1997) by incorporating a processual element to help clarify the relationship between the field and the habitus at a time of change. This processual element is Weick’s notion of sensemaking, an ongoing process members engage in to create meaning especially when the flow of organizational life has been disrupted.

Major police reforms such as those experienced in New South Wales inevitably cause disruptions to the field of policing. Bourdieu’s theory suggests that the occupational habitus of policing will adjust to the new field, because changes in the field create a new ‘necessity’ which may require different coping strategies. This situation can be analysed in a more detailed and dynamic way using the sensemaking framework. Major reforms trigger an occasion for sensemaking because members can no longer take things for granted, their personal and organization identities are being challenged and there is a need to put some order into the chaos created by the reforms. Members make use of various cultural resources such as ideologies, assumptions, stories and traditions to provide cues and labels. Organizational leaders are often the primary sensegivers: their definitions of the situation are influential in simplifying or constructing ways of seeing. Through sensemaking and sensegiving, leaders and workers enact a new organizational environment that becomes ‘real’ in constraining and enabling actions. Sensemaking is, however, time and context dependent, so that the sense a past event makes can change according to the sensemaker’s current situation.

Interviews with the cohort of police recruits in our longitudinal study provide some useful data for illustrating the sensemaking process. In Chan et al. (2003), we demonstrated that when a policing field is changing, new recruits were no longer simply socialized into a stable organizational culture; instead they became conscious and reflective about their own actions and adaptations because ‘the game’ was no longer clearly defined. They went through a complex process of sensemaking that involved a careful negotiation within the minefield of an organization that was both unfamil- iar and changing. The negative publicity generated by the corruption scandals uncovered by the Royal Commission challenged their personal identity as police officers as well as the identity of the police organization. This set off a new focus and necessity for sensemaking.

The cohort’s perception of the Royal Commission and subsequent reforms was heavily influenced by the sense that political and organizational leaders gave to the rank and file. In spite of the Government’s full support of the recommendations of the Royal Commission, the NSW Police’s lack of commitment to reform was heavily criticized by the QSARP reports. Instead of following the Commission’s reform agenda, the then police commissioner chose to focus on crime reduction as a priority. Given the law-and-order climate of NSW politics, such a focus was consistent with the political interests of the Government. The crime reduction focus, the move to ‘continuous business improvement’ models, and the removal of the word ‘reform’ from




corporate objectives all pointed to a strategy to ‘normalize’ the organization. It is therefore not surprising that rank-and-file officers also carried on business as usual and were ‘confused or hostile’ to reform.

Interviews with the cohort suggest that rank-and-file police officers initially interpreted police reforms using the traditional ‘street cop versus management cop’ cultural frame. They also drew on personal experience, discussion with colleagues, stories, information circulated within the organization or published in the media to interpret these changes. Often, their cultural frames (habitus) did not change substantially—police reforms seem to fit the interpretation that once again police were prevented from doing‘real’ police work. Even though no one explicitly criticized the necessity of accountability, there was a consensus that police were overly accountable. A story about unfair treatment of police by an external watchdog reinforced the sense of cynicism about external oversight. Officers seemed to have developed a kind of ‘ostrich mentality’ in that they did not want to know what these layers of accountability were about. As long as they did not do anything corrupt and they covered their ‘arses’, they did not need to worry about these agencies. Although some officers saw positives in having a rigorous structure of accountability, most were not interested in it and would rather not have anything to do with it.

Police reforms obviously affected the organization in different ways, but officers on the ground were pragmatic in their interpretation of changes. Instead of challenging officers’ identity and purpose, reforms had in fact reinforced certain accepted wisdom about who they are, what they are doing, what matters and why. The presence of a highly complex network of accountability mechanisms merely encouraged officers to make sure that they covered themselves so that they did not get into trouble.

These observations are consistent with the view that ‘police culture’ is an obstacle to reforms. The irony, however, is that key informants we interviewed (including those external to the police) consistently credited police reforms as having led to an increase in professionalism and a willingness to report misconduct among NSW police, in effect a major change in police culture. This could, of course, be the consequence of ‘arse-covering’, since not reporting misconduct may be construed as lacking integrity and hence a misconduct in itself. Even so, some police admitted that accountability had its positive side: by keeping fuller and more accurate records, by having elec- tronic recording of interviews, etc., officers had readily available evidence to help exonerate themselves against allegations of misconduct. Some officers understood that having independent watchdogs could also help improve the public image of police as professionals. The defensive and dismissive reaction of NSW police and political leaders to the QSARP reports meant that positive ‘stories’ of reform were not put to good use to reconstruct the identity of NSW Police as a professional organization (Marks, 2005).

As Bourdieu suggests, the adjustment of the habitus to changes in the field is ‘never radical’ because the process of adjustment (sensemaking) relies on existing cultural frames for cues and interpretations. Nevertheless,




there is room in the sensemaking process for members to ‘mistrust’ their old frameworks and test out new interpretations (Weick et al., 2005: 412). The increased reporting of police misconduct by police is evidence that the old‘stand by your mates’ framework is no longer sustainable under the new regime. In this sense, reforms that tightened accountability had led to some major behavioural and cultural change, so that the overall picture of reform outcomes is one of both continuity and change.

Notes

This article is based on research funded by an Australian Research Council Grant DP0344753. The author would like to thank Richard Ericson, Monique Marks, Eugene McLaughlin and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on the article. The assistance of Elizabeth Maloney, Ben Jones and Chris Marel is acknowledged and appreciated. Special thanks to Sally Doran who assisted with the survey design and conducted nearly all the interviews. The co-operation of the NSW Police is also gratefully acknowledged.

1. A total of 133 invitations went out to officers, including those who did not commence training with the cohort but graduated with them. We included these participants in the study but did not count them in calculating the response rates.

2. For details, see Chan and Doran (2005).3. The Police Assistance Line, established in 1998, uses centrally located 24-

hour-a-day call centres to process citizens’ calls.4. Complaints against police by police constituted 29 per cent of complaints

received by the Ombudsman in 2004–5, compared with 18 per cent in2000–1 (NSW Ombudsman, 2005: 43).

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JANET CHAN PhD FASSA is Professor at UNSW. Her research interests have been in reforms and innovations in criminal justice, policing and creativity in the arts and sciences. Her recent major publications include Fair Cop: Learning the Art of Policing (with Devery and Doran, 2003); and Reshaping Juvenile Justice (2005).



Documents

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