Democratic policing is the idea that the people should take responsibility for policing, as they do for the rest of their government, and that policing agencies should be responsive to the people’s will. Of course, democracy in the United States does not mean the people make all the decisions all of the time. If that were the case, no one would have time to lead their everyday lives. It means, rather, that our representatives make decisions for us, in an open and transparent way. Those representatives can include policing officials themselves, who have expertise in what needs to be done. But what democratic policing requires, at bottom, is that rules are in place before policing officials take action, that the public has an opportunity to participate in the formulation of those rules, and that the rules are available for all to see.
Applying this familiar model of government to policing poses certain challenges. In part those challenges are historical; we’ve left policing officials to make decisions on their own for a long time now. Fundamentally changing how we do things is going to be a big shift. All the more so because part of the reason policing is not subjected to close democratic control is that our representatives don’t see much profit in writing rules for the police. So we are going to need to find a way to motivate the process of popular participation in the governance of policing. Then, even after we overcome those hurdles, we have to take account of the special nature of policing. Popular governance requires transparency, but policing sometimes needs a certain amount of secrecy. So we have to figure out how to accommodate those competing considerations.
This first part is about how we tackle these challenges in order to achieve democratic policing. Chapter 1 discusses the history of policing and the problem of transparency v. secrecy. Chapter 2 talks about the need for public rules to regulate policing, why legislators don’t deliver them, and how policing agencies themselves could. Chapter 3 answers the question many may have, and that needs to be addressed sooner rather than later—why can’t the courts just supervise the police? Chapter 4 then explains how judges actually could help spark the process that is needed to democratize policing.