Dorothy Smith's institutional ethnography, as I understand it, concerns itself with "problematics," or aspects of difficulty or uncertainty within an institution or organization. Recent events have brought to public scrutiny the long-extant need for improvement in justice practice generally, and policing in particular (we will look at prisons and the court system another time). It is useful, I think, to examine the problematics as they exist in the institution of police. I do not mean to imply that all police departments are the same, or that they have similar problematics profiles. Here, now, I am speaking in the most general of terms about the police as an American institution.

First, recent events have highlighted the problematic of racism within police agencies. First, let us address briefly the distinction between institutional racism and “thick injustice,” and then these ideas and individual racism. Institutional racism is the phenomenon whereby organizations and institutions create race-specific harm as a result of their actions, omissions, and policies. Hayward and Swanstrom (2011) paint for us the idea of “thick injustice;” ostensibly non-race-specific policies and organizational activities nevertheless have race-relevant impacts. Individual racism, in contrast, refers to the psycho-emotional fear of humans of another "race." The former two are collective phenomena, whereas the latter is an individual one. Institutional racism and thick injustice may or may not be a function of overt individual racism, of course: outward hate is not necessary to create an institution or system which negatively impacts those with diminished sovereignty.

In every node or locality within an institution, even in each action of every actor within the institutional node, the relationship between these three will be different; they are distinct, yet interpenetrating phenomena, but in each case to a different degree. From a social change perspective, this variability poses a considerable challenge, as at the outset it means that no template is likely to be of sufficient value to justify its existence; no social justice manual is fully possible. Instead, those who would seek to reform an institution at the local level must of necessity begin (once self-purification through contemplation has been accomplished) to contemplate the local iteration of the ill institution. It is imprecise and unfair to assume that because there may be police officers in a police department who are other-race-hostile, that all officers are so situated. It is also imprecise to conclude that a demonstrated pattern of institutional racism means that every interaction between that organization and a member of a racethnic minority will conclude in toxic fashion. Our concern, then, must be with a more complete and nuanced understanding of the nature of any given institutional locality vis-à-vis the etiology of race-relevant harm.

Etiologically speaking, institutional racism and thick injustice may be fueled by individual race hatred, or they may not be, depending on context. Past hatred may have set the rules to the game well in advance; those hate-guided authors being long gone, the cold shell of their sickness remains as part of our social infrastructure. Moreover, privilege is insidiously transparent to the bearers. In some cases, no ill-will may ever have been intended, yet concrete race-relevant harms might result. In all of these instances, however, even if etiologically different, a common remedy remains, binding them together, this common remedy being made clear by an even closer examination of etiology. Humans do what they do, as my father so cogently observes, because they believe it will be self-enhancing in some way. Often we act from a subterranean fear of connecting and being hurt, or a fear of loss (DeValve, 2015). Marx had it almost right: security is the truest opiate of the masses; God is only one delivery method. Our confusion about what is self-enhancing is at the very heart of all three of these damage engines. One may be nearly hate-free, but be predisposed to accept uncritically, say, the consensus assumption of criminal law. In this assumption, the end of security is well served when someone does something harmful and that person is punished. Punishment thus re-ratifies the communal identity, and our membership within it. One who hates acts, as some Native American communities have said, as if one has no ancestors. Hate is a lie, but it is a lie that inures, that swaddles and soothes. In both instances, then, examining, and thus dissolving addictions to false security leads to a new, true freedom: a freedom (and capacity) to love. Love, then, obliterates the ill-functioning institution just as inexorably as it obliterates hate.

As our second axis of problematics, let us contemplate the ironic tension between myth and accountability as it exists currently in American policing. My dissertation chair, Phillip Lyons, is a wise man indeed. We have talked recently about the classic narrative about police officers, relative to the community and the “bad guys.” We the people are sheep. Cops are sheepdogs, whose job it is to protect us from being eaten by the wolves. With red glowing eyes, the wolves stare down at the sheep from cover on the high ground to our flanks; we have no protection other than the sheepdogs. The sheepdogs stand strong and vigilant against the carnivorous packs who would otherwise turn each of us into bloody meals. This narrative is utter and complete hogwash. Many cops love it. Even when confronted with irrefutable arguments against this narrative, they tend to cling to it. It is sexy. Of course it implies that sheep, sheepdogs, and wolves are all different species, fundamentally different from each other. Clearly this is not the case, as we are all one species, and all one as bearers of sentience. This clumsy narrative, this Wiley Coyote myth, tends to guide not only how police see themselves, but also how police see their work, and thus how they approach self-assessment.

We the people have demanded that police, as our agents, as recipients of tax revenues, account for their use of resources. Fair enough. Unfortunately, it turns out that policing is a marvelous example of Einstein’s point: what matters may not be measurable, and what is measurable tends not to matter. Yet there is a tendency, particularly in the shadow of tragic events, like the several deaths of Black men at the hands of police in the St. Louis area, in New York, in Cleveland,… to heighten scrutiny on the police, to make them more accountable. Frustration with grand jury decisions is only too appropriate, but such frustration with the failure of the justice system to hold police accountable is meaningfully different from the increasing addiction to accountability that seems to pervade not only policing but also education.
What is truly ironic, though, is that this addiction to accountability – ostensibly an effort to understand objective truths about how the police function – is guided not by objectivity, but by myth. Wiley Coyote shopped for his diabolical gear at Acme Co. COMPSTAT is one of Acme Co.’s bestselling products.

For there to be meaningful progress in policing, these and other problematics must be examined. We must resist the urge, however, to patch and stitch partial solutions onto a leaky dinghy, and instead learn from these and other insights so as to create from foundation a truer, different, and more loving justice.