Are St. Louis cops professionals? Realistically, is policing “a vocation or occupation requiring advanced education and training, and involving intellectual skills, as medicine, law, theology, engineering, teaching, etc.” (Webster’s New World College Dictionary)?
Establishing professionalism in the St. Louis Police Department is the single most critical element inherent to creating a police agency that is a law enforcement leader, a positive element of City government and the community.
But the qualities inherent to professionalism are often oblique concepts in the policing realm. Honesty, integrity, morality, a sense of fair play and the pursuit of efficiency are often career-killers for police department personnel.
So how is professionalism attained?
A good starting point would be to take a long, studious look at The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (U.S. Government Printing Office, February, 1967). It’s a comprehensive report from the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice. Supported by nine task force reports (one on the police), it is heralded as the most comprehensive work of its kind and is said to remain relevant today.
“An examination of the Crime Commission’s work on the police is useful in two respects,” University of Nebraska-Omaha Professor Samuel Walker writes in an evaluation of the Commission’s report and recommendations concerning the Task Force report on the police (“The 1967 President’s Crime Commission Report: Its Impact 25 Years Later”).
“First, the Commission’s reports serve as a benchmark in the history of the police. The President’s Crime Commission marks a critical period of transition between an old view of the police and a new one just being born.”
President Lyndon Johnson’s Crime Commission was staffed by a stellar group of American scholars who rendered a Task Force report on the police that offered a plethora of recommendations regarding professionalizing police agencies. Among them: Nationwide recruiting of police personnel; elimination of residency requirements; restrictions on the co-employment of relatives; high educational standards for hiring and promotion; establishment of a metropolitan police academy with a demanding, high-quality curriculum; frequent and intense in-service training; and separate career paths for patrol, investigative, technical and administrative positions.
Some will argue that the St. Louis Police Department has already implemented many of the Commission’s recommendations. This is factually true, but the mere fact that a program of some sort exists offers no guarantee that it accomplishes its written goals, functions within the parameters of its formal guidelines, or achieves professional standards.
Thus programs, procedures and guidelines that appear to be progressive, productive and professional are often nothing more than facades that mask an operational performance permeated with corrupt practices.
Unfortunately, St. Louis’ police department remains a corrupt political entity functioning in a corrupt political system. Corruption as used therein and as it relates to police department and City government in general is not that typically depicted in popular entertainment. Actual corruption is less dramatic than crime movies, but indubitably pervasive and damaging to the police function and the community it serves. It is low-level, everyday corruption that is more often accepted as “business as usual” than it is challenged as a detriment to a professional police department.
Police professionalism in St. Louis hasn’t happened yet. Maybe that will change when the City takes full control of its police department. Maybe not. Police professionalism will be accomplished only if the citizens of St. Louis demand a professional police department and work diligently to achieve it.
Michael K. Broughton is retired from the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.