UC Irvine

In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, two broad camps have emerged in debates about the possibilities and limitations of police reform. Reformists maintain that theoretically and empirically supported reforms can improve police outcomes, for example by reducing uses of force, reducing complaints against police, and/or reducing racial disparities in enforcement. Abolitionists counter that the fundamental purpose and ultimate function of policing is racial and economic subordination, and consequently any attempts to meaningfully address asymmetric police harm are doomed to failure. These conflicting perspectives on police reform are undergirded by conflicting conceptions of police culture. As virtually all police observers acknowledge, when it comes to shaping officer behavior, “culture eats policy for breakfast.” Reformists do not view police culture as an insurmountable obstacle for reform. To the contrary, reforms are often targeted specifically at police culture in the hopes of producing lasting change. Abolitionists, however, assert that discrimination and violence are intrinsic features of police culture by virtue of policing’s role in maintaining social hierarchy, and thus these features cannot be eradicated through the sort of technocratic fixes advocated by reformists.

This study seeks to surmount the reformist-abolitionist divide by providing an alternative perspective on police culture grounded in a sociohistorical analysis of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). The LAPD is widely regarded as the catalyst for two of themost violent and destructive racial uprisings in U.S. history. Yet, at multiple points over the previous century, the department has also been identified as a model of successful police reform. By tracing LAPD culture through these periods of scandal and reform, the study illustrates how the fundamental logic at the core of the department’s organizational culture has remained fixed over time. However, because the key cultural categories embedded in this logic are inherently fungible and polysemic, the operative meanings of these categories have shifted in the course of reform, resulting in concomitant shifts in LAPD practices that most reformists would identify as meaningful improvements. The study concludes by illustrating how this empirically grounded understanding of cultural change and continuity in the context of reform can make sense of both the possibilities for improved outcomes cited by reformists and the persistence of racialized police harm cited by abolitionists.