BITTNER, EGON (police)

 

Egon Bittner (1921—), a pioneer in the sociology of policing, is widely credited with largely defining the police function, the role of police use of force, and significant principles of law enforcement organization. Bittner’s work is widely considered among the earliest academic treatments of law enforcement that moved away from an applied and practitioner orientation to a systematic social science study that largely redefined our understanding of police functions and roles in contemporary society.

He received his doctorate from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1961 and subsequently held faculty appointments at a number of universities, including the University of California at Riverside, the University of California Medical School, a social science research appointment at the Langley Porter Neuropsychiatric Institute in San Francisco, and the position of Harry Copland Professor in the Social Sciences at Brandeis University. He remains affiliated with Brandeis University where he is professor emeritus in the Department of Sociology. He is a past president of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and has served as a consultant to many police departments, the Police Foundation, and the Advisory Committee of the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice.

At Brandeis in the 1960s, Bittner interacted with several leading sociologists of the day including Everett Hughes, Kurt Wolff, and Lewis Coser. A synergy evolved from the department’s long-standing strength in classical European theory and a favorable orientation toward fieldwork. In October 1967, Police on Skid Row: A Study of Peacekeeping became Bittner’s first big academic hit that spearheaded a minor movement within social science qualitative methodology. Bittner portrayed the police as authority figures fueled by violence toward effecting absolute subordination to control a vagrant underclass. Bright young scholars embraced this authority-questioning style of ethnography and sought appointments within the Brandeis sociology department. Most notably, Samuel E. Wallace, whose transformed doctoral dissertation Skid Row as a Way of Life (1965), actually an earlier but less credited treatment of life among the homeless drunken underclass, joined the Brandeis sociology faculty and helped to propel Bittner’s work. They argued that interaction between police and vagrants was primarily a process of assimilation that both alienates and reinforces through well-defined roles determined by a dichotomous power dynamic. The ethnographic approach of studying human subjects in natural deviance settings made popular by Bittner and Wallace has reemerged in contemporary studies of crime and deviance through the growing edge ethnography and extreme methods movement en vogue with critical criminologists and alternative qualitative methodologists.

In 1970, Bittner published The Functions of the Police in Modern Society, his most famous work, which explains that the capacity to use force is the core of the police role. Virtually every undergraduate and graduate course in the sociology of the police as well as policing courses taught in the criminal justice sciences look to Bittner for a definitional understanding of police power. Perhaps the foremost message in this work is the inevitable and necessary assignment of use of force as clearly purported: ”It is possible, certainly not unthinkable, that at some future time policemen may be able to compel the desired outcome of any problem without ever resorting to physical force. But it appears that in the existing structure of communal life in our society such force is not wholly avoidable. This being the case, not only its avoidance, but its employment must be methodically normalized” (p. 100).

The idea of police role, function, and objectives, as described by Bittner, largely bypassed technical and logistical dimensions of police work and focused on the philosophical mission of law enforcement as the face of and foremost realization of formal social control and governmental authority. Bittner’s work in this area has set the parameters for long-standing and continuing discussion of the legitimacy of authority in society as expressed by police behavior and related consequences. Also often credited with contributions to organizational sociology, Bittner’s foremost scholarly contributions to police ethnography and the functions of police in modern society have shown lasting utility and will likely continue to influence both philosophical and logistical orientations to law enforcement in democratic society.

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