Best known for his concepts of ”proactive” vs. ”reactive” mobilization of police action, Albert John Reiss, Jr., was a criminologist who pioneered the use of systematic research methods to study the causes and consequences of police behavior.
Born in Cascade, Wisconsin, on December 9, 1922, Reiss received his Ph.D. in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1949, where he taught before moving successively to Vanderbilt, Wisconsin, and Michigan. He served Yale University as the William Graham Sumner Professor of Sociology for a quarter-century. After completing major contributions of widely cited research on juvenile delinquency, Reiss began field observations of police work with the Detroit and Chicago Police Departments in 1963 and 1964, respectively. It was during these patrols that he developed his conceptual framework on the mobilization of the police.
Reiss described police patrol as primarily ”reactive” in the sense that it is directed to tasks generated by people, such as crime victims, who are located outside of the organization. Reiss contrasted the most common form of police work with police-initiated detection of crimes, or ”proactive” law enforcement. These terms spread like wildfire after they were first published in the mid-1960s (Bordua and Reiss 1966; Reiss and Bordua 1967), first among academic social scientists, then among police officials themselves, and finally to business, military, and organizational strategy. (This concept was not only new to police work. It was also new to the English language. On that basis, the American Sociological Review refused to print the article later published by the American Journal ofSociology in 1966, saying that the authors could not use the word proactive because it did not exist in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary [1989, Vol. XII, 533 now credits Reiss with the first printed usage of the word.)
The importance of these concepts for policing derived from Reiss’s (1971a) crucial observation about the legitimacy of police work, as well as its potential for corruption. When citizens mobilize police, as Reiss showed, officers encounter less violent resistance than when they enter a social setting uninvited by any of the citizen-participants. Mobilization decisions against such ”victimless” criminals as drug dealers and gamblers, usually made internally by the government, offer greater potential for corruption. Without a citizen complainant, Reiss said, it is difficult to detect the fact that enforcement operations have ceased upon payment of a bribe.
In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice asked Reiss to undertake a major study of patterns of police contact with citizens in major metropolitan areas. Using the systematic social observation approach previously used only in laboratory settings (Reiss, 1971b), Reiss led the first quantitative field study of police encounters with citizens. In the summer of 1966, his team of thirty-six observers working in Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., filled out observation forms on 5,360 mobilizations of the police—of which 81% were reactive— compiling detailed data on how police interacted with 11,255 citizens.
These data led to the first precise estimates on such key questions as how often citizens assault police and in what kind of circumstances, how often police use illegal force against citizens, whether black officers are less likely to use excessive force against black citizens than white officers (they were not), and the correlates of arrest decisions (see Reiss 1968). This work also contributed to a broader understanding of the reciprocal nature of respect and legitimacy in police-citizen encounters (Reiss 1971a). The research method became the gold standard for describing police conduct, with other social scientists replicating it with National Science Foundation support in 1977 (see Smith 1986) and with National Institute of Justice funding in 1995-96 (see Mastrofski, Reisig, and Snipes 2002). Access to the database has allowed many other researchers to publish analyses of the data, notably including Donald Black (1980) and Robert Frei-drich (1977, 1980).
Reiss also developed the conceptual framework for understanding police strategies for ”soft” versus ”hard” crime (Reiss 1985), which was later used in the development of computerized crime mapping and hot-spot patrol practices (Sherman and Weisburd 1995). His work explored the view of police from the perspective of crime victims such as small business owners, who depend heavily on police in order to stay in business (Reiss 1969).
Perhaps the most significant contribution Albert Reiss made to policing has yet to be fully appreciated. His National Academy of Sciences review of patterns of co-offending in criminal careers (Reiss 1988) posed a major challenge to police organizations. It suggested the great importance of mapping the social networks of co-arrestees, identifying a small number of criminals who recruit a high percentage of all offenders into committing their first crime. The incarceration of such ”Typhoid Marys,” if found, could reduce the spread of ”infection” of criminal events, and reduce the crime rate. The implication of Reiss’s work on this subject is that police could do much more to reduce crime by focusing on such recruiters.
In addition to his own research, Reiss trained and advised the largest generation of police researchers so far produced in the Western world, either as graduate students or as leaders of research projects on which Reiss served as an adviser. He played key roles in overseeing the design of police research at both the (U.S.) Police Foundation and the National Institute of Justice. That research included the multi-city Spouse Assault Replication Project or SARP (Sherman 1992), the multicity Drug Market Analysis Program or DMAP (see, for example, Weisburd and Green 1995), and the research program on deadly force by police.
In his writing for the latter program, he critiqued the widely held view of police shootings as ”split-second decisions” made ”only at the last minute when the citizen failed to heed all warnings” (Reiss 1980, 127). He urged all research projects to focus on the fundamental starting point in the sequence of decisions leading to police use of deadly force: the broader context of all policies and practices governing police operations. If that context lacks policies for structured alternatives that can de-escalate confrontations, such as waiting out a hostage situation, then the ”final frame” of the sequence may have been determined well in advance by that context.
Reiss was elected president of both the American Society of Criminology, which honored him with its Sutherland Award, and the International Society of Criminology, which honored him with its Prix Durkheim. A festschrift honored his career with assessments of his contributions by leading criminologists (Waring and Weis-burd 2002), and a distinguished scholarship prize named after him was established
