Author: Jason
The policy implementation stage of the policy process is where policy decisions are translated into action (Howlett & Ramesh, 2014). In this week’s lead précis, Cocco-Klein underscores Lipsky’s (1980) bottom-up theory of policy implementation and how it may help us understand the dynamics that underlie President-Elect Trump’s proposal to reform the nation’s educational system. She concludes her discussion by asking a few questions, including how the implementation of previous policies has shaped Trump’s 100-day policy agenda. In response, this essay aims to briefly examine the implementation of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policing program through both the top-down and bottom-up models of policy implementation.
During the end of September 2016, Trump proposed a nationwide stop-and-frisk program because “it worked incredibly well” in New York City. In sum, stop-and-frisk authorizes a police officer who reasonably suspects that a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or misdemeanor to stop, question and possibly frisk that individual (NYPD, 2016). Although stop-and-frisk has received much attention over recent years, the debate surrounding its constitutionality has been ongoing ever since Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed it into New York state law over fifty years ago (Waxman, 2016). In the 1990s, pressure for police officers to practice stop and frisk was intensified after the introduction of CompStat – a crime reduction technique, inspired by broken windows theory, that uses comparative statistics to identify spikes in crime with the intention of addressing those spikes with targeted police enforcement.
Howlett highlights two dominant competing theories of policy implementation: the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach. The top-down approach emphasizes that central-level decision-makers, or “policy architects,” hold dominant power and deliver clear goals and instructions to staff who are expected to carry out these instructions in a rational and linear fashion. From this perspective, policy design is of utmost importance and successful policy implementation essentially depends on the design itself. In the case of stop and frisk, top-down analysts assume that senior NYPD officials convey explicit directions to police officers about the program and the police officers execute the “one-best way” to put stop and frisk into action.
The top-down approach has two major analytical shortcomings. First, as noted by critics such as Herbert Simon, it is “often contradictory and proverbial rather than scientific” (Howlett, 2004). It assumes that higher-ups provide implementers with clear goals for a policy; however, since the legislation process is political and involves bargaining, policies often end up with vague and contradictory language, which may result in policy failure. Second, the top-down approach maintains that senior politicians and officials are the key actors during the implementation stage, but in reality, these officials usually play a lesser role in the everyday implementation of policy compared to lower-level officials and members of the public. Subsequently, scholars developed an empirical and more descriptive model of implementation known as the bottom-up approach.
The bottom-up approach holds that policy success or failure “often depends on the skills and commitments of those directly involved in implementing policy” (Howlett, 2004). Lipsky’s (1980) prominent version of the bottom-up approach posits that “street-level bureaucrats,” rather than top-level officials, are central to the implementation process because their decisions and actions, which directly affect the recipients of a policy, are what actually become and represent the policies of their agency. The underlying premise of this approach is that street-level bureaucrats have a certain degree of discretion over the services, benefits, and sanctions delivered to policy recipients, and the way they execute this discretion – which is shaped by limited time, lack of resources, high caseloads, individual interests, and so on – may result in the implementation of policy that is contrary to organizational and managerial objectives and directives. From this perspective, an analysis of the implementation of stop-and-frisk would begin with police officers and “their patterns of practice, routines and simplifications that help them to deal with the dynamics” of carrying out the program (Erasmus, 2014). While this approach alone may seem like it would provide more insight into policy implementation than the top-down approach, these models are best used in conjunction with one another, especially in regards to the implementation of the stop-and-frisk program.
When CompStat was introduced in the 1990s, senior NYPD officials instructed police officers to employ stop-and-frisk as their main policing strategy. Police officers were required to document each stop-and-frisk occurrence, which would then be plugged into CompStat and also serve as a measure for police performance. Crime soon began to significantly drop in the city and the department was lauded for its “advanced’ crime-fighting tactics. However, it eventually became apparent to the public that the high-crime, targeted areas identified by CompStat were predominately Black and Hispanic communities. And although crime dropped throughout the city, senior officials directed police officers to continue to stop-and-frisk “as a means for us [police officers] to show that we were still fighting crime” (Naspretto, 2012). Consequently, public hostility towards the NYPD grew and the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk program was questioned.
In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD violated the constitutional rights of minorities in the way that it implemented its stop-and-frisk program, calling it “a form of racial profiling of young Black and Hispanic men" (Kiely, 2016). In other words, the judge did not make a decision on the practice and/or effectiveness of stop-and-frisk in general, but ruled that the NYPD’s particular implementation of the program (or the behavior of NYPD police officers when executing the program) was unconstitutional. “This Court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool,” the judge opined. Since this is a matter of implementation failure, what can the two models tell us? Was the judge correct in her decision?
From a bottom-up perspective, it seems that police officers were forced to execute stop-and-frisk in target communities because their jobs and/or status in the police department would be jeopardized if they didn’t reach their quotas. However, I do believe that police officers have the discretion to police in a way that is civil and non-threatening even under very stressful circumstances. According to a study by the Urban Institute (2014), nearly 30 percent of all stops conducted in New York City between 2004 and 2010 were made on either an illegal or questionable basis. Through a survey of 500 young New Yorkers living in heavily patrolled areas, the study also found that: (1) less than one-third of respondents were given a reason for why they were stopped, (2) almost half of the respondents reported being threatened or having force used against them during a stop, and (3) more than half stated that they were treated worse because of their race or ethnicity.
The last finding from the Urban Institute study begs the difficult but interesting question of whether or not discriminatory police behavior in this instance was shaped by personal bias or rather by the orders from senior officials to target minority communities. From a top-down perspective, it seems to me that the stop-and-frisk implementation directives from high-level officials, along with the performance metrics, promoted both a discriminatory organizational culture and forced the majority of police officers to participate in a discriminatory program even if they personally objected to such practices. (For an account of what happened to a police officer who did blow the whistle against these practices, see Rayman’s The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage). Ultimately, I agree with the judge’s decision on stop-and-frisk in New York City, and believe that CompStat was inherently racist and created a work environment that encouraged discriminatory police behavior which still lingers in the department today.
Circling this discussion back to Trump, the newly-minted president-elect who frequently referred to himself as the “law and order candidate” has unsurprisingly advocated for a nationwide stop-and-frisk program throughout his campaign. Nonetheless, his recently released 100-day initiative on police reform reads:
8. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.
While this brings great uncertainty much like the rest of his policy initiatives, the language used here makes me wonder if he just recently discovered that stop-and-frisk eventually failed in New York City and then swiftly decided to reach into the garbage can to find the Community Safety Act, which seems to incorporate elements of collaborative implementation. But who knows considering that former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani is likely to be granted a cabinet position.
External Sources
Erasmus, E. (2014). Guidance Note 5: Street-Level Bureaucracy. University of Cape Town.
Kiely, E. (2016, September 29). Is Stop-and-Frisk Unconstitutional? FactCheck.org.
La Vigne, N. G. (2014). Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime Control with Community Relations. Urban Institute.
Naspretto, E. (2012, June 3). The real history of stop-and-frisk. NY Daily News.
Waxman, O. (September 21, 2016). Here’s How Stop-and-Frisk Laws Got Their Start. Time Inc.
The policy implementation stage of the policy process is where policy decisions are translated into action (Howlett & Ramesh, 2014). In this week’s lead précis, Cocco-Klein underscores Lipsky’s (1980) bottom-up theory of policy implementation and how it may help us understand the dynamics that underlie President-Elect Trump’s proposal to reform the nation’s educational system. She concludes her discussion by asking a few questions, including how the implementation of previous policies has shaped Trump’s 100-day policy agenda. In response, this essay aims to briefly examine the implementation of New York City’s stop-and-frisk policing program through both the top-down and bottom-up models of policy implementation.
During the end of September 2016, Trump proposed a nationwide stop-and-frisk program because “it worked incredibly well” in New York City. In sum, stop-and-frisk authorizes a police officer who reasonably suspects that a person has committed, is committing, or is about to commit a felony or misdemeanor to stop, question and possibly frisk that individual (NYPD, 2016). Although stop-and-frisk has received much attention over recent years, the debate surrounding its constitutionality has been ongoing ever since Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed it into New York state law over fifty years ago (Waxman, 2016). In the 1990s, pressure for police officers to practice stop and frisk was intensified after the introduction of CompStat – a crime reduction technique, inspired by broken windows theory, that uses comparative statistics to identify spikes in crime with the intention of addressing those spikes with targeted police enforcement.
Howlett highlights two dominant competing theories of policy implementation: the top-down approach and the bottom-up approach. The top-down approach emphasizes that central-level decision-makers, or “policy architects,” hold dominant power and deliver clear goals and instructions to staff who are expected to carry out these instructions in a rational and linear fashion. From this perspective, policy design is of utmost importance and successful policy implementation essentially depends on the design itself. In the case of stop and frisk, top-down analysts assume that senior NYPD officials convey explicit directions to police officers about the program and the police officers execute the “one-best way” to put stop and frisk into action.
The top-down approach has two major analytical shortcomings. First, as noted by critics such as Herbert Simon, it is “often contradictory and proverbial rather than scientific” (Howlett, 2004). It assumes that higher-ups provide implementers with clear goals for a policy; however, since the legislation process is political and involves bargaining, policies often end up with vague and contradictory language, which may result in policy failure. Second, the top-down approach maintains that senior politicians and officials are the key actors during the implementation stage, but in reality, these officials usually play a lesser role in the everyday implementation of policy compared to lower-level officials and members of the public. Subsequently, scholars developed an empirical and more descriptive model of implementation known as the bottom-up approach.
The bottom-up approach holds that policy success or failure “often depends on the skills and commitments of those directly involved in implementing policy” (Howlett, 2004). Lipsky’s (1980) prominent version of the bottom-up approach posits that “street-level bureaucrats,” rather than top-level officials, are central to the implementation process because their decisions and actions, which directly affect the recipients of a policy, are what actually become and represent the policies of their agency. The underlying premise of this approach is that street-level bureaucrats have a certain degree of discretion over the services, benefits, and sanctions delivered to policy recipients, and the way they execute this discretion – which is shaped by limited time, lack of resources, high caseloads, individual interests, and so on – may result in the implementation of policy that is contrary to organizational and managerial objectives and directives. From this perspective, an analysis of the implementation of stop-and-frisk would begin with police officers and “their patterns of practice, routines and simplifications that help them to deal with the dynamics” of carrying out the program (Erasmus, 2014). While this approach alone may seem like it would provide more insight into policy implementation than the top-down approach, these models are best used in conjunction with one another, especially in regards to the implementation of the stop-and-frisk program.
When CompStat was introduced in the 1990s, senior NYPD officials instructed police officers to employ stop-and-frisk as their main policing strategy. Police officers were required to document each stop-and-frisk occurrence, which would then be plugged into CompStat and also serve as a measure for police performance. Crime soon began to significantly drop in the city and the department was lauded for its “advanced’ crime-fighting tactics. However, it eventually became apparent to the public that the high-crime, targeted areas identified by CompStat were predominately Black and Hispanic communities. And although crime dropped throughout the city, senior officials directed police officers to continue to stop-and-frisk “as a means for us [police officers] to show that we were still fighting crime” (Naspretto, 2012). Consequently, public hostility towards the NYPD grew and the constitutionality of the stop-and-frisk program was questioned.
In 2013, U.S. District Court Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the NYPD violated the constitutional rights of minorities in the way that it implemented its stop-and-frisk program, calling it “a form of racial profiling of young Black and Hispanic men" (Kiely, 2016). In other words, the judge did not make a decision on the practice and/or effectiveness of stop-and-frisk in general, but ruled that the NYPD’s particular implementation of the program (or the behavior of NYPD police officers when executing the program) was unconstitutional. “This Court’s mandate is solely to judge the constitutionality of police behavior, not its effectiveness as a law enforcement tool,” the judge opined. Since this is a matter of implementation failure, what can the two models tell us? Was the judge correct in her decision?
From a bottom-up perspective, it seems that police officers were forced to execute stop-and-frisk in target communities because their jobs and/or status in the police department would be jeopardized if they didn’t reach their quotas. However, I do believe that police officers have the discretion to police in a way that is civil and non-threatening even under very stressful circumstances. According to a study by the Urban Institute (2014), nearly 30 percent of all stops conducted in New York City between 2004 and 2010 were made on either an illegal or questionable basis. Through a survey of 500 young New Yorkers living in heavily patrolled areas, the study also found that: (1) less than one-third of respondents were given a reason for why they were stopped, (2) almost half of the respondents reported being threatened or having force used against them during a stop, and (3) more than half stated that they were treated worse because of their race or ethnicity.
The last finding from the Urban Institute study begs the difficult but interesting question of whether or not discriminatory police behavior in this instance was shaped by personal bias or rather by the orders from senior officials to target minority communities. From a top-down perspective, it seems to me that the stop-and-frisk implementation directives from high-level officials, along with the performance metrics, promoted both a discriminatory organizational culture and forced the majority of police officers to participate in a discriminatory program even if they personally objected to such practices. (For an account of what happened to a police officer who did blow the whistle against these practices, see Rayman’s The NYPD Tapes: A Shocking Story of Cops, Cover-ups, and Courage). Ultimately, I agree with the judge’s decision on stop-and-frisk in New York City, and believe that CompStat was inherently racist and created a work environment that encouraged discriminatory police behavior which still lingers in the department today.
Circling this discussion back to Trump, the newly-minted president-elect who frequently referred to himself as the “law and order candidate” has unsurprisingly advocated for a nationwide stop-and-frisk program throughout his campaign. Nonetheless, his recently released 100-day initiative on police reform reads:
8. Restoring Community Safety Act. Reduces surging crime, drugs and violence by creating a Task Force On Violent Crime and increasing funding for programs that train and assist local police; increases resources for federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to dismantle criminal gangs and put violent offenders behind bars.
While this brings great uncertainty much like the rest of his policy initiatives, the language used here makes me wonder if he just recently discovered that stop-and-frisk eventually failed in New York City and then swiftly decided to reach into the garbage can to find the Community Safety Act, which seems to incorporate elements of collaborative implementation. But who knows considering that former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani is likely to be granted a cabinet position.
External Sources
Erasmus, E. (2014). Guidance Note 5: Street-Level Bureaucracy. University of Cape Town.
Kiely, E. (2016, September 29). Is Stop-and-Frisk Unconstitutional? FactCheck.org.
La Vigne, N. G. (2014). Stop and Frisk: Balancing Crime Control with Community Relations. Urban Institute.
Naspretto, E. (2012, June 3). The real history of stop-and-frisk. NY Daily News.
Waxman, O. (September 21, 2016). Here’s How Stop-and-Frisk Laws Got Their Start. Time Inc.