The Dragnetpicture of American law enforcement continues to lurk, in particular, in the background of most criminal procedure scholarship

DAVID GARLAND, THE CULTURE OF CONTROL: CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 169 (2001). 1209 CRIME AND SOCIAL ORDER IN 1210 DAVID A. SKLANSKY [Vol. 96 In other respects, though, American policing has been transformed. Three changes are particularly notable. First, the mantra of community policing has replaced the orthodoxy of police professionalism. Second, civilian oversight, once resisted tooth-and-nail by the police, has become unexceptionable. Third, and most striking of all, police workforces have grown much more diverse. The virtually all-white, virtually all-male departments of the 1950s and 1960s have given way to departments with large numbers of female and minority officers, often led by female or minority chiefs. Openly gay and lesbian officers, too, are increasingly commonplace. Today’s Los Angeles Police Department is not the homogeneous workplace celebrated on Dragnet-andneither is the police force of any other large American city. This article focuses on the last of these changes, the dramatic shift in the demographics of police departments-in who the police are. What implications should this transformation have for how we think about and regulate the police? The same question can, and should, be asked about community policing and civilian oversight. But workforce diversity is at once the most dramatic and the least scrutinized major change that American policing has undergone over the past several decades. There is a widespread sense that the change has been revolutionary,2 but it is hard to know quite what to make of it. So often the change is simply ignored. Law enforcement is analyzed as though it were still monolithically white, male, and straight.3 The Dragnetpicture of American law enforcement continues to lurk, in particular, in the background of most criminal procedure scholarship–even when that scholarship pays careful attention to the race, gender, and sexual orientation of the people being policed. Those scholars who have not ignored the new demographics of American policing have tended to reach one of two polar conclusions about their implications. Either the growing diversity of American police forces changes almost nothing, or it changes almost everything. Usually the new demographics are treated as cosmetic or, at best, largely symbolic. The nature of policing, the argument goes, is overwhelmingly a matter of occupational outlook and organizational culture, not of the personal characteristics of new recruits. “Blue is blue”: the job shapes the officer, not the other way around.4 Officers of all backgrounds are assumed either 2 See, e.g., DAvID H. BAYLEY, POLICING IN AMERICA: ASSESSMENT AND PROSPECTS 3 (1998), available at http://www.policefoundation.org/pdf/Bayley.pdf. 3 See, e.g., KENNETH BOLTON JR. & JOE R. FEAGIN, BLACK IN BLUE: AFRICAN-AMERICAN POLICE OFFICERS AND RACISM 2, 4 (2003) (noting that “[i]n many discussions of policing, all the law enforcement officers are, implicitly or explicitly, taken to be white”). 4 See, e.g., SAMUEL WALKER, CASSIA SPOHN & MIRIAM DELONE, THE COLOR OF JUSTICE: 2006] NOT YOUR FATHER’S POLICEDEPARTMENT 1211 to make peace with the “white, masculine, heterosexual ethos”‘5 of policing, or to have difficulty lasting. At the other extreme, the growing diversity of American police forces is sometimes cited as grounds for a complete rethinking of criminal procedure and, more generally, our entire approach to law enforcement.

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