The Functions of the Police in Modern Society: A Review of Background Factors, Current Practices, and Possible Role Models - Egon Bittner, Ph.D. (Brandeis University) - November 1970 (National Institute of Mental Health, Crime and Delinquency Issues monograph series)

Bittner argues the police cannot be understood through legal ideals or law enforcement alone. Instead, he locates their defining core in the capacity to distribute situationally justified force whenever circumstances seem to demand immediate intervention.

1. “Enforcing the law” doesn’t explain what police actually do.

2. The heart of policing is the authority to use force.

3. The role is shaped by police’s place in society, not by the law.

4. The real skill of policing is hidden and undervalued.

🧠 Conclusion

Assumptions challenged

Bittner takes apart three ideas most people never think to question.

The first is that police exist to enforce the law. He shows that this can’t be true in any straightforward way, because the law never tells an officer what to do in a specific situation — judgment always fills the gap. If the law doesn’t determine the action, it can’t be what defines the job. ⭐

The second is that policing is fundamentally about crime. Watch what officers actually spend their days on and crime-fighting is a small slice of it. The “war on crime” framing describes an aspiration, not the work.

The third, and the one he pushes hardest against, is the comfortable belief that force is an unfortunate exception in policing — something that happens when things go wrong. Bittner reverses this completely. Force isn’t the exception; it’s the center. Everything else is what the job looks like on the ordinary days when that authority doesn’t have to be exercised.

Underneath all three sits a fourth assumption he challenges: that we can describe an institution by its stated ideals. He argues you have to start from what people actually do and work back toward the ideals, not the other way around.

Main takeaway

Police are the institution we’ve created to handle situations where something needs to be settled immediately and no other means will work — and what makes that possible is their standing authority to use force. ⭐

Naming this honestly isn’t an attack on police; for Bittner it’s the only foundation on which policing can become a real profession.

As long as we hide behind the language of law enforcement, the actual skill of the job — reading situations, defusing them, knowing when not to act — goes untaught, unmeasured, and unaccountable. The uncomfortable truth is the starting point, not the conclusion.