Conducted energy devices and criminal justice policy

Samuel Walker’s (1993) book, Taming the system: The control of discretion in criminal justice, 1950–1990, provides time-tested insights on the relationship between bureaucratic decision making and criminal justice policy. Published in the early 1990s, the book provides an analysis of existing literature that pertains to the exercise of discretion at specific criminal justice decision points. Walker discussed that often both anticipated and unanticipated consequences develop after new policy changes are implemented—a conclusion that is consistent with many other classic and contemporary work that points to the instabilities of policy reform. Legislatures, bureaucratic organizations, and courts often initiate policy change to control discretion, and sometimes these efforts are successful. For example, Walker (1993: 147) referred to the control of deadly force in policing as having “enormous significance,” and that the adopted rules reduced the overall number of police shootings and helped minimize racial disparities in the use of deadly force. These changes, in addition, had few unanticipated consequences because officers killed or injured in the line of duty did not increase after the adoption of new deadly force policies. New policies can, thus, positively initiate change in criminal justice organizations, and documenting the “law on the books” provides a good starting point for understanding better the impacts of policy change. Such changes, however, also can result in a bureaucratic chain reaction that subverts, undermines, or delegitimizes the intent of the new rule or decision. Personnel will attempt to break or bend any new rule so that the impact is consistent with their accepted and expected routines. The conflict between “law on the books” and “law in action” provides one element of the policy context for the important debate engaged in this section of the journal. The use of conducted energy devices (CEDs), the most popular of which is the TASER (Taser International, Inc., Scottsdale, AZ), is widespread within the law-enforcement community—nearly 12,000 lawenforcement agencies have acquired the devices (National Institute of Justice [NIJ], 2008). It could be argued that the adoption of such devices (and other less lethal weapons) is a sensible policy change that was adopted to manage better one of law enforcement’s most volatile