"Violence is an inherent part of policing. The police represent the most direct means by which the state imposes its will on the citizenry. When persuasion, indoctrination, moral pressure and incentive measures all fail — there are the police. In the field of social control, police are specialists in violence. They are armed, trained and authorized to use force. With varying degrees of subtlety, this colors their every action. Like the possibility of arrest, the threat of violence is implicit in every police encounter. Violence, as well as the law, is what they represent. Despite the official insistence to the contrary, it is clear that police organizations, as well as individual officers, hold a large share of the responsibility for the prevalence of police brutality. Police agencies are organizationally complex, and brutality may be promoted or accommodated within any (or all) of its various dimensions. Both formal and informal aspects of an organization can help create a climate in which unnecessary violence is tolerated, or even encouraged. Among the formal aspects contributing to violence are the organization’s official policies, its identified priorities, the training it offers its personnel, its allocation of resources, and its system of promotions, awards, and other incentives. When these aspects of an organization encourage violence — whether or not they do so intentionally, or even consciously — we can speak of brutality being promoted “from above.” This understanding has been well applied to the regimes of certain openly thuggish leaders —Bull Connor, Richard Daley, Frank Rizzo, Daryl Gates, Rudolph Giuliani, Joe Arpaio (to name just a few) — but it need not be so overt to have the same effect. On the other hand, when police culture and occupational norms support the use of unnecessary violence, we can describe brutality as being supported “from below.” Such informal conditions are a bit harder to pin down, but they certainly have their consequences. We may count among their elements insularity, indifference to the problem of brutality, generalized suspicion, and the intense demand for personal respect. One of the first sociologists to study the problem of police violence, William Westley, described these as “basic occupational values,” more important than any other determinant of police behavior."