When a city launches a new drug enforcement campaign, doubles down on narcotics sweeps, or deploys a freshly created task force, observers in the drug policy world tend to ask a familiar question: does it work? What gets asked far less often, and what I think is actually the more important question, is whether the system is even structured to care whether it works.
That is the uncomfortable ground that Crank and Langworthy (1992) occupy in their study, "An Institutional Perspective of Policing," published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Their argument is not that police departments are corrupt or incompetent. It is that the organizational logic driving police behavior is institutional rather than technical, meaning that departments survive by satisfying societal expectations of what policing should look like, not by producing measurable public safety outcomes. The distinction sounds academic. In practice, it explains a great deal about why American drug enforcement has remained so resistant to evidence for so long.
I want to work through their argument carefully here because I think it gets underread by people working in drug policy, who tend to engage with policing literature through the lens of effectiveness research rather than organizational theory. That is a gap worth closing.
Policing as an Institutionalized Organization
Crank and Langworthy (1992) draw on a distinction from organizational sociology between what they call technical environments and institutional environments. In a technical environment, organizations survive by producing results. A manufacturer that makes a better product at a lower cost grows; one that fails to do so loses market share and eventually collapses. The feedback loop between performance and survival is relatively direct.
Institutional environments work differently. Here, organizations survive by conforming to powerful norms, cultural expectations, and myths about what a legitimate organization looks like. Legitimacy, not technical efficiency, is the primary currency. Crank and Langworthy (1992) argue that American municipal police departments operate primarily in an institutional environment. Their survival depends on how well they embody societal myths about what policing should be, far more than on whether they demonstrably reduce crime.
This is a structural claim, and it is worth sitting with. The authors are not saying that police officers or administrators are acting dishonestly. They are saying that the organizational incentives that shape police behavior reward institutional conformity over technical performance. When those two things conflict, institutional conformity tends to win (Crank & Langworthy, 1992).
"Police departments thrive in their institutional environment by adhering to powerful myths and maintaining legitimacy with influential actors in their surroundings. The structure and activities of police departments are determined less by technical demands and more by societal expectations of what a police organization should look like and how it should behave."
Crank & Langworthy, 1992, p. 341
The implications of that claim are significant. If police departments are shaped primarily by institutional pressures, then studying policing through an effectiveness lens alone will always produce an incomplete picture. You will keep finding that practices persist despite evidence of limited effectiveness, and you will keep struggling to explain why. Institutional theory offers an answer: practices persist because they serve a different function than the one researchers are measuring.
Core Concepts from Crank & Langworthy (1992)
Institutional Myths: Socially shared beliefs about what a police department should look like and how it should operate, which drive organizational structure independently of whether those structures improve outcomes.
Sovereigns: The external actors (city councils, mayors, courts, and the general public) whose approval determines whether a department receives political support, resources, and stability.
Ceremonial Practices: Organizational rituals such as random patrol, rapid 911 response, and specialized units that signal legitimacy to external audiences regardless of their crime-reduction impact.
Legitimacy Crisis: A moment, usually triggered by scandal or sustained public criticism, when a department's perceived legitimacy collapses and must be symbolically restored, often by replacing leadership.
What Institutional Myths Actually Look Like
Crank and Langworthy (1992) identify a set of institutional myths that shape the structure and behavior of American police departments. These are not fabrications. They are genuine cultural expectations about what professional policing looks like, built up over decades of political history, media coverage, and public experience with law enforcement. But they function as organizational imperatives regardless of their relationship to effectiveness.
Symbols of Professionalism
The most visible expressions of these myths are the symbols that communicate police legitimacy to the public: uniforms, rank insignia, patrol vehicles, the physical iconography of law enforcement. Crank and Langworthy (1992) note that these symbols matter organizationally not because they make officers more effective, but because they communicate to sovereigns and to the public that this is a disciplined, professional institution. The myth of the crime-fighting professional is sustained partly through these artifacts, which is why departments invest in maintaining them even when budgets are constrained elsewhere.
Specialized Units and the Logic of Expertise
One of the more consequential institutional myths that Crank and Langworthy (1992) identify concerns specialized units. Their argument is that units dedicated to particular crime categories, including narcotics, gang suppression, and vice, frequently exist not because evidence supports their superiority over other organizational arrangements, but because public demand and sovereign expectations for visible expertise drive their creation. Specialization signals seriousness. It tells the public and political leadership that the department has organized itself around the problem in a serious, professional way.
The drug policy implications here are direct. Narcotics units and drug task forces proliferated across American law enforcement throughout the latter decades of the twentieth century in response to a political and social environment that demanded organized, specialized, visible action on drugs. Their existence satisfied sovereigns. Whether they produced durable reductions in drug use or trafficking was, institutionally speaking, a secondary question (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). The organizational payoff came from having them, not from what they produced.
Preventive Patrol and the 911 System
Perhaps the clearest illustration of an institutional myth in the literature is the random preventive patrol. Crank and Langworthy (1992) observe that research findings questioning its crime-reduction effectiveness have not led to its abandonment. The same holds for the 911 rapid response model, organized around the premise that faster police response prevents more crime.
Both practices have continued not because the evidence supports them, but because they fulfill a legitimating function. The public expects to see police cars on the street. City councils expect rapid response times. These expectations are themselves products of institutional myths about what policing does and how it works. Crank and Langworthy (1992) are clear that the practices are sustained by institutional demand, not technical performance, and that this is precisely why evidence-based critiques of them have had such limited practical effect.
Source Note: All arguments and findings cited in this piece come directly from Crank, J. P., & Langworthy, R. (1992). An institutional perspective of policing. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 83(2), 338-363. This is a peer-reviewed publication.
Who Actually Controls Police Departments
Central to the framework Crank and Langworthy (1992) develop is the concept of sovereigns: the external actors whose approval determines whether a police department thrives or struggles. These include city councils, mayors, courts, the media, advocacy organizations, and the general public. A department that satisfies its sovereigns receives resources, political protection, and organizational stability. One that fails to satisfy them faces budget cuts, imposed restructuring, and political interference.
Sovereigns do not evaluate police departments against sophisticated outcome measures. They evaluate them against institutional myths, against whether departments appear to be doing what police are supposed to do. When crime becomes politically salient, sovereigns demand visible enforcement. When drug use rises in public consciousness, they demand specialized units, targeted sweeps, and clear evidence that the department is mobilized and serious (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). The department adapts its structure and public behavior accordingly.
This is, I think, the single most important thing that institutional theory tells us about drug enforcement. The police department does not primarily drive its own policy agenda. It adapts to the expectations of the sovereigns whose approval it depends on. Which means that drug enforcement strategies attracting sustained criticism on grounds of effectiveness or racial equity can persist for years, even decades, because the institutional environment rewards their continuation. The sovereigns who matter most politically have supported them.
Crank and Langworthy (1992) also discuss the specific institutional function of the police chief. The chief serves as a symbol of departmental identity and direction to external sovereigns. This has a predictable organizational consequence when legitimacy fails: replacing the chief is one of the most reliable ceremonial responses available to a department under pressure, a way of signaling accountability without necessarily restructuring anything that actually caused the crisis.
What Legitimacy Crises Actually Produce
Crank and Langworthy (1992) are particularly useful on the question of what happens when police departments lose legitimacy, when scandal, sustained failure, or public crisis erodes the confidence of key sovereigns. Their argument is that departments respond to legitimacy crises not primarily through substantive structural change, but through ceremonial action designed to restore the appearance of legitimacy to external audiences.
These ceremonial responses take recognizable forms: replacing leadership, announcing new initiatives, establishing review commissions, and publicizing reform commitments that may or may not alter what officers actually do day to day. The function of these responses is institutional. They are designed to satisfy sovereigns, to signal responsiveness, to restore the department's perceived legitimacy with the actors whose support it needs (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). Whether they change anything operationally is a separate question, and in many cases, not the primary organizational concern.
Anyone working seriously in drug policy reform will recognize this pattern. Periods of intense public scrutiny of drug enforcement, whether driven by evidence of racial disparities, the scale of the overdose crisis, or sustained skepticism about prohibition-oriented strategies, have repeatedly produced institutional responses that fit this ceremonial template precisely. New task forces get announced. Leadership changes are made. High-profile reform language is adopted. And then, often enough, the underlying operational practices and incentive structures remain largely intact.
Crank and Langworthy's (1992) framework helps explain why this happens structurally, not as a failure of political will or individual leadership. Reform designed primarily to satisfy sovereign expectations rather than to restructure institutional practice will produce ceremonial change. Treating that as substantive progress, and measuring it accordingly, is an analytical mistake the drug policy field has made repeatedly.
When Institutional Demands Pull in Opposite Directions
One of the more nuanced elements of Crank and Langworthy's (1992) analysis is their recognition that police departments often face competing institutional demands. Different sovereign groups hold conflicting expectations that cannot be simultaneously satisfied. When these conflicts are severe enough, they generate organizational crises that the department must navigate through symbolic gestures toward each competing demand rather than through genuine resolution of the underlying tension.
This is exactly the position that many urban police departments find themselves in today with respect to drug policy. Some sovereigns, including certain segments of the public, particular political constituencies, and some local governments, continue to expect aggressive enforcement as the primary signal of order and public safety. Other sovereigns, including public health agencies, harm reduction advocates, courts applying evolving constitutional standards, and a growing base of community organizations, expect a shift toward treatment-oriented, health-centered approaches. These are not easily reconciled positions.
What institutional theory predicts, and what the record largely confirms, is that departments caught between these competing demands will respond with hybrid messaging and symbolic concessions to each camp without resolving the operational tension. Community policing initiatives get launched alongside continued narcotics operations. Diversion programs get announced while the narcotics unit continues to operate under the same incentives as before. The performance of balance replaces strategic coherence (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). The researchers who evaluate either the diversion program or the narcotics unit in isolation will produce accurate findings. But they will miss why the institution as a whole keeps doing both.
What Police Departments Actually Do, Versus What We Say They Do
One of the clarifying points in Crank and Langworthy's (1992) analysis is that the institutional identity of police departments as crime-fighting agencies does not accurately describe the majority of what officers actually do day to day. Most routine police work involves order maintenance and service functions, not criminal investigation or crime prevention. The crime-fighter identity is the institutional myth that sustains organizational legitimacy with sovereigns. The actual daily work is broader, more complex, and considerably less dramatic.
This gap between institutional identity and operational reality has direct consequences for drug policy. If police departments are institutionally positioned as crime-fighting organizations, and if their sovereign relationships depend on maintaining that identity, then operational shifts toward diversion, pre-arrest treatment referral, or harm reduction will face structural resistance that has nothing to do with whether those approaches work. They do not fit the dominant institutional myth. They do not send the signal that the sovereigns who fund and protect the department have been conditioned to expect (Crank & Langworthy, 1992).
This is why evidence-based alternatives to enforcement often fail to gain traction even when they have strong empirical support and genuine political goodwill behind them. They require either a transformation of sovereign expectations, meaning a change in what the public and political actors demand of police, or the cultivation of new sovereign relationships built around a different definition of what police success looks like. Neither is a short-term project, and neither is addressed by training programs or policy mandates that leave the institutional environment unchanged.
What This Means for Drug Policy Research
Crank and Langworthy (1992) do not offer a policy prescription, which is appropriate. This is theoretical and analytical work, not a reform agenda. But it carries real implications for how researchers and advocates should approach the persistent disconnect between drug enforcement practice and the evidence base.
The most basic implication is that we need to be more precise about what drug enforcement is actually doing, and for whom. If enforcement strategies are designed primarily to satisfy institutional legitimacy requirements rather than to reduce drug-related harm, then evaluating them on public health or crime-reduction metrics alone will produce perpetually incomplete findings. The metric that matters most to the organization may not be the metric being measured. This is not a minor methodological footnote. It changes how you frame the research question.
Beyond measurement, the framework demands that reform efforts take the institutional environment seriously as an object of change. Narcotics units do not dissolve because a study questions their effectiveness. Random preventive patrol does not end because researchers demonstrate its limitations. These practices are sustained by institutional demand. Changing what police departments do requires changing the sovereign expectations and institutional myths that currently reward what they do. Training programs, policy mandates, and new protocols that leave those upstream pressures intact will tend to produce exactly what Crank and Langworthy (1992) would predict: ceremonial compliance, not operational change.
There is also a more uncomfortable implication about evidence itself. The persistence of practices that research has questioned is not primarily a problem of insufficient information. Departments and their sovereigns generally know that random preventive patrol is not a precision crime-reduction tool. They continue it because the institutional environment rewards it. Evidence is necessary for reform, but as Crank and Langworthy's (1992) framework makes clear, it is not sufficient on its own. The institutional architecture has to change alongside the evidence base, and that requires different kinds of work than producing more studies.
As someone doing doctoral research in this area at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, I find this framework genuinely clarifying, not because it resolves anything, but because it is a more honest account of the terrain. And a more honest account of the terrain is the prerequisite for research that actually reaches the problem rather than describing it repeatedly.
Reform Requires More Than Evidence
Crank and Langworthy (1992) published their institutional perspective of policing as a contribution to organizational theory within criminology. Thirty-some years later, it reads as one of the most useful explanations available for why American drug enforcement has been so resistant to evidence, and why the gap between what the research says and what policy does has proven so durable.
The core argument bears repeating plainly: police departments are institutionally stable organizations that survive by satisfying the legitimacy expectations of their sovereigns, not by optimizing for public safety outcomes. Much of what we call drug enforcement, the specialized units, the visible sweeps, the rapid-response operations, the ceremonial reforms that follow legitimacy crises, follows this institutional logic more than it follows the evidence. That is not a criticism of individuals within these institutions. It is a description of how the institutions work.
If the drug policy field wants enforcement to change, it needs to understand what enforcement is actually doing: managing legitimacy in an institutional environment, not optimizing for public health. Those are not the same project, and they do not respond to the same interventions. Treating ceremonial reform as structural change, and being surprised when the practices return renamed but largely intact, is an error the field can no longer afford to keep making.
The institutional myths that shape American policing formed over decades. They are not going to dissolve in response to a single study, a single reform cycle, or a change in departmental leadership. But they are not permanent either. Institutions change when the sovereign environments that sustain them change, when what counts as legitimate policing gets redefined, when new actors gain enough standing to make new demands, and when the myths that once did the organizational work no longer serve the same function (Crank & Langworthy, 1992). That kind of change is slow, and it requires sustained pressure on the institutional environment itself, not just on the practices it produces.
That is the work.
Reference
Crank, J. P., & Langworthy, R. (1992). An institutional perspective of policing. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 83(2), 338-363.
Fahad Bin Islam Khan is a Ph.D. student in Criminal Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York (CUNY). His research focuses on U.S. drug policy, criminal justice systems, comparative criminology, and institutional inequality within policing and criminal justice institutions.