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In the 21st century, racialized police violence and related protests have renewed debates over the proper relationship between social work and policing. While many scholars presume social work’s capacity to reform policing, this position neglects scholarship documenting the carceral and coercive practices of social work itself and overlooks historical evidence of social work-police relationships, both of which are critical for assessing how social workers have attempted to influence police. Using more than century of historical conference proceedings, we answer the following questions: How have social work and law enforcement actors related to each other over time in their shared field of charities and corrections? And how have social workers sought to shape the field over time via their relationships with police?
Methods
This study combines historical research approaches and thematic analysis, drawing on data from the National Conference on Social Welfare Proceedings (formerly the National Conference of Charities and Correction). The conference met annually from 1874 to 1983, making it the longest-running U.S. social work conference. To balance rigor with feasibility, we took a systematic random sample of 25 years and identified all references to law enforcement, yielding 769 unique references for extraction. We followed Terry et al.’s (2017) six-phase thematic analysis, including collective review and discussion of all records; inductive code generation, codebook development, and extract summaries; deductive application of codes to all extracts; and interpretive assessment of coding patterns, themes, and periodization. We applied codes for speaker type, perceptions of police and social work, professional functions, and relationships. To contextualize and add veracity to findings, we also examined secondary sources on shifts in social welfare philosophy and criminal justice approaches that may have shaped or reflected the patterns observed in analysis.
Findings
We use Strategic Action Field theory to trace this relationship across three eras (1874–1904; 1909–1949; 1954–1982), showing how social workers partnered with police while seeking to reshape the field in line with social work’s rehabilitative and preventive ethos. Social workers relied upon the coercive powers of police to address social problems and used various resources and strategies to influence police—often engaging in particular kinds of cooperative and collaborative relationships as a means of doing so—with the goal of aligning the field more closely with social work’s predominant vision. Strategies to influence police included administrative control, promotion of hybridized policewomen, and embedded police-social work. Analysis reveals a persistent pattern of social workers seeking influence through partnership, efforts stymied by power asymmetries and organizational constraints.
Conclusions and Implications
Police–social work relationships involved both partnership and conflict, with social workers attempting to influence police through these relationships but facing significant constraints, particularly as police gained greater autonomy over time. Given the dominance of carceral logics and police power in many service fields, attempts to shape policing through social work values may have limited impact. By historicizing these dynamics, this study underscores the challenge of advancing reform through social work–police partnerships and the value of historical analysis for informing contemporary debates.