Bureaucracies do not begin with the intention to destroy legal restraint or normalize violence. They learn to do so through structure, incentive, and repetition.
By Matthew A. McIntosh
Public Historian
Brewminate
Introduction: When Policing Becomes Procedure
Twentieth-century authoritarian regimes demonstrate that violence does not require the abandonment of law to become systematic. Instead, coercion often advances through administrative procedure, embedded within legal frameworks that preserve the appearance of order and legitimacy. Policing in these systems did not operate primarily as an instrument of spontaneous terror or ideological frenzy. It functioned as routine governance, carried out by agencies that understood themselves as lawful actors fulfilling institutional mandates. Arrest, surveillance, detention, and removal were standardized tasks, executed through internal directives, memoranda, and chains of authorization rather than through independent judicial review. What emerged was not chaos or lawlessness, but a form of legality optimized for enforcement, efficiency, and compliance rather than for restraint.
This transformation marked a shift in the meaning of policing itself. Law enforcement increasingly operated as management rather than adjudication. Officers were instructed to act based on institutional authorization, not warrants issued by courts. Compliance with procedure replaced engagement with evidence, individualized suspicion, or external review. The absence of judicial oversight was rarely framed as a deficiency. It was justified as efficiency, necessity, or modern administrative rationality. Within this logic, legality became synonymous with following internal rules, and policing became proceduralized. Decisions that once demanded moral or legal judgment were reduced to questions of correct process and hierarchical approval.
The danger of this system lay not only in the intentions of leaders, but in the incentives embedded within bureaucratic structure. Administrative policing rewarded obedience, productivity, and visible enforcement. Arrests completed, files processed, and targets met became markers of professional competence. Restraint, hesitation, or refusal offered no comparable institutional reward and often carried professional risk. Over time, this incentive structure generated mission creep. Enforcement mandates expanded beyond their original scope, standards of suspicion eroded, and errors multiplied. Violence became normalized not because individuals were inherently brutal, but because the system defined effectiveness in terms of action taken rather than harm avoided or rights preserved.
What follows argues that twentieth-century authoritarianism reveals how bureaucracies learn to harm through procedure rather than ideology alone. Administrative policing radicalized enforcement by internalizing legality, sidelining courts, and converting violence into routine work governed by rules and metrics. The result was a form of coercion that felt lawful to those carrying it out precisely because it followed prescribed processes. Understanding this dynamic is essential for recognizing how modern states can produce widespread harm without openly discarding legal order, and why genuine restraint must be structural, not dependent on individual conscience.
Administrative Policing in the Modern State
The emergence of administrative policing was closely tied to the expansion of the modern state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As governments assumed responsibility for public health, labor regulation, migration control, and internal security, enforcement increasingly shifted from courts to specialized bureaucracies. Police forces and security agencies were professionalized, centralized, and equipped with expansive mandates that extended beyond traditional crime control. Law enforcement was reconceived as a form of administrative management, tasked with regulating populations and risks rather than adjudicating individual guilt.
This transformation altered the source of policing authority. Rather than acting primarily on judicial warrants or court orders, officers were increasingly empowered through internal directives, regulations, and executive instructions. These authorizations derived their legitimacy from institutional hierarchy rather than from external review. Administrative approval became sufficient to trigger enforcement action, while courts were relegated to peripheral or retrospective roles. The warrant, once a prerequisite for coercive intrusion, was gradually displaced by internal permission structures that emphasized speed, coordination, and bureaucratic control.
Administrative policing also reshaped the relationship between law and discretion in ways that proved structurally dangerous. While modern states continued to affirm the rule of law rhetorically, they expanded zones of action in which enforcement discretion operated with minimal oversight. Agencies were granted broad interpretive authority to determine when intervention was necessary, which behaviors constituted risk, and which populations required monitoring. This discretion was framed as technical expertise rather than political judgment, shielding it from democratic scrutiny. Decisions with profound consequences for liberty were reclassified as operational necessities, insulated from challenge precisely because they were administrative rather than judicial.
The institutional logic of administrative policing favored standardization over deliberation. Procedures, forms, and reporting requirements structured enforcement activity, creating an appearance of neutrality and objectivity. Officers learned to navigate bureaucratic rules rather than legal principles, measuring success by compliance with protocol rather than adherence to rights. In this environment, legality was experienced not as a boundary but as a checklist. So long as internal procedures were followed, actions were understood as lawful regardless of their substantive impact on individuals or communities.
By the early twentieth century, this model of policing had become deeply entrenched across a wide range of regimes. Authoritarian systems did not invent administrative policing. They exploited and intensified tendencies already present within modern bureaucratic governance. The administrative state supplied ready-made mechanisms for coercion that required no dramatic legal rupture and no suspension of legality. Policing authority could be expanded incrementally, targets quietly broadened, and violence normalized through procedure, all while preserving institutional continuity. This inheritance helps explain why administrative policing proved so adaptable to authoritarian purposes and why restraint proved so difficult once judicial oversight was displaced by internal authorization.
Law without Courts: Executive Authorization as Legality
Twentieth-century authoritarian regimes did not generally abolish courts or formally repudiate law. Instead, they redefined the location of legality itself. Executive authorization increasingly replaced judicial warrants as the operative source of lawful action. Agencies were instructed that approval from superiors, ministries, or party leadership carried the same legal force as court orders. In this arrangement, legality flowed downward through bureaucratic hierarchy rather than outward from independent adjudication. Courts continued to exist, but their role was narrowed, delayed, or rendered irrelevant to the moment of enforcement.
This relocation of legality was most often justified through the language of emergency and necessity. Executives claimed that judicial processes were too slow, too public, or too procedurally constrained to confront threats posed by internal enemies, political instability, or social disorder. Internal directives, decrees, and memoranda were framed as practical adaptations to modern conditions rather than as departures from legality. Because these authorizations were issued within the formal apparatus of the state, they retained a legal character. Officials were not told to act outside the law, but to follow a different legal logic, one in which executive command itself defined what lawful action meant. Obedience to hierarchy replaced judicial review as the primary marker of legality, and compliance became a professional obligation rather than a constitutional question.
The consequences of this shift were profound and enduring. When executive authorization functions as legality, courts lose their capacity to restrain power before it acts. Judicial oversight becomes optional, delayed, or symbolic. Individuals are arrested, detained, or subjected to coercion first and judged later, if judgment occurs at all. This inversion of process transforms law from a prior condition of enforcement into a post hoc rationalization of actions already taken. Legal form remains intact, but its restraining function collapses. Power acts decisively, and legality follows as explanation rather than permission, eroding the protective role of adjudication without formally abolishing it.
What makes this system especially resilient is its internal coherence. Executive authorization does not present itself as arbitrary. It is documented, procedural, and routinized. Files are opened, approvals logged, and orders transmitted through official channels. For agents on the ground, legality is experienced as correct paperwork rather than lawful judgment. The absence of courts at the moment of action is normalized, even rendered invisible. Law without courts thus becomes not an aberration, but a stable mode of governance, capable of sustaining coercion while preserving the outward appearance of legality and order.
Mission Creep as Structural Outcome
Mission creep in administrative policing was not the product of individual excess, ideological fervor, or sudden policy reversal. It emerged as a structural outcome of enforcement systems designed around internal authorization rather than external restraint. Initial mandates were often narrow, clearly framed, and publicly justified as temporary responses to defined threats. Agencies were told to address specific dangers, restore order, or neutralize limited categories of risk. Yet once the principle was established that enforcement could proceed without judicial oversight, the boundaries that defined those mandates became inherently unstable. Without an external arbiter to enforce limits, scope was governed by interpretation, habit, and institutional momentum. What began as exception gradually became baseline practice.
This expansion was facilitated by the ambiguity inherent in administrative directives. Orders were frequently phrased in broad or flexible terms, granting agents discretion to interpret who qualified as a target and what constituted sufficient cause for action. Because review was internal, overreach was rarely corrected and often rewarded. Success was measured by activity rather than accuracy. Arrests made, files opened, and operations completed became indicators of effectiveness, encouraging agents to err on the side of inclusion rather than restraint. Mission creep thus advanced not through explicit policy change, but through everyday decision-making shaped by institutional incentives.
As enforcement widened, error became inevitable and increasingly normalized. Individuals swept up by administrative policing were often reclassified not as mistakes, but as acceptable collateral outcomes of necessary action. Bureaucratic systems proved adept at absorbing these errors without triggering reform. Complaints were redirected, responsibility diffused, and harm reframed as unfortunate but unavoidable. The absence of independent review meant that no external authority existed to halt expansion or impose corrective limits. Mission creep became self-sustaining, driven by procedure rather than deliberation.
This process fundamentally transformed the character and purpose of policing. What began as targeted enforcement evolved into broad population management, with ever-expanding categories of suspicion. Evidence gave way to profiles, and individual culpability was replaced by association, proximity, or administrative classification. Ordinary citizens were increasingly swept into enforcement nets originally designed for specific threats. This collapse of distinction between target and bystander was not an accident or deviation from policy. It was the logical outcome of a system in which authority expanded without countervailing restraint. Mission creep reveals how administrative policing systems radicalize structurally, not because agents become monsters, but because the architecture of power rewards expansion and provides no institutional brake against it.
Incentives, Obedience, and Bureaucratic Radicalization
Administrative policing radicalized not primarily through ideology, but through incentives embedded deep within bureaucratic structure. Agencies rewarded visible compliance, productivity, and alignment with leadership priorities rather than judgment or restraint. Promotions, favorable assignments, professional security, and even personal safety flowed to those who demonstrated effectiveness as defined internally by the institution. Effectiveness rarely meant careful deliberation or rights preservation. It meant action taken, orders executed, and measurable results produced. Files processed, arrests completed, targets identified, and operations concluded became the currency of success. In such systems, obedience was not merely expected. It was institutionalized as competence and professionalism.
This incentive structure reshaped the meaning of obedience. Agents were not asked to embrace violence ideologically or articulate loyalty in abstract terms. They were asked to perform their duties efficiently and correctly. Orders arrived through formal channels, framed in technical or neutral language, and accompanied by procedures that normalized compliance. Questioning an order was not framed as moral reflection, but as procedural friction. Obedience ceased to feel like a choice. It became an automatic professional response. Bureaucratic loyalty was expressed through action taken rather than belief held, through execution rather than conviction.
Fear played a central and corrosive role in accelerating this process. In authoritarian systems, restraint carried asymmetric risk. Excessive enforcement was rarely punished and often praised, while insufficient zeal could trigger suspicion, investigation, or demotion. Agents quickly learned that caution invited scrutiny, whereas overcompliance offered protection. This asymmetry rewarded anticipation. Officials did not need explicit instructions to escalate enforcement. They inferred expectations from institutional cues, leadership rhetoric, and peer behavior. Acting aggressively became a form of insurance against accusations of disloyalty. Obedience thus shifted from reactive compliance to proactive demonstration.
Bureaucratic radicalization was further sustained through routinization and fragmentation. As enforcement practices repeated, they lost moral salience and emotional weight. What once appeared extreme became ordinary through repetition, documentation, and bureaucratic rhythm. Arrests were logged, transfers processed, and detentions recorded as administrative events rather than moral acts. Violence was broken into discrete tasks distributed across departments, offices, and individuals. Each participant handled only a fragment of the process, shielded from its cumulative effect. Paperwork, forms, and procedural checklists mediated responsibility, allowing individuals to perceive their role as minor, necessary, and correct even as the overall system escalated harm.
The result was a system in which radical outcomes emerged without radical intent. Agents did not need to be fanatics, sadists, or ideological zealots. They needed only to follow incentives, obey directives, and meet institutional expectations. Bureaucratic radicalization shows how administrative structures can generate escalating violence while preserving a self-image of legality, professionalism, and order. Violence became procedural, obedience became virtue, and restraint became irrational. In such systems, moral collapse did not require hatred. It required only compliance.
Violence as Procedure, Not Exception
Once administrative policing is fully embedded within bureaucratic structure, violence ceases to appear as an extraordinary act. It becomes procedural. Coercion is no longer experienced as a rupture or moral escalation, but as the ordinary execution of assigned tasks. Arrests, removals, interrogations, and detentions are processed through routine workflows governed by forms, schedules, and performance metrics. Violence is thus absorbed into the daily rhythms of administration, stripped of its exceptional character and reframed as work.
This proceduralization profoundly alters how violence is perceived by those who carry it out. Agents are rarely confronted with the totality of harm their actions produce. Instead, they engage with fragments of a process: verifying a name, executing a transfer, escorting a detainee, filing a report. Each step appears minor, justified, and correct within institutional rules. Responsibility is diffused across offices, ranks, and departments, allowing individuals to experience their actions as technical contributions rather than coercive acts. The moral weight of violence is broken into administratively manageable pieces, making it easier to perform without reflection or resistance.
Bureaucratic procedure also creates insulation from consequence. Errors, abuses, and excesses are absorbed by the system as administrative irregularities rather than moral failures. Mistaken arrests are reclassified as procedural mishaps. Injuries and deaths become unfortunate outcomes rather than indictments of the system itself. Because enforcement actions are authorized internally and documented formally, responsibility is dispersed and accountability diluted. The system corrects paperwork more readily than harm.
Performance metrics further entrench procedural violence. Arrest numbers, quotas, clearance rates, and productivity indicators transform coercion into measurable success. These metrics reward volume and speed rather than accuracy or restraint. Agents learn quickly that the safest course is to act decisively and often. Hesitation carries professional risk, while excess rarely does. Quantification creates a feedback loop in which violence generates data, data signals effectiveness, and effectiveness justifies further violence. Coercion is thus incentivized not through explicit brutality, but through numerical abstraction.
The normalization of procedural violence reshapes institutional culture at every level. New agents are trained within systems where coercion is routine, expected, and morally neutral. They inherit practices already stripped of ethical tension, reinforced through training manuals, peer behavior, and supervisory evaluation. What might once have provoked discomfort becomes unremarkable through repetition and socialization. Institutions cease to ask whether violence is justified and instead focus on whether it is executed correctly, efficiently, and in accordance with internal rules.
The result is a system in which violence no longer requires justification beyond compliance with procedure. Exceptional acts become standard operations. Coercion is routinized, depersonalized, and rendered administratively invisible. Violence as procedure represents the culmination of administrative policing: a mode of governance in which harm is produced predictably, legally, and efficiently without ever appearing as a departure from order.
Civilian Sweep and the Collapse of Targeted Enforcement
Administrative policing systems initially present themselves as precise instruments aimed at defined threats. Early mandates emphasize specificity, containment, and proportionality. Yet as mission creep advances and violence becomes procedural, the distinction between target and bystander erodes. Categories of suspicion expand beyond those originally designated, and enforcement nets widen to include associates, neighbors, family members, and eventually entire populations. What was framed as targeted enforcement collapses into generalized surveillance and coercion.
This collapse is driven by structural pressures rather than explicit policy shifts. Administrative systems prioritize coverage over accuracy and prevention over proof. As enforcement agencies are evaluated by activity, output, and visible results rather than correctness or restraint, uncertainty is consistently resolved in favor of action. When doubt arises, the safest bureaucratic response is inclusion rather than exclusion. Individuals who fall within ambiguous categories are treated as acceptable risks rather than protected innocents. Over time, procedural logic displaces legal principle. The presumption of innocence is not formally rejected, but it is functionally replaced by a presumption of administrative relevance, where being potentially connected to a threat becomes sufficient grounds for coercive attention.
Errors accelerate this process. Mistaken arrests, false identifications, and wrongful detentions do not halt enforcement. They normalize it. Each error becomes evidence not of systemic failure, but of the necessity for broader action. Agencies reinterpret mistakes as proof that threats are more diffuse, hidden, or pervasive than initially assumed. Civilian harm is reframed as collateral consequence, an unfortunate but unavoidable byproduct of maintaining order. The system adapts not by narrowing its scope or refining standards, but by widening its reach and lowering thresholds.
As targeted enforcement dissolves, administrative policing increasingly relies on association rather than conduct. Individuals are swept up because of proximity, background, or bureaucratic classification rather than specific acts. Social networks, workplaces, neighborhoods, and ethnic or political identities become markers of suspicion. This shift allows enforcement to scale efficiently, but it abandons individualized judgment altogether. The line between suspect and citizen becomes indistinct, replaced by gradations of administrative risk.
The civilian sweep marks the final stage of administrative policing’s transformation. Enforcement no longer operates as a response to discrete threats, but as a mode of population management oriented toward anticipation rather than adjudication. Ordinary citizens are subjected to coercive power not because they have done something, but because the system has learned to act expansively and defensively. This outcome is not an aberration or an excess of zeal. It is the predictable result of administrative authority unrestrained by judicial review and incentivized by activity. When legality is defined internally and success is measured by action taken, targeted enforcement cannot endure. It collapses under its own logic, carrying civilian protection down with it.
The Performance of Loyalty
As administrative policing expands and targets blur, enforcement increasingly becomes a performance of loyalty rather than a calibrated response to threat. Agents are judged less by the accuracy, legality, or proportionality of their actions than by their visible alignment with institutional priorities. Loyalty is demonstrated through action itself. Arrests, raids, detentions, and reports function as public signals of obedience to leadership, confirming that the agent understands what is expected and is willing to act without hesitation. In this environment, enforcement ceases to be merely instrumental. It becomes expressive, a ritualized affirmation of allegiance that reassures superiors and protects the agent within a system that prizes zeal over restraint.
This performative dimension reshapes behavior throughout the bureaucracy. Agents learn that restraint is ambiguous and potentially dangerous, while excess is legible and safe. To act aggressively is to display reliability. To hesitate is to invite suspicion. Over time, enforcement becomes anticipatory rather than reactive, as officials infer expectations from leadership rhetoric and institutional culture.
The performance of loyalty also dissolves moral responsibility at the individual level. When actions are framed primarily as demonstrations of obedience, ethical judgment is displaced by institutional alignment. Harm inflicted on civilians or unintended targets is reinterpreted as evidence of seriousness rather than error. Violence becomes a credential, proof that the agent has subordinated personal hesitation to organizational demand. Agents reassure themselves that they are not choosing cruelty or injustice, but fulfilling duty under conditions they did not create. Loyalty thus operates as a moral solvent, dissolving ethical hesitation by redefining virtue as compliance and dissent as risk.
This dynamic completes the transformation of administrative policing. Enforcement no longer serves law, public safety, or even administrative efficiency in any meaningful sense. It serves the regime’s demand for visible allegiance and continual affirmation of authority. Violence persists not because it achieves clearly defined goals, but because it proves obedience. The performance of loyalty becomes self-sustaining, generating cycles of escalation as agents compete to demonstrate commitment. In such systems, restraint is no longer neutral or prudent. It becomes indistinguishable from disloyalty. The bureaucratic apparatus radicalizes not through ideology alone, but through the everyday incentives that reward action, punish hesitation, and convert coercion into symbolic allegiance.
Administrative Policing Then and Now
Administrative policing in the twentieth century did not emerge from a vacuum, nor does it belong solely to the past. Its defining features recur across regimes and eras: enforcement authorized internally, discretion insulated from judicial review, and legitimacy derived from procedure rather than adjudication. What changes across time are the legal vocabularies and institutional settings, not the underlying logic. Whether framed as emergency powers, regulatory enforcement, or administrative necessity, the same structure appears again and again. Modern administrative policing inherits a long tradition in which coercive power is exercised through bureaucratic routines that preserve the outward form of legality while quietly eroding its restraining function.
Historically, authoritarian regimes relied on administrative policing precisely because it allowed repression to operate without openly repudiating law. Courts could remain formally intact while enforcement shifted elsewhere. The modern state perfected this model by embedding coercion within ordinary governance. Ministries, agencies, and departments acquired enforcement powers framed as technical necessity rather than political choice. The result was a system in which violence could be escalated incrementally, justified administratively, and normalized socially without requiring a dramatic constitutional break.
Contemporary democratic states often insist that their administrative policing bears no resemblance to these earlier systems. They point to statutory frameworks, internal guidelines, training requirements, and post hoc review as safeguards against abuse. Yet the structural similarities remain striking. When enforcement agencies are empowered to act on internal authorization alone, when courts are excluded at the moment of intrusion, and when legality is defined primarily by compliance with agency procedure, the same dynamics reliably reappear. Mission creep, error normalization, civilian sweep, and loyalty performance are not historical anomalies confined to dictatorships. They are predictable outcomes of administrative design whenever judicial restraint is displaced by executive discretion.
The difference between past and present is not one of form but of degree and speed. Modern administrative policing operates within more complex legal environments and often with greater rhetorical commitment to rights. Yet these commitments are easily overridden when enforcement is framed as urgent, technical, or necessary. The bureaucratic language may be sanitized, and the targets may change, but the logic persists. Administrative legality continues to compete with judicial legality, often quietly and often successfully.
Administrative policing then and now reveals a sobering continuity. Systems that permit enforcement without prior judicial restraint do not remain limited for long. They expand, adapt, and entrench themselves through procedure, precedent, and institutional habit. History shows that such systems rarely collapse under moral critique alone, because they present themselves as lawful, orderly, and necessary. They persist until their consequences become impossible to ignore. The lesson is not that authoritarianism suddenly arrives, but that it grows administratively. Law is not abolished. It is reinterpreted, internalized, and displaced, until legality itself becomes an instrument of power rather than a limit upon it.
Conclusion: How Bureaucracies Learn to Harm
Bureaucracies do not begin with the intention to destroy legal restraint or normalize violence. They learn to do so through structure, incentive, and repetition. When enforcement authority is relocated from courts to administrative hierarchy, harm does not arrive as rupture or dramatic abuse, but as routine. Each procedural adjustment appears minor, justified, and reversible. Each internal authorization seems reasonable in isolation. Yet taken together, these adjustments quietly reorient the system away from adjudication and toward action for its own sake. Law remains present, invoked constantly and documented meticulously, but its function changes. It no longer restrains power in advance. It follows power after the fact, converting action into legality. What bureaucracies learn in this process is not cruelty or malice, but how to operate efficiently without external judgment.
This learning process is reinforced by institutional feedback loops. Agencies reward compliance, speed, and visible results while discouraging hesitation and dissent. Over time, personnel internalize the lesson that legality is procedural rather than moral, that success is measured by activity rather than accuracy. Violence becomes legible as competence, restraint as liability. The system educates its agents continuously, not through ideology, but through promotion, discipline, and professional survival. Harm emerges not because individuals abandon ethics, but because ethical judgment is rendered structurally irrelevant.
History shows that such systems are remarkably adaptable. Administrative policing survives regime change, rhetorical reform, and legal rebranding because its core logic is bureaucratic rather than ideological. It can operate under authoritarian rule or democratic governance, so long as enforcement is permitted to proceed without prior judicial restraint. Courts may exist, rights may be proclaimed, and oversight may be promised, yet none of these prevent harm if they are displaced from the moment when power is exercised. Bureaucracies learn to harm precisely because they are allowed to act first and justify later.
The central lesson is therefore institutional rather than moral. Preventing bureaucratic harm does not depend on better intentions, improved training, or more careful language. It depends on restoring structures that impose restraint before action, not after. Judicial warrants, independent review, and enforceable limits are not technical inconveniences or procedural delays. They are the mechanisms that prevent systems from teaching themselves that harm is normal, lawful, and necessary. When those mechanisms erode, bureaucracies do exactly what they are designed to do. They learn from incentives, internalize procedure, and optimize behavior. And what they learn, in the absence of restraint, is how to harm efficiently, predictably, and with the full confidence of legality.
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Originally published by Brewminate, 01.28.2026, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
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