Specialized complaint units let ordinary officers and hirers skip changing their attitudes.

Evidence

Police departments channel what they label minority cases to human relations units when questions about racial attitudes are raised, freeing ordinary officers from having to resolve them. The affirmative action office takes responsibility for recruiting women to the work force, absolving the people who normally do the hiring from having to change their attitudes about female employees. Moreover, the ordinary worker recognizes the essentially symbolic and nonintegral nature of the new unit and may display toward it the same antipathy extended toward the group it is supposed to represent. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1005

Categorization

• XREF: Pairs with the ‘World of Strangers’ finding that role specialization structurally limits who knows whom — here specialization also limits who must change. — connects to: Officers judging complaints against officers makes official brutality appeals futile — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of…, 995
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘The Bypass Unit: How Organizations Route Around Attitude Change.’