Police Matter

If the first thing we learned was that tactics drove strategy, the second was that police matter in crime control. It is now pretty well understood—at least by police—that the ideas promulgated by President Johnson’s 1965 Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Criminal Justice (Commission) that so dominated criminal justice thinking were seriously flawed. For the Commission, poverty, the economy, demographics, racism, and social injustice caused crime—these structural features of society were crime’s “root causes.” Logically derived from this belief, is the idea that given these circumstances police can do little about crime except respond after it occurs. Crime can be prevented only when these root causes are rectified.

For the most part, police and local politicians succumbed to these ideas. And, if anything, the Commission’s beliefs were strengthened by 1970s research into policing’s law enforcement strategy. Nothing worked. Preventive patrol by automobile didn't prevent anything, and rapid response to calls for service made little difference. Ergo, the best police could do was respond and attempt to arrest offenders. Police officers could and did try to arrest their way out of the crime problem. Crime prevention in policing was most often relegated to a small special unit (often staffed by the “empty holster crowd”—officers deemed for one reason or another as being not real cops) who would lecture to community groups about locks, dogs, and other security measures individual households could implement. It is interesting to note that as the police moved away from prevention as a goal, the public and the private security sector increasingly embraced crime prevention strategies and tools (locks, alarms, guards, fences, cameras) to make up for the ineffectiveness of police strategies and tactics.

The Commission’s ideas and policing’s inability to stem the tide of crime that characterized this era, gave us “Community Policing I.” (Labeling the shift as “Community Policing I” is not meant in a pejorative sense; as is seen below, it was an important but limited development.) Initially, community policing grew out of the recognition that the relationship between police and communities, or neighborhoods was spotty at best. President Johnson’s Crime Commission properly alerted police to the reality and consequences of policing’s antagonistic relationship to African American communities and proposed the adoption of community relations programs. While the intent and content of such programs ranged from attempts to “sell” communities already failing and other unpopular tactics to genuine attempts to restructure the relationship between police and minorities, they had marginal impacts at best. They did, however, develop within police departments’ personnel and units skill in reaching out and working with minority groups—competence of which was to become a necessary skill in all police departments as policing was confronted by civil rights movements.

Moreover, by the 1980s a new generation of police, many educated under the Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP), were moving into policing. This generation was both confronted by the inability of policing to control crime through the law enforcement strategy and was aware of policing’s uncomfortable and often hostile relationship with minorities. Their shifts—outreach to community, attempting to deal with community problems, and less reliance on law enforcement—were the first tentative moves to establish community policing, initially as a program, but increasingly as an alternative strategy to what has been referred to in the literature as the professional, reform, or law enforcement strategy. The inchoate community policing movement, referred to here as Community Policing I, enjoyed broad community and political support.

As positive as these movements were, they still largely put aside crime prevention. Most of the early community policing advocates strongly adhered to the “root causes” theory of crime and crime control: police could do little to prevent crime. Consequently Community Policing I, although strongly supported by community groups, some police leaders, and most politicians, was unacceptable to the majority of practicing rank-and-file police officers; they wanted to fight crime.

The breakthrough, or at least the breakthrough that initially received the most attention, was in the New York City subway starting in 1990. Its seemingly intractable problems of disorderly behavior and its increasing mix of minor crime (especially farebeating) and more serious crimes (especially robbery) gave way to problem solving; broken windows policing; and, in general, assertive, targeted policing. For the first time in three decades, crime went down and has gone down every year since. With continuity of leadership, the lessons learned in the subway were subsequently applied in New York City itself by the recently enlarged NYPD, resulting in the now well-known crime reductions. Between these two efforts community policing matured: good policing not only sought the approval and cooperation of neighborhoods and communities to define and solve problems, good policing also prevented crime by changing the behavior of a substantial number of would-be miscreants. To be sure, partners were required. In the subway, for example, partners included maintenance staff, station managers, and business improvement districts (BIDS), in the last case to reclaim Grand Central Station and its immediate environment.

Moreover it became clear that good policing was an investment in a community. Good policing generated wealth through improving the conditions under which other organizations, public and private, operated. The private sector (property values, asset protection, places of worship, conduct of commerce, etc.) and the public sector (schools, transportation, recreation, etc.) simply cannot function adequately without basic levels of order and safety. Even other forms of community protection—for example, firefighting—cannot function without order and safety. Police matter—a lot.