- by Cheryl Iwamoto
In his “The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism,” David Sklansky maintains that the next big change in policing will be from community policing towards (or rather, back to) police professionalism. Pervaiz Shallwani and Sean Gardiner’s piece in the Wall Street Journal, titled “NYPD Officers “Pushed” on Stop-and-Frisk,” exemplifies Sklansky’s concern. The article recounts statements by current Police Commissioner Bill Bratton on how NYPD officers were pressured by their supervisors to stop-and-frisk more people during the administration of the former NYPD police commissioner Raymond Kelley. The practice of stop-and-frisk was such a highly publicized point of contention between public law enforcement and communities that activists came together to protest the ruling. The relative reemergence of the practice can be seen as indicative and supportive of Sklansky’s claims of a shift back to policing professionalism.
Yet, as Sklansky says, the move back to policing professionalism does not necessarily mean that our society will revert back to the ways of the 1960s. Rather, “there is increasing sympathy for the notion that police departments should focus on crime suppression, that they should do so in ways dictated by objective analysis rather than public whims” (Sklansky 2). Stop-and-frisk, although highly controversial, would technically fit into the description given by Sklansky. However, accepting this sort of paradigm would seem to only increase the already existent rift between public law enforcement and the communities it serves. Regarding the push on stop-and-frisk mentioned in the article, New York Mayor Bill de Blasio commented: “Not only was that an unjust policy, it caused a rift between police and community, it caused real damage to the self respect of a lot of our young people” (Shallwani & Gardiner). Likewise, Sklansky cites Ratcliffe, who maintains that modern police professionalism, particularly intelligence-led policing, is a “top-down managerially driven approach to crime control in which a community’s concerns are not permitted to perpetually trump an objective assessment of the criminal environment” (Sklansky 3). So the problem that is brought up by the article in conjunction with Sklansky’s work seems to be how to create a balance between carrying out crime suppression based upon objective analysis and respecting the rights and interests of the general public.
Achieving this balance, however, is sure to be difficult and will most likely be no time soon in the future. Despite the fact that Sklansky says that the return of police professionalism does not necessarily entail a reversion back to the policing tactics of the 1960s, how will the creators of this ideal system ensure that seemingly impersonal practices of police professionalism do not overtake the interests of the general public? Even in the current system, there are already such problems. Shallwani and Gardiner’s article mentions the use of quotas for the number of stops made by officers; however, quotas are technically illegal, so they are instead implemented under the guise of “productivity goals”. Like this, it seems that already the 1960s and its police tactics are back, just with a new name.
Sources:
http://blogs.wsj.com/metropolis/2014/01/30/nypd-officers-pushed-on-stop-and-frisk-police-commissioner-bratton/?KEYWORDS=police
"The Persistent Pull of Police Professionalism" by David Alan Sklansky
New York gets a lot of criticism for Stop and Frisk, and partly that criticism is due. It's easy to mentally decide whether we personally prefer soft police measures or hard police measures. But it's very difficult to effectively solve the problem of crime.
ReplyDeleteFurther, you don't have to look all the way to New York for bad policing measures.
San Jose, the birthplace of Crime Science, implemented "reasonable suspicion" as a grounds to terry stop somebody, which was a drop from the previous "probable cause" standard.
The law came with a mixed bag of implications.
As a result, areas of "high gang activity" got more police scrutiny. If you were in the wrong neighborhood, wearing the wrong color, that was grounds for a stop.
It was a move that was sold to the public as a reduction in gang activity in a city where gang activity was on the rise. As a byproduct it displaced a lot of traditionally hispanic neighborhoods.
I guess my point is it is easy to cast stones at New York. Stop and frisk has basically done nothing except for marginalize already marginalized communities.
But in grand view, our entire justice system is only really good at marginalizing already marginalized. Stop and frisk is just another sucky cog in a bigger extra-sucky justice machine.
So, for me, the intense scrutiny of stop and frisk is sort of a compositional fallacy. The intensity of our criticism of stop and frisk is so blinding, that we negate equally unjust measures in our own backyards. We sort of lazily isolate one thing to critique, when in reality it is a series of things that all sort of work together to collectively suck.
These trash measures of policing are all made against the backdrop of real cities with real crime problems. So what do we do? Again, it's easy to critique New York, and say "hey that's not good" but we never offer any real alternatives. They're terrible policies, sure, but what else do we do?
It would be intellectually lazy to simply say that all we need to "rethink police protocol" to point to community policing or professional policing sort of negates the crime problem, and isolates police as the antecedent of the disorder.
What does a city like San Jose do to keep gang activity down, given that it's a city of limited budget, with slashed police expenditures, yet rising criminal activity, and criminal localization? What does a city cop, police chief, or city mayor do to implement alternative incentives to soften crime boundaries, knowing that basically every move will be held as an "erosion of civil liberties."
It's sort of a zero-sum game. Either way you go it's bad. You can heavily police known gang neighborhoods and get critiqued on marginalizing certain populations, or you can be lax on the policing apparatus and potentially enable crime epicenters to densify.
There is just no clear answers, it's a really complex and dynamic problem. I'm sort of just glad I'm not some cop that works those beats, or a city mayor where you have to be the face of these complex solutions.
So I guess, in conclusion my point is:
Yes, New York's stop-and-frisk policy sucks, but do we have any better ideas?
-Sorry this kind of just became a rant.
I look forward to your response.
This debate which opposes professional policing and community policing is very interesting to me because it began also in my country in the late 1990.
ReplyDeleteBetween 1997 and 2002, the left-wing Government created the "police de proximité" (proximity policing) which corresponded to the American community policing. Yet, this government has been blamed for the dramatic increase in general criminality. Consequently, in 2002 presidential elections, the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin ended third behind the right-wing President Jacques Chirac and the far-right-wing candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In reaction to the huge demand for more security which had been expressed during the elections, the new right-wing Minister of the Interior, Nicolas Sarkozy removed the community policing. He argued : "Cops are not to act like social workers or play football with kids. Their mission is investigation, interpellation, the fight against crime". He reformed policing methods to base them on statistics, data, files, prediction.
In 2012, as President of the Republic running for a second term, Nicolas Sarkozy argued that after an increase in crime by 17% between 1997 and 2002, his policy had caused a decrease by 17% between 2002 and 2012. Yet, there is a huge controversy over the value of the statistics and over the fact that physical violences kept skyrocketting.
Yet, since 2012 and the return of the Socialists at the head of the State, no one stood for the reformation of a community policing. Most claims are about the number of cops - judged too low - rather than about their style.
It is very interesting to see that the chronology of policing styles is very similar in both the United States and France despite the huge differences between them.
Romain MILLARD
Cheryl, Your integration of the outside source with Sklansky's article leads to a classic question -- how can law enforcement suppress concentrated crime while maintaining a commitment to citizen legal/human rights. I wonder if it should be thought about beyond the balancing framing you invoke. If, as we know, most of the citizens in an area where street crime is congregated are law abiding, how might law enforcement tap into this majority to device a strategy that bridges rather than balances crime suppression and rights? What stands in the way of securing such a bridging strategy?
ReplyDeleteMadeleine McGlade:
ReplyDeleteHi Cheryl,
I think this is an interesting post that sheds light on a very important issue – how to strike a balance between a community-based approach to policing, and more objective, technological approaches. I think that bridging the gap between communities and police forces is integral to facilitate a more tailored approach to the policing of diverse communities and awareness of right and policies. However, evidently this would be a very difficult task and could enhance problems to do with equality and consistency of law enforcement. Yet, I think it requires further attention as has the potential to create a less domineering, more cooperative relationship between communities and law enforcement. I believe that impersonal practices of police professionalism and actions such as stop-and-frisk can exacerbate the divide between police and communities and potentially leave room for racial profiling/oppositional attitudes between police and youth. So yes- striking the balance is an area that requires future consideration!
Thomas Smith
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you in that I feel like law enforcement needs to develop the ability to determine whether community policing or the more impersonal police professionalism is more appropriate, depending on the situation. In recent years law enforcement has relied far too much on police professionalism, and everyone (both the police and the communities) is hurt as a result of this lack of balance. Programs such as stop-and-frisk not only violate the rights and dignity of the people in the community, they also undermine the legitimacy of the police forces due to the resentment they foster.
I think that professional policing and community policing both have advantages and disadvantages. The best way is to combine the two together in a specific situations. A lot of theories emerged in the way of colluding these two but still they couldn't be sure which one is the best because every theory has both advantage and disadvantages. Experiences in situations and adapting the two will lead to perfect solutions/actions.
ReplyDeleteWarinya Rojanasuwan
As has been mentioned in previous comments, it seems that what your post really amounts to is the question of how to balance between professional policing--which is claimed to yield better results in terms of crime reduction--and community policing, or "soft-policing", which is thought to be more community-focused and respectful of citizens' rights. In New York, where stop-and-frisk policies are highly contested for the marginalizing effects upon already marginalized societies, part of the problem has had to do with the use of stiop-and-frisk in conjunction with the implementation of mandatory minimum drug sentences, which created a system that filtered young black men into the prison system (furthering the efforts of the prison industrial complex as it is recognized today). Were these young men merely searched, and not just as frequently incarcerated, perhaps the stigma would not be so prevalent. Surveillance in areas where there is a known high crime rate is not necessarily a bad thing, but when cops are viewed as an enemy by even the innocent, it shows that there is something very wrong in the policing structure. The only suggestion that seems plausible thus far is increasing the standards necessary to allow for a stop beyond "reasonable suspicion", and having greater oversight in the police force--if the force remains autonomous, and unaccountable to the public, the situation is unlikely to improve.
ReplyDeleteAyesha Ali