Let me start by stating I hope this will be the first post in many regarding collaborative progressive policy making, it’s me living up to a bloggers pledge I made.
I’ve been reading a lot of Jacobin lately, which is one of the most substantive and dare I say stylish radical left publications out there. It’s trying to make Marxist analysis and true social democratic solutions relevant to the 21st century. I am more of an old school New Deal liberal myself, but I appreciate where they are coming from and definitely feel we need outside forces to move the Democratic party leftward. One area where we could all do more is policing. Like the author of this article, I was disappointed with Bill de Blasio’s pick of Bill Bratton for a host of reasons.
He outlines some crucial ones below:
But the mayor-elect’s choice of Bratton goes beyond an attempt to keep an onerous but important constituency placated. De Blasio’s choice also signals to the city’s finance and real estate sectors that he isn’t the Occupy Wall Street candidate some right-wing editorial boards fear — Bratton reportedly says he would have evicted the Zuccotti Park encampment on day one. And then there’s Bratton’s record of instituting George Kelling and James Q. Wilson’s “broken windows” theory of policing in New York City — a policing strategy centered on automatic suspicion of the poor and disenfranchised.
This is very important. For many poor and urban communities the police are already looked upon as an enemy presence rather than a force designed to help them. In some cases they have assisted in modern day red lining schemes to gentrify crime ridden neighborhoods, whether wittingly or as part of a plan. Moving away from this not only helps reduce crime and save lives in neighborhoods torn asunder by violent crime, it also makes us safer. Compstat and broken windows places a high emphasis on arrest counts at the expense of everything else. As The Wire and other looks into inner city crime show, all this does is add body counts in the failed drug war and does little to solve community problems or make them safer.
And Bratton’s definition of victory in this “war” shouldn’t be overlooked. The quotas for arrests and stop-and-frisk, criticized by reform advocates and average cops alike, are the result of Bratton’s deference to cold metrics. Robert Gangi of the Police Reform Organizing Project illustrates this point by repeating what one cop told him: If a cop breaks up a fight between two kids, he doesn’t get any credit. If he delivers a baby in an elevator, he doesn’t get any credit. He only gets credit if he brings in an arrest.
PROP has a lot of good material on it’s website about progressive alternatives to the policies that are failing so many cities. It’s time we start discussing this and I want to hear more ideas from those that may know more than I do. But it’s important to discern what the alternative will be as we critique the flaws in the status quo.
but I think the link to the progressive alternatives doesn’t work
quoatas and metrics driven policing seem very skeptical to me… I think a lot of people that hate “government” are upset with its bureaucracy and reliance on “by the book” procedures… a little flexibility for police, teachers, judges etc to make what they believe is the right decision in that situation… of course that requires oversight and more importantly trust
and link fixed
…is that you take care of the little problems before they become something bigger. That can only be a good thing in my book, but it doesn’t necessarily require objectionable police work.
start bothering people who commit relatively small infractions like grafitti and jumping turnstiles in the subway. It depends on the infractions and how they are dealt with. Bratton and Giuliani instituted a zero tolerance policy for small infractions. See Wikipedia:
…NOT addressing grafitti and turnstile jumping? If so I would disagree vehemently. I’m not suggesting locking such offenders up and throwing away the key, but grafitti is vandalism, generally of someone else’s property and turnstile jumping is a theft of service. I’m not sure I understand the public/private comparison in your quoted paragraph. Certainly you can paint a mural on a wall you own and it would rightly not be considered vandalism. Turnstile jumping by definition only takes place on public transit. I assume even the poor would prefer to live in decent environments.
the infractions and how they are addressed. Yes, you deal with petty crime, but you don’t use a zero tolerance policy.
The point of the excerpt is that people without adequate private spaces–that is people who live in socialize outdoors because they lack adequate housing–get rousted for being “disorderly” in public. Something that don’t happen to those of us who have a place to live or who socialize on the street like many poor people do.
Graffiti doesn’t lead to armed robbery or rape or murder. It’s an appealing theory, but it’s crap. In New York, it also went hand in hand with racial profiling and stop-and-frisk. Bratton and Giuliani claimed that their policy resulted in a lower crime rate. The crime rate had been declining all over the place.
… closer to that of Christopher and, in fact, is predicated upon ‘zero tolerance’ for broken windows and other petty crimes, particularly high visibility crimes like turnstile jumping and graffiti.. So, if you reject a ‘zero tolerance’ policy then you reject ‘broken windows’. I have no problem with such a rejection but would likewise have no problem with an implementation of ‘broken windows’ with sufficient numbers of adequately trained police, as jconway elucidates below.
It is entirely possible that racial profiling and ‘stop-and-frisk’ had a strong affect on the crime rate. Not because of the racial profiling but because of the high visibility of it. Personally, I think that ‘stop-and-frisk’ and racial profiling are worse crimes than turnstile jumping and graffiti and are more of a result, again, of inadequate numbers of poorly or partially trained officers than the pressures of ‘broken windows’ policing. (Although that, undoubtedly, had something to do with it.) Officer training, if it is a core problem, is going to be a problem whether you implement ‘broken windows’ or whether you implement something else or nothing at all…
It is, however, reasonable to imagine that investigating graffiti, which often takes the form of gangs tagging their turf, will allow law enforcement to get their hooks into said gangs and thus fight the violent crime gangs tend to engage in.
looks at graffiti, but that has nothing to do with the broken windows policy.
Broken windows would not be a problematic strategy if it was coordinated with true community policing and citizen directed. If an elderly grandparent was complaining about graffiti, or broken windows in her neighborhood, or torn basketball hopes, etc. and the police responded, that improves a community. What makes broken windows problematic under Bratton, is that it was combined with a system that incentivized maximizing arrests at all costs. This led to issues of police brutality, torture, and forced confessions that should give law enforcement policy makers and civil libertarians alike great pause. Additionally, by focusing on small time arrests, it made it harder to create bigger cases to bring down larger cartels and criminal organizations. It also meant fewer police to protect school children walking to school, to respond to non-criminal related emergencies and threats, and to patrol neighborhoods. It essentially militarized the police and made them constantly at war with the very neighborhoods and individuals they were supposed to form rapports with. It also deputized them in the larger failed experiment of the federal drug war.
It contributed to recidivism since former offenders were easy targets for police harassment. I am quite pro-law enforcement, and I have tremendous respect for police officers. I even defended Chicago’s response to the NATO protestors. That said, I think most cops would even agree, they need time to be social workers, youth advocates, and community builders. There is so much they need to be doing beyond arresting people. Broken windows could be a proactive policing strategy that is part of a community effort, or it could be entirely reactive. Under Bratton it was the ladder. And such a climate led to the development of stop and frisk.