Enough broken windows policing. We need a community-oriented approach
|
Version 0 of 1. Many criminologists know that broken windows is a broken concept. As President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing asserts, there is a strong need to enhance community policing and “build trust and legitimacy.” One key problem with broken windows is its lack of a clear definition. Its characterization has been contorted over the years to mean anything. To many, including police officers, it is zero tolerance – enforcing every minor violation in the book. These advocates see it as the holy grail of crime reduction. Such a system, however, is not responsible for enormous crime decreases. Even the NYPD’s boasting of being exclusively responsible for the reduction in homicides has been questioned by academics such as John Jay College’s Professor Andrew Karmen and others. Broken windows also yields unfortunate consequences. It has led to useless summonses in New York City given to: women eating doughnuts in a Brooklyn park; chess players in an Inwood park; subway riders for placing their feet on seats at 4am and an elderly Queens couple cited for no seatbelts on a freezing cold night while driving to purchase needed prescription drugs. Allegedly, the man was instructed to walk home to secure identification – a few blocks from the pharmacy. When he returned to the pharmacy, the officers already wrote the ticket using a prescription bottle as identification. The elderly man’s subsequent heart attack led to his death. The city is now being sued. Good police work? We think not. Though many people associate broken windows policing with a focus on statistical arrest data, few are aware that broken windows wasn’t endorsed by the late NYPD deputy commissioner Jack Maple. Maple was a former confidant of Commissioner Bill Bratton and the key architect of Compstat, NYPD’s performance management system (erroneously associated with broken windows) that has gone viral among police departments. Contrary to the practice of broken windows, Maple argued that rules have to be designed to catch the “sharks” not the “dolphins,” pointing out how costly and inefficient it is to simply arrest all minor violations. Today very few have focused on his insights. Instead, under the most common conception of broken windows policy, professional police officers are treated as if they are automatons, seeing a violation and forced to write it up or make an arrest. Officers lack discretion in meeting strict arrest, summons and stop and frisk quotas. Stop and frisk is a byproduct of “broken windows” policing because of its unremitting pressures to stop millions of innocent minority men. There have been arguments to return to the former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s stop and frisk policy of stopping everyone, despite court rulings outlawing the manner in which this policy has been practiced in New York City and elsewhere. This would be a disaster. Though some still stubbornly argue that stop and frisk efficiently gets guns off the streets, they’re misinformed. In its heyday, with hundreds of thousands of illegal stops conducted annually, only 0.1% of those stops led to guns. There are far more successful strategies for getting guns off the streets, of which Commissioner Bratton is well aware (as the architect of earlier successful efforts, including working with communities to get information on crime, using detectives to interrogate suspects likely to have knowledge of where illegal guns are, gun buy-back programs and working with Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms Special Agents and other federal authorities to stop gun running and trace illegal guns to their sources). Other tactics that need to be embraced include placing more officers on the ground, especially at hotspots where crime is rampant. These officers need to be properly trained to use their discretion in a professional manner. This stands in stark contrast to the unrelenting practice of broken windows policing, which places enormous pressures on police officers to cast wide nets of summonses and arrests and vitiates their professional capacities. Officers need to develop close ties to the communities they serve rather than alienate them. They should not browbeat citizens but work with them so that if citizens see something they will actually say something to the local beat cop. Officers must have the discretion to write or not write a summons, conduct a forcible stop or make an arrest. They must not be robots who try to meet mindless quotas. Most importantly, communities must have input into police practices. This must be substantive rather than a simple going through the motions to check boxes. Target and quota driven policing has been exposed as a threadbare approach to policing in many countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia. Police reform is long overdue. Police leaders must make sure not to repeat the illegal stops of minority youth, ludicrous quotas, useless summonses and arrests and haranguing innocent citizens. Policing in a democratic society requires a problem-solving, community oriented approach. Crime and terrorism cannot be solved by police departments focused on targets. Rather, partnerships with communities will yield intelligence information that is far more valuable than summonses given to elderly couples looking to get their prescription medication. |