Law enforcement in subordinated communities: innovation and response.

AuthorDelgado, Richard

CITIZENS, COPS, AND POWER: RECOGNIZING THE LIMITS OF COMMUNITY. By Steve Herbert. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 2006. Pp. ix, 180. Cloth, $40; paper, $16.

RACE AND POLICING IN AMERICA: CONFLICT AND REFORM. By Ronald Weitzer and Steven A. Tuch. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, and Sao Paulo: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. xi, 225. Cloth, $70; paper, $28.99.

POLICE INNOVATION: CONTRASTING PERSPECTIVES. Edited by David Weisburd and Anthony A. Braga. Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, and Sao Paulo: Cambridge University Press. 2006. Pp. IX, 367. Cloth, $85; paper, $37.99.

INTRODUCTION

Policing styles and policy reform today exhibit a ferment that we have not seen since the turbulent sixties. The reasons propelling reform include some of the same forces that propelled it then--minority communities agitating for a greater voice, demands for law and order--but also some that are new, such as the greater premium that society places on security in a post-9/11 world.

Three recent books discuss this new emphasis on styles of policing. Each centers on policing in minority communities. Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community (1) examines the innovation known as community policing and concludes, based on extensive interviews and surveys, that the approach is conceptually flawed. Herbert finds that the hope that police could form cooperative arrangements, especially with communities of color, is largely vain.

Ronald Weitzer and Steven Tuch's Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform (2) is similarly based on survey research and personal interviews. It documents a continuing racial divide in which white respondents exhibit a much more favorable attitude toward the police than do blacks or Latinos.

The Weisburd and Braga collection, Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives, (3) contains pro and con chapters on a number of emerging avenues to policing, including the harsh "broken windows" approach and the softer community-policing and "hot spots" models. With extensive comments by the editors concluding each of the sections, the book emerges with a somewhat more positive view of policing innovation than do the other two under review.

Published by a major press, each of the books is likely to prove influential in a debate about race, crime, and policing that shows no sign of abating. Even though major crime has declined somewhat in recent years (Weisburd & Braga, p. 349), public alarm remains high, in part because of post-9/11 insecurities, but also because politicians stir up fears and implicitly play to crime's racial dimension. (4)

My thesis is that recent efforts to toughen responses to crime, including the "broken windows" theory of policing, have produced a countering response in those sectors of the minority community of intense interest to the police. This response, which appears to be unplanned and spontaneous, substitutes a rough type of people's justice for the official, uniformed version. And, unfortunately for police innovators, the response is often as effective, and inventive, as the official version.

After outlining and describing the three books, I will discuss a number of manifestations of this response, which essentially aim at nullifying the police. In the black community, a campaign against snitching--complete with T-shirts, rap songs, and extra-official pressure--aims to secure total noncooperation with the police, especially regarding enforcement of the drug laws. In the Latino community, a somewhat similar movement seeks to subvert the immigration laws through asylum churches and towns, and efforts by church groups and white sympathizers to leave water, food, and other essential supplies in the desert for the use of undocumented Latinos heading north. Also in the Latino community, folk tales called corridos celebrate the exploits of drug dealers and coyotes (human smugglers) who outwit the cops. These three movements, which have sprung up quite separately, evidence a growing conviction among some communities of color that the police are essentially an invading force, unresponsive to the community's needs, and thus illegitimate.

These developments show that a growing segment of the minority community believe that some conventionally defined criminals are simply ordinary individuals trying to make a living, while the police are an alien force--precisely the opposite, in other words, of the usual perception. Both movements, consciously or not, build on predecessors such as the Black Panthers ("no justice, no peace"), Martin Luther King (Letter from Birmingham Jail (5)), and, in our time, Paul Butler (jury nullification) and Regina Austin (a politics of identification versus a politics of respectability).

These events suggest that heavy-handed enforcement of unpopular laws breeds resentment, particularly in outsider communities, canceling out any gains from terror, deterrence, and higher arrest rates. They also suggest, as two of the books do obliquely, that society needs to respond to crime and disorder not merely by increasing police presence, incarceration, and harsher laws and sentences, but by constantly re-evaluating the role of law and law enforcement in a diverse society.

  1. RECENT BOOKS ON POLICE AND POLICING

    Three recent books on police and policing focus on innovations that aim to improve on what police have been doing all along. In the conventional approach, the police patrol areas (usually in cars), respond to calls, and try to arrive on the scene quickly enough to arrest offenders or at least to collect evidence while it is fresh (Weisburd & Braga, pp. 5-9). Because of a widespread belief that this approach is yielding fewer and fewer gains, reformers have been proposing new approaches of two broad types. The community policing model aims to share the burden of policing with the community itself. By securing the cooperation of the residents of a neighborhood, the thinking goes, the police will be more effective in controlling crime and disorder (Weisburd & Braga, pp. 5-18). A second approach aims to use current police resources toward time-honored ends, but more effectively than in the past (Weisburd & Braga, pp. 5-18).

    The first of the books, Citizens, Cops, and Power: Recognizing the Limits of Community, by Steve Herbert, analyzes community policing in West Seattle and concludes that this approach is largely doomed to failure. Another, Race and Policing in America: Conflict and Reform, by Ronald Weitzer and Steven Tuch, focuses on the role of race in policing. They conclude that the black and white communities view the police in starkly different terms, with distrust and suspicion running much higher in black and Latino communities than in white ones. A third collection, Police Innovation: Contrasting Perspectives, edited by David Weisburd and Anthony Braga, considers a number of approaches to policing, most of them of the get-tough variety, finding that few of them offer the silver bullet to reducing crime, much less winning citizens' cooperation.

    1. The Tug of Community

      The brightest hope for counteracting heavy-handed police actions has been the community policing policy project. Steve Herbert's Citizens, Cops, and Power begins by reminding readers how strongly the idea of community attracts us and how deeply ingrained the urge is for a rich life together. (6) In our times, writers such as Michael Sandel, Alistair McIntyre, and Charles Taylor have embraced community and challenged the atrophied, shrunken vision of society composed of jealous, rights-guarding individuals that is implicit in many liberal accounts of the state (Herbert, pp. 3-5, 145).

      Community policing, the subject of Herbert's book, is one dimension of this idealistic approach. In this form of policing, which, according to Herbert, is becoming widespread, (7) the police aim to improve their connection with citizen groups and decentralize their operations so that small groups of neighbors make decisions about the kind of policing they want and are prepared to accept. Often patrolling on foot, the police seek input and information from those citizens--meeting with them both formally--for example, in a high school auditorium for biannual sessions--and informally, through daily contacts on the streets. Officers work the same beat for long periods of time so that they can become friendly with the local residents and earn their trust (Herbert, pp. 4, 77-78, 94-95, 134-40, 144).

      In pursuit of the same policy, police administrators push decision making down to lower levels so that the officers closest to the action make key decisions about what areas and activities to focus on. Community policing speaks the language of partnership and cooperation. It aims at having the police and the community solve problems--such as loitering, noise, gangs, abandoned cars, and break-ins---collectively and in ways that local residents believe will be effective (Herbert, pp. 4, 77-78, 94-95, 134-40, 144; Weisburd & Braga, pp. 27-73).

      But are distressed neighborhoods really communities? If so, who speaks for them? Can the police really hear and take seriously what ordinary citizens say, given what we know about police norms and culture? Can "community" be oppressive, a form of veiled majoritarianism, so that struggling, overworked members of an inner-city neighborhood, for example, are apt instinctively to realize it will do little to solve their problems? (Herbert, pp. 145-46).

      Herbert addresses many of these caveats in his opening chapter (Herbert, pp. 7-8). And his intensive study of West Seattle, a mixed-race, blue-collar neighborhood with a strong sense of identity and a neighborhood feel, (8) demonstrates that these concerns are not just hypothetical--they shadow even the most promising and determined of police programs taking this form (Herbert, pp. 7-8).

      In West Seattle, a working-class neighborhood...

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