| POLICE AND SOCIETY Some general facts about policing and street crime in America, and some implications: 1. If somebody tells the police "who did it" the crime is usually "cleared" (by arrest, identification of a �suspect known to the police,� etc.). If nobody tells the police who did it, the crime is usually not cleared. Investigation rarely clears crimes (less than 1% of the millions of crime victimizations that occur every year) - unlike on TV where virtually every crime is cleared by the end of the show. 2. Less than half of crimes involving victims are reported to police � best estimates based on National Crime Victimization Surveys (NCVS) commissioned by the federal government indicate that about 1/3 of crime victimizations are reported. For �victimless� crimes (prostitution, drug offenses, etc.) the proportion reported is much smaller. For corporate crime the proportion is smaller yet (wealth and power allow the rich to hide their crimes). 3. The overall "clearance rate" for serious street crimes (especially stranger crimes like burglary and robbery) is much less than 10%, and there is probably no effective way to raise this rate. For acquaintance crimes (most assaults, including homicides, involve friends, family, or other acquaintances) victims often won't report it or tell police who did it. For stranger crimes, victims usually can't tell police who did it (they don't know!). For victimless crimes, there is no "victim" to report it or tell the police who did it. 4. All of this means that the legal system (CJS) has very little access to crime. 5. So what "regulates" crime - what keeps crime rates more or less stable over time? Young males "age in" to crime in their mid-teens, commit a lot of mostly petty crimes (along with some serious crimes) mostly without getting caught, and then "age out" of crime again (from their mid-twenties on) as they grow older, find jobs, get married and have kids, etc. A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLICE Pre-feudal Europe (400ad - 1000ad) before national unity under kings; rural agricultural society; a few rich warrior/landowners, a few mostly nomadic merchants, 99% rural, poor, illiterate, landworking peasants. Self-sufficiency - peasant families banded together for protection against thieves and marauders - sometimes overseen by Constables appointed by landowners. Shire Reeves (early �sheriffs�) collected taxes and rents for landowners from peasants in the form of goods and/or labor (shire reeves were not popular with peasants!). Feudal Europe (1000ad - 1700s) landowners unify and organize nation-states (countries), villages grow larger. The �Watch System� emerges - public watchmen supervised by Constables used mainly to protect against fire/marauders. Industrialization (1700s - 1900s) � the growth of trade and industry led to the growth of towns and cities, rural peasants became urban wageworkers. In feudal Europe, growing agricultural productivity (fewer people were able to produce more food through the use of technology) plus "enclosures" of public land (seized as private property by rich and powerful landowners) led to rural surplus populations among peasants, who were eventually forced into towns/cities to work in newly emerging factories. Former poor peasants (now even poorer wageworkers) from different cultures led to conflict and violence. There were also large urban surplus populations with no way to make a living (no jobs and couldn�t return to the land). New cheap hard liquor (gin, etc.) also led to public drunkenness and violence. Europe�s surplus population problems gradually declined with large-scale forced out-migration (�transportation�) to North America, South America, Australia, etc., and crime rates then gradually dropped. As towns grew into cities (larger and more complex), the watch system evolved into modern forms of policing (e.g., watchmen began to patrol towns instead of staying in watchboxes). The Metropolitan Police of London (1829) are usually recognized as the first modern police force. Organized by Sir Robert Peel (thus the nickname "bobbies") the Metros included more than 1000 uniformed officers organized under a military command structure. Note: in rural areas self-sufficiency continued, in villages the watch system continued, etc. POLICING IN AMERICA The situation in colonial North America (1700s) was similar to that in England in the 1700s - self-sufficiency in rural areas, the watch system in villages, county sheriffs and/or town marshals in urban areas. US surplus populations (mostly coming in from Europe) continually moved west, so crime rates were relatively low for two centuries. The first modern US police forces emerged in the 1800s in cities (Boston 1838, NY 1844, and others followed as cities grew). See this interesting history of the New York Police Department Unlike England, where bobbies were centralized, American police forces were mostly formed by specific cities and were usually controlled by local elites through corrupt city political machines - which led to corrupt police forces. Police had little training or supervision, most police patrolled on foot, and police corruption and brutality were everyday events. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, reform movements arose against corrupt city machines (and also targeted police corruption and brutality). Reformers advocated a bureaucratic "business model" for governing and policing cities � including professional police under a civil service system. Included were centralized organizational structures and record keeping; strict military style discipline; use of science/technology (telegraph, cars, radio, scientific investigation, etc.); training, education, and better pay. The basic idea was to create professional, incorruptible, and effective "crime fighters" who do not question the authority of central command. This is the model that has shaped the development of contemporary urban police. CONTEMPORARY POLICE The main activity of modern police departments is car patrol (this is also the most visible component of policing). Some intended purposes of patrol are: to deter crime through high police visibility, to maintain public order, to respond quickly to crimes and other emergencies, to provide aid to citizens in conflict/distress, to make arrests when justified, to facilitate the movement of people and traffic, and to promote a public sense of safety/security. It is often taken for granted that visible police patrol/response deters crime. Criminologists have long doubted this. A set of experiments done in the early 1970s in Kansas City found no relationship between the amount/type of police patrol and crime rates (or citizen attitudes toward police, satisfaction with police, or fear of crime). Also, statistics regularly indicate that cities with more police per capita generally have higher, not lower, crime rates (note: more police are probably a response to, not a cause of, higher crime rates). Increasing the number of police doesn't lead to lower crime rates. In reality, the main job of most police most of the time is dealing with social problems of poor people. Police do some of the ugliest work in modern societies - handling domestic and other disputes; dealing with derelicts, the homeless, mentally ill, chronically sick poor, runaways, and the massive gun carnage (including dead bodies) in American cities. "Police culture" (see below) is partly a result of doing this ugly work. Detective work (including forensics and new technologies) is no more effective than patrol. The solving of crimes through detective work (like on TV) is so statistically rare that it is virtually mythical. POLICE CULTURE (slowly changing with more police education and diversity) The stresses and strains of police work (ugly work, constant potential for violence, emotional turmoil of dealing over and over again with people with intractable problems, etc.) have influenced the development of a distinctive police culture based on clannishness and alienation (the "blue curtain" and "thin blue line"). Click here for some facts about police suicides Police culture holds that police are the only real crime fighters, no one else understands them, police have to stick together because everyone is out to get them and make their job more difficult, people are quick to criticize the police until they need help themselves, police have to bend the rules to fight crime because criminals have been given too many rights, patrol is boring and only detective work is "real police work." Racism is a particularly troubling aspect of police culture. Historically police have overwhelmingly been working class, uneducated, white males who grew up in segregated neighborhoods, attended segregated schools, lived in segregated neighborhoods, and interacted only with each other outside of work. The only minorities they interacted with are generally poor and either have serious problems or cause problems. Most police have little or no contact with non-poor minorities so they tend to see all minorities as "crime-prone." MORE ABOUT CONTEMPORARY US POLICE CULTURE Before WW2, the US population was about evenly split between urban residents (mostly first or second generation immigrants) and rural/small town residents (mostly descended from earlier �whiter� immigrants). After WW2 the US urbanized rapidly and thus cities and urban police departments grew rapidly. Because of patterns of discrimination that were pervasive at the time, police were virtually all male, all white, working class and poorly educated (high school or less), and most had a military background (veterans were given preferences for public jobs after the war). Policing was a low-status poorly-paid job. Further, because of patterns of segregation that were pervasive at the time, police recruits had grown up in racially/ethnically segregated neighborhoods, attended racially/ethnically segregated schools, married within their �class and race� (usually a woman from their own neighborhood and/or school), and were raising their own families in segregated neighborhoods and schools. Finally, because of the unique circumstances of their jobs (uniforms, guns, exposure to the hidden and ugly aspects of city life, etc.), police tended to further segregate themselves from �civilians� by associating almost exclusively with each other when not working, which reinforces the white male poorly-educated militaristic orientation of police culture. Over the several generations since the end of WW2, police culture has become very resistant to change, and even police administrators (more diverse, more educated, less military) are regarded as outsiders to be scorned and resisted by �real cops.� COMMUNITY POLICING The ineffectiveness of patrol and investigation, police scandals, and especially incidents involving police racism and brutality (like the Rodney King incident and controversies over racial profiling) have contributed to a number of new efforts at police reform. The general aims of community policing involve getting police out of their cars and into communities where they will be friendly and establish bonds with residents who will then be more cooperative with police (report crime and tell police who commits crimes). Aspects of community policing include: a more educated and diverse officer corp, foot-bicycle-rollerskate-etc. patrol, storefronts and neighborhood precincts, and other approaches that encourage positive police-public contact. Community policing has been hard to implement because police culture resists changes ("turns police into social workers"), much of the public has been convinced by conservatives that the police need to �get tougher� instead, and highly publicized incidents involving police racism and/or brutality lead to widespread distrust of police among urban populations, especially in poor and minority neighborhoods. SUMMARY Because police are the "front line" of the CJS and clearance rates are chronically very low, the CJS actually has little access to crime, and this situation is very unlikely to change significantly. So nothing that the CJS does or can do is likely to reduce crime very much, if at all. In short, "nothing works" with respect to reducing crime through CJ policy alone. Copyright � 2009 Ernie Thomson. All rights reserved. email: [email protected] |