Public Safety, Trust, and Efficiency

Is it possible to create policing strategies that identify the community as a major stakeholder and are efficient as well as effective? Policing is especially important to observe because it highlights a specific tension between the drive for efficiency and for government to establish trusting partnerships with its citizens. In light of the recent federal case over the NYPD’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy, it seems that results-driven policing has alienated entire communities—particularly low-income minority communities. I find Meulman’s case study on the Dutch police force to offer a more inclusive (and desirable) alternative. 

The NYPD’s model of policing is celebrated nationally for its performance driven efficiency. Crime has gone down significantly in the last few years, with aggressive policing given much of the credit. No one can argue that lower crime is desirable, but those living in poor, high crime communities of color have a drastically different experience with the police than their white counterparts. The push for arrests and stop-and-frisk quotas has released a powder keg of frustration in these communities, with kids on their way to school reporting that police subject them to frequent pat downs in broad daylight in front of community members.

Police commissioner Ray Kelly and Mayor Bloomberg publicly shun such behavior, chalking it up to a few bad apples, but the reality is that police officers are behaving badly because of intense pressure from above. During the recent trial over the controversial policy, one police officer testified that his precinct’s 

performance goals were 20 summonses, 5 street stops, and 1 arrest per month. The intense pressure coming from on high makes it difficult to establish trust within the community. How can you build a partnership and co-produce results rather than rule from on high when the community you serve refuses to work with you because of your management tactics?

In stark contrast to the NYPD stands the Dutch police force in the Netherlands. Louis Meulman’s work explores the consensus style of governance adopted by the Dutch, with a particular focus on its community policing style.  Establishing trust is a primary focus, as is integrating the police force into the community. In order to do this the police must “relinquish {their} monopoly on safety and crime” (Meulman 209). Rather than a hierarchical approach, the Dutch police realize that citizen support is crucial and seek to attain it by developing partnerships. They enable their police officers by allowing them high levels of discretion rather than soul crushing quotas. This may be in direct conflict with performance driven contracts and market oriented governance, but I think building relationships are more important than efficiency.

 Policy makers, especially Bloomberg, often create a false dilemma: if you don’t have aggressive, top down policing, you can’t have low crime rates, they say—even if certain communities are essentially living in a police state. The Dutch policing strategy proves that you can have public safety, cooperation and low crime rate.

Best Practices and the NYPD

New York City and its Ray Kelly headed police force is regarded as a particularly successful model for crime control. The zero tolerance and quality of life policies that have been implemented, when coupled with the harsh sentencing practices of the Rockefellar Drug Laws have contributed to an exponential increase in the incarceration rate in New York State.

Contrary to the repetative discourse that bemoans ineffective government bureaucracies, local governments can be active when need be. City governments also frequently communicate and share best practices with each other. Agencies such as the publically funded MTA, for example, talk to cities that have similar transit systems like London and Paris. The head of the MTA will share what has proven effective, what is supported by the public, and how best to implement improvement projects. When discussing transportation initiatives, this all seems fairly innocuous, but when the subject matter is crime control and policing, this takes on an entirely different shade. What if the subject matter is less about adding more subway lines and more about effective ways to stifle protests?  And what if the supposed leader of innovation, the NYPD, is actually promoting an archaic, expensive, unjust and ineffective method of policing?

There is an insistent and oft repeated correlation between broken window policies and the decrease in crime that began to occur in the early 90s but the validity of this relationship has little empirical merit: crime rates dropped dramatically all over the United States and other industrialized nations. Not all of the cities that experienced this decrease in crime practiced the broken window theory and yet the public perception continues to accept that harsh sentencing and tough-on-crime policies were the reason—to the detriment of low level offenders of color. So if we have a model of policing that is nationally and globally celebrated as a success and is adopted by other municipalites, despite contradictory evidence, then we have a problem, and it’s a problem that has civil rights implications.

Very briefly, let’s look at Paris and the riots of 2005. The direct cause of the riots was linked to the deaths of two boys who were hiding from the police in a power substation and were electrocuted. That’s the basic premise, although I’m greatly shortening it for simplicity’s sake.

Nicolas Sarkozy was the Interior Minister at the time and he showed little empathy and insisted that the youths were possible suspects fleeing a crime scene rather than kids playing soccer. In the world that he lives in, there was no way that they were fleeing from what they perceived to be yet another frequent and unnecessary police interrogation where they would be forced to show their identity papers. The New York Times reported that many in the poor communities in Paris blamed Mr. Sarkozy for alienating young people with the way he has pressed a zero-tolerance anticrime campaign, which features frequent police checks of French Arabs in poor neighborhoods”

The Sarkozy administration did not acknowledged that youth in blighted and segregated regions of the city do not see themselves fully reflected in the promises of the republic of France. He has not acknowledged that the public visibility of youth of North African origin beyond the boundaries of the projects provokes discomfort, rejection, and relentless identity checks [by police] and fuels a powder keg of frustration.

It’s no accident that the constant identity checks bear an eery resemblance to some of the NYPDs tactics. These are “best practices” that have been shared and implemented with corporate precision. What is interesting is that the subjects of the abusive police practices whether they are French Arabs of North African descent or Black and Latinos in New York City, while they have varied and unique cultural experiences, they have one distinct commonality: those that suffer from these abusive policies are minorities who have historically experienced institutional discrimination in the forms of slavery, colonialism, Jim Crow, and other government mandated forms of human rights violations.  

The reason for sharing this background and scope and bringing up Jim Crow, slavery and colonialism is to highlight that the current punitive policies didn’t hatch themselves. Rather, they are part of a long-standing and substantial institutional lineage. Now is the time to break away from this inheritance. Now is the time to bring the issue of equitable justice to the public forefront.