The Crisis in American Policing
By Malcolm Sparrow
The following is an excerpt from Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back and the Keys to Reform.
These are tumultuous times for policing in America. Thanks in part to the almost ubiquitous presence of video cameras, the American public has recently had the chance to see the very best and the very worst of police conduct.
At the scene of the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013, Boston police officers and other emergency workers instinctively ran toward the site of the explosions to help the injured and take control of the scene, even while nobody knew how many more bombs there might be. Video footage made plain to all the classic courage of first responders reacting to a traumatic situation with professional discipline and putting their own lives at risk for the sake of the public they serve.
Three days later, on April 18, MIT patrol officer Sean Collier was shot dead in his patrol car by bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, who were apparently seeking to acquire weapons and perhaps provoke a major confrontation with police. In an extraordinary display of public appreciation for police officers and the dangers they face on a daily basis, more than 10,000 people attended Officer Collier’s funeral.
“Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems.”
Scores of law enforcement officers from federal, state, and local agencies had flooded into the area and cooperated in the search. When it was all over, local residents — who had voluntarily heeded the police request to “shelter in place” — emerged from their homes, gathered on street corners, and spontaneously applauded as buses full of law enforcement officers passed by.
During that week in April 2013, nobody seemed to have anything but praise for the courageous and selfless way police conducted themselves in the face of those extraordinary dangers.
But 2014 and 2015 brought to public attention a series of incidents, many of them video-recorded on the cellphones of passersby, that appalled the public, astonished many, and raised troubling questions about the quality and nature of policing in America. Several incidents involving the deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of white police officers, albeit in different jurisdictions, came in quick enough succession to be perceived as a pattern and to prompt national debate. The pattern was pretty much established after two high profile incidents just three weeks apart: the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and of Eric Garner in New York City. Public concern over the issues raised drew commentary from the president, led to the establishment of a presidential task force, resulted in investigations of patterns of police conduct by the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, and spawned protests against police violence — particularly against minorities — that spread across the nation far beyond the cities directly involved.
As soon as the pattern was established, every subsequent incident where police used force then drew unprecedented levels of public and media scrutiny as the public searched for answers to some very basic questions: Do police regularly abuse their powers and use excessive force? How widespread is such abuse? How much is it targeted on minority and poor communities? Why can police not be held accountable even in those instances when their actions appear patently criminal?
“Community policing is not merely a device for controlling crime.”
It would be interesting to know some basic facts and figures. For instance, how many times a year do American police officers shoot unarmed suspects and subsequently justify their actions by claiming they felt their own life was in immediate danger, either because the suspect appeared to be about to pull something out of a pocket or, in the course of a scuffle, the suspect seemed to be reaching for the officer’s own weapon? In the absence of witnesses or video evidence or contradictory forensic evidence, such accounts are unlikely to be refuted. Such incidents would normally end up classified as justifiable homicides — or, to use the peculiar language of the police profession, as “good shootings.”
The fact of the matter is that we have no idea how often this happens, as the United States does not gather any reliable national statistics on officer-involved shootings, or on other deaths at the hands of police, or on deaths that occur in police custody. Federal databases exist, but submission of those data by law enforcement agencies remains voluntary and is, consequently, acknowledged to be woefully incomplete.
This book focuses deliberately on those issues that, while they may be reflected in the current American crisis, are not uniquely American. It is worth noting that these aspirations about the nature and quality of policing are by no means just American, either. Citizens of any mature democracy can expect and should demand police services that are responsive to their needs, tolerant of diversity, and skillful in unraveling and tackling crime and other community problems. They should expect and demand that police officers are decent, courteous, humane, sparing and skillful in the use of force, respectful of citizens’ rights, disciplined, and professional. These are ordinary, reasonable expectations.
“Community policing is an end in itself.”
But whenever someone advocates for community policing, others object, pointing to the lack of convincing evidence in the research literature that community policing is effective in controlling crime. There are some rather clear reasons for that lack of evidence, including the fact that community policing in many departments has been mere rhetoric, and, even where community policing has been implemented in ways that affect operations, the variations in form between departments are too great to permit reliable evaluation.
But more fundamentally, it seems that researchers ask the wrong question. If one regards crime control as the “bottom line of policing,” then one might assess policing styles and strategies solely in terms of how much they contribute to the singular purpose of reducing reported crime. Community policing is not merely a device for controlling crime. Rather, effective crime control is just one component of community policing.
Community policing is an end in itself. It is an entitlement. From a public perspective it is vital to work out, finally, how this model of policing can be delivered in a mature and sustainable way. The current crisis in American policing makes that much, at least, quite clear.
Purchase Malcolm Sparrow’s book: Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back and the Keys to Reform.
Malcolm K. Sparrow is professor of the Practice of Public Management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and faculty chair of the school’s executive program “Strategic Management of Regulatory and Enforcement Agencies.” His previous books include Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing (with Moore & Kennedy, 1990); The Regulatory Craft (Brookings, 2000); and The Character of Harms (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
