The astoundingly crude and arrogant response of NYPD rank and file to the tragic murder of two officers by an unstable young man last month (read the fascinating story by Kim Barker, Mosi Secret and Richard Fausset in the New York Times on the man who killed the officers) raises an interesting question: do we really need the police?
Angry at Mayor Bill DeBlasio for winning an election on reforming police practices, and speaking honestly about how people of color feel about the police in the aftermath of the Michael Brown and Eric Garner killings, NYPD officers have undertaken a public campaign of not using their arrest powers unless the situation absolutely requires it, resulting in an unprecedented drop in both arrests and parking tickets. Angered that citizens and their elected officials should ever question how the police behave, NY "finest" are saying in effect, "you'll have it our way, or you won't have it at all." Maybe, just maybe, it's time to say "let's not have it this way at all, and if you can't change, we need a new alternative. "
My criminological colleagues will be cringing. Cannonical doctrine suggests that while better policing may lead to better public safety results, even the worse police department is better than none at all. In a famous natural experiment in 1944, documented by criminologist Johannes Andeneas, the Nazis arrested the entire police force of occupied Copenhagen (fearing that they would aid an Allied effort to liberate the city). Despite the Nazis' own credible threats to execute criminals on site, and what one might expect to be strong feelings of solidarity among the citizens of the occupied city, robberies and larcenies soared; similar results have emerged from police strikes (see a summary by Lawrence Sherman of some studies here).
But we need not consider replacing the police with nothing. The real question is why, despite a century and a half of incredible urban and political change in industrial democracies, we still cling to the idea of the police invented in the early 19th century to contain the dangerous classes of London and New York?
I'm not ready to float a comprehensive proposal now, but a few thoughts to get our collective imagination going while we wait to see how NYPD's Copenhagen experiment plays out.
Do we really need the police? So far, crime has not gone up in New York City, but criminological doctrine suggests it is only a matter of time before the criminally inclined decide there is little price to be paid for acting on those impulses.
On the other hand, crime is highly situational, and responsive to individual and collective sensibilities. Perhaps the same emotions that have led tens of thousands of New Yorkers to protest against aggressive policing (and earlier to vote for Bill DeBlasio) has led more individuals to feel a sense of legitimacy in the public order of the city and a sense of collective efficacy.
I would not want to rely on individual consent and collective efficacy to keep crime low on their own indefinitely. We need something like the police, but not "the police" as we've known them. Police are important, but they are not like air. We can live without them when that is necessary. And we can reinvent them.
Cross-posted from Jonathan Simon’s blog, Governing Through Crime.