Police violence and "community policing"

Hannah Cooper and Mindy Thompson Fullilove in a recently published but pre-George-Floyd-uprising book, From Enforcers to Guardians: A Public Health Primer on Ending Police Violence (2020) provide a timely look at various approaches to police defunding/reimagining/reform.

The framework of police reform and violence-reduction in a span of official attention reaching from the Kerner Commission Report (Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, 1968) to the Obama Administration's Task Force on 21st Century Policing includes a variety of measures ranging from purely cosmetic to the substantive, including some arguable successes.

But Cooper and Thompson also proceed from a critical viewpoint that requires keeping in mind a sociological perspective and not on organizational and bureaucratic solutions alone:

... policing in the United States is not taking place in a vacuum. It is carried out for the benefit of a society with a long history of using police to shore up American apartheid capitalism by being the face and force of race, gender, class, and other kinds of oppression. The most marginalized people and neighborhoods experience the most distorted policing.

We have proposed that there is a toxic triad of marginalization, distorted policing, and violence, which leads to health costs in all directions. While the most prominent arguments against police brutality concern the cost of the lives of the policed, it is clear that the costs of policing fall heavily on the police as well. ... Furthermore, the stress of the social situations in which the police are meant to act radiates in all directions, undermining our democracy and straining our institutions.

The toxic triad is destructive, if not deadly, all around, but it cannot be upended by pushing a single lever. Getting the society to issue new edicts is not enough to change the reality of the officer. [my emphasis]

The Obama Administration's reform approach, which I hear referred to in current reports with special reference to the concept of community policing, a concept that the Clinton Administration also promoted. This David Sirota comment on a tweet of the pathetic reactionary Republican Scott Walker is a great snapshot of the flux in which the American political narrative is experiencing on police violence right now:

The funniest part of this is that this right-winger doesn't even realize he's now forced to support "reform" precisely BECAUSE protests have been using the slogan "defund the police," which has shifted the Overton Window to make reform the minimum conservative position. https://t.co/AStlBjmGTh

— David Sirota (@davidsirota) June 14, 2020

It's a reminder that the politics of reforming/reimagining/abolishing policing is littered with scams, empty rhetoric, bad faith posturing, and unproven ideas - along with real and serious attempts to address the real and serious problems. And with endless commissions, task forces, initiatives, and policy statements. Obama's Task Force grouped their proposals into six "pillars":

• Building Trust and Legitimacy
• Policy and Oversight
• Technology and Social Media
• Community Policing and Crime Reduction
• Training and Education
• Officer Wellness and Safety

"Training and education" in the political context of the current moment means about the same as "thoughts and prayers," i.e., we don't care, much less take this seriously. Although no one denies that the substance in it is critically important, including the on-the-job training that occurs day-to-day.

The Task Force description of community police sounds - not surprisingly - like it was carefully produced by a committee to sound serious but benign enough not to ruffle any feathers:

Community policing is not just about the relationship between individual officers and individual neighborhood residents. It is also about the relationship between law enforcement leaders and leaders of key institutions in a community, such as churches, businesses, and schools, supporting the community’s own process to define prevention and reach goals.

Law enforcement agencies cannot ensure the safety of communities alone but should seek to contribute to the strengthening of neighborhood capacity to prevent and reduce crime through informal social control. More than a century of research shows that informal social control is a much more powerful mechanism for crime control and reduction than is formal punishment. And perhaps the best evidence for the preventive power of informal social control may be the millions of unguarded opportunities to commit crime that are passed up each day. [my emphasis]

There are a couple of considerations that stand out for me on community policing. One is that it may give storekeepers and restaurant owners a warm and fuzzy feeling to see cops in uniform walking the beat, it isn't necessarily the most efficient and effective way to deploy police officers. Cops in patrol cars can get to places quickly where actual criminal activity in progress is being reported.

Just having police officers show up to chat with folks at the proverbial donut shop only build trust if the cops convey they can be trusted. I lived for years in Oakland, CA, where the police department has had numerous serious problems over the years with excess force, discrimination, planting fake evidence, etc. And in practice, the police culture can often be insular, so that even the actual liberal mayors in large cities like Oakland who may be interested in doing so find the police leaders to be difficult partners in that process, to put it politely. Oakland encouraged a neighborhood-watch kind of effort that I suppose was part of the community policing concept. It involved periodic neighborhood meetings and education efforts on what to do in an emergency.

I recall one event that involved block parties schedule on a particular day, where someone from the fire department and police department stopped by to give safety tips. The fire department person gave some general safety tips and engaged with the group a bit. The uniformed police officer just ranted about how urgent in was to pass a hire-more-cops city ballot measure that the police department and the police union were backing. He didn't show any interest in chatting with the folks, much less hearing any concerns about police misconduct. All he was doing was politicking for his ballot proposal. Which was inappropriate in the situation in any case, and I'm pretty such was a violation of his department's regulations and likely illegal.

It didn't exactly leave me with a warm-and-fuzzy feeling. But he didn't shoot or club anybody, so there's that.

Anecdotal evidence aside, Cooper and Thompson argue that "policing does have to have a perspective, and identification with the local community offers a powerful psychological tool for intervention in police brutality. Community policing is centered in a place - a neighborhood — and relates to that place." But they also quote from a column by Terrell Jermaine Starr (Community policing is not the solution to police brutality. It makes it worse. Washington Post 11/03/2015), in which he argues:

Community policing is a feel-good term, one so broad and nebulous that it seems difficult to oppose. While speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference last week, President Obama touted it as the solution to crime in Chicago and Camden, N.J. Presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the Urban League in July that police brutality is unacceptable and offered community policing as the first solution to dealing with it. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been a vocal proponent of community policing for decades, promoting it in her 1996 book “It Takes a Village.” ...

But at its foundation, community policing demands more police on the streets. Obama said as much in his IACPC speech last week, and Clinton has professed that community policing needs “more officers on the streets to get to know those communities.” But in communities like mine, the predominately black Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, putting more officers on patrol doesn’t lessen the chance of police brutality — it worsens it. As long as police know their badges empower them to operate with near-impunity, we don’t need more encounters with them; we need fewer. ...

As sincere as the philosophy of community policing might be, it’s not the solution to police brutality. The bad relationship between police and residents is not the cause of excessive force, it’s the result. The real cause is the fact that police officers are rarely, if ever, charged in connection to the people they kill. A Washington Post investigation found that only 54 officers had been charged in the thousands of fatal police shootings over the past decade. With those odds against police accountability, why would any marginalized community feel comfortable with more police patrolling their streets? [my emphasis]

It's important to keep in mind that in the era of neoliberalism, the US leaves various critical social needs seriously underfunded and underserved: housing, education, mental health, drug addiction, direct measures to mitigate poverty. These do generate problems whose consequences we leave to the police to attend to. At the same time, though, crime rates in the US and even worldwide have been going down for the last quarter century or so. So it's not that crime overall is increasing. But the "drug war" is a huge, glaring example of how a social and medical problem has been criminalized with the police expect to handle it with police methods, which has enormous spillover effects in crime and social violence.

Or, to put it another way, there are community problems that are should not treat primarily as police problems, or at least not to the extent they currently are. The concept of "community policing" can also feed the idea that social/community problems can and should be addressed by the police.