http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/e189388e-d3ea-11e0-b7eb-00144feab49a.html#axzz1WyfWrMs4
More about victims than perpetrators
The purpose of the police has been the subject of various theories over the past half-century, writes John McDermott. In different ways, the Royal Commission on the Police (1962) in the UK and the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement in the US (1967) both advocated the “professionalisation” of forces. The police were to become more like modern civil servants: removed from citizens, subject to routine and top-down management. They were to retrospectively solve crime and control social disorder.
During the 1980s, this approach, at least in the US, was deemed by many to have failed. Crime statistics are notoriously tricky but violent crime rose during the decade and peaked sometime in the early 1990s. Critics argued that this was in large part because the police had lost legitimacy in the most violent areas. “Above all, we must return to our long-abandoned view that the police ought to protect communities as well as individuals,” wrote George Kelling and James Wilson in their famous 1982 essay “Broken Windows”.
The “Broken Windows” theory is often wrongly assumed to mean a “zero tolerance” approach. But it was always more about victims than perpetrators. In the mid-1990s, under Mayor Giuliani and with Bratton as police commissioner, New York arrested trainloads of subway fare dodgers. In part, this was to teach petty criminals a lesson. But it was meant to show citizens that the police were on their side.
Bratton’s use of data was revolutionary. NYPD’s Compstat system, created by deputy commissioner Jack Maple, provided information about when, where and why certain crimes took place. For example, if assaults were spiking on a specific street corner, more police could be dispatched or a lightbulb replaced. Individual officers could then be held accountable for results. Ironically, Bratton’s results are hotly contested. The homicide rate dropped by 73.6 per cent in New York between 1990 and 2001, the largest fall of any major US city. However, the fall began three years before Bratton became police chief and coincided with a 45 per cent increase in the size of the NYPD, thrice the average national rise. Los Angeles and Washington DC forces also presided over large drops in violent crime during this period.
In the 1990s Britain’s Labour party vowed to be “tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime”. “Hotspot-based” policing and crime maps were introduced, despite resistance in the force, but these proved a pale imitation of the Compstat model. The crime-focused approach, allied to a reliance on CCTV, meant that even as crime fell, the fear of crime did not. Sir Robert Peel’s adage that “the police are the public and the public are the police” had seemingly been forgotten.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011
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