POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Abstract

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an institution in deep crisis and a flashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals saw the police as racist, violent, and ineffective and blamed them, with justification, for the hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. At the same time, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of “law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in 1968.1 By the late 1990s, however, the police had become far more diverse and far less insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and “problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, class, and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could profitably emulate.3 The pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of officers as “pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of policing, and allied himself with officers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had. In the summer of 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the police, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforcement officers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; they wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, meanwhile, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, in 2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for off-year electoral losses to Republicans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and marginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in crisis, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.In other ways, as well, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. This is especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality. Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of force, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century, officers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American policing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. People of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suffer from both police nonfeasance and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-offs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tolerated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two different social divides. The first is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a century ago, has made policing a partisan flashpoint. The second divide is sociological: the gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who disproportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. Each of these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a premium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people of color, especially African Americans.8Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and 1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more effective, less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their very real shortcomings. Fortunately, moreover, the proposals most likely to work are supported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the groups most affected by crime and by abusive policing.How can American policing be transformed into a more effective and egalitarian system of public safety? We need to start with four key facts. First, crime has devastating, disproportionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. Second, police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize toll on poor people and people of color, and here, too, Black Americans are particularly likely to be victimized. Third, improved policing has helped make crime far less common today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years. Fourth, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police departments, but the victories have been partial and very often fleeting.Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime inflicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Criminal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disadvantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide, aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, at greatly elevated rates.There are between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the United States—a rate of about five or six per one hundred thousand people in the country. Among Black Americans, though, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the third-leading cause of death among Americans aged fifteen to thirty-four; it is the leading cause of death among Black males under forty-five and the second-leading cause of death among Latino males under forty-five. Young Black men are fifteen times more likely than their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these attacks, too. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United States. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of violent victimization.10Moreover, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighborhoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s lives, affecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns heat waves more deadly, for example, by making people afraid to leave their homes. Children living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, reinforcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty. This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just before. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the effects appear to accumulate with each additional killing. Crime, especially homicide and other serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping disparities between the household wealth of Americans of different races and robbing local governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for individuals, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimination perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential offenders more desperate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white, wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by people of color.13If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suffered from inadequate protection against crime, they have also suffered from an excess of violence and abuse at the hands of the police. Police officers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. Somewhere between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustified.14 And the victims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 through 2019, on an age-adjusted basis, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites; Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 and 2019, an unarmed Black man was four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was five to one.18Deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers are the most extreme way, but far from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, are more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched, and more likely to be arrested.19The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by police has ramifications far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inflicts. Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discriminatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their communities, with lasting effects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on broader ideas about law, government, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, African Americans consistently report less confidence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the police often leads, also, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the mistreatment but in friends, family, and neighbors as well.22The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the explanation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; more aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life offenses; and the spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, transformational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homicide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack. Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, particularly by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-first century. Homicide rates began to rise, though, around 2014, and then surged in cities across the country during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021.28 Some major American cities recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black neighborhoods, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, for example, Black Americans are nine percent of the population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York City, the figures are twenty-four percent and sixty-five percent, respectively.31 Rates of other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nationwide homicide rate in 2020 and 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. Still, a significant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early 2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. Just as there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guarantee those rates will not return.The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime drop, though, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expansion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely to both factors. The evidence is threefold. First, a growing body of research links increased police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research examines the effects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the effects of temporary surges in police presence because of, for example, terrorist alerts.32 Second, the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere in the country, and the most plausible explanation for the difference is the especially large changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33 Third, there is strong evidence for the effectiveness of particular police strategies that became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, and too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, for example, police departments in the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many departments, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces were majority minority—this was true, for example, in Los Angeles, Detroit, and Washington, D.C.—and the percentage of female officers had grown as well. Smaller departments made less progress, though. Moreover, as court-ordered hiring plans have expired over the past twenty years, diversification has stalled even in larger departments, and some past gains have been undone.35Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female officers are less likely to use unjustified force, especially against people of color.36 White male officers partnered with minority or female officers also change their patterns of policing for the better. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt other reforms.37One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by countering the strident hostility of police unions toward efforts to reduce police violence, increase police accountability, and combat racial biases in law enforcement. Police unions are not always implacable opponents of reform, but even today they do more to obstruct than to champion measures for making law enforcement fairer, more effective, and less lethal.38 One reason for that is that the leadership of police unions remains considerably older and whiter than police officers overall. Organizations of Black and Latino officers have often championed reforms opposed by police unions, and the presence of officers of color may in some cases have led police unions to moderate their own positions.39The most important of those reforms over the past half century have been community policing and problem-oriented policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and 1990s, sometimes as actual programs and sometimes, unfortunately, just as slogans.40 Virtually every police department in the country eventually claimed to practice “community policing,” in part because it became a routine requirement for federal grants. At its best, though, community policing was more than a slogan. It was a comprehensive reorientation of law enforcement away from a go-it-alone “warrior model” and toward a collaborative “guardian model” that relies on consultation and cooperation with the public and with other government agencies.41Community policing had major weaknesses, some of which will be discussed below. And because community policing was implemented with varying levels of seriousness, it was hard to rigorously evaluate. It spread, though, because it often greatly increased public satisfaction with the police and made people feel safer. Decreased fear of crime itself probably led to real reductions in crime: when people felt safer they ventured out more, and streets and parks tended to become safer with more people around.42When implemented most fully, community policing also decentralized control within police departments, and it broadened officers’ focus beyond crime suppression, allowing them to address a range of other concerns raised by the communities they served. It therefore fit well with problem-oriented policing, which called on officers to work creatively, and on an ongoing basis, with other agencies and the public to address issues of particular local concern. Sometimes, but not always, problem-oriented policing involved reallocating resources to “hot spots” responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime; sometimes, but not always, the resources reallocated were patrol officers. Unlike community policing, problem-oriented policing—especially the focus on hot spots—lent itself to statistical evaluation, and a steadily increasing body of evidence credits these techniques with significant crime reductions.43 Furthermore, there are indications that hot spots and other forms of problem-oriented policing have helped some cities defy the national trend and reduce homicides in 2021.44Beyond hot spots, community policing and problem-oriented policing frequently also involved increased attention to low-level, “quality of life” offenses, such as vandalism, loitering, and disturbing the peace. Part of the idea was that when these kinds of violations were left unaddressed, neighborhoods spiraled toward greater disorder, fewer people on the streets, and higher rates of serious crime; this was the famous, later infamous, theory of “broken windows.” Police initiatives focused on quality-of-life offenses could be empirically evaluated, too, and the results suggested that these programs were in fact effective at reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as hot-spots policing and only when the programs involved community collaboration and carefully targeted particular problems in particular places. Aggressive, indiscriminate crackdowns on quality-of-life offenses, although frequently billed as community policing and problem-oriented policing, did not reduce crime.45At the other end of the spectrum from quality-of-life policing, problem-oriented policing sometimes took the form of programs in which the police worked with community groups and other government agencies to address particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate share of a city’s gun violence. These programs—the first and most famous of which was Boston’s Ceasefire initiative in the 1980s and 1990s—were sometimes called “focused deterrence” because their most prominent component was often threats of heavy penal consequences targeted at the individuals and groups driving violence in a particular area. But the programs also included offers of social support to the same people, and some, more recent versions of this approach emphasize peer-to-peer counseling more than policing. Evidence is growing that these programs, when done right, significantly reduced gun violence.46At their best, moreover, community policing and problem-oriented policing provided their greatest benefits in poor neighborhoods. These programs were redistributive, and not just because they were resource intensive, requiring lots of time from lots of officers in neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. Community policing and problem-oriented policing required police to adopt what the criminologist James Q. Wilson had called the “service style” of law enforcement—the kind of policing typically found in relatively well-off suburbs—and to move away from the types of law enforcement traditionally pursued in poorer areas—what Wilson had called the “legalistic style,” which prioritized arrests, and the “watchman style,” which emphasized order maintenance.47 (Conversely, when community policing and problem-oriented policing were reduced to “zero tolerance” campaigns against quality-of life offenses, they doubled down on the watchman style.) In addition, community policing and order-maintenance policing frequently required officers to arrange for crime-ridden neighborhoods to receive a range of services other than law enforcement: trash cleanup, rodent abatement, streetlight repair, and so on. Officers might complain that they had not signed up to be social workers, but it turned out they often were good at getting other municipal agencies to pay more attention to marginalized neighborhoods.48For several different reasons, community policing and problem-oriented policing have lost much of their luster over the past two decades. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, led to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and state and local budget shortfalls in the early 2000s led many departments to view community policing and problem-oriented policing as unaffordable luxuries. Degraded forms of these programs, like the zero-tolerance crackdowns on turnstile jumping and “squeegee men” in New York City, helped to sour community activists against them and, eventually, in many cases, against the whole project of police reform.49 And it became increasingly clear that, even at their best, community policing and problem-oriented policing had some glaring flaws.One was that these programs paid little attention to police violence. This was not inherent in the philosophy of either set of reforms. Departments could have collaborated with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police violence. But they rarely did. Police reformers deemphasized the problem of police violence, especially police killings, because they did not appreciate the gravity of the problem. This was partly because the victims were generally members of marginalized groups (poor, young, and Black, Latino, or Native American), partly because federal government did not (and still does not) collect reliable data on police killings or other forms of police violence, and partly because, until the advent of body cameras and smartphones, officers’ accounts of these episodes were difficult to challenge. It took those technological developments and the Black Lives Matter movement to give the issue of police killings the attention it had long deserved.50Nonetheless, lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has declined significantly over the past half century. Controlling for the age of the victims, the risk of being killed by a police officer in the United States fell during the 1980s, and the drop was particularly dramatic—around fifty percent—for Black Americans and Latinos. The decline in police killings over the course of that decade appears to have been mainly attributable to new policies restricting the use of lethal force against fleeing suspects.51 In the following three decades, in contrast, the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant nationwide, while the rate for white Americans increased; as a result, the age-adjusted figure for Americans overall also rose somewhat. In some places, though, rates continued to drop. From 2013 through 2019, police killings rose in rural areas and suburbs but declined by thirty percent in the thirty largest American cities, probably because of new restrictions on officers’ use of deadly force.52Police violence in some cities has dropped especially sharply. In Los Angeles, for example, significant uses of force by the police appear to have been cut in half between 2006 and 2019, and police shootings appear to have declined by forty percent.53 Shootings by LAPD officers increased alarmingly in 2021 but remained far lower than in past decades.54 In Cincinnati, on the other hand, uses of force by the police have dropped by fifty percent over the past fifteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not shown a similar decline. Police shootings in Cincinnati rose sharply between 2006 and 2011, plummeted in 2012 and 2013, spiked again in 2014 and 2015, and then gradually dropped over the next several years, returning by 2019 to roughly the 2006 level.55 Los Angeles and Cincinnati have been sites of major, sustained efforts at police reform over the past two decades, so the statistics regarding uses of force by police in these cities over the past decade are encouraging in some respects (significant reductions in uses of force in both cities and significant reductions in police shootings in Los Angeles) but disappointing in others (no overall progress on police shootings in Cincinnati).The statistics also underscore the great variation in patterns of police violence, as in crime rates, across the United States. The Police Scorecard Project, led by the activist and data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, compared the number of uses of deadly force per ten thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from 2016 to 2020: the results ranged widely, from fifteen down to zero.56 If the United States as a whole had New York City’s rate of police killings, almost 600 fewer Americans would have been killed by the police in 2019.57 (If America had New York City’s homicide rate, 4,400 fewer people would have died violently that same year.58) Police reformers can succeed, and have succeeded, but the victories have been slow, partial, and often