Policing critical tool to deal with change
“[W]e are suffering from a sickness that comes from too much change in too short a time. That sickness is called future shock.” From the 1972 film documentary “Future Shock”
In the 1972 film documentary “Future Shock” (based on futurist Alvin Toffler’s 1970 book of the same name), narrator Orson Wells admonishes the audience that, “[W]e are suffering from a sickness that comes from too much change in too short a time. That sickness is called future shock.”
That line, uttered 48 years ago, describes what the COVID-19 pandemic is causing society to experience today.
There has, perhaps, never been such a rapid change in the structural and cultural underpinnings of society since the last World War. Arguably, the current pandemic has been treated differently than any similar event in modern history. It has been the catalyst for unprecedented change in a few months’ time: the economy, patterns of social interaction, and work. Suddenly, vast numbers of people are sequestered in their homes; many have encountered empty shelves in grocery stores; all education in the United States is now being conducted at a distance, if at all; many jobs normally done in offices are now done from home. From college presidents to police chiefs, groups responsible for the stewardship of myriad organizations in many diverse fields are speculating on the future and how — and — their institutions and industries will cope with the economic and social changes caused by the pandemic.
One of the institutions that will almost assuredly be affected by this sense of future shock is the police.
In the United States, there are approximately 18,000 police departments. They range in size from 1- or 2-person departments up to the New York Police Department (NYPD) at about 38,000 sworn officers and 17,000 civilian employees. Around 700,000 police officers in the United States provide police services to more than 328 million people. The historic mandate of the police has always been a concept centered on the maintenance of law and order in districts around the nation.
The manner in which policing currently is carried out in these districts has changed slowly over time to arrive at what now is called the community problemsolving era. Policing scholar David Bayley describes this recent era as a hybrid of community-oriented policing, in which the police partner with communities to achieve a collective efficacy of sorts, and crimecentered policing, in which officers try to use more efficient enforcement tactics. Both strategies depend heavily on interaction with the public to be effective. As a matter of fact, the entire foundation of community policing depends on the positive and procedurally just interface between the police and the community. In order for police to be successful, they must not only be trained in what is the smallest part of their job, the enforcement of laws, but they also must be educated in what is called “Pillar One” of the seminal
the building of trust and legitimacy with the public.
It is incontrovertible that the pandemic’s effect on our economy (including local taxes and budgets and the subsequent ability of municipalities to pay for optimal staffing and education of officers) will have negative consequences. When we understaff police departments and do not adequately train and educate officers, we take the risk that police services will regress rather than move forward. We make render these services reactive (instead of proactive) and mire them in the status quo.
There’s a lot of progress on the line. Crime rates have fallen in the United States since 1994. Before the pandemic, they were the lowest we had seen since the end of WWII. Criminologists have tried to explain this trend, and have offered many ideas as to its cause. We do know that, during the same time period, police agencies began using certain methods of policing rooted in accountability, legitimacy and outcomes – rather than mere outputs. Although it is impossible to credit police for the totality of the 26year-long crime drop in the United States, it is likely the new methodologies they were using (such as the aforementioned community-oriented policing) were at least partially responsible for it.
As the structural and economic effects of the pandemic play out, we will experience the effects of something called the routine activity theory, first described in 1979 by criminologists Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson, based on how social change affects crime rates. No one can accurately predict what type of social change will happen as we emerge from the pandemic’s deadly grip on society. We can speculate with some certainty, however, that there will be change that affects crime and disorder and our ability to deal with it. As we are planning where to put our future resources, health care is an obvious choice. It will also be important to maintain and improve our policing systems in order to cope with possible negative trends in crime. The maintenance of order in communities by society’s appointed guardians is a vital service of government. It is critical to maintain high standards and not shrink police services or shirk our mandate to educate cops. Through research and more than 45 years of experience, I know what happens when we do.
John DeCarlo, a retired chief of police, is associate professor and director of the Masters Program in Criminal Justice Henry C. Lee School Of Criminal Justice and Forensic Sciences, University of New Haven.