Broken policing: The need for new approach to public safety
Policing in America is broken. Headlines remind us daily of the situation — excessive use of force, citizen deaths, the escalation of interactions into deadly confrontations, and more. The tragedy of ineffective policing goes beyond impacts on citizens. It includes officers, who face high levels of stress, mental illness, violence and suicide.
Calls to defund the police represent only the latest indicator that policing is broken. In fact, policing has been broken since its inception. Rather than create an institution that would help to prevent crime, authorities created agencies that primarily responded to crime. Other problems, such as corruption and patronage that bent policing to the services of political leaders, existed. The design flaw, though, lay in creating a reactive rather than proactive, prevention-oriented vision of policing.
That problem persists to the present. As the policing scholar, David Bayley, wrote over two decades ago, “The police do not prevent crime.” His assessment holds true today. Rather than address the plethora of different causes of crime, we wait for crime to happen, then take action.
Do arrests, convictions, and subsequent punishments deter crime? Yes, to some extent. In that limited sense, the police may contribute to crime prevention.
But these efforts ignore the role that neighborhood conditions—such as poverty, anemic and poorly functioning schools, and fractured communities— play in contributing to crime. They also ignore developmental and criminological science that identifies many factors that increases the chances that someone will commit crime. Low self-control, weak ties to conventional society, strains, and more have consistently been shown to predict offending.
By and large, the police do nothing to address such factors. Here, however, is an even bigger problem — it is not just the police that fail to address these factors, it is society. Many citizens view the criminal justice system as a “public safety system.” In reality, it is a punishment system, one designed to catch and then punish those who commit crime. Where is the institution charged with systematically and comprehensively implementing strategies to prevent crime from happening in the first place? It does not exist. In short, broken policing is a symptom of a broader problem. As a society, we have failed to prioritize crime prevention. Yet, we expect our persistent reliance on a flawed design to somehow achieve the impossible. That does a disservice to society, and it puts unrealistic expectations on the police.
One strategy is to improve policing. There are, fortunately, many ways to do so. Increasing educational and training requirements alone would go a long way. Another is to strip away the many non-crime responsibilities that get foisted on them. As one police executive noted, “Every societal failure, we put it off on the cops to solve.” Mental health funding shortfalls, problems in schools, dogs roaming through neighborhoods — we unrealistically expect the police to address these and other problems. Working with citizens, through strategies like community policing, can be effective, and, when implemented well, engender greater trust in the police. Hot spots and problem-oriented policing, guided by research, can be effective as well.
But such efforts will only go so far. We need a public safety system that prioritizes crime prevention. It would lead the way in targeting efforts to address the root causes of crime, and it would guide the police towards prevention-oriented actions. One example—when police regularly work in neighborhoods, they can gain bootson-the-ground insights about crime. They can work with citizens to learn about the causes of crime and built-in community strengths that could be leveraged to address them. Doing so requires creating a great deal of trust, something that is sorely lacking — often with good reason — in communities around the country.
It is, though, possible with sufficient training and accountability.
A public safety system would require the police to adopt such an approach. It also would lean heavily on research-based policies and programs rather than assumptions and ideologies. It would coordinate the efforts of the courts, correctional system, education, health, and other agencies, and collaborate with communities in the co-production of crime prevention.
To fix broken policing, we need to fix a broken public safety system. A good start would be to create that system in the first place.
Daniel P. Mears is a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University. William R. Kelly is a professor of sociology at The University of Texas at Austin.