February 24, 2004
IT NEEDS TO BE US VS. US NOT US VS. THEM:
London's cops look to New York: London's mayor Ken Livingstone wants to introduce New York-style policing. It is more difficult than it sounds (The Economist, Feb 19th 2004)
WHEN “Red” Ken Livingstone ran London in the early 1980s, he enjoyed cocking a snook at authority over everything from outsize public transport subsidies to Irish terrorism. But reincarnated as the capital's ardently business-friendly, market-minded mayor, keen on road pricing and selling the city abroad, Mr Livingstone has changed his tune on the law. He's now a strong supporter of intensive, highly visible policing. [....]Initially, the idea was to copy the “zero tolerance” approach of New York's former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and William Bratton, the police commissioner from 1994 to 1996. This interventionist method, also known as “broken windows policing” assumes that minor, unpunished crimes encourage more law-breaking. It's a sensible notion, but results in Britain have so far disappointed. The thinking now is that the new techniques worked in New York because police numbers rose a lot too.
Mr Livingstone hopes to pull off the same trick. He goes into this year's mayoral elections saying that he will be disappointed if crime in London does not halve.
That's a brave and probably a foolish pledge. New York's recovery certainly started with a clampdown on anti-social behaviour—graffiti writing, street drinking, turnstile jumping, and so on. But these low-level miscreants were then shackled, fingerprinted, and (if they didn't have identification) often held overnight in police cells. Over time, the police built up a store of information that they used to solve all sorts of crimes. British police, with their milder approach and heavier form-filling burden, will find these methods hard to copy.
Secondly, away from the neighbourhoods that British politicians tended to visit, New York's cops were trying out more aggressive methods such as undercover buy-and-bust operations, neighbourhood sweeps and “vertical patrols”, in which entire tower blocks were raided. These did more to take bad guys off the streets than harassing squeegee men.
This style of policing only works if citizens are willing to suffer it.
Folk underestimate the degree to which our enduringly puritanical ethos inclines Americans to tolerate such things.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 24, 2004 07:16 AM
It is incredibly condescending, not to mention foolish, to assert from the comfort of one's safe and near Lily-white suburb that poor urban dwellers "suffer" more from invasive policing than from drug dealers and gang-bangers.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at February 24, 2004 10:34 AMMichael:
Even more amusing is to listen to white folks bemoan "police brutality". If Rodney King drove through a white neighborhood going a 100mph and whacked out on crack, folks would pour onto their lawns to root on the beating.
Posted by: oj at February 24, 2004 10:42 AMUnfortunately, mamories are short, and "social activists" are fully willing to take advantage of that fact. In the case of New York, things have to sink low enough to surpass the level of maximum tolerance before a majority of the population is willing to allow the police to do their jobs without accepting the activists' cries of brutality as fact.
That's why cases like the Dialou and Louima incidents in New York never provoked the backlash the way the Rodney King case did in Los Angeles -- they happened too soon after the crime-riddled Dinkins years for people to have forgotten the bad old daysm no matter how many songs Bruce Springsteen writes. The terrorst attack probably gave New York's law enforcement agencies a couple of extra years of support from the public, but eventually memories will fade and some politician will emerge who finds he can create a path to the top by attacking excessive police violence and discrimination against the city's minority communities (the national Democrats are trying the same thing right now when it comes to policing of terrorism, hoping memories of 9/11 have faded away among the American public, though I can't believe that will hold true when voters really start focusing on the election in the fall).
Posted by: John at February 24, 2004 11:17 PMI spent a week in Queens and Manhattan in January, and I don't believe I saw a city cop the whole time.
The only people in uniform I can recall were a couple of guards at Times Square.
Didn't see any crimes in progress, either.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at February 25, 2004 04:05 PM