Do You See Police As Bringers Of Law And Order Or As An Alien Occupation Force?

Late last month we looked at some solutions to the devastating problems inherent in hair-trigger police brutality. We heard a diverse array of opinions-- from Ice-T, The Clash and Millions of Dead Cops to ex-police officers Frank Serpico and Redditt Hudson. Here are half a dozen from legendary New York City police detective Serpico:

1. Strengthen the selection process and psychological screening process for police recruits. Police departments are simply a microcosm of the greater society. If your screening standards encourage corrupt and forceful tendencies, you will end up with a larger concentration of these types of individuals;

2. Provide ongoing, examples-based training and simulations. Not only telling but showing police officers how they are expected to behave and react is critical;

3. Require community involvement from police officers so they know the districts and the individuals they are policing. This will encourage empathy and understanding;

4. Enforce the laws against everyone, including police officers. When police officers do wrong, use those individuals as examples of what not to do-- so that others know that this behavior will not be tolerated. And tell the police unions and detective endowment associations they need to keep their noses out of the justice system;

5. Support the good guys. Honest cops who tell the truth and behave in exemplary fashion should be honored, promoted and held up as strong positive examples of what it means to be a cop;

6. Last but not least, police cannot police themselves. Develop permanent, independent boards to review incidents of police corruption and brutality-- and then fund them well and support them publicly. Only this can change a culture that has existed since the beginnings of the modern police department.

Another suggestion that we made recently was to have cities look into the feasibility to just hiring their own residents to the police force, not angry, frustrated, racist white suburbanites. Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Patrick Egan, an Associate Professor of Politics and Public Policy at NYU, took an academic look at the stats behind which cities have racially diverse police forces. His conclusion is that, for different reasons, both conservative cities-- like Colorado Springs, Jacksonville and Virginia Beach-- and liberal cities-- like San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington-- have police forces that look like their populations. A caveat: "cities like these are the exception: in almost all large cities, white officers are over-represented on police forces." Take a look at the graph up top.

Racial diversity is not found exclusively in the police forces of America’s most liberal cities.  The graph plots the unrepresentativeness of each city’s police force against the political views of city residents. The smoothed green line traces the relationship between these two variables... If anything, it is cities in the middle of the political spectrum that are most likely to have a police diversity problem: those with the most unrepresentative police forces have relatively moderate residents.

In sum, among America’s big urban areas, liberal cities are no more likely to have diverse police forces than conservative cities. Why might this be the case? One possibility may be the varying degree across cities to which police unions are powerful. In conservative cities, public employee unions are typically weaker and thus less able to block efforts at diversifying the police, including residency requirements and expanded recruitment. Another hypothesis is that military bases tend to contribute to a place’s conservatism, but they also provide a ready supply of diverse individuals who are veterans-- a top source of new police officers. The most likely explanation, however, is that until recently police diversity was not high on the agenda in many cities. Voters weren’t paying much attention to the issue, and thus city officials pursued diversity policies for reasons unrelated to their residents’ liberalism or conservatism. That may change over the next few years if the spotlight of controversy continues to shine on the lack of diversity in most big-city police departments.

Diversification of police forces is no magic solution to our current controversies surrounding violent encounters between cops and citizens. For example, as FiveThirtyEight’s Ungar-Sargon reports, evidence is mixed that non-white police officers are involved in violent encounters any less than white officers. But common sense suggests that police forces will be more effective and more respected to the extent that their racial makeup is similar to that of the city residents they serve. For now, this circumstance is just as likely to be true in our most conservative big cities as in our most liberal ones.

Too many communities of color see the police as occupying forces from outside the area, sometimes very deadly and brutal occupying forces. The recent trauma caused unprosecuted police murders of residents in Ferguson, Cleveland and Staten Island has acerbated that to the snapping point.