Over at Reason, there’s an interview with Ed Burns, the co-creator of HBO’s The Wire. The Wire was an account, for five seasons, of criminal justice in Baltimore.
The administration of justice is seldom depicted accurately, and in any event, Whitewater is almost nothing like Baltimore, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, or New Orleans.
Burns was a former narcotics officer in Baltimore for years before taking his ideas to television. The interview with Reason is interesting for the points that Burns raises about policing, the drug war, and criminal justice.
1. Burns describes himself as “Liberal. Liberal to radical.” His disappointment with the criminal justice system made him this way, by his account. I would not describe myself as liberal or radical (unless one considers Goldwater radical). There are others, some in Whitewater, who wouldn’t understand these distinctions anyway.
2. Burns describes and contrasts ‘community policing,’ with ‘broken window’ enforcement, and ‘enforcement by numbers [of arrests, etc.].’ (Burns calls ‘broken window’ policing – to issue citations to people for small infractions to maintain order – as a ‘trick’. He doesn’t say why he considers it a trick, but most likely it’s because even proponents admit that broken window policing produces little or no reduction in actual crime rates.)
3. There is no mention – at all – of the officer as warrior. It’s the discredited notion that police officers are a like a warrior vanguard within the community, at battle with crime and criminals.
The lack of reference to the notion of the officer as warrior is telling, because Burns is a self-described ‘radical’ who’s willing to criticize existing practices. Yet, he doesn’t even mention the officer as warrior. ’
It’s because almost no one would hold to that model.
The exception is Whitewater: the WPD police newsletter, only a few years ago, touted the officer as warrior perspective as worth considering.
Let me suggest other topics, just as contemporary and useful, for our chief’s column: “Indentured Servitude as a Model for Reducing Labor Costs” or perhaps, “Feudalism: It’s Good for You!”
(There is another reason that no one sensible mentions the officer as warrior model – in the event of a lawsuit against a department, statements in support of officers as ‘warriors’ are just fuel for embarrassing questions at deposition and trial.)
For more on the officer as warrior, see my post from December entitled, “The Force We Need.”
4. Add the view of the ‘officer as warrior’ to the other three, and you have four ways to look at policing. Three of them are sometimes compatible (warrior, broken window, and numbers), but one is not: community policing is incompatible with the others.
True community policing, shifts a focus away from numbers counts, broken window enforcement, or views of the officer as a warrior.
5. If you have a person who simultaneously contends that one can advance community policing and the role of the officer as warrior, then you have someone who could erroneously, and ridiculously, combine any two ideas together: Marxism and the free market, Nixon and Kennedy, dogs and cats, etc.
As a policy or theory, holding to both community policing and the role of the officer as warrior is nonsense. As a rhetorical device for a department, the officer as warrior view plays an internal, self-aggrandizing role, while claims of community policing play an external, public relations role.
The self-flattery and separation of the officer from the community present in the officer as warrior perspective is about the worst model that a contemporary community could adopt. Officers and officials are – and should see themselves as – of, from, and for the communities they serve.
There is no special, separate administrative or guardian class in America, and when there is, we’ll be America no longer.