Following a house party at which over one-hundred people were cited for underage drinking, Whitewater’s long-tenured police chief, James Coan, announced that two people hosting the party would be cited for violations amounting to six-thousand dollars apiece. (What they’ll actually pay may be a different matter.) See, Residents fined $12,000 from party bust.
(I’ve written about this incident before. In each case, it’s clear that I am no admirer of a drinking or drug culture — they have no appeal whatever. See, Citations and Drinking, The Utter Foolishness of Jim Coan’s Prohibition, and The Weak Reasoning of Prohibitionism.)
Twelve thousand, or one-hundred twenty-thousand — it won’t matter. Coan’s approach is a useful case only of bad enforcement policies that will do little to stop underage drinking. Sporadic enforcement, using civilians in foolish ways, with supposedly harsh punishments that are only useful to grab headlines and impress people into thinking that something’s happening. Below, at the bottom of this post, I have embedded a video that I posted previously, in which noted UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman explains that approaches like these are failures.
(Kleiman is talking about incarceration as a punishment, but his remarks on sporadic punishment are apt in many situations.)
In fact, Whitewater’s citations are a fine example of what not to do to solve a chronic problem. Too much show, with declarations that — this time — there will be a stop to this, until the next time, when the same things happen, and the cycle starts all over again.
I do have a question, though:
It’s not been a few years, but now nearly two decades’ time.
For all that time, Coan’s made no headway against substance crimes in the city, and certainly not a problem like underage drinking. Big parties, drinking, big raids, headlines, drinking, dispersal to smaller parties, drinking, smaller raids, smaller headlines, same drinking: that’s Coan’s spin cycle.
Each effort and each headline is the one that’s going to turn it all around.
Except it never does.
These unsolved problems are not borne by a few police leaders, but by residents and officers for whom these efforts are ineffectual.
There’s no effort at education, at outreach, because Coan shows no aptitude for those key elements of community policing. It’s just a big headline here, years passing, and then another one. He’s less like a tenured leader than like someone inexperienced and just starting out.
There are still a few — now only a few — who will trumpet these fines and raids as progress. Like a one-party state whose doctrine is overemphasized by a few, yet disbelieved by most, there’s no longer credibility to these claims.
The problems of the city go on, unsolved.
Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lDr3DQnHo
UCLA Professor of Public Affairs Mark Kleiman is “angry about having too much crime….”
In his book, When Brute Force Fails, Kleiman explains that, when it comes to punishment, there is a trade-off between severity and swiftness. For too long the U.S. has erred heavily on the side of severity… .
Quick note: Kleiman’s book is available in hardcover, paperback, or Kindle editions.