Beware of ‘Shrinking Police Footprint’: Paper Warns

Despite a growing consensus that police are asked to do too much, arguments for devolving many law enforcement responsibilities to civilian agencies rely “on a faulty understanding of the police role,” according to a recent paper published in Criminal Justice Ethics.

“Police are a residual institution, charged with managing the crises that other institutions cannot handle adequately on their own, and it is not easy to reassign that work to anyone else,” writes David Thacher, the paper’s author and Associate Professor of Public Policy and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

“In the course of doing it, however, they develop expertise in the nature and sources of these crises that positions them to identify and help repair the institutional failures that generate them.”

Reducing police numbers or replacing a police force entirely with an “unarmed alternative,” would generate the same tensions that have stoked fears about public safety, he argues.

Abolitionists who want to “defund” the police are misguided in thinking that other institutions “can resolve those problems less violently and more effectively,” Thacher writes.

He acknowledges the perspective that other players in the community can help in dealing with some of the contributing factors that bring people into contract with the justice system, such as drug abuse, homelessness and mental illness. But law enforcement can also learn uniquely from its mistakes and accept the need to change policies and strategoes, Thacher writes.

A Case Study

Thatcher shares a case-study  example in his paper, noting that during the 1960s when the crime of “drunkenness” accounted for over one third of all arrests made in the U.S., efforts shifted responsibility away from the justice system and into the hands of public health and social welfare programs.

The police collaborated with “inebriation monitors” and other caregivers that diverted many of those picked up for drunkenness to detox centers instead of jail.

“Regardless of the model, the [detox] centers generally proved unsuccessful at managing the kinds of incidents that had previously drawn police attention,” Thatcher observed.

He explained that the failures were largely due to the fact that nonprofit groups and programs would often not have the proper experience at offering services, and also that some would turn away people for uncooperative behavior and call the police anyway to address conflict situations they were better trained to handle.

Recommendations

While some may argue more civilian community services could develop “police-like capabilities,” Thatcher contends the complexities of doing so should not be under-estimated.

A better course would be to deploy learning-oriented incident reviews, or so-called “Sentinel Event” reviews to enable police and other stakeholders to analyze mistakes and develop remedial action.

Thacher also writes about a Cincinnati problem-oriented policing initiative, where city staff and police accumulated knowledge of neighborhood violence to measure and prevent specific traffic and parking situations that were present in drive-by shooting areas.

Data-influenced change was able to drive down levels of crime.

“All of that said, examples like those … indicate that more democratic ways of shrinking the police footprint are realistically available, and they illustrate viable organizational models that can potentially guide this work,” Thacher concluded.

“That strategy can potentially play a central role in the police reform agenda today, and it comprises an essential part of the police mission to minimize the use of coercive force in society.”

David Thacher received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Masters of Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. His work aims to develop and apply a morally engaged approach to policy research that draws from the humanities as well as the social sciences.

The full paper is available for purchase here:

Andrea Cipriano is associate editor of The Crime Report