Democratic Policing in a Changing World by Manning Peter K.;

Author:Manning, Peter K.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

A Reconsideration of the Arguments

Let us consider these BW arguments from a sociology of knowledge perspective. Whose interests are supported by these ideas, and what does the manifestation of their consequences support materially and intellectually? What are the academic sources of the ideas, and what are their broader intellectual commitments? Who gains from such ideas as they become governing notions, the touchstones of policing aesthetics? What is omitted from such considerations and the definition of what is relevant to control?

First, whose political interests are mirrored in the arguments? Let us not naively dismiss police views as differing from the Wilson-Kelling-Coles perceptions and attributions of causes and manifestations of crime and disorder. The ideas and their origins are well connected. The appeal of broken windows is precisely this: it rationalizes the prior operational assumptions of policing as usual in extremely disadvantaged areas. This is not a theory of police but a commonsense distillation of stereotypical beliefs about criminogenic places and groups. As is the case with any arrest-oriented crude and unexamined deterrence theory, it mirrors the police outlook. It could be said yet another way: what other modes have they refined and developed and made public over the past eighty-five years or so? The vested interests of the police are found in the defenses made. One police anti-intellectual position is that “liberal academics” believe that inequality causes crime. These “liberal academics” are wrong; because ORC can be reduced by police actions (Bratton and Kelling 2006). This argument in bare rudiments is that none of these social forces that cause crime are sufficient or in fact relevant to eradicating crime. The efforts of the Manhattan Institute and of Kelling in particular are directed in large part to encouraging police, sharpening their traditional practices, increasing the public knowledge of the front-stage rhetoric of police leaders such as William Bratton, elevating uncritically a conservative and conventional notion about policing, improving the quality of life in cities, and selectively demonizing and criminalizing lifestyles.

Second, no closely reasoned research can sort out directly the consequences of a growing economy, increased and focused police actions, high rates of jailing and incarceration, and declining birthrate and cohort effects (the heavy use of cocaine and the effects of the decimation of young blacks between fourteen and twenty-five over the past ten years via suicide, homicide, and incarceration. Fagan (forthcoming) found that for the year 2007 in New York City, the probability of a young African American aged eighteen to twenty-two being stopped in the disadvantaged areas in which police were most deployed was .90. Even the most cautious and thoughtful series of inferences by Harcourt (2001) and Levitt (2004) conclude that it is not possible to attribute decline in OCR directly to police actions, because the gap between macroeconomic factors, costs, and police practices cannot be closed. How these arrest tactics work, and what their consequences are, is unclear.

Third, no research, as will be discussed in the following chapter, has actually looked closely through interviews, observations, and persistent and repeated measures of impact to show how and why such actions affect the social organization of communities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.