"State Violence, Legitimacy, and the Path to True Public Safety"

The title of this post is the title of this new commentary authored by David Kennedy that was one of my very favorite reads this week.  The piece is mostly about police reform and is quite lengthy, but its worth the time (and even a re-read).  Among the many virtues of the piece is the reminder that if — I fear I should say when — we see a considerable spike in crime in the coming months, increased criminality may well primarily reflect decreased trust in law enforcement by the community, not decreased activity by law enforcement in the community.  (I recall making in this post a less-eloquent version of this important point five years ago as there was on-going debate about crime spikes after Ferguson.)   Here is an excerpt:

The protest movement represents core American values and deserves broad bipartisan support.  It is no threat to our efforts to prevent crime and violence; indeed, it represents an opportunity to make those efforts much more successful.  That is because it can support the emergence of a fundamentally better way to produce public safety.  The evidence from the scholarly literature suggests that the more legitimate the law and the police are in the eyes of America’s communities, the less we will actually have to use them.  And while “law and order” has traditionally been a platform for the political right, this goal — using the state’s coercive power no more than absolutely necessary — is one that conservatives should find easy to embrace. In a very real way, more legitimacy in the realm of policing means less government.

Legitimacy is a core element in democracy: the belief of the people in the institutions of government and their power to set rules and gain compliance.  When people think of the law and of policing, they think of the power of the courts, jail and prison, of the gun and the badge.  In fact, that power is trivial compared to voluntary compliance with the law. Most of the time, people do not need to be threatened by the state in order not to kill, rape, and rob.  Most people know that when the law says not to do terrible things, the law is right; when they are tempted, they believe that the law has the standing to say, Don’t.  Scholars like Tom Tyler point out that even criminals obey the law most of the time: They buy groceries, stop at red lights, and seldom kill the people they’re mad at.  Policing research shows very clearly that as legitimacy goes up, violence goes down, voluntary compliance with the law goes up, people call 911 when they need help, and the like.  When legitimacy goes down — as after incidents of police violence — research shows that Black communities withdraw from the police and violence goes up.  

Contrary to what many think “high crime” Black communities are deeply law-abiding.  Research shows that residents in the most troubled areas of those communities have a very high regard for the law, want their neighbors to obey the law, want to be safe, and even want to have good relationships with the police.  But they don’t trust the police, don’t think the police respect them, don’t think the police share their values, think the police are biased, and don’t trust the police to govern themselves.  

Scholars have long characterized this as “legal cynicism“: belief in the law, but not in its institutions, especially the police.  More recently, scholars like Monica Bell have gone beyond this to a profoundly more dire — and in my experience, more accurate — notion of “legal estrangement.”  Bell reminds us that more than 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission found that “police have come to symbolize White power, White racism, and White repression.”  Those beliefs are driven by hundreds of years of history and collective memory and experience, present treatment and mistreatment by police, and the vicarious experience of the endless series of police killings.  “Much literature has shown that, regardless of how trust is measured or conceived, African Americans, particularly those who are poor or who live in high-poverty or predominantly African American communities, tend to have less trust not only in the police, but also in other governmental institutions, in their neighbors, and even in their intimate partner relationships in comparison to other racial and ethnic groups in the United States,” Bell writes.  “Most discussions of African American distrust of the police only skirt the edges of a deeper well of estrangement between poor communities of color and the law — and, in turn, society.” 

This is not about every officer or all officers.  Policing is full of — and in my personal experience dominated by—good and frequently amazing people who do often extraordinary work under unimaginable circumstances. I have had former public defenders come into my organization, hating the police.  Yet as they get to know the officers we work with, they’ve taken me aside to say, “This is really weirding me out; I like them.”  That’s not the point. The point is not the tired argument about good officers and bad officers, or “bad apples” or the lack thereof.  It is that the institution of policing has been ungovernable.  Officers do terrible things, and nothing happens.  Departments make terrible choices — Let’s “protect” communities by swamping them with officers and stopping everybody who moves — and there’s no way to stop them.  Disrespect is rampant — in many cities, the single most frequent complaint is officers cursing the public — and nothing happens or changes.  The Supreme Court of the United States creates case law that makes it nearly impossible to hold officers accountable for killings and shootings.  Cities, pressured by the political clout of police unions, give away the powers that would let chiefs fire officers they know are toxic and make departments reinstate the officers they have managed to get rid of.  Police union heads sully the names of Black men killed by their members and get reelected.  No institution is perfect; doctors kill patients all the time.  But when a doctor kills through gross malpractice, the head of his hospital doesn’t throw a press conference to talk about how the dead man had a criminal record and really deserved it. 

Prior related post:

• Keeping in mind the research that may suggest crime increases resulting from a different kind of "Ferguson Effect"