Armed to the teeth, cops can do as much bad as good

Jack Schillaci

Slam it to the Left

Being tough on crime has long been a stalwart of successful politics. Of course, this makes sense: No one really likes crime, and siding with criminals seems a reasonable faux pas. The messy interplay between politics and law enforcement has driven campaigning all over the country for decades. The ill-conceived "war on drugs" and the proliferation of death penalty statutes are only two examples of the somewhat unproductive, knee-jerk reactions that this nexus has created. The '90s, unlike the decades that preceded it, proved to be the time when the concept of getting tough went from campaign rhetoric to useful policies with statistics to back up their value.

Crime rates plunged throughout the '90s, especially in large urban areas. New police institutions like New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's Street Crimes Unit are in large part responsible for this drop. In many ways, the new tactics reflected the fact that Americans were fed up with our nation's high crime rates.

But sometimes this new emphasis on fighting crime has squeezed at the same time it has soothed. The aftermath of the Amadou Diallo shooting in New York illustrated in fine detail the problems that can come with the promise of lower crime.

The NYPD (no, not the pizza place on Williams St.) has, in many ways, become disenfranchised from the communities it serves. The hardball tactics embraced by the department, while successful at reducing crime, have managed to cast a pall over the department, making it seem more like an enemy than a friend to many. This is probably a natural response to some of the tactics employed - being stopped and frisked will hardly win cops any friends, but in many ways it seems worthwhile in the name of cleaning up the streets.

Three thousand miles away, Los Angeles police have been facing their own pariah status. While indeed a different case than New York, cops in L.A. have been unsuccessfully battling back images of racism and brutality throughout the past decade.

The trend often adopted by anti-crime crusaders is that of zero tolerance to crime. As a no-holds-barred effort to reduce crime at all cost, the ends of lower crime rates are held to justify the means. But the net result is more than just safer streets - it is popular alienation from the police and its tactics. The results include a public that is fearful of the officers in their neighborhood should they come under suspicion unjustly. While Giuliani's police have made New York one of the safest cities in the country, they have also created an annual bill of $25 million for settlements of police brutality lawsuits.

Even in the quaint little town of Ann Arbor, the police have had to deal with a declining public image, albeit on a much smaller scale. After the increased numbers of raids on student parties that began a year and a half ago, many students began to view cops as a nuisance whose policies reflected more public relations scam than actual concern for student safety. In the aftermath of the tragic death of Courtney Cantor, it seemed the AAPD saw a quick fix in stepping up issuance of Minor in Possession citations.

The narrow-mindedness of many anti-crime reformers has promoted this antipathy. While many view hardball tactics as the only means to cleaner streets, there is evidence to the contrary. San Diego, whose homicide rate has plunged faster than New York's according to The New York Times, has used community policing to fuel the drop in crime.

Rather than focusing exclusively on the kinds of tactics that do indeed cut crime but at the same time alienate people, police leaders need to consider programs that help them bridge the gap between themselves and the community. Being a hard-ass is all fine and good, but if you're helping people at the cost of frightening them, you've probably taken things a step too far.

A greater focus on community policing and a stronger connection between police and neighborhood leaders would help curb the problems. The police - in Ann Arbor and across the country - need to make themselves seen not as a group that harasses potential criminals but as a force of people dedicated to improving life for citizens. Given the quickly dropping crime rates of recent years, now is a better time than any for many police departments in the nation to make this sort of long-overdue adjustment.

- Jack Schillaci can be reached via

e-mail at jschilla@umich.edu.