Prevention through community prosecution - New Approaches to Fighting Crime

Public Interest, Summer, 1999 by Catherine M. Coles, George L. Kelling

The single greatest influence on postwar American criminal justice policy was President Johnson's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, whose main report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society (1967), was hailed by liberals and criminologists as a great breakthrough. Its conclusions quickly became the conventional wisdom, laying the foundation for criminal justice policy throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s.

The commission made two recommendations that were especially important at the time. First, it insisted that police firmly adhere to lawful procedures when handling offenders. Indeed, the Supreme Court, aware of the brutal investigating tactics that police chiefs either could not or would not rein in, had already handed down rulings describing how a lawful investigation would be conducted. Second, the commission urged the nation's criminal justice agencies, especially police departments, to improve their relations with minority communities. If the police did not directly cause every riot in the 1960s, as their most hostile critics alleged, their insensitivity toward minorities certainly triggered many.

But, for all its key contributions, many of the commission's other findings and conclusions are being challenged, and even abandoned, today. Its attempt to "professionalize" criminal justice is, in particular, under assault. According to the commission, the amalgam of police, prosecutors, jails, prisons, probation, parole, and courts comprised a "criminal justice system" - the "business" of which was to process cases. Only felonies like murder, rape, assault, and robbery were recognized as serious, while comparatively minor offenses, like public drunkenness and other "victimless" crimes, would essentially be decriminalized. Moreover, responses to crime were to be handled only by highly trained "professionals." Citizens would report crimes and act as witnesses. Crime prevention, to the extent that it occurred in this "system," would be achieved through incarceration and deterrence.

Underpinning this notion of a criminal justice "system" was a "root-causes" understanding of crime. The commission argued that the root causes of crime were racism, poverty, and social injustice - implying that crime prevention would require the elimination or amelioration of these conditions through radical social change.

In fact, the policies derived from root causes ideology and the narrowly defined functioning of criminal justice agencies have hindered crime prevention and innovative thinking about crime control for decades, According to liberals, crime can be prevented only by massive social changes that address crime's root causes. Conservatives have their own theory of root causes: To prevent crime, the decline of families and corrosion of traditional values must be reversed. Until recently, little was expected of criminal justice agencies except to respond to crime and process the ensuing cases.

The most highly publicized rejection of this old paradigm, and the most prominent battleground for its survival or demise, is in New York City, where, under Mayor Giuliani and Commissioners Bratton and Safir, an array of aggressive, new police tactics, along with numerous public and private initiatives, led to an unprecedented reduction in crime. But New York City's success has engendered both welcome support and outright hostility. Critics in the popular media concede that the police department's new strategies have helped reduce crime but charge that lower crime rates have come at an unacceptable cost to civil liberties, especially those of poor and minority residents. Skeptical criminologists deny any linkage between police tactics and the drop in crime, attributing the reduction instead to changes in economic, demographic, or drug-use patterns. The root-causes philosophy drives many of these denials - for how could crime rates drop except through economic or social change?

The debate continues. But New York City is not alone in adopting and implementing new crime-prevention strategies - cities like San Diego and Boston have been just as successful. And more than just police departments are participating in the reforms. Prosecutors are changing their practices as well, joined in a growing number of cities by probation and parole officers, the courts, and even wardens.

Turning a corner

In policing, the President's Commission largely endorsed the early twentieth-century Progressive agenda. Yet, even as reform was being implemented - improved recruitment, training, and administration, and tighter control to reduce corruption - the seeds of its demise were being sown. Despite police claims that adequate numbers of professional police could reduce crime, the opposite occurred: Beginning in the 1960s, crime began to rise.

In 1975, eight years after the commission released its report, the Kansas City Preventive Patrol Experiment was published. The study concluded that the impact of police patrolling in cars on crime, and citizen fear of crime, was negligible. Then in 1977, the first of several "response-time" studies appeared, showing similarly that rapid response to calls enhanced neither police effectiveness nor citizen satisfaction with the police. By the late 1980s, incident-based reactive policing - taking police off streets and placing them in cars so that they could engage in preventive patrol and rapid response to calls - had "de-policed" most major cities. Gangs and drug dealers controlled many public spaces. As Ed Davis, Chief of the Lowell (MA) Police Department, has said: "The trouble is we were all doing our jobs well: police, prosecutors, courts, and corrections. We were making good arrests; prosecutors were handling eases well, and so on. Yet, despite this, things were getting worse and worse on the streets."