Responses

...The good points are that communities deserve a high level of public safety, that police are probably more capable of helping to provide it than some people (left, right, or center) have assumed, and that therefore the left should support police crimeprevention strategies that deliver the goods...

...It's worthy of note that James Q. Wilson, the conservative co-author of the "broken windows" model, has issued the same caveat...

...Beyond these problems are a couple of others— less consequential, but troubling nonetheless...

...I don't want to see limited police resources diverted to popular but weakly evaluated panaceas when they could be used to save lives in ways we're pretty sure really work...

...92 • DISSENT...

...There are people on the left who fit the straw figure Tomasky erects, but most don't, and there are fewer of them all the time...

...The more important one is that Tomasky slides from the sound point about the potential of good policing into a set of claims for the so-called "quality of life" model of policing that doesn't stand up to scrutiny...

...Pitting "disorder" and "poverty" against each other as competing, rather than complementary, explanations of crime only muddies the issue...

...Tomasky is surely right that something the police in New York are doing has helped to drive down the crime rate, but he stretches the point in two crucial ways...

...Excuse me...

...But simple common sense would also suggest that a national phenomenon that looks very similar in cities with and without serious community policing is likely to be mostly due to something else...

...FALL • 1997 • 91 Arguments Where's the beef...

...And while we have, to my knowledge, very little hard evidence that rousting squeegee men has much impact on serious violent crime, the evidence for some other strategies—like getting guns off the street and defusing violence around open-air drug markets—is substantial and growing...

...I can't tell you how often in that time I've heard some version of Tomasky's argument that the left is all wrong on crime because . . . something...

...Not too many years ago some leftists were flaying other leftists because they didn't sufficiently appreciate neighborhood watch programs—the panacea of the early eighties, now encased in deafening silence...

...But unlike quality of life policing, there's often real evidence that they work...

...I hate to sound like a curmudgeon, but I've been both a criminologist and a progressive for a long time...

...This isn't only Los Angeles, either: it's a lot of cities...

...Liberals, for that matter, invented community policing—and in New York, it was David Dinkins and Lee Brown, not Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton, who first got the ball rolling to put more cops in the neighborhoods...

...I'm open to evidence that the more amorphous "broken windows" approach cuts homicide sharply (indeed, cuts it faster than it does lesser crime)—but I haven't seen any...

...But that's only part of what's been going on in New York, and arguably not the most important part...

...Now Tomasky recycles the same old non sequiturs...

...And I don't want to see morally troubling police tactics defended on the basis of flimsy evidence of their effectiveness in fighting crime...

...The kind of public-order policing Tomasky celebrates easily slides over into the aggressive and discriminatory police work that rightly disturbs civil libertarians...

...Most, if asked, would say that we need a multipronged approach if we really want enduring public safety in American communities: we need early intervention programs, family supports, an intelligent employment policy, good drug treatment, better wages, and good child care—and we need effective, community-oriented policing...

...Tomasky is right that the cities deserve the best public safety they can get...

...I haven't seen it...

...90 • DISSENT Arguments That said, I'd agree that in some cities with unusually large drops in violent crime—New York and Houston among them—the evidence is strong that innovative policing has made a real difference and is a significant part of the explanation...

...Tomasky also tells us that—unlike Bratton and Giuliani—urban liberals and progressives haven't done much about crime...

...The distinction is important, because as Tomasky is right to point out, lives are at stake here—and so are precious civil liberties...

...Getting tough on homeless people or teenagers in baggy pants is often justified—and Tomasky comes perilously close to this—on the ground that there's a necessary trade-off between civil liberties and public safety: that if we want our neighborhoods to be free of violence, we have to allow cops to do things that might otherwise make us squeamish...

...However, that's a minor problem...

...Most liberal or left criminologists I know—and I know a lot of them—would surely see this as a false dichotomy...

...Fortunately, plenty of progressives are already on the job...

...The leftbashing tone Tomasky adopts, therefore, is both distracting and off the mark...

...But in order to show that this trade-off exists, we'd need to show both that aggressive "public order" policing actually cuts serious violent crime significantly and that it does so better than other things the police might do that have less troubling implications for civil liberties...

...Tomasky suggests that giving considerable credit to community policing for the decline in crime is "simple common sense...

...But figuring out how to accomplish that requires much tougherminded thinking about what really works...

...Liberals and progressives have been quietly and painstakingly doing the real work of crime prevention in urban neighborhoods across the country for years...

...Someone may have that evidence...

...This is important, because what we— not just the left, but everyone—ought to be supporting isn't the police strategy that's the fashion of the moment, but the police strategies we have reason to believe really make a difference...

...And more...

...The fact that homicide in particular has declined rapidly in New York is strong, if indirect, evidence for this point...

...First, he attributes more of the recent decline in crime—in New York and nationwide— to police work in general than the evidence really supports...

...But Tomasky, like many other commentators, leaps too quickly to the assumption that it is the "quality of life" approach specifically that is making the difference...

...It's true that these efforts don't get the press that "quality of life" policing does...

...Meanwhile, we do have evidence—from Lawrence Sherman's research in Kansas City, for example— that carefully targeted efforts to get guns off the streets can indeed reduce gun-related violence...

...He alludes to the key problem himself, but then mostly evades it: it's difficult to give most of the credit to new community policing strategies when crime has fallen from its recent peaks in most major cities, including many that have invested little, in practice, in intensive community policing strategies of any kind...

...Much is made of the influence of the "broken windows" argument on the New York approach, but in fact the Bratton model fits a longer-standing tradition of "problem-oriented policing"—targeting specific crime problems in a city, going after them aggressively, and monitoring the results...

...A fall in homicide points to something happening to the key problems that drove the city's homicide rate up in the first place, notably the explosion of street drug dealing and the accompanying flood of firearms...

...I agree with all of that, though I'd also add that it's hardly a new sentiment for the left, and that indeed most left criminologists that I know— including me—have agreed for years...

...They've built family support and child-abuse prevention and youth development programs, community anti-gun campaigns, fullservice schools—and much, much more...

...Why in the world, for example, does the success of community policing, where it has indeed been successful, "call into question a central tenet of liberal-left belief about crime"—namely, that it's often a "response to poverty and lack of options...