Responses
Tomasky, Michael
Elliott Currie is a criminologist, and I'm a journalist, so I feel no shame in confessing that he knows more about criminology than I do. I'm happy to hear of my "straw men" that there...
...But add to the mix the Korean deli boycott—not a crime problem, but certainly a public order problem—and Crown Heights— police ordered not to act as two days' worth of riots resulted in a racial murder, which in turn rendered an acquittal about which Dinkins showed utterly no public remorse—and their crime record looks a tad spotty...
...Cops should be better educated—college requirements, specific study requirements in history and current events, should be mandatory...
...I did so largely because of space...
...For one so concerned about labels, Fuchs is pretty slippery with them herself...
...I don't see how I could have been much more emphatic than that...
...he hassles him, makes him move on...
...The most difficult point Currie raises has to do with the matter of the "necessary trade-off' between civil liberties and public safety...
...Yes, Dinkins hired more cops and, with his first police commissioner, Lee Brown, initiated community policing...
...And I've never heard Dinkins lumped in with Daley Jr...
...For many years, departments didn't want people from, say, Bedford-Stuyvesant policing BedfordStuyvesant on the theory that the cops would have gone to school and church with the bad guys and would be either more lenient or susceptible to corruption...
...It's nice to be able to say that there is or need be no such trade-off, but I suspect the circumstances of the real world are more complex and require such trade-offs every day...
...Those points are true, as Fuchs herself goes on to prove by hauling out David Dinkins as the genuine architect of New York's war on crime...
...The cop has violated his civil rights...
...it's a topic that could fill an entire article, or respectable chunks of a three-hundred-page book, as it does Kennedy's...
...I don't really have the space here either, but as quickly as I can: It's a huge problem, and most politicians, all of whom are under pressure to jump to cops' defense, are guilty of trying to ignore it...
...Randall Kennedy is right—I did glance over police brutality...
...In a rough neighborhood on a street corner known for drug dealing and related crime, a cop sees a teenager wearing gang colors and hanging around for a lengthy period of time...
...Maybe, but on balance, a black cop who grew up in Bed-Stuy walking the local beat there strikes me as a far better idea than having a white guy there who goes home to Rockland County forty miles away...
...and Rendell...
...What I wrote was that liberals have opposed the New York's media celebration of the reduction (which I agree FALL • 1997 • 95 Arguments has at times been uncritical) and oppose Rudy Giuliani's getting too much credit for it...
...Aggressive minority recruitment is a must...
...Of course, this means they should be better paid, which I'd also favor on the above conditions...
...traditional left (let's explore root causes) model, and maybe that movement can be in the direction of a solution that combines rigorous pursuit of public order with preventative social spending...
...At one point I say, apropos blame for the crime problem, that "bureaucratized and aloof police departments must accept a much more direct responsibility" than urban progressives...
...That strikes me as a reasonable calculation for a cop policing a high-crime area to make, and there's no way to know if he was right or wrong--crimes prevented, like rain that failed to fall, can't be measured (and please, I'm not saying cops should be able to issue such commands with impunity...
...Sure, they're "Democratic mayor[s]," but they're far closer to Giuliani than they are to Dinkins, and Fuchs knows it...
...I'm not quite sure what these "other things the police might do that have less troubling implications for civil liberties" are, and Currie doesn't spell them out...
...These and other factors can help demilitarize police forces and make them into public service forces—Kelling's next big project, or so he said when I heard him talk...
...Honestly...
...And of course I don't think that liberals "oppose reductions" in the crime rate...
...I'm happy to hear of my "straw men" that there are "fewer of them all the time...
...I saw George Kelling give a talk in New York City earlier this year in which he hailed Bratton (paraphrasing) as having demonstrated as police commissioner—and as transit police chief in the early 1990s, when Bratton and Kelling first worked together closely—that his theories can show results...
...Civilian complaint review boards with real independence and power will just never be put into place in most cities...
...What I'm not sure about is how realistic "policing the police" really is...
...Rizzo is fair game as a conservative who ran a big city...
...Ester Fuchs, and to a lesser extent Currie, reprove me for calling names...
...it's about as likely as Congress rescinding last year's welfare bill...
...but Daley Sr...
...Finally, my respondents don't seem to disagree too strenuously with my concluding point: That maybe the successes of Bratton-style policing can move the conversation out of the weary traditional right (let's crack heads) vs...
...That being the case, I think progressives, while not giving up on review boards, need to pursue and support other strategies...
...That, especially given the expectation that crime will begin to rise again fairly soon, is not a bad place to position ourselves...
...I can match them with John Lindsay and Marion Barry and Coleman Young and Tom Bradley and Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher and Wilson Goode and any number of other liberal mayors...
...But maybe, thinks the cop, based on everything he knows about his beat, that teenager was going to commit a serious crime...
...I went awfully light on the name-calling...
...q 96 • DISSENT...
...last governed Chicago twenty-three years ago...
...He's right that this is delicate stuff, and I don't think that in my piece I gave short shrift to civil libertarian concerns...
...That said, I wonder about his assertion that the Bratton crimefighting model is more accurately described by what he calls "problem-oriented policing" than by application of the broken windows theory...
...This, on top of the many testimonials the two have offered each other, shows at least that they think they're theoretician and applicant of the same practice...
Vol. 44 • September 1997 • No. 4
