Political Booknotes
Wilson, James Q.
POLITICAL BOOKNOTES Public affairs books scheduled to be published this month. -James Q. Wilson Sustaining the Earth. John Young. Harvard University Press, $19.95. 1988 was the year of the...
...Clearly graffiti and low-level drug dealing can be managed this way...
...Why do terms like “postcolonial,” “postindustrial,” and “postcapitalist” inevitably crop up...
...It’s not growth that Young rails against so much as the misapplication of it...
...Sure, the environmental movement was right to forecast the industrial plague on nature...
...The efficiency goal requires that patrol officers be taken off foot beats and put into radio cars, that specialized detective units be set up to investigate crimes, and that a clear paper trail be established to account for how well officers use their time...
...Can’t crops be developed to prevent the erosion of topsoil and to require less irrigation...
...What do we mean by “community,” anyway...
...The particular tactics are less important than the organizational culture that some chiefs have tried to instill in their forces...
...Dire prophecies of environmental degradation suddenly seemed true...
...You’ve got to be kidding...
...Former Earth Firster Dave Foreman is quoted as explaining (monstrously), “The worst thing we could do in Ethiopia is to give aidthe best thing would be to just let nature seek its own balance, to let the people there just starve...
...But does that require us to renounce all technology and industry...
...The only germ of truth in Foreman’s statement is that man has failed to use his rational powers to sustain nature and thus himself...
...1988 was the year of the greenhouse...
...The tactics include familiar ones, such as foot patrols and neighborhood police stations, and unfamiliar ones, such as cleaning up littered lots, tearing down abandoned houses, painting over graffiti, blockading roads used by driveby drug dealers, conducting drug-education programs in the schools, and reorganizing the management of crime-infested public housing projects...
...The media showcased ecology experts in stories on toxic garbage barges, beached medical waste, droughts, and wild weather...
...American police chiefs as social reformers...
...In fact, as Young explains, “so long as we continue to change the global environment against her preferences, we encourage our replacement with a more ‘environmentally seemly’ species...
...Like all good converts, we are asked first to believe and only then question...
...And Young employs it himself in this “postenvironmentalist” treatise...
...I confess to being a partial convert...
...That is now hard to do, for many well-understood reasons...
...A controversial study by the RAND Corporation suggested that detectives did not solve many crimes...
...A “professional” police force values integrity and efficiency above all else...
...It appears to work in the Wilshire area of Los Angeles and the Link Valley area of Houston...
...The authors of Beyond 911 sketch the work of seven chiefs who have moved beyond the traditional model and embraced, in whole or in part, the community-oriented model...
...With its spiritual base common to nearly all religions, it could be the rallying cry of the decade, whether history labels it “postenvironmentalist” or, quite possibly, “antebellum...
...To varying degrees, they have introduced new or revised tactics-foot patrols, neighborhood police stations, a concern about disorder and the fear of crime, interviewing citizens door-todoor to identify concerns, and working with other city agencies to find solutions to such problems as drugdealing in an abandoned house or gang warfare in a housing project...
...Integrity is to be maintained by tight central controls on personnel (otherwise they will be coopted by local political machines...
...Not at all...
...One way for environmental groups to employ their mailing lists, greatly lengthened by the Earth Day ballyhoo, is to call for rationing in the midst of the Persian Gulf crisis...
...Is the criminal justice system truly “bankrupt...
...According to John Young, satellite-linked conferences on the greenhouse effect engendered not “technological optimism but despair...
...But civil libertarians argue that a police response is the wrong response...
...In Liberty City...
...Bill McKibben recently quoted Wendell Berry’s description of environmentalism as still “vacationoriented or crisis-oriented” at its core...
...Family planning slogans backfire in the Third World: “When an extra child means an extra hand to chase pigs away from the vegetables, or to catch small fish for bait, that child will not be seen as a liability...
...Young points out that “The Second World War did a lot more to equalize British society, as it turns out, than the period of Labour government that followed it...
...Stewardship” seems the best unifier in Young’s scenario for the future of green politics...
...That new relationship has many names-“community-oriented policing,” “problem-oriented policing,” “the broken-windows strategy...
...I hope their next book systematically looks back at a decade or two of communityoriented policing and provides a sober assessment of its strengths and limitations...
...But what does the new model suggest...
...What about organized gang warfare conducted with AK-47s...
...Economies which look healthy in terms of GNP might look much less flourishing in terms of NHB if the violence, anomie, boredom, and diseases of affluence were set down on the debit side of the ledger...
...As Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy see it, that price was high: The standard tactics of the professional model were not very effective in reducing crime...
...James Q. Wilson Sustaining the Earth...
...That culture can be best understood by contrasting it with the model of professional law enforcement that has set the standard for police reform for much of the past half century...
...There is a lot to be said for this model because it did in fact curtail corruption, open up police work to talented and nonpartisan professionals, and bring to police agencies useful new technologies...
...in view of the large amount of research that indicates otherwise, this omission is a bit surprising...
...I believe-up to a point...
...Moreover, the pursuit of the efficiency goal led police, in the eyes of these authors, to cut themselves off from the community, to insist that they were concerned solely with crime (and not with the seemingly minor social disorder problems of which citizens complained), to call patrol work “the pits,” and to perceive the citizenry as at best uncomprehending and at worst hostile...
...In what kinds will it not...
...They are: *In what kinds of communities will community-oriented policing work...
...But for now, I am enough of a convert to say that this is the book I would give to any newly installed police chief...
...More than ever, Young tells us, “environmental activists found themselves likened to tomatoes‘they start out green and turn red.’ ” The “post-” prefix has become the ultimate postmodem tool for debunking predecessors and launching new agendas...
...But, as with all reforms, a price had to be paid...
...We are in fact speeding down highways towards irreversible depletion of resources...
...What kinds of problems are susceptible to the empathetic, partnershiporiented style of policing...
...Every class sacrificed a little and public health was never better...
...On what side are Sparrow, Moore, and Kennedy...
...The traditional police model, which they deride, would roust or arrest street people...
...In Anacostia...
...Malcolm K. Sparrow, Mark H. Moore, David M. Kennedy...
...Research in Kansas City showed that reducing police response time did not lead to more arrests...
...Like most missionaries, the authors mdo not pause to examine the problems and limitations of their strategy...
...The authors produce no hard analysis to support this serious charge...
...The people in wealthy nations have heard so many environmental alarm bells that they’re nearly deaf to them by now...
...What would the authors do about the homeless...
...At the end of a book that combines insightful analysis with missionary zeal, the authors (one of whom, Sparrow, is an ex-cop from England) list a variety of steps police departments can take that will lead to the adoption of an organizational culture that emphasizes, in the authors’ words, “openness,” “accountability,” “innovation,” and “partnerships...
...This may be the critical test for their model of policing...
...efficiency is to be achieved by maximizing the speed with which officers respond to calls, the skill with which they investigate crimes, and the frequency with which they patrol a given street...
...That is a much saner, though still radical, view than that espoused by Earth First...
...Ned Martel Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing...
...Young pushes economic growth as the remedy for overpopulation, but encourages a fairer distribution of wealth...
...Are traditional police methodsarrest and prosecution-really as ineffectual as the authors claim...
...Young expands on economist F. E. Schumacher in asking, “Small is beautiful, but can we afford it...
...Can’t our system of accounting focus on Net Human Benefit instead of Gross National Product...
...Three serious, wellinformed scholars at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government have set forth in lucid and lively prose a compelling account of the transformation that is now occumng in the thinking and practice of key police administrators around the country, a transformation in how the police define their relationship to the communities they serve...
...Sustainable growth can perhaps be achieved more quickly with help from the legion of scientific brains now devoted to defense-50 percent of the world’s research scientists, according to Young...
...in fact, I have been deeply involved (as a sponsor or as an observer) in some of the changes described in this book...
...Can’t rail systems be made more accessible and less costly so they can replace deadlocked expressways...
...He looks to technology itself for answers...
...Even the Gaia hypothesis came from a NASA study, one that found Mars and Venus to be “dead” planets and proclaimed life on Earth a marvelous and tenuous fluke...
...Why should a “scientific” get-together become a bull session for revolutionaries...
...Basic Books, $22.95...
...Neighborhoods are fed up with vagrancy, panhandling, and sleeping in public places...
...Experiments by the Police Foundation showed that random preventive patrol did not deter crime...
...At that point I have some questions that, to my great regret, are not seriously addressed in this book...
...Will it work in the South Bronx...
...Under these labels a variety of tactics, some new and some retrieved from the dustbin of history, are being employed by the police to help neighborhoods identify and address not only crime but disorder, decay, and the mismanagement of public services...
...Instead of discussing techniques for mitigating the effects of sea-level rises on coastal real estate values, workshops found themselves discussing suicide rates among teenagers and strategies for social empowerment,” Young reports...
Vol. 22 • October 1990 • No. 9
