It's the Rudy, stupid

Jeffrey Rosen's cover story last week in The New Republic got me thinking about cops again. Namely, that there's been a lot of hollering about police brutality since the NYPD shot some innocent people. So I wondered, is this community policing thing not working out?

Now, I know a few cops. I worked around them for 18 months as a police reporter. Generally, they have enough fights with drunks who start brawls that they're not looking for one with someone minding his own business. The live-and-let-live atmosphere can actually be helped by "broken window" policing, in which the cops are actively involved in knowing their communities, and maintaining a reasonable sense of order. When cops know people and walk the street, rather than merely reacting to crime calls from their patrol vehicles, they know when to talk rather than bust, and they can prevent more crime than they ever solve.

But New York, as Rosen sez, has taken a good idea -- the "broken window" policing theory -- and turned it into a way to catch more hardcore bad guys. By hassling and frisking every young guy not wearing a tie in New York (which means, mainly Hispanic and black guys), the cops are catching a lot of felons with outstanding warrants. They're also getting themselves into situations where they shoot people who weren't doing anything, not to mention pissing off the people who wanted better law enforcement to begin with (the poor folks who are the most likely targets of crimes).

But is this a national trend, to be blamed on "broken window" policing (as that gripstick Alexander Cockburn insists)? Not from the evidence. In Boston and Chicago, community policing has coincided with New York-like drops in crime, without an increase in citizen complaints. The Rampart thing in L.A. is just old-fashioned corruption and laziness, not related to community policing.

And police brutality, while a bad thing to be punished, isn't anywhere near as large a contributor to lumps on heads as are, say, Saturday night fights at redneck bars. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that fewer than 5 percent of arrests in six cities studied involved even the threat of the use of a weapon. Cops were more likely to be hurt themselves than the people they arrested when force was used (half the time, the use of force involved a drunk suspect).

Cops in general are not the problem. Jerkoff mayors who wish they could be dictator of Singapore are the problem.