What is Good Policing?
by
improving police
What is
good policing? How do you know if your police department is providing it?
There are
over 16 thousand police departments in our nation and there are over 600,000
police with no national standards. This means policing is local in our nation
and, therefore, the improvement of police must be taken on at the local level.
• Quality policing begins at home.
• Citizens determine the quality of
their police departments.
• Quality policing is dependent upon
public approval.
A few
years ago, Michael Scott and I wrote a short piece on these qualities. If you
are unsure about what you should expect from your police, read on:
Qualities
of Police in a Free and Democratic Society
David C.
Couper and Michael S. Scott
• Accountable
Police
recognize the nature and extent of their discretionary authority and must
always be accountable to the people, their elected representatives, and the law
for their actions, and be as transparent as possible in their decision-making.
• Collaborative
Police
must be able to collaborate, as appropriate, with community members and other
organizations in settling disagreements, choosing policing strategies, and
solving policing problems. This collaborative style must also apply to the way
police departments are led and managed. This means police leaders must actively
listen to their officers and work with them in identifying and resolving
department and community problems.
• Educated and trained
All
police officers with arrest powers should begin their career with a broad and
advanced education in the sciences and humanities. Training should consist of
rigorous and extensive training courses in an adult-learning climate that
teaches both the ethics and skills of democratic policing.
• Effective and preventive
The mark
of a good police department and the officers who work within it is that they
continuously seek to handle their business more effectively and fairly,
emphasizing preventing crime and disorder and not merely responding to it, and
applying research and practical knowledge, using problem-solving methods,
toward that end.
• Honest
Honesty
and good ethical practice are essential. The search for and cultivation of
these traits begin with the selection process and continue throughout an
officer’s career. Only those police candidates who have demonstrated good
decision-making so far in their lives should be selected.
• Model citizen
Police
officers must not only be good police officers, but good citizens as well,
modeling the values and virtues of good citizenship in their professional and
personal lives.
• Peacekeeper and protector
The
police role is, above all else, that of community peacekeepers, and not merely
law enforcers or crime fighters. Their training, work, and values all point
towards the keeping of peace in the community. As gatekeepers to the criminal
justice system, police must see themselves as defenders and protectors of
Constitutional and human rights, especially for those who cannot defend or care
for themselves in our society.
• Representative
The
members of police organizations must be demographically representative of the
communities they serve, both because it reflects fair employment opportunities
and because it enables the police to be more effective in achieving their
objectives.
• Respectful
Police
officers should treat all persons with unconditional courtesy and respect, and
be willing to listen to others, especially to those without social power or
status. Likewise, police leaders should treat their workers with courtesy and
respect their employment rights.
• Restrained
The
preservation of life should be the foundation for all police use of force.
Police officers should continually prepare themselves to use physical force in
a restrained and proper manner, with special training in its application to
those who are mentally ill. Deadly force should be used only as a last resort
and only when death or serious injury of the officer or another person is
imminent. Less-than-lethal force should be preferred where possible.
• Servant leader
Every
police officer, regardless of rank, must simultaneously be a good leader and a
good servant, to the public and to the police organization. Servant leaders use
their authority and influence to improve others’ welfare.
• Unbiased
Although
some bias is inherent in human nature, police officers recognize that they can
and should train themselves to reduce their biases and deal with all people
fairly and without regard to their race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic
condition, national origin, citizenship status, or sexual orientation.
Too Many People in Jail? Abolish Bail
By MAYA SCHENWARMAY 8, 2015
CHICAGO — HOW can we reduce the
enormous populations of our country’s local jails?
Last month, Mayor Bill de Blasio
of New York unveiled a plan to decrease the population of the Rikers Island
jail complex by reducing the backlog of cases in state courts. About 85 percent
of those at Rikers haven’t been convicted of any offense; they’re just awaiting
trial, sometimes for as long as hundreds of days.
Mayor de Blasio’s plan is a
positive step. Yet it ignores a deeper question: Why are so many people —
particularly poor people of color — in jail awaiting trial in the first place?
Usually, it is because they
cannot afford bail. According to a 2011 report by the city’s Independent Budget
Office, 79 percent of pretrial detainees were sent to Rikers because they
couldn’t post bail right away.
This is a national problem.
Across the United States, most of the people incarcerated in local jails have
not been convicted of a crime but are awaiting trial. And most of those are
waiting in jail not because of any specific risk they have been deemed to pose,
but because they can’t pay their bail.
In other words, we are locking
people up for being poor. This is unjust. We should abolish monetary bail
outright.
Some will argue that bail is
necessary to prevent flight before trial, but there is no good basis for that
assumption. For one thing, people considered to pose an unacceptable risk of
flight (or violence) are not granted bail in the first place. (Though the
procedures for determining who poses a risk themselves ought to be viewed with
skepticism, especially since conceptions of risk are often shaped, tacitly or
otherwise, by racist assumptions.)
There is also evidence that
bail is not necessary to ensure that people show up for trial. In Washington,
D.C., a city that makes virtually no use of monetary bail, the vast majority of
arrestees who are released pretrial do return to court, and rates of additional
crime before trial are low.
In addition to being unjust and
unnecessary, pretrial incarceration can have harmful consequences. Not only do
those who are in jail before trial suffer the trauma of confinement, but in
comparison with their bailed-out counterparts, they are also more likely to be
convicted at trial. As documented in a 2010 Human Rights Watch report, the
legal system is substantially tougher to navigate from behind bars. People in
jail face more pressure to accept plea bargains — often, ones that aren’t to
their advantage — than do those confronting their charges from home.
Those who spend even a few days
in jail can lose their jobs or housing during that time. Single parents can
lose custody of their children. By exacerbating the effects of poverty, and by
placing people in often traumatizing circumstances, pretrial incarceration may
actually lead to more crime.
Bail also raises issues of
racial injustice. A number of studies have shown that black defendants are
assigned higher bail amounts than their white counterparts. This discrepancy is
compounded by the fact that black people disproportionately live in poverty and
thus unduly face challenges in paying bail.
Other burdens of bail also fall
harder on people of color. For instance, black mothers face a particularly
serious risk of losing custody of their children while incarcerated, because
they are excessively targeted by child protective services.
Jails disproportionately
confine mentally ill people, too — rates of mental illness are four to six
times higher in jail than outside — and people with mental health problems
often live in economic circumstances that make it difficult to afford bail. A
study released in February by the Vera Institute of Justice found that
one-third of jailed people with mental illness were unemployed before being
arrested.
Finally, monetary bail is at
odds with the legal ideal of the presumption of innocence. If we want to grant
people this presumption, we must not punish them before their trials.
There is no getting around it:
We are incarcerating people for being poor, at great cost to actual human
lives. We have to stop.
Maya Schenwar, the editor in
chief of Truthout, is the author of “Locked Down, Locked Out: Why Prison
Doesn’t Work and How We Can Do Better.”
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