This guy is a hard nosed reporter in New York who spends much of his time with police patrols working in the bad areas. His site is always worth visiting but a recent piece on Community Policing (latest item in 'Fred's Columns') is especially relevant now that it is being proposed by President B Liar as the latest panacea (also known as snake-oil which cures everything. I quote extracts from the article but I recommend you read the whole thing (and drop in on some of his others as well).
An advantage, or disadvantage, of having been in the news racket too long is that you see the same nostrums proposed again and again. One of these, “community-based policing,” was briefly popular during my long and fascinating years on the police beat for the Washington Times. I hear noises on the web to suggest that it may be returning. A few thoughts:
Community-based-policing is a well-intentioned cure-all for crime. The idea is that the police should mingle with the people, and come to be loved, so that the people help them to fight crime. Instead of those intimidating, remote, paramilitary, and ninja-clad Robocops in cruisers, you have Officer Krupky the kindly Irish cop (all right, O’Krupky) who knows the people, understands their culture, is part of the neighborhood, and so on. CBP has the advantage of appealing to the desire of nice people for niceness. It charms people with terry-cloth minds, and conservatives who want to be thought insightful. Unfortunately it works best in neighborhoods that don’t need it.
The police are terrible at hearts-and-minds just as soldiers are, and for the same reasons: They are incorrigibly authoritarian, clean-cut blue-collar believers in personal responsibility and self-discipline who find themselves shepherding anarchistic, often ethnically disparate people who don’t care about anything the cops believe. Drill instructors and hippies. The two come to hate each other.
To understand this you have to know, as many white Americans do not, just how segregated the United States really is. In large parts of big cities, in LA, DC, Chicago, Boston, on and on—you can ride for eight hours with a cop and never see a white face. In the highly segregated satellite towns around Chicago, the police cite figures of eighty-five percent unemployment. The baby carriages hold the fourth consecutive generation on welfare. Selling drugs is the only industry, often regarded as no more criminal than copyright piracy.
These places amount to Kenya and Tijuana distributed in pockets across a European nation. They see the cops as an occupying force. The police are always carrying the young men off to jail, usually on drug charges. I can’t count the times I’ve watched young black males leaning against cars and being searched. The locals know that whites in the suburbs use drugs and don’t get into trouble. The locals know that if they drink a beer in the front yard or roll dice on the hood of a car, here comes a cop. They feel…occupied.
His comment on the alienation that is caused is very easily transposed into the recent claims of justification for dissent and violent action from young Islamists. We too have our ghettos where races gather together. Oh, by the way, he speaks of police officers in a Community role - our idea is to have rentacop quasi-pensioners and disaffected ex. school-crossing ladies with hardly any powers beyond dealing with people who do not clean up after their dogs.
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