“Set a thief to catch a thief.” –Ancient Wisdom

People are calling to abolish the police. How did it come to this?

It’s a truism that police do best when they are engaged with the community in a spirit not of punitive law enforcement, but of public service to maintain the public order. If that engagement breaks down, if mutual trust erodes, policing becomes less effective and more resented. In the worst cases, police departments get into a “seige mentality” where they have given up on the community and now just protect and serve the police. Everybody knows this stuff.

We pay a lot of attention to police beatings and shootings. But that’s not where the distrust arises, or at least it wouldn’t be if the media didn’t amplify these things so much. Hardly anyone has direct experience of being roughed-up or shot by cops. But many see evidence in their daily lives of police practices that erode trust.

You might think that abandoning such practices would fix the problem. It is not always so simple. One example is what they call Proactive Policing.

There is an excellent movie I can highly recommend, which toils with the difficulties of Proactive Policing. The movie is Mulholland Falls [not Mullholland Drive, the David Lynch movie]. Mulholland Falls recounts the adventures of a four-man police hit team called the Hat Squad, in Los Angeles circa 1945. These men, hulking apes in stylish suits, swan about town in a conspicuous open-topped car, as though daring anyone to mess with them.

They are experienced detectives with an extensive information network. Their brief is mob activity. This would be about when the Chicago Outfit was mobbing up Las Vegas, and Mafia were looking for new rackets anywhere they could. The Hat Squad’s mission was to make sure it didn’t happen in LA.

In the early scenes of the movie, the Hat Squad moves in on a Mafia boss who has set up shop. The film makes clear that the mobster is a very bad guy; I forget how, maybe they show him injecting a naked fourteen-year-old girl with heroin in his hotel room. Something horrible like that. The Hat Squad defeat his feeble resistance and take him into custody. He lands in the back seat of the Hat Squad cruiser, with an officer on either side and two more in the front seats.

And the gangster thinks it’s a joke. He already owns the DA. He could buy the governor, manipulate any witness or judge. The Hat Squad don’t know whom they’re dealing with. The Gangster is probably already plotting revenge just for the inconvenience.

The Hat Squad agree, it is a joke. They don’t even bother to book the Gangster on suspicion of a crime. Instead they…dispose of him, leaving his remains to be found along Mulholland Drive. It is a satisfyingly violent scene.

On the one hand, that’s effective policing. It keeps the Mob out of LA. On the other hand, it’s illegal. The film goes on to explore in far greater depth how a government agent with license to pursue a critical civilization-saving mission is doomed to commit major crimes.

In recent real news, New York mayor Bill deBlasio ordered the NYPD to disband its plainclothes proactive policing division. Law-and-order populists indignantly pointed out that this would increase crime. They were right; crime did increase. Now, Bill deBlasio is the most callous and irresponsible NYC mayor in memory. Disbanding the plainclothes unit caused harm to the community. But honest discussion must take into account the harms caused by proactive policing itself.

In the Giuliani era, NYPD famously had a “stop-and-frisk” policy. Cops would detain and frisk anyone who looked suspicious. The vast majority of persons subjected to this treatment were military-age black males. Michael Bloomberg would later say that this demographic accounted for so much crime, law enforcement should simply focus on young black males.

Stop-and-frisk was effective policing. It removed felons and weapons from the streets, and the public felt safer. But stop-and-frisk also hassled a lot of innocent people, who knew they were hassled because they were black.

Baltimore has employed aggressive proactive policing. “Knockers”, or “jump-out boys” were plainclothes cops with Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force (GTTF) who cruised around town like the Hat Squad, four to a car. When they saw a group of youths loitering on a street corner, they’d pile out of the car and detain everybody. They’d frisk anyone they got their hands on, and chase anyone who ran away.

They recovered a lot of weapons and nabbed some bad guys. Perhaps more importantly, this tactic gave Baltimore police access to a steady stream of informants. Whether on the street or taken in custody, many detainees would volunteer information in exchange for leniency. So the cops knew who were the bad guys in their community. They knew who were the real psychopaths, the big-time dealers, thieves, fences, pimps, etc.

Knowing that, GTTF cleaned house in Baltimore. They took some seriously bad actors off the streets. They made the public safer.

They also committed outrageous crimes, and everybody knew it.

The question was once put to a prison guard: what percentage of hard-time inmates are innocent? The guard supposed hardly anyone in there was truly innocent, but he estimated five per cent were not guilty of the specific crimes they’d been convicted of. They had committed other crimes and then were “stitched up” by proactive police. Sometimes cops want to get rid of one specific person. They know what he did, but they can’t prove it, so they stage a raid, plant the evidence, and send that person away. Maybe the community should be grateful. Either way, the community knows what these cops are up to. Word gets around. People start to fear the police.

Nobody wants criminals, and GTTF’s heavy-handed tactics might be justifiable in some context. But then there’s the corruption. In Baltimore, they say the GTTF was stealing money, drugs and weapons from crime scenes. The money they could spend. The drugs and guns they sold back to the street through their own channels. That’s not reducing crime. And if these cops were working with dealers and fences, there’s no reasonable doubt they were taking protection money. They probably were silent partners with some of the biggest criminals in town. And they didn’t hesitate to use physical intimdation and violence. For some of them, police work was a heaping helping of criminal rackets with a side dish, or maybe a garnish, of justice.

Black people understand this better than whites. Ask a black man in Baltimore what he thinks of the plainclothes cops, and he will surely know what you are talking about and have an opinion of his own. Ask a white man in Portland the same question and he won’t know what you’re talking about. White people aren’t targeted for proactive policing. We don’t experience it.

Being singled out, hassled and shaken down, you would think black people would uniformly oppose proactive policing. But when crime soars in their neighborhoods, blacks call for proactive policing. They know the downside. They also know that proactive policing is effective. So they support it when crime is high. When the policing becomes more obnoxious than the (now much reduced) crime, blacks call to eliminate proactive policing.

One commentator bemoaned this see-saw effect.

Every time there’s a spike in violence, there have been calls for proactive plainclothes policing again, and we forget about any of the kinds of reform. We’re willing to look the other way again, because we want them to get the bad guys with guns…

You can blather on about reform all you like, but there’s no way to balance this see-saw. When street crime surges it’s a desperate problem, and desperate solutions come into play. There is no reform, there is no institution as effective at fighting street crime, as proactive policing. But then proactive policing undermines public trust and moves the police toward a state of seige.

Cops are human and some of them are crooked. Even for good cops, the temptations to corruption must be well-nigh irresistible. They can sleep at night, they can justify the occasional grift, because after all they put their lives on the line for public safety.

It’s well-nigh impossible to police the police. Activists and whistleblowers occasionally expose a crooked cop, but nobody really wants to be an activist or a whistleblower. People fear the police.

There’s no solution here, only a brutal tradeoff. Maintain public order, lose the public trust. Reform to regain the public trust, lose the public order. Residents in high-crime communities would be well served to understand that they are making this tradeoff every day. It’s not a question of more or less crime per se, but whether you want the threats in your neighborhood to wear badges. It’s a question black communities will have to wrestle with, the more honestly the better, for the foreseeable future.