After becoming the first police force to develop its own crime tracking system back in the 1990’s, the New York Police Department has decided to pioneer a new way to measure public safety: asking New Yorkers how they think the police are doing in real-time. While seeking feedback from the public is hardly a new idea, the new system developed by the NYPD employs new technology to get up-to-the-minute insights.

The NYPD’s new sentiment meter works much the same way that traditional polling does, except it will provide live data at a hyper-local level. With the same technology used by online advertisers, the NYPD will ask people to rate their trust, sense of safety, and approval of the local police. Working with a consulting company, the department will identify individuals by their location and ask them a short series of questions with online surveys targeted like commercial ads. The way it’s administered will allow the NYPD to constantly bring in new information about its performance in each neighborhood.

Since the implementation of CompStat–the department’s management and crime tracking system–in 1994, the NYPD has relied on crime statistics as one of its primary measures of success, contributing to a dramatic reduction in crime over several decades. Here’s a look at how the city’s violent crime rate per 100,000 residents has changed since the mid-1980’s and how that compares to cities with populations over 250,000 and the U.S. as a whole:

To see more of New York’s crime data or to see how other large cities compare, check out Law Street’s interactive dashboard.

While the NYPD has undoubtedly played a role in lowering the city’s violent crime rate, the department’s relationship with the community has frequently been strained. In many minority communities across the country, trust in the police has plummeted following high-profile deaths at the hands of law enforcement. And in New York, the death of Eric Gardner–who died from being placed in a chokehold by a police officer after he was confronted for selling cigarettes on the street–sparked protests across the city after a video of the incident went viral.

With the new system, which Police Commissioner James O’Neill has started calling the “sentiment meter,” the NYPD seeks to understand how people view the local police force and how those perceptions vary throughout the city’s 77 precincts. New technology will allow the department to monitor how New York residents rate its performance by surveying a larger sample, with more frequency than ever before. Much like how the CompStat system allowed the NYPD to identify hot spots–areas where crime was particularly prevalent–data from the sentiment meter will allow local commanders find neighborhoods with low trust in the police. This will allow them to create and evaluate new strategies to both reduce crime and improve public relations.

John Linder, who worked as a consultant to help the NYPD develop the system, outlined the department’s goals in an interview with the Marshall Project in January:

If we can find a way to give the commanders of the NYPD real time data on what people feel, then police brass can tailor strategies and tactics in response. It can give them more than just crime statistics, police activity (arrests, summonses, stop-question-frisks, case closures by detectives) to guide what they do and don’t do. That’s what O’Neill has told us to deliver.

While the department is hopeful that the new data will help resolve longstanding issues with the community, some still question whether the new data will be as useful as the NYPD suggests. Johnetta Elzie, founder of Campaign Zero–an advocacy group devoted to ending police violence–asked, “Who feels safe to even reply back? And who, in the marginalized community, is going to trust the police and send an honest answer back?” in an interview with the New York Times.

As crime rates in cities across the country have fallen over the past several decades, the key to reducing crime even further may be improving police-public relations. While it may take some time before the new system yields results for the NYPD, placing this level of emphasis on how the actions of police officers affect the many communities they serve is certainly a step in the right direction.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post The NYPD’s New Plan to Measure Community Safety: Will it Work? appeared first on Law Street.

A study released Tuesday by the National Registry of Exonerations found that black Americans are more likely than white Americans to be wrongfully convicted of murder, sexual assault, and drug crimes.

The study  broke down the exonerations that are listed in the National Registry of Exonerations’ records by demographic. The results were striking: despite the fact that black people make up 13 percent of the population in the U.S., they make up 47 percent of innocent defendants convicted and then exonerated. You can read the full study here, but here are some of the other illuminating findings:

• Innocent black defendants are roughly seven times more likely to be convicted of murder than innocent white defendants. Black defendants are most likely to be wrongfully convicted if they are accused of killing white victims.
• Black prisoners are 3.5 times more likely to have been wrongfully convicted of sexual assault than white prisoners. The study attributes this disparity to issues with witness identification. According to the study: “Assaults on white women by African-American men are a small minority of all sexual assaults in the United States, but they constitute half of sexual assaults with eyewitness misidentifications that led to exoneration.”
• In regards to convictions of drug crimes, the study determined that black people were 12 times more likely to be wrongfully convicted than white people. The study notes that this disparity likely comes from the fact that “police enforce drug laws more vigorously against African Americans than against members of the white majority, despite strong evidence that both groups use drugs at equivalent rates.”

The study also concluded that innocent black people usually spend a longer period of time incarcerated than innocent white people before being exonerated.

This study obviously cannot account for innocent people who have not been exonerated, which is likely a fairly large population. We don’t know definitively what that population looks like. But this study does point to a troubling picture: almost across the board, it’s more likely that black Americans are wrongfully convicted of crimes than White Americans.

Anneliese Mahoney

Anneliese Mahoney is Managing Editor at Law Street and a Connecticut transplant to Washington D.C. She has a Bachelor’s degree in International Affairs from the George Washington University, and a passion for law, politics, and social issues. Contact Anneliese at amahoney@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Study Finds Black Defendants More Likely to Be Wrongfully Convicted than White Defendants appeared first on Law Street.

During the campaign, President-elect Donald Trump gave a speech in the wake of two bombings in New York and New Jersey. In response, Trump said that the police force should have the ability to profile suspects in order to be able to target individuals and subsequently catch criminals faster. While people quickly debated what exactly Trump was calling for, whether it was racial profiling versus criminal profiling, his comments immediately stirred debate over the questionable practice.

Read on to find out more about the history of racial profiling, how it is still used, its effectiveness, and the impact it has on individual freedom.

History of Racial Profiling

According to the ACLU, racial profiling is “the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion, or national origin.” Racial profiling is closely associated with and only narrowly differentiated from criminal profiling which “is the reliance on a group of characteristics they believe to be associated with crime.”

In criminal profiling, the cumulative characteristics of people who have committed a crime are used to identify those who may be likely to commit the same crime. However, racial profiling assumes any member of a racial or ethnic group of people may commit a crime because of who they are.

In addition, part of racial profiling is willfully overlooking members of the majority when they commit crimes. The ACLU cites the following example:

An African American man in Maryland, who after moving into a white community, was attacked and subjected to property damage. Local police failed to respond to his repeated complaints until they arrested him for shooting his gun into the air, trying to disperse a hostile mob outside his home.

The accompanying video looks at the practice of racial profiling and what it means:

Racial profiling in the United States traces its roots all the way back to colonial times. One of the earliest examples was a registry in which free blacks were required to enlist. The registry kept track of a number of physical characteristics as well as how that person came to be free. The idea behind it was to limit the movement of free black people around the South. If they were unable to prove their status they could even be forced into slavery. This kind of targeting particularly reemerged during the Jim Crow era and continued on throughout the Civil Rights Movement and into the present. Often when it comes to racial profiling, the discriminatory practices are not written down in a record but implied.

The closely associated criminal profiling also has a long history, dating back to the 1880s in England when experts tried to track down the elusive Jack the Ripper. Profiling in the United States began gaining momentum in the late 1950s with profiles contributing to the arrest of suspects in high-profile crimes. In 1974 the FBI launched its Behavioral Science Unit utilizing profiling techniques to locate serial rapists and murders. Over the years psychology has taken a major role in these profiles as certain, common traits are identified in many of the cases and used to pinpoint other offenders. While this approach is used more to identify specific individuals guilty of specific crimes, it also creates a template for future investigations to use as well, which is similar to how the ACLU describes criminal profiling. Nevertheless, these same profiles cannot be overly broad generalizations, or they risk being another form of racial profiling.

The Use of Profiling

In his speech, one of the points Donald Trump alluded to was Israel’s use of racial profiling and the success it has had with it. While many other Western nations have shunned the practice, Israel has readily adopted it as a means of protection. This is especially true in airports where people with Jewish last names or links to Israel are able to quickly move through security while those from other regions, particularly from predominantly Muslim regions, are often held up for hours for intense inspections.

While the United States does not have similar programs, for the most part, there is one glaring exception that generated a lot of high profile coverage just a few years ago. That is the infamous stop-and-frisk program that was a major component of the New York Police Department’s effort to fight crime. While the city claimed this program was an effective way to reduce crime, a federal judge disagreed, claiming instead that it provided cover for officers to target non-white citizens in unnecessary and illegal ways.

While police officers are well within their right to stop someone they suspect of committing a crime or are likely to commit a crime, they must be able to demonstrate some cause. However, in the case of stop-and-frisk, people of color were being stopped at a disproportionately high rate, which led a federal judge to deem the policy unconstitutional. In fact, 83 percent of the stops conducted by the NYPD between 2004 and 2012 were of black or Hispanic people, while those groups made up slightly more than half of the city’s population. The following video gives the details behind the stop-and-frisk ruling in New York:

Although stop-and-frisk was really the only major program that led to clear racial profiling in an attempt to fight crime, as mentioned earlier, racial profiling is often done without a directive or anything on the books. The ACLU, for example, has a long list of what it claims are incidents of racial profiling against a variety of minority groups. Over the last couple of years, there have been a number of high-profile incidents involving white police officers and non-white victims, which certainly seem to indicate racial profiling does still occur even without an explicit policy.

When it comes to criminal profiling, the practice has gotten a lot of attention in popular culture but its effectiveness has also been called into question. Part of the problem is that criminal profiling is not much more reliable than racial profiling. According to a small study done in Britain, only 2.7 percent of 184 cases showed that the practice helped lead to an arrest. The main issue was there were so many different characteristics that it was hard to create a single profile that would be used to capture criminals. This sentiment was echoed by a Secret Service report on school shooters that suggested that potential shooters would have to be identified on an individual basis because they were all so different. The most common results, unfortunately, were confirmation bias at best, and at worst simply another form of prejudicial profiling.

Evaluating the Use of Profiling

Since racial profiling only targets a select group of people it is unsurprisingly not very effective. For the clearest evidence, one need only to look at New York’s stop-and-frisk program once more. Of all the people stopped, nearly 90 percent were released with no further action and were free to go. In other words, only 6 percent of stops ended with an arrest and another 6 percent resulted in court summonses. In fact, the data indicates that stop-and-frisk likely had little relation to the number of murders and other violent crimes in New York.

Other instances, such as the ones listed by the ACLU, also show how racial profiling is typically not effective. In fact, these instances of racial profiling only seem to make matters of crime worse as they encourage disaffected people to lash out in anger.

Impact

Not only is racial profiling ineffective it can also be harmful in the long run. The reason for this is because people who are unfairly targeted by police tend to feel a reduced trust in the police force as an effective means of fighting crime. When people do not trust the police, then the police are less able to do their jobs because they lack both authority and the necessary assistance from communities to help them with their work.

This feeling of being excessively targeted also seems to be supported by the numbers. The clearest example, and by now one that is well-worn, is the existence of clear racial discrepancies in prisons. Black male children born in 2001 are approximately 5.5 times more likely than white children to be incarcerated at some point in their life.

From a dollars and cents perspective, racial profiling is also costly. Retraining officers following a racial profiling incident or paying a settlement for racial profiling can cost a city or police department millions, if not tens of millions of dollars. There are countless examples of this, one of the most egregious is in Arizona–where the actions of notoriously prejudiced Sheriff Joe Arpaio just cost his county $22 million in settlements with Latino community members.

Conclusion

Like other controversial techniques for preventing crime, racial profiling does have its defenders. They argue that it has been successful in reducing crime and point to examples like stop-and-frisk in New York and to other countries that embrace the measure such as Israel. It even has a closely related cousin, criminal profiling, which relies on somewhat related methods to help in the hunt for criminals.

However, like many of those very same controversial techniques, the numbers suggest racial profiling actually does not really reduce crime at all. In fact, it may actually increase crime by lowering trust in police and diminishing officers’ effectiveness in minority communities. It also seems to fill prisons in the United States disproportionately by race while also costing police department millions in settlements and training.

Racial profiling then seems to be a practice that is more harmful than good. However, the reality of that may not outweigh some people’s perception that it is effective. In either case, the practice is unlikely to be done away with entirely, in the meantime it is likely to make the tenuous relationship between the police and many communities even worse.

Resources

CNN: Donald Trump Defends Racial Profiling in Wake of Bombings

ACLU: Racial Profiling: Definition

History News Network: The Roots of Racial Profiling

Haaretz: in Israel, Racial Profiling Doesn’t Warrant Debate or Apologies

The New York Times: Racial Discrimination in Stop-and-Frisk

American Psychological Association: Criminal Profiling: The Reality Behind the Myth

Center for Science and Law: Criminal Profiling, Present, and Future

National Institute of Justice: Race, Trust, and Police Legitimacy

Economic Policy Institute: Where Do We Go from Here? Mass Incarceration and the Struggle for Civil Rights

CNN: Racial profiling Costs Arizona County $22 million

Brennan Center for Justice: Ending New York’s Stop-and-Frisk Did Not Increase Crime

Michael Sliwinski

Michael Sliwinski (@MoneyMike4289) is a 2011 graduate of Ohio University in Athens with a Bachelor’s in History, as well as a 2014 graduate of the University of Georgia with a Master’s in International Policy. In his free time he enjoys writing, reading, and outdoor activites, particularly basketball. Contact Michael at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Judging a Book by its Cover: The History of Racial Profiling in the United States appeared first on Law Street.

The FBI recently released a snapshot of law enforcement officer deaths in 2015, indicating that such deaths decreased last year. But that is only a small subset of the available information on officer deaths. Now that policing has reached the center of the public’s attention, statistics about what happens to officers while they’re on duty are sure to be an important part of the debate.

Interactive Map: Officer Assaults and Employment by State

The FBI publishes an annual report on Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted in the Line of Duty (LEOKA), which can provide some interesting insights into the matter and inform debates about police deaths. The annual LEOKA publication is one of the most detailed data sets kept by the FBI. For obvious reasons, it’s important for the FBI and all law enforcement agencies to keep track of and understand the situations in which police officers are killed and assaulted.

Here’s what the FBI data tells us:

More Officers Die from Accidents than Felonies

Source: FBI LEOKA 2014     |     Includes Preliminary 2015 Data

The chart above details the number of officer deaths from both accidents and felonies between 2005 and 2015. The average number of felonious deaths during that 11 year period is about 50, while the average number of accidental deaths is just below 60. Last year saw particularly low numbers for both felonious and accidental deaths, with 41 and 45 respectively.

The data can also tell us a lot about the causes of these deaths. Nearly 60 percent of accidental deaths that occurred between 2005 and 2014 were the result of automobile accidents. If you broaden the category to include motorcycle and aircraft accidents they account for more than 70 percent in total.

The chart below details the trends over time:

Source: FBI, LEOKA and *Preliminary 2015 Data

There has been a slight downward trend in both felonious and accidental police officer deaths. The preliminary numbers for 2015 are also encouraging, as the number of accidental deaths tied its 10-year low with 45, and the number of felonious deaths matched the second lowest point in the same period at 41. Law enforcement deaths in the line of duty is certainly an important thing to track, but when it comes to assessing the threat that officers face every day, looking at assault statistics can be particularly informative.

 What We Know About the Offenders

Source: FBI, LEOKA – Table 47

The FBI keeps detailed information on both victims and offenders, allowing felonious offenders to be broken down by race, sex, and several other categories. Between 2005 and 2014, there was a total of 563 offenders involved in felonious officer deaths. When you break those numbers down by race, 309, or 55 percent of the known offenders are white and 224, or 40 percent are black. Asian/Pacific islanders, Native Americans, and offenders whose race was not reported account for less than 2 percent each.

Offenders are also overwhelmingly male–nearly 97 percent of known offenders are men. The vast majority–83 percent–have also had prior criminal arrests and just over one-quarter of all offenders were under some form of judicial supervision.

Assaults and Injuries have Been Decreasing

Source: FBI, LEOKA – Table 76

Assaults on police officers have generally trended downward over the past 10 years. After peaking at 61,257 in 2007, the total number of assaults has decreased to 48,315 in 2014, a decrease of more than 20 percent. The chart above also details the number of officers who sustained injuries from an assault. All injury numbers are estimates–based on percentages provided by the FBI–with the exception of 2014, which is the exact number recorded by the FBI.

The number of assaults that caused injuries also followed a downward trend, with approximately 16,866 in 2007 and 13,654 in 2014. Although the number of injuries has not dropped as quickly as the total number of assaults, this is certainly an encouraging sign for police officers.

Moving Forward

The 2015 assault and injury statistics, which will be released later this year, will be particularly interesting in light of recent discussion of the so-called “Ferguson effect,” in which some argue that the perceived threat to law enforcement officers has caused proactive policing to decline and crime rates to go up. These numbers will also help inform the debate on the alleged “war on police,” a related argument in which some claim that officers are being attacked more as protests and movements like Black Lives Matter have called more attention to issues surrounding police violence.

Based on the preliminary numbers for felonious deaths, that does not appear to be the case. But we do not yet know whether increased scrutiny is correlated with an increase in assaults. As the chart above indicates, the number of assaults has gone down steadily over the past several years, but in time, we’ll know if 2015 is an exception.

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Police in America 2016: What We Know About Officer Deaths in the Line of Duty appeared first on Law Street.

It’s official–last month marked the third highest number of homicides in Baltimore history. The city saw 43 homicides in the month of May while arrest rates sharply declined. Since Freddie Gray’s controversial death in April, the relationship between the police and the public has taken a turn for the worse. Unrelenting media coverage and public outcry over police-related violence have made 2015 the year of police scrutiny, or as some may say, accountability. Recent cases of police-related violence have led to greater distrust in the police in many areas across the country.

The growing sense of disconnect between local communities and the police has led many to question whether law enforcement is the problem, not the solution. Some believe they are better off without the constant presence of the police. This belief is especially common in the city of Baltimore, where riots erupted after Freddie Gray’s death.

The protests sent a message to Baltimore police officers indicating that they were undesired in many communities. The riots also led to a rapid decline in proactive law enforcement techniques, an effort to appease many Baltimore residents. But in light of recent murder statistics, are people better off with less policing?

The month of May saw a drastic decline in police activity, with arrests going down approximately 56 percent compared the same period last year. In May 2014, police arrested 2,396 people in the first 19 days of the month, with an average of 126 arrests per day. Last month, however, there were considerably fewer arrests, as police arrested 1,045 people, an average of 55 arrests per day.

Anthony Batts, the Commissioner of the Baltimore City Police Department, attributes the dramatic decrease in proactive policing in Baltimore to the growing fear of prosecution among police officers. At a recent city council meeting, Batts said “There are people, and they’ve said this to me, ‘If I get out of my car and make a stop for a reasonable suspicion that leads to probable cause but I make a mistake on it, will I be arrested?’” This growing fear of legal action against officers appears to explain the sharp decline in arrests, which comes just one month after six police officers were indicted for their involvement in Freddie Gray’s death.

While the rate of arrests in Baltimore plummeted last month, the number of homicides did not. Instead, the city experienced its single bloodiest month in more than 40 years with a total of 43 homicides. The month of May saw more than 40 percent more murders relative to the previous year, and the rate nearly doubled the 22 homicides of the month prior. A total of nine murders occurred over a violent Memorial Day weekend, which also had nearly 30 shootings.

Last month’s raw homicide figures were the worst of any month in 40 years, and the third worst in Baltimore’s history. This is particularly shocking when looking back at the well-documented history of violence that made Baltimore one of the most violent cities in America for some time. August 1990 held the fourth bloodiest month in Baltimore history with 42 homicides, December 1971 takes second place with 44, and August 1972 tops the list with 45.

In terms of raw numbers, May saw fewer murders than December 1971 and August 1990, but when you adjust for changes in population the rate was actually much higher than any previous month. The murder rate last month was 6.9 murders per 100,000 residents, a stunning 38 percent higher than the rate in August 1972. This is because Baltimore housed roughly 280,000 more residents in 1972 than in 2015 according to Census data.

The chart below shows the adjusted murder rate for the four deadliest months in the Baltimore’s history as well as their total homicide counts.

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore police officer and current professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice put these numbers in perspective in a recent blog post:

Even if no other people had been murdered in Baltimore before May, and even if no more people were killed from today until 2016, Baltimore would still have an above average annual homicide rate just based on the May killings.

In the first full month since the Freddie Gray protests two major changes have occurred in the city. Arrest rates have dropped by more than half, while homicides have risen by 40 percent. Antoinette Perrine, a Baltimore resident whose brother was recently gunned down near her home in West Baltimore told CBS Baltimore, “It’s so bad, people are afraid to let their kids outside… police used to sit on every corner, on the top of the block. These days? They’re nowhere.” It may be too early to tell, but a reduction in police activity might not be what is best for the city of Baltimore.

Kwame Apea

Kwame Apea is a member of the University of Maryland Class of 2016 and a Law Street Media Fellow for the Summer of 2015. Contact Kwame at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post Baltimore After Freddie Gray: One of the Bloodiest Months in History appeared first on Law Street.

A recent slowdown by New York Police Department officers has ignited a debate over what the role of police officers should be and to what extent policing should focus on minor crimes.

According to the New York Post,

There were just 1,191 parking summonses handed out between Dec. 29 and Jan. 4 — down nearly 93 percent from the same period last year, when 16,008 of the dreaded orange envelopes were slapped on windshields

The NYPD slowdown involved a nearly complete abandonment of enforcement for low-level crimes like parking tickets and public order offenses. While slowdowns can have many different causes, it appears that the recent one in New York is a result of the rising tension between police officers and Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The New York Post also reported that the slowdown will cost the city roughly $10 million per week in lost ticket revenue. Doug Turetsky, of New York’s Independent Budget Office, put that number in context by comparing it to the city’s $77 billion annual budget; however, if losses continued over a long period of time the effects would be notable.

The Associated Press further noted that only one arrest was made and zero tickets were issued for low-level offenses on New Years Eve, a day when roughly one million people flock to the city. Despite this dramatic decrease in enforcement, there was actually a modest decrease in the number of reported serious crimes over a two-week period when compared to the same time span one year earlier.

Recent activity suggests that the NYPD slowdown is coming to an end and may have even stopped completely. Commissioner Bratton threatened to take away sick days and vacation time until ticket and arrest numbers returned to normal levels. While the slowdown may be over, it renewed the debate over the underlying policing theory present in many American cities.

Broken Windows Policing

Although the NYPD slowdown can have important implications for the NYPD and New York City, it has also called the Broken Windows style of policing into question. Behind the Broken Windows theory is the idea that disorder leads to both fear and more crime. The theory was first established by professors George L. Kelling and George Q. Wilson in an article they wrote back in 1982. They argued that the proactive enforcement of laws pertaining to lower level and often very visible crimes, like breaking windows, will restore order to public places and prevent additional crimes.

Put in their words:

The unchecked panhandler is, in effect, the first broken window. Muggers and robbers, whether opportunistic or professional, believe they reduce their chances of being caught or even identified if they operate on streets where potential victims are already intimidated by prevailing conditions. If the neighborhood cannot keep a bothersome panhandler from annoying passersby, the thief may reason, it is even less likely to call the police to identify a potential mugger or to interfere if the mugging actually takes place.

New York City was actually a primary testing ground for the Broken Windows style of policing. The strategy came to New York in 1993 under the tenure of Commissioner Bill Bratton, first  appointed by Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Bratton later returned to New York to once again act as Commissioner under de Blasio in 2014. Broken Windows is frequently attributed to the city’s dramatic decline in crime during the 1990s.

Kelling stands with his theory in light of the recent debate. In an interview with the New York Daily News he argued that while it is unlikely that one week-long slowdown will have a meaningful impact on crime numbers, he did caution about long-term effects. Kelling continued to argue that maintaining order will meaningfully constrain the crime levels in the city, but also acknowledged that the maintenance of order is not intended to punish people. Kelling argued that the underlying principle of Broken Windows remains strong, but policing methods may still be updated to fit the present circumstances.

New York’s Crime Decline

Between 1990 and 2012 New York City’s violent crime rate per 100,000 people has decreased by nearly 75 percent and the total number of murders went from 2,245 in 1990 to 335 in 2013. While most cities in the United States experienced significant decreases in their violent crime rates since the 1990s as well, New York has far outpaced the national average and has continued that downward trend in recent years.

Before you ask, there was also a decrease in the actual number of broken windows over the past several years (and yes, there is data on that).

Although it is impossible to determine whether or not Broken Windows policing caused this decrease–many factors typically impact a city’s crime level–it is likely that policing played a role. Despite this correlation, many are calling for the end to Broken Windows as a modern policing philosophy. It has long been criticized for its effects on minorities, which tend to be the target of many ‘order-related’ arrests, but the recent death of the unarmed Eric Gardner at the hands of the NYPD has sparked further protest.

The Policing Debate

While it is unfair to claim that Broken Windows policing caused the death of Eric Gardner, such a policing strategy will increase the number of times minorities are stopped by the police. Arresting people for committing crimes like selling loose cigarettes, the act which precipitated Gardner’s encounter with police officers, will simply increase the likelihood that altercations occur in the future.

Supporters of Broken Windows argue that it is not the underlying theory that causes tragedies like Gardner’s death, but rather it is the training and tactics that officers employ that lead to abuse. As a result, people call for police reforms that would improve tactics and training; however, evidence may also suggest that police reform may not adequately address problem. Last summer the NYPD ended its controversial stop-and-frisk policy due to complaints that it disproportionately violated the rights of the poor and minority populations, yet problems persist.

Despite the removal of stop-and-frisk as an important policing tactic, situations Gardner’s encounter with the police still occur and continue to disproportionately affect minorities. The Broken Windows theory sought to reduce public fear by bringing order to public places; however, it has also helped create a different kind of fear among minority populations, which is developing into increasingly more hostile attitudes toward the police. In a series of polls asking people whether or not they believe the police treat blacks and whites equally, a significant gap between white and black perception emerges. The most recent poll suggests that a majority (52 percent) of white respondents have a “great deal of confidence” that both races are treated equally; among black respondents that number dipped to just 12 percent.

Distrust and fear toward the police has led to hostile interactions between minority populations and law enforcement officers. Supporters of the Broken Windows theory of policing may be right when they argue that enforcing order can reduce crime rates and fear among the general public; however, attention must also be paid to the additional implications that aggressive policing of low-level crimes may have.

What is the role of Broken Windows policing when many of the broken windows have been fixed? Crime in New York City has experienced massive declines over the last two-and-a-half decades, and according to its crime statistics is now a pretty safe city relative to its population size. Creating order may serve an important role in reducing crime, but when crime has already decreased by such an extent should it be enforced as aggressively as it was in the 1990s?

Kevin Rizzo

Kevin Rizzo is the Crime in America Editor at Law Street Media. An Ohio Native, the George Washington University graduate is a founding member of the company. Contact Kevin at krizzo@LawStreetMedia.com.

The post NYPD Slowdown Ignites Debate Over Broken Windows Policing appeared first on Law Street.