Liberal Community Activists Attack Aggressive, “Racist” Police as the Enemy in Crime-Ridden Cities

By Nicholas Stix

April 26, 1999
Insight on the News

Are police the bad guys? On Feb. 4 [1999] in the Bronx, an unarmed, West Guinean peddler, Amadou Diallo, was shot 19 times by four white New York police officers. On Dec. 28 [1998] four Riverside, Calif., police officers shot 19-year-old Tyisha Miller 12 times as she lay unconscious in her locked car with a gun on her lap. And on Dec. 21 a white Pittsburgh policeman shot and killed Deron Grimmit as the unarmed parolee was fleeing a traffic stop.

Quoting the New York Police Department, or NYPD, patrol guide, New York Daily News reporter John Marzulli, a former NYPD officer, calls police shootings such as in the Diallo and the Miller cases a "mass reflexive response" to a perceived threat.

Unfortunately, "mass reflexive response" also explains high-profile reactions to the shootings. On March 14, Newsday reporter John Riley wrote of "the quick sequence of white-on-black police shootings" while civil-rights groups across the nation claim to see a pattern of racism, and even President Clinton is getting involved.

On Feb. 26, ABC's Nightline showed NYPD Lt. Eric Adams, leader of 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care, a national, fraternal police organization, telling black youngsters that they have more to fear from the police than from criminals.

The Nightline reporter neglected to mention Adams' belief in racial purity and his conviction that black officers' higher failure rate proved that random drug tests were biased. On the same show, New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani responded to Ted Koppel's baiting by remarking, "New York has the least amount of shots fired by police officers of any major city."

Some white police officers certainly are racists. New Jersey state troopers' infamous practice of profiling young black and Hispanic male drivers led Gov. Christine Todd Whitman in March to dismiss state police superintendent Carl Williams. However, as Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, author of Race, Crime, and the Law, points out: "Blacks have suffered more from being left unprotected or underprotected by law enforcement authorities than from being mistreated as suspects or defendants, although it is allegations of the latter that now typically receive the most attention."

Whether police are perceived as the bad guys is part of a national battle between local police and community activists who support "community policing" and oppose all aggressive police tactics, most notably the insurgent "quality-of-life" model associated with the NYPD.

Hoover Institution research fellow Joseph McNamara, chief of police in San Jose, Calif., from 1976 to 1991 and earlier the Kansas City chief of police, supports community policing.

McNamara's vision, in which an entire police department "works with all community groups" opposes the mentality which he identifies with the pre-1992-riot Los Angeles Police Department and the contemporary NYPD, whereby, as he put it to me, "the police are an occupying army, as Joseph Wambaugh called them, `the new centurions,' here to save civilization."

McNamara told me, "The NYPD has exported its quality-of-life model, which causes a mentality which leads to atrocities such as the Livoti case and the stationhouse assault on the Haitian guy." McNamara was referring to former NYPD officer Francis Livoti, who choked Anthony Baez to death, and the stationhouse sodomizing of Haitian immigrant Abner Louima by police in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, McNamara's "occupying army" image is a carryover of the hard left, which since the 1960s has demonized the police while lionizing criminals as revolutionaries. Today's would-be revolutionaries seek to free such criminals as Mumia Abu-Jamal, who was convicted of the 1981 execution-style murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkiner.

In McNamara's toned-down, liberal vision of community policing, police "are part of the community" and are more social workers than crime fighters. To him I must respond with the words of a Puerto Rican NYPD officer working in Brooklyn who told me, "In a rough neighborhood, you gotta be rough with the people. Either you're gonna be in control, or they're gonna be in control."

The New York quality-of-life model is based on the "broken window" theory formulated by Harvard criminologist George Kelling, according to which aggressive enforcement of "quality-of-life" violations like subway fare-beating and public urination prevents the rise of disorder and violent felonies.

Kelling told me, "Nationally, a lot of people who aren't antipolice believe in the ideal that in order to change crime you have to eliminate racism and social inequality. What you see are people struggling to hold on to the old liberal ideal without being antipolice, and you can't have it both ways." Mentioning Boston, San Diego and New York as examples of the success of "repolicing," Kelling says, "The idea that crime control can be held hostage to massive social change is under assault, and that's the cutting edge of the cultural war."

Aggressive police work can make a difference, but there are statist assumptions in Kelling’s, as well as McNamara's, position that leave little room for self-reliant citizens. On the one hand, rigorous enforcement of so-called quality of life violations can lead to all citizens becoming hostages of a hyperaggressive police force. On the other hand, so-called community policing presupposes an interventionist state which undertakes to resolve an ever-growing list of urban pathologies. Most cops are the good guys, but so are most hardworking civilians.

Nicholas Stix writes on politics and urban issues from New York City.