The War on Cops

As the most anti-law-enforcement administration in memory draws to a close, crime is shooting up in cities across the United States. Homicides in the country’s 50 largest cities rose nearly 17 percent in 2015, the greatest surge in fatal violence in a quarter-century, reports the Washington Post. Milwaukee was experiencing its deadliest year in a decade. Homicides in Baltimore were at their highest per capita rate ever by mid-November—50 killings per 100,000 residents. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis alderman Joe Vaccaro at a City Hall hearing in May 2015. President Obama himself conceded that “gun violence and homicides have spiked—and in some cases they’ve spiked significantly.”

The crime surge was especially troubling in that it reversed a two-decade-long decline, during which American cities vanquished a 1960s-era notion that had made urban life miserable for so many. Breaking the law, the thinking went, was but a symptom of social failure and governmental neglect, or even an understandable expression of protest. Until poverty and racism were eliminated, routine behaviors such as walking down a street, strolling through a park, or operating a store would necessarily remain fraught with fear and the possibility of violence. Under the influence of this “root causes” conceit, acres of city space were ceded to thieves and thugs, to hustlers and graffiti “artists.” Disorder and decay became the urban norm.

A combination of forces eventually reversed this state of affairs. Starting in the late 1970s, legislators demanded that convicted criminals serve more of their sentences; habitual felons were finally locked up for lengthy prison stays. And police leaders challenged the “root causes” concept with a countervailing idea: the police could actually prevent crime and, in so doing, would make civilized urban life possible again. is sea change in policing philosophy originated in New York in 1994 under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, a former U.S. attorney who had campaigned on the promise to free the city from its growing squalor and anarchy. Giuliani’s first police commissioner, William J. Bratton, was a champion of Broken Windows policing, which holds that allowing a neighborhood to become overrun by graffiti, litter, public drunkenness, and other forms of disorder breeds more crime by signaling that social control in the area has collapsed. Bratton had already shown the effectiveness of Broken Windows enforcement in New York’s subways as transit police chief in the early 1990s; now he would have an entire city upon which to test the concept.