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Proactive policing and the violent crime rate
by George Hofstetter
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| George Hofstetter |
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This past week, FBI Director James Comey waded back into the
debate over policing
in America, stating he believed less aggressive policing was driving an alarming spike in murders in many cities.
Director Comey received strong
backlash from President Obama
for similar remarks in 2015, when he linked the rise in violent crime to the "chill wind that has blown through American law enforcement over the last year." At that time,
President Obama accused Comey
of "cherry-picking data" and ignoring "the facts" on crime in pursuit of a "political agenda."
However, statistics and interviews with police officers suggest Comey is exactly right. Proactive policing, which has proven to reduce crime and been a staple of modern American police work, is screeching to a halt across the country. The reason is because police officers are becoming increasingly risk averse. There is a direct correlation between the second guessing and protest of police officers and the disinclination of police to engage in proactive police work and avoid the risks inherent in actively engaging suspected criminals.
Take, for example, the City of Minneapolis, which has been rocked for months by protests following the
2015 shooting of Jamar Clark
, who attempted to take an officer's gun from him. Despite some bystanders' claims that Clark was handcuffed when shot, a four-month investigation found the shooting was justified, with evidence proving Clark was not handcuffed and did try to grab the officer's gun.
Minneapolis, police were under intense public criticism in the months following the shooting and
proactive police work plummeted
. In the precinct where the Clark incident happened, police stops and contacts dropped 51% and arrests declined 45%. City-wide police contacts dropped 32%, and arrests decreased by the same amount.
Officers told the local paper they were in "self-preservation mode," (aka career survival) responding to emergency calls, but not engaging in proactive policing. Said one veteran officer: "Confrontation equals getting indicted, put on the front page or [Chief] Harteau will bury you." The term "bury you" refers to the discipline meted out to officers sacrificed on the altar of public opinion to ease some executives and politicians lives.
The same story is being repeated in other cities, where officers retreat from proactive policing and violence soars. In
Chicago
, where officers have been under the microscope since the Laquan McDonald shooting, investigative stops in 2016 plunged a staggering 80% over the same period the year before. "The officers are just having second thoughts about being aggressive," said a local professor of criminology.
At the same time, violent crime has soared to a level not seen in years.
On the heels of a nation-leading 468 homicides in 2015,
141 people were murdered
in Chicago in the first three months of 2016, a 72% increase from the same period the year before. The violence continues unabated. Over the recent
Mother's Day weekend
, eight people were fatally shot and 43 others were shot and wounded.
A similar situation has played out in Baltimore, where arrests plunged immediately after six officers were indicted in the death of Freddie Gray. Officers said they were afraid to do their jobs given the charges filed against their peers in Gray's death.
In five of eight months following Gray's death and subsequent rioting,
homicides topped
30 to 40 a month - levels not seen in years.
Locally, we have seen some indications that the same trend is playing out here. Los Angeles Police Protective League President Craig Lally said officers would be hesitant to patrol proactively after the LA Police Commission found an
officer at fault
in the shooting death of a suspect, even though the suspect was proven by DNA evidence to have been wrestling for control of an officer's gun.
That
ruling was based on a misreading
of both the
Fourth Amendment
and civil case law. But it left officers believing they would be unfairly scrutinized for doing police work resulting in suspects trying to disarm them! How could officers have confidence in a Police Commission whose president, a practicing (entertainment) attorney,
dismissively rejected
a request to participate in the LAPD Force Option Simulator training-stating that it would do him about as much good as it would LAPPL members learning how to write contracts for Oprah Winfrey.
Writer
"Jack Dunphy"
, the pseudonym used by a retired LAPD officer who writes for national publications, recently penned a piece that examined what runs through an officer's mind when thinking of engaging in proactive police work: "Confirmed: Demoralized cops equal higher crime," he stated.
Whether it be Dunphy's fictional account of a day on patrol, or the real-life statistics in Minneapolis, Baltimore and Chicago, FBI Director Comey has hit the nail on the head. The chill wind blowing through law enforcement in the United States has led to the end of proactive policing, with a rising violent crime rate left in its wake.
George Hofstetter is President of the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. ALADS is the collective bargaining agent and represents more than 8,200 deputy sheriffs and district attorney investigators working in Los Angeles County. George can be contacted at [email protected].
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