The murder of George Floyd is calling the question on 50 years of reform and retreat. Exasperated with the inevitable reversal of each hard-won reform, protesters are now calling for more radical solutions: closing police departments or severely restricting their roles, cutting their budgets, and replacing them with other kinds of services that can deliver safety and emergency response in today’s heavily policed urban communities. There are other debates underway about the ways in which police departments police political protest, and the roles of police unions in electoral politics; but the signal debate is whether to abandon the strategy of piecemeal reform for the wholesale reorganization of policing in the cities of the United States.
There are activists on both sides of this debate. While press attention is focused, as usual, on the most extreme demands — in this case to defund and dismantle police departments — there are activists speaking up for persistence in the longstanding project of gradual reform. These advocates want a revival of the Justice Department’s pattern-and-practice investigations, greater integration of smartphone video into existing mechanisms of police accountability, continued improvement of use-of-force policies, greater respect for procedural justice in police interactions with civilians, and genuine commitment to principles of community policing. These are the kinds of reforms championed by the
President’s Commission on 21st Century Policing, empaneled by President Obama but its recommendations dismissed by President Trump.
The crucial disagreement separating the two sides in this debate is over community control. The reform agenda promises to reduce police violence, but it does not remove authority over police policies and strategy from police leaders and elected officials. The activists urging the defunding and dismantling of police want control of public safety resources — money, personnel, and institutions — to move into the hands of the communities that depend on these services.
That language of local control is deeply embedded in the history of American policing, in contrast with the police histories of Europe and the 19th and 20th century colonies of European imperial powers. This is why there are more than 18,000 separate police organizations in the United States, in contrast to the handful of police agencies in most countries, or the several dozen in the federal structures of Brazil, Germany, or India, for example. But for all the talk of local control in the United States, this has never meant local control by those
being policed. It has meant local control by local elites including, at various times and places, white slave holders, factory owners, financial and media titans, chambers of commerce, and racist and nativist organizations.
What if this tradition of local control could be claimed by the black and brown residents of working-class and middle-class communities who are most dependent on public police services for their safety and for help in emergencies? This is the question being posed by the movement to dismantle the police organizations that have repeatedly refused to cede that control. There have been experiments here and there with community control in the United States, including in Minneapolis in the 1960s, but never on the scale now being proposed.
Some limited community control, or at least community participation, has been part of the gradual-reform agenda as well, but it has proved elusive in practice. Specifically, community participation in setting police priorities and strategies was among the principal promises of “community policing,” a term of art with many definitions, but usually including officers assigned to the same neighborhoods on a regular basis, out of their cars, engaging constructively with community residents.
The architects of community policing envisioned police and residents meeting regularly
and cooperating in the design of solutions to local crime problems, co-producing public safety. In some cities, local community organizers were paid to build and maintain active citizen engagement; in others, local residents were elected to serve on community policing councils. New York City’s only black mayor, David Dinkins, and his black police commissioner, Lee Brown, put community policing at the center of their major reorganization of the city’s police department in 1990. Rather than defund the police, they persuaded voters to impose a tax surcharge to increase police budgets aligned with this new philosophy. Indeed, beyond the United States, the hope that community policing might become a truly participatory form of democratic policing inspired the drafters of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution to require the establishment of Community Policing Forums in every community of the post-apartheid nation.
Perhaps predictably, however, the failure to deliver community control has been the greatest disappointment with the implementation of community policing decade after decade, from New York and Chicago to Johannesburg. A few of the most determined efforts to give community councils a meaningful voice and role in community policing succeeded for as long as three or four years, but the few successes depended on the commitment of particular police and community leaders. Community control in most cases never took hold, and, where it did, it has not lasted. In short, where it was adopted, community policing has gotten a lot of police patrol officers out of their cars and helped some become better problem-solvers. It has helped to reduce crime in some places. Crucially, however, the promise to black and brown communities of joint control over police priorities and strategies has never been fulfilled.
George Floyd’s murder has produced anger and outrage, but also perhaps the greatest chance in fifty years to break the cycle of reform-and-retreat by forcing a meaningful measure of community control. Of the many useful elements included in the
reform legislation endorsed by Governor Walz in Minnesota and being considered by the legislature as I write this, the most significant may be the funding for community groups that could act as alternatives to the police. If proposals like this take hold, a new era of community control over public safety and police resources may finally be dawning. Any serious program of community control will bring its own challenges, but power will have shifted in ways that it has never shifted before and the new challenges will be welcomed.