Arshi Bhartia Ranjan
What is the system willing to risk in order to see change?
Fired from your job—everything in your life crashes. Economic stability, relationships, your home, everything. Scraping by, running a day-to-day life, and struggling physically and emotionally. Living in an area with other individuals who struggle the same as you, working a job that pays minimum wage. One day, police place you in jail because they suspect you of stealing - even though you know you are innocent, your status proves otherwise. The worldbank.org has reported high levels of economic and social status to be correlated with violence and victimization than anywhere else and, “Neighborhoods exhibiting higher levels of income inequality and concentrated disadvantage experience higher levels of mistrust, social disorganization, and violent crime.
"Failure to adequately address these issues dramatically reduces equality of opportunity and outcomes across generations, perpetuating violence...
Relationships between disadvantaged communities and local government – particularly law enforcement – are often fraught. When police use excessive force, this can further diminish trust.” While the socioeconomic status of individuals is closely related to the inequality of the US justice system, the ideas of proactive policing seem to be a part of the change to resolve some of this problem.
Proactive policing can be effective because it provides various prevention strategies that can help prevent crime before it occurs - instead of the police being reactive, they will be proactive, using place-based, problem-oriented & community-based policing. The National Institute of Justice studied that place-based policing is, “focused on small areas where crime is clustered, using maps and geographic information systems to identify clusters of crime.” Problem-oriented policing is developing, “strategies that prevent and reduce crime by targeting underlying conditions that lead to recurring crime.” Lastly, community-based policing is, “promoting strategies that support the systematic use of community partnerships and problem-solving techniques to proactively address conditions giving rise to crime.”
These techniques are effective because they allow the police to build trust with the individuals that live in various communities. Build a relationship, that they are there to protect them - not to exert authority and control, but to protect & embrace the community for the common goal of making our society better and safer. Melvin Russell, a police officer himself, shared in a TEDx talk that utilizing proactive policing, without the prejudice of one’s race, creed, or class led to a significant decrease in crime in Baltimore when implemented, and in a short period of time, the city experienced a 30-year crime low. For the first time in 30 years, Baltimore had under 200 reported homicides. He shared,
“we celebrated, because we had learned to become great servers, become great servers first.”
Although, it is important to be noted that the biggest issue with proactive policing is the quick jump from safe policing to over-policing which can lead to even more marginalization of communities with lower socioeconomic status and racial status. It can be used to punish individuals much easier because they are not responding to a crime but are actively guarding these communities. The Atlantic discusses that the rise of high-profile police scandals has been brought to the public eye with much more regard have often caused the police to pull back. Unfortunately, they change the extent to which they get involved in incidents, as well as the type of incidents. So proactive policing can bring 2 negative extremes, where the police often make choices to pull back, or over-exert control unfairly over individuals.
"[Naturally] residents and community members also often step back in the aftermath of high-profile incidents when the legitimacy of police departments is questioned. The public becomes less willing to reach out to police for help and less willing to cooperate or provide information.”
There are clearly many cases brought out in light of the media today reflecting on the unfair and unjust prosecutions of individuals, that never receive justice.
It goes to show that the idea of proactive policing has its flaws and flaws that cannot always be prevented because of natural biases that human beings start to develop. Yet given our current status of the criminal justice system, proactive policing can be a step towards bridging a gap between marginalized groups. Change is important to reduce the injustice that individuals have suffered for decades and still do. The National Institute of Justice expands on the system of proactive policing. That it approaches the tough problems of maintaining and strengthening law enforcement’s connections with communities, by building trust, “and working to institutionalize respect for residents’ legal rights while targeting persons who commit violent offenses.”
It's clear that proactive policing has a fair amount of benefits but also irregularities. Where if the idea of prejudice is taken away, crime can severely decrease in communities building a relationship of trust, security, and safety, it can also give a certain extent of unfair power. So the question is asked repeatedly, what is the system willing to risk in order to see change? Is it willing to have officers build relationships, and create guidelines so that over-policing is avoided? Is it willing to educate officers to avoid biases? Many questions have to be asked, and then only change individuals see change, for the better.
Sources Used:
Haskins, Paul. “Research Will Shape The Future of Policing”. National Institute of Justice.n.p., October 24, 2019, https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/research-will-shape-future-proactive-policing#citation. January 10, 2022
Robert Muggah and Sameh Wahba. “How reducing inequality will make our cities safer”. World Bank.n.p., March 02, 2020, https://blogs.worldbank.org/sustainablecities/how-reducing-inequality-will-make-our-cIties-safer. January 10, 2022
Russell, Melvin. “I love being a police officer, but we need reform.” TEDx.n.p., September 2015, https://www.ted.com/talks/melvin_russell_i_love_being_a_police_officer_but_we_need_reform?referrer=playlist-criminal_justice_reform_now#t-51344. January 11, 2022.
Thompson, Derek. “Why America’s Great Crime Decline Is Over.” The Atlantic.n.p., March
24, 2021,
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/03/is-americas-great-crime-decline-over/618381/. January 12, 2022
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