The era of malign neglect was driven by the police's limited reaction as long as the crime victims were black and the crimes were committed in black communities where they would not upset whites. Police response times were far worse in black neighborhoods. Police patrolling was far more limited in black neighborhoods and it was done increasingly with multiple officers in patrol cars with limited interaction with civilians. Malign neglect was the opposite model of community policing.
During the era of malign neglect, violent crime in black neighborhoods, committed overwhelmingly by young black males and aimed disproportionately at young black males, occurred at rates dramatically greater than today's rates. Violent gangs, typically composed of blacks, Latinos, or Asians, led to extremely high rates of violent crime in some of the Nation's largest cities and turned our prisons into extremely dangerous recruitment and training devices for these gangs.
The Era of Malignly Benign Aggressive Policing
Fourth, more recently in the 1980s and 1990s, there was the "war on crime," the "war on drugs," and local wars on gangs. Non-coincidentally, we had the accompanying politics of "law and order," Ronald Reagan's "Southern Strategy," and Bill and Hillary Clinton's "New Democrats'" embrace of key aspects of these Republican memes, even the infamous blood libel of the fictional epidemic of "feral" black and Latino "super-predators." Most notoriously, this was exemplified by Bill Clinton's bipartisan accord with Congressional Republicans to block the recommendation of the Sentencing Commission to end the 100-to-one disparity in sentencing severity for crack v. powder cocaine because it was producing enormous, totally indefensible racial disparities in sentencing that were sure to ruin the future job and marriage prospects of hundreds of thousands of young black males and Latinos. One of the results was the mass incarceration of young black males and Latinos. Tom Frank's most recent book, Listen, Liberal, explains this dismal history.
Donald Trump is copying Reagan's Southern Strategy and seeking to spark the most recent moral panics against blacks, Latinos, and Muslims. I will return to these recurrent efforts to create "moral panics" about young black male street criminals in future installments in this series.
Note that these "wars," for all their bigotry, their lies about young black males' supposed inherent criminality, and their structural racism marked a sharp break with the policy of malign neglect. Black lives now mattered. The new policing strategies required LEOs to take on aggressively black criminals and suspect. Police resources were now devoted heavily and aggressively to many predominately black and Latino communities.
LEOs were taught that the actions they were taking were to protect and serve the law abiding citizens in predominately Black and Latino communities. The meme was that these law abiding citizens were the super-predators' prey. LEOs were selected and trained to reject racism and to take pride in protecting and serving all citizens. They were taught that their actions were benign, brave, and the opposite of bigoted.
This era also saw the rise of "broken windows" policing. "Broken windows" was a metaphor. An empty building with a few broken windows, if not promptly repaired, will soon have hundreds of broken windows. Young males will treat the failure to repair as a sign that no one cares about the damage, and young males often love to throw rocks and break windows. A future installment in this series of columns will address broken windows policing. For present purposes it is sufficient to say that it was based on the deliberate targeting of young black and Latino males for ultra-intrusive stops, stops and frisks, fines, and arrests for often trivial crimes and even non-criminal civil offenses. It was one variety of the policing strategies adopted once the era of malign neglect ended. Conservative wonks tend to love broken windows strategies against crimes of the streets -- and hate them when proposals are made to use the same strategy against crimes of the C suites.
Paradoxical Hard Truths About U.S. Crime, Policing, and Race
One hard truth that emerges from studying this history, denied by huge numbers of white Americans, is that the criminal "justice" system in the U.S. (and its predecessors before the creation of true public police forces) has in fact been characterized from its origins to today by structural racism. Policing has often been aimed overwhelmingly against young black males and then also young Latino males.
A second hard truth, however, denied by the organizing leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement, is that the nature of the repression of blacks and Latinos through policing has changed enormously in the last 30 years. It also varies enormously by police department.
The end of malign neglect, the reduction in virulent racism among whites in general and LEOs in particular, the dramatic reductions in police departments led by vicious racists, the very large increases of minority and female LEOs in many departments -- and in the leadership ranks of many departments -- and the rise in many police departments of leaders committed to reforming policing has falsified the old view of the police as simply a racist means of repression of blacks and Latinos. Blacks, Latinos, and women are still substantially underrepresented in the ranks of most police departments, but the increase in diversity is substantial and it means that open racism is an excellent way of ruining a LEO's career.
The brilliant strategy by gays was coming out. Straights soon learned that gay people were diverse and "normal" rather than depraved people to be feared. Even with continued underrepresentation, the number of minorities serving as LEOs in departments of any size has long since been large enough to serve a similar function in police departments all over the Nation. Much of the policing literature stresses that minority LEOs tend to adapt to the existing police culture, and warns that this could include a greater willingness by minority LEOs to use force against young black men. The same acculturation process, however, is likely to make minority LEOs far less threatening to white LEOs and make it more likely that white LEOs more likely will adopt more positive view of minority LEOs and minority civilians.
Policing reforms over the last 25 years have helped to dramatically reduce the deaths of blacks and Latinos. The end of malign neglect has demonstrated that policing that treats saving black lives (and their property) as a mission produces a dramatic reduction in the most serious violent crimes. Blacks, particularly young black males, have been the largest beneficiaries of the end of the policing strategy of malign neglect. Tens of thousands of black lives have been saved that would have been lost under malign neglect. Hundreds of thousands of crimes that would have victimized blacks under malign neglect have been prevented.
Every day, tens of thousands of LEOs, of every race, ethnicity, age, and gender routinely take actions that put their lives at risk in order to protect blacks from harm. But LEOs, in many communities, also stop or stop and frisk thousands of black males in situations where they would not do the same if the civilian were white. This inherently produces enormous ill will among large parts of the black community and it is one of the important reasons that some young black males end up being killed by police and why it is harder to recruit blacks to become LEOs.
I explore in future installments how these aggressive policing practices can indirectly increase crime through indirect effects on employment and marriage. We know how to implement reforms that will turn our lose-lose strategies into win-win strategies.
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