Policing Is Not Prevention

And other lessons from a police conference

First, watch this video. John Oliver perfectly sums up the many things wrong with our youth justice system that I have been learning about and sharing over the past few years. It is a system in need of total overhaul from top to bottom, something that Hawaii has had some success with.

I had the opportunity to attend a recent conference on preventing youth crime that was designed by police officers, for police officers. About 90% of the organizers, 100% of the presenters, and maybe 80% of the attendees were current or former police. Given my recent posts about copaganda and the harms of policing as an institution, you might wonder why I attended this.

I’m a firm believer in pragmatic radicalism. By which I mean, holding an ideal, striving toward it, and always ensuring real, concrete progress toward your goal. Because of this pragmatism, I believe it’s important to include a diverse range of strategies and actions that are all pushing in the same direction. As I’ve written before, The Civil Rights movement took decades of organizing with people who had very different ideas about the strategies to advance civil rights and equality and end segregation. As I wrote before:

Just as societal change is messy and unpredictable, so are the movements that bring it about. At each stage of the civil rights movement, people argued and disagreed and had different ideas of how to best further the cause of desegregation. The NAACP focused on legal challenges and believed that they were the driving force of desegregation and their work needed more recognition, while the SCLC had its own strategies of direct action (boycotts, marches, etc.). There was conflict between the two organizations, yet everyone was moving toward the same goal in their various ways and that mobilized a lot of different people who were working for different reasons and believed in different strategies. Then there was the SNCC and the Nation of Islam, with their own, more radical visions of the future who mobilized even more people toward their cause and often acted as a foil for the still very radical NAACP and SCLC when seeking concessions from the white political power base.

To give just one example of the messiness of movements, in Birmingham, King and other SCLC leaders were frustrated by middle class black residents who were slow to join the cause of desegregation because they benefited from the status quo. It took conversations and meetings and work, so much work, and finally images and videos of white people and police officers brutally attacking black people to change minds and build consensus. That consensus was fragile.

I use the Civil Rights example above to stay grounded in the long-running harms police have and continue to perpetuate. Policing still disparately harms minority populations. It has always been a tool of the owners of property to protect that property and force the poor to work for them. As I noted recently, while individual police officers may act in an ethical way, they are still sworn to uphold the law which often requires them to break strikes or arrest homeless people for simply existing in a system which values a banker in New York’s right to own 1,000 vacant properties over the rights of people to life and liberty. Their very existence upholds this system, even the threat of violent police enforcement can prevent activists from attempting to change things. We are seeing direct examples of this violence in Los Angeles, New York, and across the country right now, with local police departments supporting racial profiling of U.S. citizens for harassment and detention because ICE suspects they might be immigrants.

Given all this, I attended the conference not because I believe policing is the solution to crime, but because police are an extraordinarily powerful political bloc in this country. It is important to understand what they are working on, and the reality is that in many localities it is vital to work with police to have any chance at reform. They garner this power not only through their solidarity with other police in their unions (but unfortunately not with other workers), but through their localized power. Police may be some of the most radical and politicized workers out there. Their unions pretty consistently back political candidates both in the center and on the right and pressure those candidates to avoid any form of accountability or reform of policing. The right-wing ideology of police is so strong that the Las Vegas Police Protective Association had to write an op-ed about why they backed some Democratic candidates:

Every Democratic candidate we have endorsed has assured me that they will not introduce any law enforcement reform bills, and they have guaranteed that the reform bills we saw in 2020 and 2021 will not be revisited. So rest assured that we have put every endorsed candidate through a rigorous screening process; it is not a rubber stamp.

When they don’t like reforms pushed by a new mayor or city councilmember, they will simply stop doing their jobs and go on the news to tell people how the city will be much less safe under this new person. Even the threat of stopping work is enough to scare a lot of people. But police are also people. Many enter policing thinking they are doing it to protect and serve and make their communities safer. Many of my immigrant students wanted to be police officers because they recognized unsafe areas in their community and they had no conception of what public safety could look like without police.

This brings me to the most surprising result of this conference. The police themselves recognize that police work is not what creates public safety. Of the innovative solutions to preventing youth crime that are being implemented across the country, only one was focused on arrests and standard police work. And that one presentation noted that as soon as they stopped their program, shootings and violence started right back up. They did nothing to change the systemic conditions that enable violence to flourish.

Every other presentation centered on police partnering with individual nonprofits or coalitions of nonprofits. The actual prevention of crime piece - measured by reduced recidivism - was achieved through restorative justice practices and/or connecting youth to resources, supportive adults, and helping them and their families meet basic needs. The most successful program in Longmont, Colorado required officers to deflect youth (refer them to programming before charging them for a crime) for almost all misdemeanors and some felonies.

I repeat, all police in this department were not allowed to charge youth for many crimes, they would give them up to three chances, and it worked! It reduced youth court cases by 90% and reduced recidivism by more than 10 percentage points. This is huge when you consider that as a baseline in many jurisdictions, after receiving one charge around 70% of youth never interact with the youth justice system again (70% is in Maryland according to the Department of Juvenile Services, but many presenters gave similar statistics for their jurisdictions). An increase of 10+ percentage points means that from 30% of youth re-offending as a baseline, providing counseling, food, school supplies, tutoring, and any number of other needs drops that to less than 20% of youth committing any second offense at all before they turn 18.

I need to emphasize again that this happened because police were required to stop doing the core job of policing. They could no longer issue a citation or charge for the hundreds of minor crimes (misdemeanors) that initially involve youth in the justice system and cause a downward spiral. Instead, while still holding youth accountable for any harm they may have caused through restorative justice and victim restitution, youth also receive the support and guidance they so desperately need. Their humanity is affirmed. When they are treated as someone who can change their ways they overwhelmingly do! More than 80% don’t make those same mistakes again, and the program in Colorado gives them two more chances when they do. This saves local governments money through fewer court cases, it recognizes that children’s brains are still developing until their mid-twenties and their judgment is not fully developed. By reducing police’s role to engagement as first-responders to a situation and having them connect youth to a network of nonprofits, communities become safer both from police violence, and from youth reacting poorly to difficult situations.

There is another program in Kansas City, Kansas in which the police set up a nonprofit driving school after citing over 1,000 youth per year for driving without licenses or for standard traffic violations. They realized after trying to help one teenager navigate the court process to pay her ticket and clear her citation that the police themselves found it difficult to understand, and that they had condemned a teenager to a 2-3 year wait to legally be able to get her license because of the excessive punishment bureaucracy. For many teens and adults, driving is the only way to get to a job and access many necessities like food and health care, so they will continue to drive without a license for the next 2-3 years, risking another citation and further fines and punishment.

After going through this process and realizing how absurd it was, the police pushed to get the law changed, reduce the punishment, and make it easier to obtain a license. Then they realized that instead of citing people for a “crime” of necessity, maybe they should tackle the underlying issue. One of the root causes of kids driving without a license was the fact that the public education system had completely defunded their driver’s education programs. There was not a single free driver’s ed course in the city, so a kid would have to pay upwards of $1,000 to be officially trained. I say this to underscore the problems that come with a disinvestment in public goods like education. I also say it to note that, once again, the way to prevent crime is to tackle the root cause of an issue through support, resources, and education. Another positive outcome of this is that it reduces the number of traffic violations and traffic stops, which the police themselves noted are often a scene of “use of force” situations (a euphemism for police violence).

Across most of the presentations, the message came across loud and clear. Ninety percent of the police chiefs who were working to prevent youth crime had done so by diverting their funding (or using tiny budgets and donations) to nonprofits in which caseworkers, mental health professionals, mentors, and other non-police workers addressed the root causes of crime. As one chief from Florida said, referring to youth crime:

“We can’t incarcerate the problem away, we tried for over 20 years and it didn’t work. These kids come back to their communities as kids and adults with ruined lives and ruined job prospects.”

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