Same Song, Second Verse
Tim Dees
Editor-in-Chief
Officer.com
The IACP has requested our president to create a national crime commission, so that we may have a unified crime control strategy. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but it has been tried before. If such a commission is formed, my bet is that the recommendations they produce won’t vary a lot from the previous entity, either. The problem isn’t in the commission or the recommendations. Rather, the problem is in what is done with the recommendations afterward.
Let me provide a bit of history here. The mid-to-late 1960s were a troubling time for America. There was an ongoing war that was largely unpopular, and was causing many of our military folks to lose their limbs or lives. Illicit drug use was a major public concern. Ethnic minorities distrusted the police, following highly-publicized uses of force and arrests for crimes that seemed to have little bearing on public safety and order. Police agencies nationwide were having difficulty recruiting and training qualified officers.
Is any of this sounding familiar? The war was in Viet Nam, not Iraq, the drugs were marijuana and LSD, not methamphetamine, the uses of force were in Watts and Chicago, not New York City and Los Angeles (well, Watts is kind of in LA), and the arrests were for anti-war protests, not for immigration violations. As for the recruiting problem, that hasn’t changed much.
President Lyndon Johnson created a crime commission, which produced a number of reports and recommendations. The best known was titled The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society. The Johnson administration tried to encourage the nation’s criminal justice agencies to embrace the recommendations by way of a long-accepted government strategy: throw money at the problem. The Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) sent billions of bucks to local police for every kind of cop toy imaginable. Seven-man outfits that hadn’t fired a shot in anger in recorded memory had M-16 rifles, starlight scopes, and radios that could reach out three states away. The Law Enforcement Education Program (LEEP) funded college degrees for cops, and indirectly spawned hundreds of criminal justice programs in colleges that had previously shunned “police science” as unworthy of the ivory tower.
LEEP was formed in direct response to one of the crime commission’s recommendations: that every police officer in America have a minimum of a bachelor’s degree by 1975. You know how that one turned out, and most of the rest of the recommendations went the same way. By the time Richard Nixon got into office, the Viet Nam war had gotten a lot more expensive, and support for LEAA and LEEP slowly waned. In 1975, the economy was in the dumper, and between the high unemployment rate and the number of vets coming out of the service after Viet Nam, police agencies were flooded with applicants. Few departments cared much whether they had college degrees or not.
We can save a pile of money by dusting off that old report and trying to find ways of implementing the strategies it outlined. The basic game hasn’t changed all that much. Technology is available that didn’t exist 30 years ago, capable of making officers more efficient and acting as force multipliers. But that technology costs money that local agencies don’t have. And the best crime fighting tool is still a trained and experienced cop, looking for things that are out of place, talking to people, and bringing community resources to bear on problems.
There also has to be a way of funding the changes needed to implement the recommendations, and adding incentives for local governments to play ball. Government at the lowest level possible is a foundation of the American ideal, but local control of the law and the police is not always a good thing. Every community seems to have members who are untouchable so far as the law is concerned, and laws that are either nonexistent or ignored in the interest of powerful people who do not have the community’s welfare at heart. Well-trained and well-educated cops who understand the whys of policing at least as well as the hows, and leaders that are committed to support them, will do more to advance public safety than any truckload of gadgets.
Our incumbent president will probably create another crime commission, because it’s a relatively cheap way of appearing to solve the problem. The commission will be composed of top police administrators and academics, who will get to take airplane rides, stay in nice hotels, sit in long, tedious meetings, and most importantly, get a very nice addition to their curriculum vita, all at taxpayer excpense. They will produce a report that won’t be much different in substance from the one that was published in 1967. And, thirty years later, it will occur to a new generation of IACP members who are now in junior high school that the country needs a crime commission. I wonder what war, what drugs, what crimes we will be concerned about then?
Tim, As a retired police Executive I agree with you 110%. I used that previous “Crime Commission” report hundreds of times attempting to improve operations and programs. I guess the “new kids” on the block think that this is a new idea…….we already the wheel, why re-invent it!!!…..
I am a little disappointed that they could not come up with something exciting and new.
Tim, your last paragraph speaks loads of what is wrong with most crime commissions. For a change, how about putting some street cops and supervisors on the commission. It has been my experience that the so called experts usually have very little experience on the street. There are some will educated and well trained street cops that can provide some real insight into the problems faced by law enforcement.
I have been Chief for 32 years and was well acquainted with the first crime commission report. All I can say is that history repeats itself and each generation seem to have its own ideas with little regard for past history.