Body Count Rises: Reimagining the police is a complete failure

By David A. Clarke Jr., Sheriff (Ret.) Milwaukee County

 As crime and violence rises in major cities all across the United States, all under the spell of progressive soft on crime policies, the casualties continue to mount in the form of human carnage stacking up like cordwood.

 All of this is preventable. The problem is that this new age of police executives have either gone soft or on the way up the ladder to their current positions, they have gotten a case of amnesia about crime control strategies. It’s embarrassing and untenable.

 Front-line cops are frustrated about a lot of things. Chief among them is that they know what to do to suppress crime, but they have been turned from crime fighters into security guards. That is not a knock on security guards. It’s that security differs immensely from police work.

 There seems to be a renewal in a push by police chiefs about this call for more community policing. I have heard numerous times in the last several months where police executives have held a press briefing relative to the rise in violence by saying we need more of an emphasis on community policing. What, I asked?  What the hell exactly does that mean?  Are they suggesting that community policing will lead to a reduction in crime and violence at street level? Seriously?

I started in policing with the Milwaukee Police Department in 1978. That is when this new form of policing was introduced. It was called community policing. Millions of dollars in federal grants were passed out to local police agencies to embrace street cops “getting to know the people on their particular beat.” It was a flop from the start. Front line cops abhorred the thought of this idea that was hatched in some think tank and recoiled that it was being shoved down their throats. It was a social engineering experiment that had no front-line officer’s input. I know cop behavior.

 So for the next 40 years of my working in policing, executives have been on this fantasy that community policing was the ticket to crime prevention, suppression and reduction. So here we are today still on this antasy about community policing.

 Here are a few thoughts on this nebulous, elusive esoteric concept of community policing. When have the street officers never worked with the community to keep neighborhoods, businesses and schools safe? That is the only way police could have achieved the success that they have. Imagine that! Additionally, police in the past had more time for a tactic called preventive patrol where a good part of their tour was spent being a visible presence in the neighborhood. That no longer exists. It made street crime tough for criminals to pull off. It is why much of the violent crime occurred when streets got dark. It offered crooks the advantage of concealment.

 Now much of the street violence occurs in daylight hours. Why? Because police ranks are so thin and 911 calls keep them going from assignment to assignment with no time to spend on preventive patrols. There was actually a strategy implemented after that said a particular assignment should only take so long to handle. If a cop was on assignment and exceeded an artificial time for that type of assignment, a sergeant would show up to see what was taking so long. I am not making this stuff up.

In a Newsmax TV interview recently, I was asked to opine on the rise in street crime and violence across America and what could be done about it. My response was simple, just like I like to keep things.

 First of all, I said that I am not hearing from chiefs, a comprehensive CRIME REDUCTION STRATEGY. They keep taking about more community policing. This is irresponsible. People are dying while they engage in progressive initiatives that tie the hands of officers on the front lines. We don’t need more community policing, we need a crime reduction strategy with metrics so they and we can see how they are doing. How do you measure community policing? We need a return to what worked. Quality of life enforcement as defined by broken windows strategies would be a good start. This led to historic reductions in violent crime all across America. Think of the lives and misery saved with fewer crime victims. 

 Recently in Chicago, Superintendent David Brown introduced yet again a new crime plan.  It is the same leftovers from last year that resulted in nothing. It targets the gun and goes after gun manufacturers. That’s right, gun manufacturers are committing the gun violence. That is akin to going after automobile manufacturers for drunken driving deaths. That’s stupid. So is Superintendent Brown’s idea. He should announce that he is going to allow his officers to engage in the strategy of stop, question and frisk, increased traffic stops in high crime areas and quality of life enforcement. This along with warrant sweeps and working with probation and parole to do searches of residences and cars of people out on probation and parole. Anyone arrested should be intensely debriefed to collect info to develop intelligence that can be passed onto front-line officers. Brown needs assurances from the Soros backed Cook County States Attorney Kimberly Foxx that people arrested for a violent crime will be held on high bail and charged.  The goal is to keep them off the street for the longest time allowable by law.

 The objective has to be to target the criminal and their violent behavior, not the tool they use.  This is not new. We did before.

 In 1994 then-Sen. Joe Biden authored the Clinton crime reduction bill. It went after violent offenders and utilized the federal code to punish career violent offenders. It didn’t go after gun manufacturers. As I said previously, it led to historic reductions in crime and violence.

 Let’s stop listening to nonsense about reimagining and reinventing police and let’s get backed to what worked.  Identify, arrest and lock up career repeat offenders.