The Blue-Uniformed Fear of ‘Social Work’ : Separation from the community is the heart of the LAPD’s problem--and the heart of modern policing.

The Rodney King incident was a tragedy for Mr. King, for Los Angeles and its police department, and for Chief Daryl Gates, to say nothing of the losses to communities and police across the country. Anti-police activists trumpeted the event as evidence that police are a brutal, incompetent and uncaring lot. Many citizens, especially minorities, see reason to be increasingly wary of police. Most police, already feeling besieged and overwhelmed, resent being caricatured as brutal and racist.

Everyone has lost: Neighborhoods lack the peace and harmony that police can bring to them and the police have lost the recognition and satisfaction that should come less from their heroism than from day-to-day perseverance in knotty and ambiguous situations. The Los Angeles Police Department and its chief, both justifiably proud of their many achievements, are besmirched.

The recommendations of the Independent Commission on the Los Angeles Police Department are largely appropriate. Yet observers of police, especially of the LAPD, cannot but have an eerie sense of deja vu. The recipe for change--strengthening management, enriching training, screening out violence-prone employment candidates, increasing officer accountability leading to better control of officers--stand firmly in a police-reform tradition initiated during the 1930s. A hero in this movement, William H. Parker, Los Angeles’ chief from 1950 to 1966, molded the LAPD as an embodiment of reformers’ ideals. Police departments throughout the country adopted the programs of leaders like Parker and O. W. Wilson, another California police reformer.

Nonetheless, Rodney King-like incidents could, and do, occur in any police department in the United States. The ferocity of the assault and the number of officers involved may have been unusual, not to mention the presence of a video hobbyist. However, the incident revealed today’s dirty secret of policing: Sixty years of reform and of administrative tinkering and polishing have not achieved control of officers. A police culture has developed that, while largely antithetical to racism and brutality, will tolerate them in the name of occupational solidarity. The blue curtain prevails.

Why is this? A substantial part of the answer is to be found in how police definitions of their mission and the tactics to achieve it have changed since the 1930s.

Police departments were once conceived as broad service agencies dealing with a variety of community problems. In the United States they set up the first soup lines, gave new immigrants safe temporary shelter in police stations, resolved community and family disputes.

In their quest for control of officers and their search for a vision of policing around which their departments could rally, modern police administrators invented a new view. Police were to be crime-fighters, the thin blue line separating good citizens from vicious predators. Wars on crime, drugs, gangs and violence were declared. Police, the front-line troops, were armed with the latest in technology: radios, powerful cars, computers, helicopters and military personnel carriers. Tactics focused on stopping crimes-in-progress and on criminal investigation. Officers in cars patrolled city streets to interrupt crimes and respond immediately to calls for service. Detectives conducted follow-up investigations when crimes were successfully perpetrated. In effect, police became the front end of a justice system whose purpose was to process criminals.

Police might perform non-law-enforcement functions--about 80% of their calls are still for neighborhood issues, such as loud parties--but they did it peremptorily and often resentfully. Their primary responsibility was crime-fighting law enforcement, not social work, and they would get no credit for handling these social-work calls.

Two of the unanticipated consequences of the reformulation of the police role are of special concern. First, the pressure to keep police in service--riding in cars, waiting for the next call--isolated them and separated them from civil and decent people. Their professional world became other police, police communications systems and troubled and troublesome people. Contacts with average citizens of all backgrounds and races, but especially with minorities, were virtually non-existent. To the “soldiers” of the wars on crime, drugs, gangs and violence, their experience taught that every citizen could become a potential foe--suspect and to be feared. The only person to be trusted was another police officer.

Second, the reformulation of police as the thin blue line didn’t work. By any standard, the idea that police are the sole or primary source of public safety has been a tragic misconception. Experiments, research and aggregate crime rates document the failure of police wars on crime. Although police make many arrests, they can by themselves have little impact on overall crime rates.

What is to be done about these circumstances that produce a siege mentality in police? Certainly leadership and good management are important. Promotion, reward and disciplinary procedures must be sound and related to actual performance. Recruitment and training must provide an adequate pool of qualified officers. And commissions and chiefs must be accountable to the public they serve. The Christopher Commission wisely emphasized these aspects of management (though their call for Gates’ retirement will certainly create as many problems as it could solve). The danger, however, in relying too greatly on administrative remedies is that they will not be successful unless a fundamental flaw in the current strategy of policing is addressed.

One section of the commission’s report does move beyond managerial control: the section on community policing. It will receive the least media and political attention, at least initially. But it is the real crux of change in the mission and tactics of Los Angeles police. It goes to the basic issue of improving the quality of policing for the citizens and neighborhoods of Los Angeles--to what the nature of police work should be.

It contains an alternate vision that implicitly acknowledges what urbanologist Jane Jacobs knew 30 years ago when she wrote “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”: Street safety is kept by deeply ingrained patterns of civil obligation and responsibility. When these patterns break down, neither the numbers of police nor their tactics can substitute; the streets become uninhabitable.

Responsibility for street safety rests with the primary institutions of society: family, church, school and neighborhoods. Police can help these institutions, but without their full involvement police cannot and should not try to solve society’s problems. Until the nature of institutional responsibility is understood and respected by police, and police are involved in close collaboration, frustrations will continue on both sides--as will the kind of zealotry witnessed in the Rodney King incident.