The Other Side of the Policing Coin

Even amidst all the noise of Ferguson and Staten Island, the words of John Jay College of Criminal Justice Professor Candace McCoy are ringing true to me:

McCoy said if policymakers really want to do something about fatal encounters between police and the public, charging more officers with crimes isn't the answer.

"Within police departments, they are doing what we, as a citizenry, have told them to do, which is over-incarcerate, arrest people for minor crimes, and use force — justifiable force — to subdue people.

"And then we wonder why the police have bad outcomes," she said. "This is what the citizenry has told them to do."

Long ago, we as a society decided that safety was a paramount concern in our lives. This probably most manifests itself in the 1980s, during the heart of the "crack epidemic" in our inner-cities, which was used as an excuse by many white folks to stay out of the inner-core of town. We wanted crime "cleaned up," and we let mayors get tough on crime. They did that, through the police, and policing as a job was changed forever. Now here we are in 2014, and perhaps that's a little much for us, and we don't like the balance. We're probably right to not like that balance, but this is the world we created for cops. They're simply responding to the overwhelming tone that was struck for them over the last three decades. Perhaps if we don't like that, we have to look at ourselves.