No Easy Answers

James Q. Wilson on bureaucracy, crime, and community

William D. Eggers & John O'Leary from the February 1995 issue

(Page 3 of 6)

In the end, do you know how many cops Los Angeles might get, if all the assumptions break favorably? Maybe 500? Now, Los Angeles could certainly use 500 more police officers. But this is a clumsy and misleading way to get them, because in five years their pay has to come out of the local taxpayers. Either that, or the federal government is going to say, "Well, we will continue the funding but only on condition that you follow these 97 federal guidelines," which I think is absolute mischief. I remember during debates for the federal aid to education act, supporters said federal money wouldn't lead to federal control of schools. Of course it did. It brought a boat load of paperwork, and this will too.

Reason: It must strike you as ironic that even as the crime bill gives the federal government more control over local police, the bill itself pays lip service to your notion of "community-based policing."

Wilson: Community-based policing has now come to mean everything. It's a slogan. It has come to mean so many different things that people who endorse it, such as the Congress of the United States, do not know what they are talking about. In the crime bill, Congress has said that, "Community policing works." I'm an advocate of it and I don't know whether it works. We have no carefully evaluated, long-term experience with it yet in any big city, with the possible exception of Houston, that tells us whether community-based policing "works."

Reason: What do you mean by "community-based policing"?

Wilson: I mean that the function of the police is to solve problems that have law-enforcement consequences in a way that is based on a genuine partnership with the neighborhood in both the venting of the problem and the discussion of the solution. Say the problem is drug dealers, or teenage gangs, or graffiti. Identifying those as problems and discussing solutions for them will be a collaborative effort. The police will do this proactively and will not wait simply to respond to a 911 call.

Reason: What kinds of proactive policing are you talking about?

Wilson: All sorts of things. You can enforce truancy laws, you can enforce a whole list of things: curfew laws, revoke a landlord's building occupancy permit, etc. The technique that police use--within broad limits--is almost irrelevant to the argument. The point is that it is to be proactive, problem-oriented, and neighborhood-based.

That still leaves a lot of questions. In what kind of neighborhoods can you have this kind of partnership? We know they now exist in affluent communities where the police and neighborhoods talk all the time. But how far down in the social structure can you go and still have that kind of effective partnership that will not either be destroyed by the absence of any social structure or corrupted by ideologues in the neighborhoods who will use this as a way of gaining and keeping power?

Reason: The Republicans are talking about passing their own crime bill in early 1995. Do you think it will counterbalance the weaker aspects of the current crime bill?

Wilson: First, most of the things that are in the current crime law as enacted are meaningless unless there are appropriations to fund them. The Republicans need do nothing more than block the appropriations for undesirable or untested programs. They do not need to repeal or amend the bill.

The larger question, however, is whether there is anything that the federal government can do at all to make a significant impact on the crime problem. I'm very skeptical of that. The Republicans may pass a crime bill that would meet with general approval--that might, indeed, meet with my approval. But it would not be a crime-reduction bill. It would be a justice-enhancing bill.

By that, I mean it would be a bill that reduces the extent to which the current system perpetuates injustices by, for example, allowing convicted prisoners to make endless and costly appeals. Or by penalizing police officers who make an honest mistake in making a search or conducting an interrogation in ways that allow the guilty party to go free. There is some reason to think that Congress can correct some of those injustices.

But whatever they do will have next to no effect on the crime rate. Still, it's worth doing nonetheless, because it would make people feel that the system now strikes a more reasonable balance between the rights of the accused and the rights of society.

Reason: As a society, how do we minimize crime?

Wilson: We have two kinds of crime problems. The first crime problem is common to every industrialized nation in the world, from the United States to France, Italy, Sweden, Australia, Canada, and even Switzerland: They all have high and rising rates of property crime and some increases in the rates of violent crime. I believe that the high rates of property crime (and some of the increase in violent crime) are part of the price you pay for freedom.