POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

AMERICAN JOURNAL
of LAW and EQUALITY

David Alan Sklansky*

Over the course of the past half century, policing in the United States has gone from an
institution in deep crisis and a ﬂashpoint in the country’s culture wars to a widely admired
example of innovative, bipartisan reform—and then back again. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, police forces were overwhelmingly white, male, and politically reactionary. Liberals
saw the police as racist, 暴力, and ineﬀective and blamed them, with justiﬁcation, 为了
hundreds of riots that convulsed American cities under Presidents Lyndon Johnson and
Richard Nixon. 同时, conservatives rallied around the police as symbols of
“law and order”—the cause that, more than any other, won Nixon the White House in
1968.1 By the late 1990s, 然而, the police had become far more diverse and far less
insular, and new approaches to law enforcement, especially “community policing” and
“problem-oriented policing,” had won remarkably broad respect across lines of race, 班级,
and ideology.2 Enthusiasts of “new governance” regularly pointed to police departments as
models of the kind of pragmatic reform other public sectors could proﬁtably emulate.3 The
pitched battles over the police in the Johnson and Nixon years, the jeering of oﬃcers as
“pigs,” and the strident calls to “support your local police” felt increasingly remote.

*Stanley Morrison Professor of Law, 斯坦福大学. Marty Berger provided superb research assistance. I received
helpful criticism and suggestions from my colleagues at Stanford Law School, especially Michelle Anderson, Ralph
Richard Banks, George Brown, John Donohue, and Robert Weisberg; from students here and at Fordham Law School;
and from Randall Kennedy and Jeﬀrey Sklansky.

MICHAEL W. FLAMM, LAW AND ORDER: STREET CRIME, CIVIL UNREST, AND THE CRISIS OF LIBERALISM IN THE 1960S (2005);
ELIZABETH HINTON, AMERICA ON FIRE: THE UNTOLD HISTORY OF POLICE VIOLENCE AND BLACK REBELLION SINCE THE 1960S
(2021); DAVID ALAN SKLANSKY, DEMOCRACY AND THE POLICE 59–73 (2008).
DAVID H. BAYLEY & JEROME SKOLNICK, THE NEW BLUE LINE: POLICE INNOVATION IN SIX AMERICAN CITIES (1986); Dan M.
Kahan & Tracey L. Meares, Foreword: The Coming Crisis of Criminal Procedure, 86 GEO. L.J. 1153, 1160–66
(1998).
Michael C. Dorf & Charles F. Sabel, A Constitution of Democratic Experimentalism, 98 COLUM. L. REV. 267, 327–32
(1998); Kami Chavis Simmons, New Governance and the “New Paradigm” of Police Accountability: A Democratic
Approach to Police Reform, 59 CATH. U. L. REV. 373 (2010).

© 2022 David Alan Sklansky. 根据知识共享署名-非商业性-禁止衍生品发布 4.0
International license (CC BY-NC-ND).
https://doi.org/10.1162/ajle_a_00036

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Then all the progress seemed to disappear. President Donald Trump resurrected “law
and order” as a partisan rallying cry, championed the most violent and aggressive forms of
policing, and allied himself with oﬃcers more loudly and divisively than Nixon ever had.
在夏天 2020, when tens of millions of protesters marched across the United
States and riots broke out in a series of cities, the motivating grievances were about the
警察, and especially about the large number of young Black men killed by law enforce-
ment oﬃcers. For many on the left, reforming the police no longer seemed possible; 他们
wanted to abolish the police or least to slash their budgets.4 Americans on the right, 意思是-
尽管, increasingly saw attacks on law enforcement as attacks on them and on their idea of
what the country should be.5 The calls in 2020 to “defund the police” were blamed, 在
2021, for rising homicide rates across the United States, for spates of robberies and car
thefts in some cities, and—by moderate Democrats—for oﬀ-year electoral losses to Repub-
licans.6 Law enforcement is again a political battleground, not just dividing Democrats
from Republicans but pitting progressives against moderates, young against old, and mar-
ginalized community against marginalized community.7 Once again, the police are in cri-
姐姐, and once again they seem part of the reason the country is in crisis. The recent history
of policing is a tale of reversals and upended expectations.

In other ways, 还有, the enterprise of policing is marked by contradictions. 这是
especially true of the deep and complicated connections between policing and equality.
Public law enforcement agencies are inherently redistributionist, socializing the use of
力量, but ever since the birth of modern policing in London in the late nineteenth century,
oﬃcers have protected the privileged against the “dangerous classes,” and American po-
licing in particular has long and continuing connections with racial subordination. 人们
of color in the United States are more likely than whites to be victims of crime and more
likely to be victims of police violence and abuse; they suﬀer from both police nonfeasance
and police malfeasance. Inadequate protection against crime is among the most damaging
forms of racial inequality in the United States, but so is the appallingly large number of
young people of color, particularly African Americans, killed every year by the police.

6
7

For thoughtful reﬂections on the abolitionist project, see Amna A. Akbar, An Abolitionist Horizon for (警察)
改革, 108 CALIF. L. REV. 1781 (2020); Tracey L. Meares, Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad, BOS. REV. (八月. 1,
2017), https://bostonreview.net/articles/tracey-l-meares-public-good-gone-bad/.
See Ashley Hackett, Why National Republicans Love Talking About “Defund the Police,” MINNPOST (Sept. 9, 2021),
https://www.minnpost.com/national/2021/09/why-national-republicans-love-talking-about-defund-the-police/;
William Saletan, Americans Don’t Want to Defund the Police. Here’s What They Do Want, SLATE (Oct. 21, 2021,
7:00 下午), https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/10/police-reform-polls-white-black-crime.html.
看, 例如, Erika D. 史密斯, Tough-on-Crime Pleas Sound All Too Familiar, L.A. TIMES, Dec. 17, 2021, at B1.
Id.; Kellen Browning & Brian X. 陈, Asian and Black Leaders Unite to End Hate but Split on Policing, N.Y.
TIMES, Dec. 20, 2021, at A11; Kim Parker & Kiley Hurst, Growing Share of Americans Say They Want More
Spending on Police in Their Area, PEW RSCH. CTR. BLOG (Oct. 26, 2021), https://pewrsr.ch/3pE9B2V.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Charting a new course for public safety thus means confronting paradoxes and trade-
oﬀs. It requires accepting necessary compromises while rejecting those that have been tol-
erated for lack of imagination. It also means confronting two diﬀerent social divides. 这
ﬁrst is the ideological divide, the growing chasm between left and right that today, as half a
century ago, has made policing a partisan ﬂashpoint. The second divide is sociological: 这
gulf separating privileged Americans from the poor people and people of color who dis-
proportionately bear the burdens of both crime and abusive forms of policing. 每一个
these two divides has implications for police reform. The ideological divide places a pre-
mium on proposals that can gain broad, cross-partisan support. The sociological divide
provides reason to give special weight to the interests and views of poor people and people
of color, especially African Americans.8

Although police reform was never as successful as it was said to be in the 1980s and
1990s, neither was it a dead end. There are ways to make policing fairer, more eﬀective,
less abusive, and less lethal by building on successes of past reforms while addressing their
very real shortcomings. 幸运的是, 而且, the proposals most likely to work are sup-
ported by Americans on both sides of the ideological divide and by a majority of the
groups most aﬀected by crime and by abusive policing.

我.

How can American policing be transformed into a more eﬀective and egalitarian system of
公安? We need to start with four key facts. 第一的, crime has devastating, dispropor-
tionate impacts on poor people and people of color, especially Black Americans. 第二,
police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement also take a tragic and outsize
toll on poor people and people of color, and here, 也, Black Americans are particularly
likely to be victimized. 第三, improved policing has helped make crime far less common
today than thirty or forty years ago, but some of the progress has been lost in recent years.
第四, there have been successes over the past several decades in reforming police depart-
评论, but the victories have been partial and very often ﬂeeting.

The Toll of Crime
Fear of crime is often whipped up for partisan purposes, but the damage that crime
inﬂicts on victims, as well as on their families and communities, is real and massive. Crim-
inal victimization is also regressive, falling most heavily on those who are already disad-
vantaged. All of this is particularly true of the most extreme forms of violence—homicide,
aggravated assault, and rape—which can fairly be called epidemic in the United States and

For a nuanced call to give more power over policing to the people most aﬀected by it, see Jocelyn Simonson, 警察
Reform Through a Power Lens, 130 YALE L.J. 778 (2021).

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which victimize African Americans, along with their families and neighborhoods, 在
greatly elevated rates.

There are between ﬁfteen thousand and twenty thousand homicides annually in the
United States—a rate of about ﬁve or six per one hundred thousand people in the country.
Among Black Americans, 尽管, the rate is much higher. African Americans die violently
at seven times the rate of whites; for men the ratio is nine to one. Homicide is the
third-leading cause of death among Americans aged ﬁfteen to thirty-four; it is the leading
cause of death among Black males under forty-ﬁve and the second-leading cause of death
among Latino males under forty-ﬁve. Young Black men are ﬁfteen times more likely than
their white counterparts to be the victims of homicide. Violence is responsible for more
lost years of Black male lives than cancer, stroke, and diabetes combined. Meanwhile more
than a million Americans are hospitalized each year from attacks that do not turn out to
be fatal, and African Americans are more likely than whites to be the victims of these
attacks, 也. Black people are also disproportionately represented among the several
hundred thousand victims of rape each year in the United States.9

The failure to protect African Americans and other marginalized populations from
crime is among the starkest and most damaging forms of racial inequality in the United
状态. No other wealthy country tolerates such extreme racial disparities in the risks of
violent victimization.10

而且, beyond the lives that it cuts short, homicide and other forms of extreme
violence can have tragic consequences for the families of victims and for the neighbor-
hoods where it occurs. High rates of violence make fear a constant presence in people’s
生活, aﬀecting the material conditions of their daily existence in countless ways. It turns
heat waves more deadly, 例如, by making people afraid to leave their homes. 奇尔-
dren living in neighborhoods with high rates of violence perform worse in school, rein-
forcing the cycle of disadvantage that keep families locked in intergenerational poverty.
This is not just a matter of correlation: Black schoolchildren do dramatically worse on
standardized tests in the days immediately after a local homicide than in the days just
前. Exposure to lethal violence makes it hard for them to concentrate, and the eﬀects
appear to accumulate with each additional killing. 犯罪, especially homicide and other
serious forms of violence, also depress property values, helping to maintain the gaping
disparities between the household wealth of Americans of diﬀerent races and robbing local
governments of tax revenues, which in turn makes it harder for them to confront not only

ELLIOTT CURRIE, A PECULIAR INDIFFERENCE: THE NEGLECTED TOLL OF VIOLENCE ON BLACK AMERICA 19–38 (2020); DAVID
ALAN SKLANSKY, A PATTERN OF VIOLENCE: HOW THE LAW CLASSIFIES CRIMES AND WHAT IT MEANS FOR JUSTICE 230
(2021); MICHAEL PLANTY ET AL., 我们. DEP’T OF JUST., BUREAU OF JUST. STAT., FEMALE VICTIMS OF SEXUAL VIOLENCE,
1994-2000, 在 3 (2013).
CURRIE, supra note 9, at 6–7.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

violence but virtually every other challenge they face. For communities as well as for in-
个人, exposure to criminal victimization, and in particular to homicide and serious
assault, is a pillar of American inequality.11

Much of the explanation for the racial disparities in rates of criminal victimization in
the United States lies outside the criminal justice system: in the pervasive, interlocking
disadvantages imposed on people of color, especially on African Americans. Discrimina-
tion perpetuates poverty, and poverty breeds crime, making potential oﬀenders more des-
perate and potential victims more vulnerable.12 But part of the explanation is inadequate
policing, and more precisely the long history of police departments protecting white,
wealthy neighborhoods more than poor neighborhoods disproportionately populated by
people of color.13

The Toll of Policing
If poor people and people of color in the United States have long suﬀered from inade-
quate protection against crime, they have also suﬀered from an excess of violence and abuse
at the hands of the police. Police oﬃcers kill roughly a thousand Americans every year. 一些-
where between half and eighty percent of the deaths, probably, are unjustiﬁed.14 And the vic-
tims of police killings are disproportionately people of color, with young Black people men
especially at risk. Black Americans are fourteen percent of the population but more than a
quarter of the people shot dead by the police.15 From 1980 通过 2019, on an age-adjusted
基础, Black people were more than three times as likely to be killed by the police as whites;
Latinos were close to twice as likely.16 Between 2015 和 2019, an unarmed Black man was
four times as likely to be fatally shot by the police as an unarmed white man.17 For

12
13

PATRICK SHARKEY, UNEASY PEACE: THE GREAT CRIME DECLINE, THE RENEWAL OF CITY LIFE, AND THE NEXT WAR ON
VIOLENCE 15–17, 76–96 (2018); THOMAS ABT, BLEEDING OUT: THE DEVASTATING CONSEQUENCES OF URBAN VIOLENCE
—AND A BOLD NEW PLAN FOR PEACE IN THE STREETS 21–28 (2019).
CURRIE, supra note 9, at 78–177; ABT, supra note 11, at 18–20.
看, 例如, RANDALL KENNEDY, CRIME, RACE, AND THE LAW 29–75 (1997); JILL LEOVY, GHETTOSIDE: A TRUE STORY OF
MURDER IN AMERICA (2015); Alexandra Natapoﬀ, Underenforcement, 75 FORDHAM L. REV. 1715 (2006).
富兰克林E. 齐姆林, Police Killings as a Problem of Governance, 687 神经网络. 是. ACAD. POL. & SOC. SCI. 114, 114–15
(2020).
Christine Tamir et al., Facts About the U.S. Black Population, PEW RSCH. CTR. BLOG (三月. 25, 2021), https://万维网
.pewresearch.org/social-trends/fact-sheet/facts-about-the-us-black-population/. 从 2015 通过 2021, 黑色的
people were twenty-seven percent of the victims of police shootings for which race could be identiﬁed. WASH.
POST POLICE SHOOTINGS DATABASE, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings
-database/ (last visited Feb. 15, 2022).
GBD 2019 Police Violence US Subnational Collaborators, Fatal Police Violence by Race and State in the USA,
1980–2019: A Network Meta-Regression, 398 LANCET 1239, 1245 (2021) (hereinafter Fatal Police Violence by
Race and State).
Joe Fox et al., What We’ve Learned About Police Shootings 5 Years After Ferguson, WASH. POST (八月. 9, 2019),
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/08/09/what-weve-learned-about-police-shootings-years-after
-ferguson/.

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Black and white males between the ages of twenty and twenty-four, the ratio was ﬁve to
one.18

Deaths at the hands of law enforcement oﬃcers are the most extreme way, but far
from the only way, in which the burdens of policing fall disproportionately on African
Americans and other people of color. People of color, especially young Black men, 是
more likely to be stopped by the police. When they are stopped, they are less likely to
be treated with respect, more likely to grabbed or struck, more likely to be searched,
and more likely to be arrested.19

The harsh, often brutal treatment of African Americans and other people of color by
police has ramiﬁcations far beyond the deaths, physical injuries, and indignities it inﬂicts.
Stops and arrests are entry points into the carceral system. Excessively aggressive, discrim-
inatory policing helps to sustain jail and prison populations that are bloated and racially
lopsided. And the interactions that people have with the police reverberate through their
社区, with lasting eﬀects not just on attitudes toward law enforcement but on
broader ideas about law, 政府, and society.20 Unsurprisingly, 非洲裔美国人
consistently report less conﬁdence in the police than whites.21 But mistreatment by the
police often leads, 还, to an enervating sense of disempowerment—a sense of physical
vulnerability, lack of belonging, and alienation—not just in the immediate victim of the
mistreatment but in friends, 家庭, and neighbors as well.22

The damage that American policing does to people of color and their communities has
received more attention over the past three decades for several reasons. Part of the expla-
nation is changes in law enforcement: the expansion of police forces since the 1980s; 更多的

18 Marc Schindler & Jeremy Kittredge, A Crisis Within a Crisis: Police Killings of Black Emerging Adults, HOW WE
RISE (BROOKINGS) BLOG (Dec. 2, 2020), https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/2020/12/02/a-crisis-within-a
-crisis-police-killings-of-black-emerging-adults/; Email to author from Jeremy Kittredge, Dec. 9, 2021 (clarifying
time period of analysis); see also Frank Edwards et al., Risk of Being Killed by Police Use of Force in the United
States by Age, Race–Ethnicity, and Sex, 116 PROC. NAT’L ACAD. SCIS. 16793, 16795 ﬁg.3 (2019) (indicating that
之间 2013 和 2018, a twenty-year-old Black male in the United States was ﬁve times as likely to be killed by
the police as a white male of the same age).
看, 例如, PAUL BUTLER, CHOKEHOLD: POLICING BLACK MEN 81–115 (2017); VICTOR M. RIOS, PUNISHED: POLICING THE
LIVES OF BLACK AND LATINO BOYS 4–5, 125–26, 147, 149, 155 (2011); Kami Chavis Simmons, The Legacy of Stop and
Frisk: Addressing the Vestiges of a Violent Police Culture, 49 WAKE FOREST L. REV. 849 (2014).
看, 例如, Jeﬀrey Fagan & Tracey L. Meares, 惩罚, Deterrence and Social Control: The Paradox of
Punishment in Minority Communities, 6 OHIO ST. J. CRIM. L. 173 (2008).
E.g., Jeﬀrey M. 琼斯, 黑色的, White Adults’ Conﬁdence Diverges Most on Police, GALLUP BLOG (八月. 12, 2020),
https://news.gallup.com/poll/317114/black-white-adults-conﬁdence-diverges-police.aspx; Rachel Lawler & Deja
托马斯, Black Californians Stand Out in Views on Police Treatment, PUB. POL’Y INST. CAL. BLOG (Apr. 16, 2021),
https://www.ppic.org/blog/black-californians-stand-out-in-views-of-police-treatment/; Saletan, supra note 5.
22 Monica Bell, Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement, 126 YALE L.J. 2054 (2017); see also Devon
瓦. Carbado, (乙)racing the Fourth Amendment, 100 MICH. L. REV. 946, 947–64 (2002); Benjamin Justice & Tracey
L. Meares, How the Criminal Justice System Educates Citizens, 651 神经网络. 是. ACAD. POL. & SOC. SCI. 159 (2020).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

aggressive use of stop-and-frisk; crackdowns on low-level, quality-of-life oﬀenses; 和
spread of militarized equipment and tactics, including through the proliferation and
increased use of SWAT teams.23 Increased public awareness of police violence has also
played a role; the key contributors here have been the Black Lives Matter movement
and the advent of smartphones and social media.24 But some part of the reason that police
violence and its disproportionate use against people of color has loomed larger may also be
a success to which law enforcement agencies themselves contributed: the dramatic, 反式-
formational decline of crime in the 1990s. As threats of private violence became less
omnipresent in poor neighborhoods of color, threats of police violence—which had always
been there, in the background—became more jarringly inexcusable.25

The Crime Decline and Partial Rebound
As devastating a toll as crime now takes in the United States, it did far more damage
thirty years ago. Between the early 1990s and the turn of the millennium, the national
homicide rate dropped by roughly forty percent, and the decline was even larger in the
neighborhoods and demographic groups hardest hit by crime. The rates of other crimes
saw similar drops.26 The sociologist Patrick Sharkey notes that for Black men, the homi-
cide drop was the largest public health achievement of the past several decades, shrinking
the racial disparity in life expectancy and preserving roughly one thousand years of life for
every one hundred thousand Black men. Sharkey has also documented the ways in which
the decline of crime changed the fabric of life in poor neighborhoods, allowing public
spaces to be reclaimed and alleviating the constant, debilitating fear of violent attack.
Combined with changes in law enforcement, the crime decline of the 1990s altered the
nature of the physical insecurity experienced in poor communities of color, 特别
by young people, “from the threat of violent peers to the threat of abusive police.”27

The plummeting crime rates of the 1990s were followed by more modest reductions in
homicides and aggravated assaults in the early years of the twenty-ﬁrst century. Homicide
rates began to rise, 尽管, 大约 2014, and then surged in cities across the country
during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 和 2021.28 Some major American cities

25
26
27
28

RADLEY BALKO, THE RISE OF THE WARRIOR COP: THE MILITARIZATION OF AMERICA’S POLICE FORCES (2014); BERNARD
HARCOURT, ILLUSION OF ORDER: THE FALSE PROMISE OF BROKEN WINDOWS POLICING (2005); ELIZABETH HINTON, FROM
THE WAR ON POVERTY TO THE WAR ON CRIME: THE MAKING OF MASS INCARCERATION IN AMERICA (2017).
FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING, WHEN POLICE KILL 202–18 (2017); Amna A. Akbar, Toward a Radical Reimagining of Law, 93
N.Y.U. L. 牧师. 405 (2018); Curtis Bunn, Why Black Lives Matter Matters, in CURTIS BUNN ET AL., SAY THEIR NAMES:
HOW BLACK LIVES CAME TO MATTER IN AMERICA 1, 6–62 (2021).
SHARKEY, supra note 11, at 28–30.
Id. at 3–13; FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING, THE GREAT AMERICAN CRIME DECLINE (2006).
SHARKEY, supra note 11, at 14–38, 66–71.
E.g., id. at 12–13; Julie Bosman et al., Lives Lost: Inside a Surging Homicide Rate, N.Y. TIMES, 十一月. 16, 2021, at A1.

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recorded more homicides in 2021 than in any prior year.29 And just as the crime decline in
the 1990s was particularly pronounced in poor neighborhoods and predominantly Black
街区, fatal shootings have risen most dramatically in recent years in those same
neighborhoods.30 In Los Angeles, 例如, Black Americans are nine percent of the
population but constituted thirty-six percent of homicide victims in 2021; in New York
城市, the ﬁgures are twenty-four percent and sixty-ﬁve percent, respectively.31 Rates of
other violent crimes do not appear to have risen as much as homicides, and the nation-
wide homicide rate in 2020 和 2021 remained well below its peak in the 1980s. 仍然, A
signiﬁcant amount of the progress made in reducing fatal attacks in the 1990s and early
2000s seems to have slipped away, at least temporarily and possibly for longer. 就像
there was nothing unavoidable about the high crime rates of the 1980s, there is no guar-
antee those rates will not return.

The causes of the crime drop in the 1990s are still debated, and so are the explanations
for the rising homicide rates of the past several years. Some of the credit for the crime
drop, 尽管, almost certainly should go to improvements in policing: either to the expan-
sion of police forces in the 1990s, or to changes in how the police operated, or most likely
to both factors. The evidence is threefold. 第一的, a growing body of research links increased
police presence to decreases in crime, especially homicides. Some of this research exam-
ines the eﬀects of changes in the size of local police forces; others look at the eﬀects of
temporary surges in police presence because of, 例如, terrorist alerts.32 Second,
the crime drop during the 1990s was roughly twice as large in New York City as elsewhere
在国内, and the most plausible explanation for the diﬀerence is the especially large
changes in the quantity of and quality of policing in New York City during that period.33
第三, there is strong evidence for the eﬀectiveness of particular police strategies that

Priya Krishnakumar et al., Fueled by Gun Violence, Cities Across the US Are Breaking All-Time Homicide Records
This Year, CNN (Dec. 12, 2021), https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/12/us/homicides-major-cities-increase-end-of
-year-2021/.
Patrick Sharkey & Alisabeth Marsteller, Neighborhood Inequality and Violence in Chicago, 1965–2020, 89 U. CHI.
L. REV. 349, 375–76, 380 tbl.3 (2022).
我们. C E N S U S, Q U I C KF A C T S, L O S A N G E L E S C I T Y, C A L I F O R N I A, htt ps://万维网. cen sus.gov/quickfact s
/losangelescitycalifornia; Tim Arango, For Host City, Super Bowl Is Proof of Progress, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 13,
2022, at A1, A21; Jim Quinn & Hannah E. Meyers, These Policies Were Supposed to Help Black People.
They’re Backﬁring, N.Y. TIMES (Feb. 15, 2022), https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/15/opinion/nyc-black-victims
-crime.html.
E.g., SHARKEY, supra note 11, at 45–47; Aaron Chalﬁn et al., Police Force Size and Civilian Race (Nat’l Bureau of
Econ. Rsch., Working Paper No. 28202, 2020), https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202; Aaron Chalﬁn & Justin
McCrary, Criminal Deterrence: A Review of the Literature, 55 J. ECON. LIT. 5, 13–16, 21–22 (2017); 约翰
MacDonald et al., The Eﬀects of Local Police Surges on Crime and Arrests in New York City, PLOS ONE, 11(6):
e0157223 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0157223.
ZIMRING, supra note 26, at 135–68; FRANKLIN E. ZIMRING, THE CITY THAT BECAME SAFE: NEW YORK’S LESSONS FOR
URBAN CRIME AND ITS CONTROL 100–50 (2012).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

became more widespread in the 1990s, especially tactics that focus on areas where a large
number of crimes take place and other examples of “problem-oriented policing.”34

Successes and Failures of Police Reform
American law enforcement didn’t just get better at controlling crime in the last
decades of the twentieth century. It also improved in other ways, albeit unevenly, 和
too often transiently. At the beginning of the 1970s, 例如, police departments in
the United States were overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly male. Many depart-
评论, particularly in big cities, grew more diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, often through
hiring plans adopted in response to lawsuits. By the early 2000s, some large police forces
were majority minority—this was true, 例如, in Los Angeles, 底特律, and Wash-
因顿, D.C.—and the percentage of female oﬃcers had grown as well. Smaller depart-
ments made less progress, 尽管. 而且, as court-ordered hiring plans have
expired over the past twenty years, diversiﬁcation has stalled even in larger departments,
and some past gains have been undone.35

Diversifying law enforcement agencies is not a panacea—there are no panaceas in
police reform—but accumulating research suggests that minority and female oﬃcers are
less likely to use unjustiﬁed force, especially against people of color.36 White male oﬃcers
partnered with minority or female oﬃcers also change their patterns of policing for the
更好的. And diverse departments are less insular, more open to outside ideas, and better
connected to the communities they serve, all of which makes them more likely to adopt
other reforms.37

One particular way in which police diversity has facilitated other reforms is by coun-
tering the strident hostility of police unions toward eﬀorts to reduce police violence, 在-
crease police accountability, and combat racial biases in law enforcement. Police unions
are not always implacable opponents of reform, but even today they do more to obstruct

E.g., PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING: SUCCESSFUL CASE STUDIES (Michael S. 斯科特 & Ronald V. Clarke eds., 2020); NAT’L
RSCH. COUNCIL, FAIRNESS AND EFFECTIVENESS IN POLICING: THE EVIDENCE 217–51 (2004); Joshua C. Hinkle et al.,
Problem-Oriented Policing for Reducing Crime and Disorder: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,
CAMPBELL SYSTEMATIC REVS. (2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1089; Chalﬁn & McCrary, supra note 32, at 17–19.
On hot-spots policing as a form of problem-oriented policing, see also MALCOLM SPARROW, HANDCUFFED: WHAT
HOLDS POLICING BACK, AND THE KEYS TO REFORM (2016).
David Alan Sklansky, Not Your Father’s Police Department: Making Sense of the New Demographics of Law
Enforcement, 96 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 1209 (2006); Lauren Leatherby & 理查德·A. Oppel Jr., 哪个
Police Departments Are as Diverse as Their Communities?, N.Y. TIMES, Sept. 23, 2020; 赋予生命. Graham,
America Is Losing Its Black Oﬃcers, ATLANTIC, Oct. 4, 2021.
E.g., Bocar A. Ba et al., The Role of Oﬃcer Race and Gender in Police-Civilian Interactions in Chicago, 371 SCIENCE
696 (2021); Mark Hoekstra & CarlyWill Sloan, Does Race Matter for Police Use of Force? Evidence From 911 Calls,
112 是. ECON. REV. 827 (2022).
Sklansky, supra note 35.

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than to champion measures for making law enforcement fairer, more eﬀective, and less
lethal.38 One reason for that is that the leadership of police unions remains considerably
older and whiter than police oﬃcers overall. Organizations of Black and Latino oﬃcers
have often championed reforms opposed by police unions, and the presence of oﬃcers
of color may in some cases have led police unions to moderate their own positions.39

The most important of those reforms over the past half century have been community
policing and problem-oriented policing, both of which spread widely in the 1980s and
1990s, sometimes as actual programs and sometimes, unfortunately, just as slogans.40
Virtually every police department in the country eventually claimed to practice “commu-
nity policing,” in part because it became a routine requirement for federal grants. At its
最好的, 尽管, community policing was more than a slogan. It was a comprehensive
reorientation of law enforcement away from a go-it-alone “warrior model” and toward
a collaborative “guardian model” that relies on consultation and cooperation with the
public and with other government agencies.41

Community policing had major weaknesses, some of which will be discussed below.
And because community policing was implemented with varying levels of seriousness, 它
was hard to rigorously evaluate. It spread, 尽管, because it often greatly increased public
satisfaction with the police and made people feel safer. Decreased fear of crime itself
probably led to real reductions in crime: when people felt safer they ventured out more,
and streets and parks tended to become safer with more people around.42

When implemented most fully, community policing also decentralized control within
police departments, and it broadened oﬃcers’ focus beyond crime suppression, allowing
them to address a range of other concerns raised by the communities they served. It there-
fore ﬁt well with problem-oriented policing, which called on oﬃcers to work creatively,
and on an ongoing basis, with other agencies and the public to address issues of particular
local concern. 有时, but not always, problem-oriented policing involved reallocating
resources to “hot spots” responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime; 有时,

40
41

Noam Scheiber et al., Fierce Protectors of Police Impede Eﬀorts at Reform, N.Y. TIMES, 六月 7, 2020, at A1. 为一个
careful, balanced assessment of police unionism placing it in the context both of criminal justice reform and of
public sector unionism more broadly, see Benjamin Levin, What’s Wrong with Police Unions?, 120 COLUM. L. REV.
1333 (2020).
莱文, supra note 38, at 1229–33; 凯瑟琳·L. Fisk & L. Song Richardson, Police Unions, 85 GEO. WASH. L. REV.
712, 744–80 (2017); Eli Hager & Weihua Li, A Major Obstacle to Police Reform: The Whiteness of Their Union
Bosses, MARSHALL PROJECT ( 六月 10, 2020), https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/06/10/a-major-obstacle-to
-police-reform-the-whiteness-of-their-union-bosses.
SPARROW, supra note 34.
James Forman Jr., Community Policing and Youth as Assets, 95 J. CRIM. L. & CRIMINOLOGY 1 (2004); see also, 例如,
SPARROW, supra note 34.
看, 例如, Debra A. 利文斯顿, Police Discretion and the Quality of Life in Public Places: 法院, Communities, 和
the New Policing, 97 COLUM. L. REV. 551 (1997).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

but not always, the resources reallocated were patrol oﬃcers. Unlike community policing,
problem-oriented policing—especially the focus on hot spots—lent itself to statistical eval-
uation, and a steadily increasing body of evidence credits these techniques with signiﬁcant
crime reductions.43 Furthermore, there are indications that hot spots and other forms of
problem-oriented policing have helped some cities defy the national trend and reduce
homicides in 2021.44

Beyond hot spots, community policing and problem-oriented policing frequently also
involved increased attention to low-level, “quality of life” oﬀenses, such as vandalism,
loitering, and disturbing the peace. Part of the idea was that when these kinds of violations
were left unaddressed, neighborhoods spiraled toward greater disorder, fewer people on
the streets, and higher rates of serious crime; this was the famous, later infamous, 理论
of “broken windows.” Police initiatives focused on quality-of-life oﬀenses could be empir-
ically evaluated, 也, and the results suggested that these programs were in fact eﬀective at
reducing serious crime, but not as dramatically as hot-spots policing and only when the
programs involved community collaboration and carefully targeted particular problems in
particular places. Aggressive, indiscriminate crackdowns on quality-of-life oﬀenses,
although frequently billed as community policing and problem-oriented policing, 做过
not reduce crime.45

At the other end of the spectrum from quality-of-life policing, problem-oriented
policing sometimes took the form of programs in which the police worked with commu-
nity groups and other government agencies to address particular groups of people respon-
sible for a disproportionate share of a city’s gun violence. These programs—the ﬁrst and
most famous of which was Boston’s Ceaseﬁre initiative in the 1980s and 1990s—were
sometimes called “focused deterrence” because their most prominent component was
often threats of heavy penal consequences targeted at the individuals and groups driving
violence in a particular area. But the programs also included oﬀers of social support to the
same people, 还有一些, more recent versions of this approach emphasize peer-to-peer
counseling more than policing. Evidence is growing that these programs, when done right,
signiﬁcantly reduced gun violence.46

43
44

See sources cited supra note 34.
Josiah Bates, Amid a Continuing Wave of Gun Violence, This U.S. City Is Bucking the Trend, 时间 (Dec. 29, 2021),
https://time.com/6129859/st-louis-shootings-homicides-decrease/ (regarding St. 路易斯); Sharon Grigsby, 达拉斯
Homicide Numbers Dropped by 13% 在 2021. How Did Chief Eddie Garcia Pull That Oﬀ?, DALLAS MORNING
NEWS (Dec. 30, 2021), https://www.dallasnews.com/news/commentary/2021/12/30/year-end-dallas-stats-show
-an-impressive-drop-in-violent-crime-how-did-chief-eddie-garcia-do-it/; Sarah Holder & Fola Akinnibi, 作为
Violent Crime Falls in Dallas, Answers Go Beyond Policing, BLOOMBERG (Feb. 3, 2022), https://www.bloomberg
.com/news/features/2022-02-03/defying-national-trend-violent-crime-in-dallas-is-down.
安东尼A. Braga et al., Disorder Policing to Reduce Crime: A Systematic Review, CAMPBELL SYSTEMATIC REVS.
(2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1050.
安东尼A. Braga et al., Focused Deterrence Strategies Eﬀects on Crime: A Systematic Review, CAMPBELL SYSTEMATIC
REVS. (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1051; see infra notes 121–122 and accompanying text.

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At their best, 而且, community policing and problem-oriented policing provided
their greatest beneﬁts in poor neighborhoods. These programs were redistributive, 并不是
just because they were resource intensive, requiring lots of time from lots of oﬃcers in
neighborhoods hit hardest by crime. Community policing and problem-oriented policing
required police to adopt what the criminologist James Q. Wilson had called the “service
style” of law enforcement—the kind of policing typically found in relatively well-oﬀ
suburbs—and to move away from the types of law enforcement traditionally pursued in
poorer areas—what Wilson had called the “legalistic style,” which prioritized arrests, 和
the “watchman style,” which emphasized order maintenance.47 (反过来, 什么时候
community policing and problem-oriented policing were reduced to “zero tolerance”
campaigns against quality-of life oﬀenses, they doubled down on the watchman style.)
此外, community policing and order-maintenance policing frequently required
oﬃcers to arrange for crime-ridden neighborhoods to receive a range of services other
than law enforcement: trash cleanup, rodent abatement, streetlight repair, 等等.
Oﬃcers might complain that they had not signed up to be social workers, but it turned
out they often were good at getting other municipal agencies to pay more attention to
marginalized neighborhoods.48

For several diﬀerent reasons, community policing and problem-oriented policing have
lost much of their luster over the past two decades. The terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001, led to calls for more aggressive forms of law enforcement, and state and local budget
shortfalls in the early 2000s led many departments to view community policing and
problem-oriented policing as unaﬀordable luxuries. Degraded forms of these programs,
like the zero-tolerance crackdowns on turnstile jumping and “squeegee men” in New York
城市, helped to sour community activists against them and, 最终, 在很多情况下,
against the whole project of police reform.49 And it became increasingly clear that, 甚至
at their best, community policing and problem-oriented policing had some glaring ﬂaws.
One was that these programs paid little attention to police violence. This was not
inherent in the philosophy of either set of reforms. Departments could have collaborated
with the public and agencies outside law enforcement to reduce police violence. 但他们
rarely did. Police reformers deemphasized the problem of police violence, especially police
killings, because they did not appreciate the gravity of the problem. This was partly
because the victims were generally members of marginalized groups (贫穷的, young, 和
黑色的, Latino, or Native American), partly because federal government did not (and still

48
49

JAMES Q. WILSON, VARIETIES OF POLICE BEHAVIOR: THE MANAGEMENT OF LAW AND ORDER IN EIGHT COMMUNITIES (1968);
see DOROTHY GUYOT, POLICING AS THOUGH PEOPLE MATTER 5–7 (1991); SKLANSKY, supra note 1, 在 4.
看, 例如, WESLEY G. SKOGAN, POLICE AND COMMUNITY IN CHICAGO: A TALE OF THREE CITIES 174, 177–210 (2006).
SPARROW, supra note 34.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

不) collect reliable data on police killings or other forms of police violence, 和
partly because, until the advent of body cameras and smartphones, oﬃcers’ accounts of
these episodes were diﬃcult to challenge. It took those technological developments and
the Black Lives Matter movement to give the issue of police killings the attention it had
long deserved.50

尽管如此, lethal police violence against Black Americans and Latinos has declined
signiﬁcantly over the past half century. Controlling for the age of the victims, the risk of
being killed by a police oﬃcer in the United States fell during the 1980s, and the drop was
particularly dramatic—around ﬁfty percent—for Black Americans and Latinos. 这
decline in police killings over the course of that decade appears to have been mainly
attributable to new policies restricting the use of lethal force against ﬂeeing suspects.51
In the following three decades, 相比之下, the age-adjusted rate of police killings of Black
Americans and Latinos remained roughly constant nationwide, while the rate for white
Americans increased; 因此, the age-adjusted ﬁgure for Americans overall also rose
有些. In some places, 尽管, rates continued to drop. 从 2013 通过 2019,
police killings rose in rural areas and suburbs but declined by thirty percent in the thirty
largest American cities, probably because of new restrictions on oﬃcers’ use of deadly
force.52

Police violence in some cities has dropped especially sharply. In Los Angeles, 为了
例子, signiﬁcant uses of force by the police appear to have been cut in half between
2006 和 2019, and police shootings appear to have declined by forty percent.53 Shootings
by LAPD oﬃcers increased alarmingly in 2021 but remained far lower than in past
decades.54 In Cincinnati, 另一方面, uses of force by the police have dropped
by ﬁfty percent over the past ﬁfteen years, but the rate of police shootings has not shown

50
51

SKLANSKY, supra note 9, at 111–14.
Lawrence W. Sherman, Reducing Fatal Police Shootings as System Crashes: 研究, 理论, and Practice, 1 神经网络.
REV. CRIMINOLOGY 421 (2017); Fatal Police Violence by Race and State, supra note 16, 在 1246, 1251.
Samuel Sinyangwe, Police Are Killing Fewer People in Big Cities, But More in Suburban and Rural America,
FIVETHIRTYEIGHT BLOG ( 六月 1, 2020), https://ﬁvethirtyeight.com/features/police-are-killing-fewer-people-in-big
-cities-but-more-in-suburban-and-rural-america/.
These statistics are based on ﬁgures provided by the LAPD. L.A. Police Dep’t, Categorical Use of Force Totals
2003–2005年 (2021) (on ﬁle with author); L.A. Police Dep’t, Categorical Use of Force Totals 2006–2020 (2021) (在
ﬁle with author).
Kevin Rector, Shootings by LAPD Oﬃcers Rising Again After Years of Decline, L.A. TIMES, (Oct. 15, 2021), https://
www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-10-15/string-of-recent-lapd-shootings-pushes-2021-count-beyond-2020
-2019-totals; see also Kevin Rector et al., LAPD Tactics Under Scrutiny After Oﬃcer Fatally Shoots Girl in
Burlington Dressing Room, L.A. TIMES (Dec. 24, 2021), https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-12-24/a
-girl-trying-on-clothes-a-cop-and-a-shocking-shooting-at-burlington-dressing-room.

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a similar decline. Police shootings in Cincinnati rose sharply between 2006 和 2011,
plummeted in 2012 和 2013, spiked again in 2014 和 2015, and then gradually dropped
over the next several years, returning by 2019 to roughly the 2006 level.55 Los Angeles and
Cincinnati have been sites of major, sustained eﬀorts at police reform over the past two
几十年, so the statistics regarding uses of force by police in these cities over the past de-
cade are encouraging in some respects (signiﬁcant reductions in uses of force in both cities
and signiﬁcant reductions in police shootings in Los Angeles) but disappointing in others
(no overall progress on police shootings in Cincinnati).

The statistics also underscore the great variation in patterns of police violence, 如
crime rates, 美国各地. The Police Scorecard Project, led by the activist and
data scientist Samuel Sinyangwe, compared the number of uses of deadly force per ten
thousand arrests for hundreds of American police departments from 2016 到 2020: 这
results ranged widely, from ﬁfteen down to zero.56 If the United States as a whole had
New York City’s rate of police killings, almost 600 fewer Americans would have been
killed by the police in 2019.57 (If America had New York City’s homicide rate, 4,400 更少
people would have died violently that same year.58) Police reformers can succeed, 和
have succeeded, but the victories have been slow, 部分的, and often ﬂeeting.

二.

By the middle of the second decade of the twenty-ﬁrst century, a small but growing num-
ber of activists and scholars were losing faith in the project of police reform and were
calling for the police to be abolished altogether.59 A milder version of this idea, “defund
警察,” spread widely in 2020. The argument was straightforward. If oﬃcers victimize
poor people and people of color and also fail to protect them from crime, why not replace
police departments, partly or entirely, with something less harmful and more eﬀective?

56
57

See PDI (Police Data Initiative) CPD Shootings, CITY OF CINCINNATI, https://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/Safety/PDI
-Police-Data-Initiative-CPD-Shootings/7a3r-kxji; PDI (Police Data Initiative) Oﬃcer Involved Shootings, CITY OF
CINCINNATI, https://data.cincinnati-oh.gov/Safety/PDI-Police-Data-Initiative-Oﬃcer-Involved-Shooti/r6q4-muts.
Calculations are on ﬁle with the author.
POLICE SCORECARD, https://www.policescorecard.org.
According to Mapping Police Violence, another project led by Sinyangwe, police killed 1,096 people nationwide in
2019 和 14 in New York City. MAPPING POLICE VIOLENCE, https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/. 这 2020 人口普查
estimated the population of the United States at 331,449,281 and the population of New York City at 8,804,190.
QUICK FACTS, 我们. CENSUS, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/.
The FBI estimates there were 16,425 homicides nationwide in 2019; New York City recorded 319 homicides that
年. 看 2019 Crime in the United States, 我们. DEP’T OF JUST., https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in
-the-u.s.-2019/topic-pages/murder; N.Y. POLICE DEP’T, CRIME AND ENFORCEMENT ACTIVITY IN NEW YORK CITY (2019).
E.g., ALEX VITALE, THE END OF POLICING (2017).

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Like the details of “community policing,” the precise meaning of “defund the police”
could be hard to pin down. Asked what a world with defunded police would look like,
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in June 2020 that it would look “like a
suburb.”60 That suggested that defunding the police might involve not taking money away
from law enforcement but instead bringing the service style of policing to poor and
marginalized neighborhoods—much as community policing had aimed to do in the
1980s and 1990s. More commonly, 尽管, advocates of police defunding sharply disas-
sociated themselves from the agenda of community policing: their principal goal was not
“better” policing but less policing. Activists argued that “[t]he more cops you have, 这
more encounters our communities have with law enforcement, the more violent encoun-
ters there are.”61 Ocasio-Cortez herself later criticized proposed budget cuts at the New
York Police Department for not going far enough. “Defunding police means defunding
警察,” she explained.62

It is hard to blame “defund the police” for the rising rates of homicide during the
pandemic or the spikes some localities saw in property oﬀenses because average police
budgets were not substantially leaner at the end of 2020 than when the year began, 和
many cities restored funding to police in 2021.63 That was partly because the slogan never
was embraced by a majority of Americans, regardless of race or party, and support for
it steadily declined as the protests of 2020 grew more distant, the pandemic dragged
在, and worries about crime deepened. 到年底 2021, nearly half of American
adults, including thirty-eight percent of the Black population and forty-six percent of
the Latino population, wanted more spending on law enforcement.64

The argument for police defunding deserves to be taken seriously. A signiﬁcant
minority of Americans, including more than forty percent of Black adults, a quarter of
Latino adults, and many activists and scholars, continue to favor cutting police budgets.65

62
63

Katherine Fung, AOC Says NYPD’s $1 Billion Budget Cut Doesn’t Go Far Enough to Defund Police, NEWSWEEK
( 六月 30, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-says-nypds-1-billion-budget-cut-doesnt-go-far-enough-defund
-police-1514523.
史密斯, supra note 6, at B2 (quoting Cat Brooks); see also, 例如, Mariame Kaba, 是的, We Mean Literally Abolish the
警察, N.Y. TIMES, 六月 14, 2020, at SR2 (arguing that “[t]he only way to diminish police violence is to reduce
contact between the public and the police”).
Fung, supra note 60.
E.g., 史密斯, supra note 6, at B2; Fola Akinnibi et al., Cities Say They Want to Defund the Police. Their Budgets Say
否则, BLOOMBERG ( Jan. 12, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-city-budget-police-funding/;
Zusha Elinson et al., Cities Reverse Police Defunding Amid Rising Crime, WALL ST. J。, 可能 27, 2021; J. 大卫
古德曼, Cities Reverse on Police Cuts as Crime Rises, N.Y. TIMES, Oct. 11, 2021, at A1.
派克 & Hurst, supra note 7; As Violent Crime Leaps, Liberal Cities Rethink Cutting Police Budgets, ECONOMIST,
Jan. 15, 2022.
派克 & Hurst, supra note 7.

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And the checkered history of police reform gives ample reason to wonder whether, 作为
activists suggest, it is time to try something diﬀerent.66

But defunding the police is not the answer, for three reasons. The ﬁrst reason is

政治的, the second is practical, and the third is conceptual.

To begin with the politics: it matters that most people oppose defunding, 包括
and often especially in the nonwhite neighborhoods hit hardest by both crime and abusive
forms of policing. And it matters even more when, as today, politics are highly polarized.
Eric Adams, a former police captain, campaigned successfully for mayor of New York in
2021, opposing calls to defund the police and promising to reform the NYPD instead. 他的
key support came from Black, Latino, and low-income voters in the outer boroughs.67 In
十一月 2021, a year and a half after George Floyd died brutally at the hands of
Minneapolis police oﬃcers, voters in that city rejected a measure to replace the police de-
partment with a new Department of Public Safety. The measure failed in part because it
was opposed by a majority of voters in the city’s largest Black neighborhoods.68 In the fall
的 2020, I helped supervise a group of law students at Stanford who met with members of
the African American Mayors Association to identify responsibilities that might usefully
be shifted away from the police. What surprised the students most was how opposed the
mayors were to removing police oﬃcers from schools. (The students wound up recom-
mending that step anyway, for reasons that will be discussed below.)69

Remaking public safety takes time. This is particularly true of approaches like commu-
nity policing and problem-oriented policing, which aim to turn police departments into
learning organizations committed to continual improvement.70 Progress in reforming the
police has been frustratingly slow in part because so many reforms, including programs of
community policing and problem-oriented policing, are abandoned when new police

66 Martin Kuz, “It’s Way Past Time to Try Something New”: The Push to Defend Police, CHRISTIAN SCI. MONITOR ( 六月
19, 2020) (quoting Mike Griﬃn), https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2020/0619/It-s-way-past-time-to-try
-something-new-The-push-to-defund-police. For a helpful eﬀort to incorporate abolitionist insights into an
agenda for police reform, see Meares, supra note 4.
Andre J. 艾灵顿, Eric Adams, Who Opposed Defunding the Police, Poised to Be New York’s Second Black Mayor
After Primary Win, NEWSWEEK ( 七月 6, 2021), https://www.newsweek.com/eric-adams-who-opposed-defunding
-police-poised-new-yorks-second-black-mayor-after-primary-win-1607379; Raeedah Wahid, Adams Won By
Betting on a New York Divided By Race and Income, BLOOMBERG ( 七月 21, 2021), https://www.bloomberg.com
/graphics/2021-nyc-mayoral-analysis/.
Nekima Levy Armstrong, Black Voters Want Better Policing, N.Y. TIMES, 十一月. 11, 2021, at A23; Michelle S. Phelps,
Why Voters Rejected Plans to Replace the Minneapolis Police Department—and What’s Next for Policing Reform,
CONVERSATION (十一月. 4, 2021), https://theconversation.com/why-voters-rejected-plans-to-replace-the-minneapolis
-police-department-and-whats-next-for-policing-reform-171183.
See MADELYN COLES ET AL., SAFETY BEYOND POLICING: PROMOTING CARE OVER CRIMINALIZATION (2021).
See Charles F. Sabel & William H. 西蒙, The Duty of Responsible Administration and the Problem of Police
Accountability, 33 YALE J. REG. 165, 193–200 (2016).

69
70

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chiefs are appointed, political winds shift, crime rates rise, or budgets are tightened.71
Successful transformation of public safety systems requires reforms that can be sustained
over the long haul.72 But the weak public support for police defunding and the shifting
politics of crime mean that even when police budgets are trimmed, the cuts are likely to be
reversed. This is in fact precisely what happened across the United States in 2021, as cities
restored funding they had taken from police departments in 2020 and in many cases gave
them additional money.73 Police defunding is not, 温和地说, a politically resilient
战略, especially in a period marked by extreme polarization.

Sometimes radical change is necessary despite its lack of political support. 但是
problems with police defunding go beyond its unpopularity. As a practical matter, 选民
are right to be skeptical that taking money from law enforcement will reduce police abuse,
let alone improve public safety. Calls to defund the police draw inspiration from the move-
ment to abolish prisons; 在这两种情况下, abolition is understood both as a utopian
endpoint—a horizon to aim for—and a path for practical, incremental progress toward
a better society.74 This makes sense for prisons, because the grotesque hypertrophy of
the American carceral system may be its signal vice. There are so many people in prison
who plainly don’t need to be there that it would take years of aggressive decarceration
before we got to diﬃcult cases. For the foreseeable future, any decreases in the number
of people the United States locks up will very clearly be changes for the better, 减少
the harms of mass incarceration without endangering public safety.

But the beneﬁts of incremental reductions in the scale of policing are less obvious.
Smaller police departments, with fewer contacts with the public, are not necessarily less
lethal, and larger, better-funded departments are not, for that reason, more abusive. 康姆-
munity policing, problem-oriented policing, and better systems of police oversight all cost
钱; this is particularly true of the ﬁrst two, which require freeing up oﬃcers’ time.
Cutting funding for police departments means making these reforms more diﬃcult. 它也是
can mean oﬃcers who are overworked, overstressed, and cut oﬀ from the people and
neighborhoods they are supposed to be protecting, all of which can lead to more, 相当
than fewer, violent encounters. After the 2008 ﬁnancial crisis forced the city of Vallejo,
加利福尼亚州, to reduce the size of its police force by close to forty percent, police killings

72
73

看, 例如, Samuel Walker, Institutionalizing Police Accountability Reforms: The Problem of Making Police Reforms
Endure, 32 英石. LOUIS U. PUB. L. REV. 57, 60–65 (2012).
See SHARKEY, supra note 11, 在 183.
Elinson et al., supra note 63; 古德曼, supra note 63; see also Jay Caspian King, In Big City Politics, a Call
to Fund the Police, N.Y. TIMES (Dec. 20, 2021), https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/20/opinion/mayors-fund
-police.html.
See Akbar, supra note 4; Allegra M. McLeod, Prison Abolition and Grounded Justice, 62 UCLA L. REV. 1156
(2015).

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skyrocketed.75 In contrast, Camden, New Jersey, signiﬁcantly reduced police violence
through reforms that ultimately involved more oﬃcers, more contacts with the public,
and a larger police budget.76

Vallejo and Camden are only two cities, and in diﬀerent ways their experiences are
exceptional. But it is diﬃcult to identify any city that has reduced police violence by
shrinking its department, or any department that has been successfully reformed on the
便宜的. The suburbs that Representative Ocasio-Cortez called models of police defunding
often spend more money and employ more oﬃcers per capita than large urban depart-
评论. The disparity is even greater when the large number of private security guards sup-
plementing public police in many American suburbs is taken into account.77

Advocates of police defunding often stress that they are calling not just for cuts in
police budgets but for allocating the savings to schools and social services.78 What hap-
pened in Vallejo, they would say, is not a fair test of their agenda. 另一方面,
Camden—which disbanded its police department and created a new one, without a union
contract—has sometimes been cited as a good example of what it truly means to “defund
the police.”79 But most advocates of police defunding make clear that they really do mean
taking money away from law enforcement and reducing the number of contacts between
police and the public.80 The opposite happened in Camden.

此外, when money is taken away from police, there is no guarantee where it
will be spent or if it will be spent at all. Advocates of mental health deinstitutionalization
in the 1970s called for closing mental hospitals and replacing them with community

77
78

Peter Jamison, This California City Defunded Its Police Force. Killings by Oﬃcers Soared, WASH. POST ( 六月 23,
2020), https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/this-california-city-defunded-its-police-force-killings
-by-oﬃcers-soared/2020/06/22/253eeddc-b198-11ea-856d-5054296735e5_story.html; Sam Levin, 19 Dead in a
十年: The Small American City Where Violent Police Thrive, GUARDIAN ( 六月 13, 2020), https://万维网
.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/13/vallejo-california-police-violence-sean-monterrosa.
Joseph Goldstein & Kevin Armstrong, The City That Fired Its Whole Police Department, N.Y. TIMES, 七月 12, 2020,
at A1; Allison Steele & Sean Collins Walsh, Camden Disbanded Its Police Department and Built a New One. Can
Others Learn From It?, PHILA. INQUIRER ( 六月 14, 2020), https://www.inquirer.com/news/camden-police-defund
-minneapolis-george-ﬂoyd-protest-20200609.html; Nathan Layne, One American City’s Model of Policing
Reform Means Building “Social Currency,” REUTERS ( 六月 12, 2020), https://www.reuters.com/article/us
-minneapolis-police-protests-camden/one-american-citys-model-of-policing-reform-means-building-social
-currency-idUSKBN23J2RU.
赋予生命. Sklansky, The Private Police, 46 UCLA L. REV. 1165, 1171–83 (1999).
Ryan W. 磨坊主, What Does “Defund the Police” Mean and Why Some Say “Reform” Is Not Enough, USA TODAY
( 六月 8, 2020), https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/08/what-does-defund-police-mean-george
-ﬂoyd-black-lives-matter/5317240002/.
Rashawn Ray, What Does “Defund the Police” Mean and Does it Have Merit?, BROOKINGS BLOG ( 六月 19, 2020),
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/ﬁxgov/2020/06/19/what-does-defund-the-police-mean-and-does-it-have-merit/.
看, 例如, Akbar, supra note 4, 在 1804; Philip V. McHarris, Community Policing Is Not the Answer, APPEAL (Dec. 2,
2019), https://theappeal.org/community-policing-is-not-the-answer/.

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mental health services; they succeeded in closing mental hospitals.81 To quote the crimi-
nologist Cynthia Lum, who began her career as a patrol oﬃcer in East Baltimore in the late
1990s, America’s poorest neighborhoods suﬀer from “under-everything.” They need more
resources for every kind of municipal service, including the police. And Lum doubts that
other social service providers “will suddenly care more about these communities and do so
without disparity if given the responsibilities previously delivered by the police.” That is
妄想, she says, contradicted by the experience of “any police oﬃcer who has
tried to get social services to respond to an abandoned or neglected child at three in the
morning.”82 In fact, some of the best documented successes of community policing came
when oﬃcers helped neighborhoods secure help from other city agencies. It should not
take a police oﬃcer to get more social services in an impoverished neighborhood—or bet-
ter streetlights, or rodent abatement—but often that was precisely what it took.

The most fundamental problem with the strategy of police defunding, 尽管, 做
not have to do with its weak political support or with concerns about its practical oper-
化. The most fundamental problem is conceptual: a lack of clarity about what is to be
defunded and what should replace it. Advocates of defunding often say that communities
themselves can provide public safety better than the police. But what counts as the com-
社区, and what counts as the police? Do the police stop being “the police” if they pursue
problem-solving or public-health approaches to community safety? Are they deﬁned by
their uniforms? Their guns? Their badges and legal powers? If wealthy communities re-
place public oﬃcers with private guards, does that count as defunding the police?

The sociologist Egon Bittner deﬁned the police by their unique social role: their re-
sponsibility for responding in emergencies where force may need to be used because
“something that should not be happening is happening and someone must do something
about it now!” What is special about the police, he said, is their ability to threaten force,
and their responsibility to do so, in situations that require it.83 One reason this is a helpful
way to deﬁne “the police” is that much of what is problematic about law enforcement—so
many of the pathologies of police work—can be traced to oﬃcers’ ability to use or threaten
force and to the circumstances in which, for that reason, they are called to respond.

82
83

看, 例如, 罗伯特·韦斯伯格, Restorative Justice and the Danger of Community, 2003 UTAH L. REV. 343, 363–68
(2003); Máximo Langer, Penal Abolitionism and Criminal Law Minimalism: Here and There, Then and Now,
134 HARV. L. REV. 42, 66–67 (2020); Rachel E. Barkow, The Political Path of Prison Abolition in America
37–43 (unpublished manuscript, 四月 2, 2022). Regarding the dangers of relying on budget cutting as a route to
criminal justice reform, see also HADAR AVIRAM, CHEAP ON CRIME: RECESSION-ERA POLITICS AND THE TRANSFORMATION
OF AMERICAN PUNISHMENT (2015). On the importance of “building up” in addition to “dismantling,” see Tracey L.
Meares, Synthesizing Narratives of Policing and Making a Case for Policing as a Public Good, 53 英石. LOUIS U. L.J.
553, 558–61 (2019).
Cynthia Lum, Perspectives on Policing: Cynthia Lum, 4 神经网络. REV. CRIMINOLOGY 19, 23 (2021).
EGON BITTNER, Florence Nightingale in Pursuit of Willie Sutton: A Theory of the Police, in ASPECTS OF POLICE WORK
233, 249 (1990).

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Understood in this way—deﬁned in terms of their distinctive social function—the po-
lice will be with us in one form or another for the foreseeable future. The key questions
about the police are how they will be managed, how they will be held accountable, 和
what tasks they will be given beyond their core responsibility of responding to situations
where force may be needed.

It is not much of an answer to say that resources should be invested in the community
instead of in the police, or that the community rather than the police should keep
neighborhoods safe. Communities act through groups, 组织, and governments—
including police departments. 而且, communities do not have clear, natural bound-
aries, and however they are deﬁned, they contain people with varying points of view.
Communities are not monolithic. What needs to be decided is not whether the commu-
nity should be empowered, 但如何: what kinds of agencies should provide public safety,
how they should be conﬁgured and controlled, and how conﬂicting values and expecta-
tions will be reconciled.84

Advocates of police defunding who imagine communities to be organic, naturally
deﬁned, and homogeneous are repeating a key mistake of the backers of deinstitutional-
ization in the 1970s, who assumed that communities would come together to take care of
people released from mental hospitals.85 The community policing movement made a
similar mistake; that is how it wound up blind to police violence. Backers of community
policing often supposed that residents of a neighborhood would speak with one voice.
Young or old, working or unemployed, conforming or rebellious, they would share
common values. Because of this simplifying assumption, community policing programs
often relied on business owners and older residents to express the sentiments of the com-
社区, and little eﬀort was made, 尤其, to solicit the views of young people.86
That was a critical error, in part because it is young people who tend to be the victims
of police violence.87

Community policing would have been more successful and more “durable” (to borrow
Patrick Sharkey’s term for policies that can be sustained over the long term)88 had it paid
more attention to the complexity of communities.89 But instead of working to incorporate
the concerns of all members of the public, community policing relied too often on the

85
86
87
88

Cf. Langer, supra note 81, 在 44 (stressing that “[e]very society has to structure power relations and regimes
somehow,” and that therefore “the question is which power relations and regimes are more just than other
alternatives”).
See Weisberg, supra note 81, at 363–68.
For the deﬁnitive exploration of this failure, see Forman, supra note 41, at 16–25.
Id. at 25–36.
SHARKEY, supra note 11, at 183–85; PATRICK SHARKEY, STUCK IN PLACE: URBAN NEIGHBORHOODS AND THE END OF
PROGRESS TOWARD RACIAL EQUALITY 12, 166–99 (2013).
See Tracey L. Meares, Place and Crime, 73 CHI.-KENT L. REV. 669, 684–94 (1998).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

小的, unrepresentative groups who showed up at neighborhood meetings. Those groups
were unrepresentative in part because departments often worked hardest to involve com-
munity members whose views they found congenial; 因此, the voices elevated in
community policing were often less critical of the police, and more supportive of aggres-
sive law enforcement tactics, then the public as a whole.90 All of this meant that commu-
nity policing, like deinstitutionalization in the 1970s, was critically undermined by a
certain naivety about actual communities.91 Arguments for defunding the police often
have the same fault.

三、.

A key element of the extraordinarily punitive turn of American criminal justice in the
1980s and 1990s was the rejection of rehabilitation: the abandonment of any eﬀort to
make prisons places that would help people convicted of crimes instead of warehousing
them and making them suﬀer. This reimagination of the prison, making pain and contain-
ment its deﬁning objectives, was commonly justiﬁed by the claim that rehabilitation was a
proven, unmitigated failure. Studies of rehabilitation programs, it was said, had exhaus-
tively demonstrated that “nothing works.” That was an egregious misreading of the re-
搜索, distorting even the article from which the phrase “nothing works” had been
lifted. As the sociologist David Garland has written, the aggressive insistence that “nothing
works” was less a careful assessment of the evidence than an “emotive overreaction” to the
excessive faith that had earlier been placed in rehabilitation, a cathartic expression of “the
righteous anger of the disillusioned.”92

If police reformers feel disillusioned and angry today, it is hard to blame them. 这是
easy to understand why many scholars and activists now say community policing made
things worse, not better, by legitimizing the police and expanding their footprint.93 But
police reform has had successes as well as failures. Deep, long-lasting change will require
recognizing what has gone right as well as what has gone wrong.

The successes and failures of police reform over the past half century oﬀer three
lessons. The ﬁrst is that successful reform requires broad public support. Transforming
law enforcement takes time and persistence, usually over a decade or more, and reforms
opposed by signiﬁcant parts of the public are likely to be abandoned too quickly, typically
after only a few years. The second lesson, connected to the ﬁrst, is that even in the smallest

90
91

92
93

David Thacher, Conﬂicting Values in Community Policing, 35 L. & SOC’Y REV. 765, 773–80, 788 (2001).
See STEVE HERBERT, CITIZENS, COPS, AND POWER: RECOGNIZING THE LIMITS OF COMMUNITY (2006); SKLANSKY, supra note 1,
at 86–90, 98–102. On the complexity of real communities and the implications for criminal justice reform, see also
John Rappaport, Some Doubts About “Democratizing” Criminal Justice, 87 U. CHI. L. REV. 711, 739–57 (2020).
DAVID GARLAND, THE CULTURE OF CONTROL: CRIME AND SOCIAL ORDER IN CONTEMPORARY SOCIETY 69 (2002).
看, 例如, Akbar, supra note 4, 在 1804; McHarris, supra note 80.

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社区, people have conﬂicting aspirations about policing and public safety; 他们
often disagree about how to balance crime control and order maintenance with the inter-
ests of privacy, liberty, freedom from harassment, and protection against state violence.
There is no single, uniﬁed “people,” no homogenous “community.” The third and ﬁnal
lesson grows out of the ﬁrst two. Because police reform requires balancing contradictory
values and mediating between competing groups, reformers need models. Big successes,
when they come, are built on earlier, smaller successes.

New eﬀorts to remake public safety should heed each of these lessons. Police reform
stands the best chance of working when it is durable, pluralistic, and experience-based.
Defunding the police fails these tests. It isn’t durable, because it lacks broad public
support or even support by a narrow majority. Most Americans, 不分种族, 反对
defunding the police. Defunding the police isn’t a pluralistic agenda, partly because it is
opposed by large portions of the American public—indeed, by a majority—and partly
because it relies on a simpliﬁed view of communities as organic, well-deﬁned, and homog-
enous, with clear and uniform ideas about law enforcement. And defunding the police
isn’t experience-based: we don’t have models of where it has succeeded in making polic-
ing more eﬀective, more equitable, or less harmful.

另一方面, broad majorities of the American public do support reforming the
警察. This is partly because, across lines of race and party, Americans share some of the
core beliefs motivating calls to defund the police: that law enforcement is frequently too
暴力, that oﬃcers are insuﬃciently accountable, and that many of the functions carried
out by the police could be better carried out by other agencies or community organiza-
系统蒸发散, working separately or in conjunction with the police.94 These areas of consensus
open up avenues of police reform that are politically feasible, have long-term resilience,
respect the diversity of communities, and build on past successes.

A durable, pluralistic, and experience-based agenda for police reform should be
centered around four elements: a revival and strengthening of community policing; 一个
expansion of problem-oriented policing, with a particular focus on programs targeting
serious violence; a renewed commitment to diversity in police hiring and promotion;
and improved mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

Community Policing
The central idea of community policing—that law enforcement should consult with
and work in partnership with communities to pursue the community’s goals for public
safety rather than operate as freestanding, largely autonomous crime ﬁghters—remains
broadly popular with Americans of all races.95 And for good reason: the successes of
community policing in the 1980s and 1990s were real.

94
95

Saletan, supra note 5.
Id.

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The older versions of community policing had critical weaknesses, 尽管, that newer
versions should avoid repeating. Most glaringly, community policing programs in the
1980s and 1990s typically failed to address the issue of police violence. This failure was
connected to a larger deﬁciency: a narrow, simplistic understanding of “the community.”
Reformers tended to assume that communities had unambiguous boundaries and clear,
consistent ideas about public safety. Divides within communities were often ignored,
or—worse—departments worked to elevate only the voices within the community that
they valued. Discussions of community policing also tended to proceed as though there
were three distinct groups of people in any given area: the “community,” the police, 和
the people from whom the community needed protection. The community generally
wasn’t thought to need protection from the police themselves. And the people from whom
the community did need protection—in particular, young people—generally weren’t un-
derstood to be part of the community. Community policing fell far short of its potential in
part because it ignored the divides within communities, and because it tended to treat
young people as threats, not as stakeholders and partners.96

In a similar way, community policing programs often erred by writing police oﬃcers
themselves out of the community. As originally conceived, community policing aimed in
part to tap into the idealism and initiative of line oﬃcers. This was true to an even greater
extent of problem-oriented policing. But as community policing turned from an idea into
a movement and then into something of an orthodoxy, it became more and more top-
向下. Less eﬀort was spent drawing on the experience of the rank and ﬁle and enlisting
their enthusiasm. In this respect, community policing continued a long tradition in Amer-
ican law enforcement. Patrol oﬃcers are necessarily given broad discretion; there is no way
to regulate the vast majority of the decisions they make on every shift. But police depart-
ments have rarely made serious eﬀorts to draw on the experience of line oﬃcers in ways
that are systematic and publicly accountable or to involve them in the ongoing enterprise
of remaking law enforcement. Police unions, with the implacable opposition they have
often shown to reform, have done little to bolster the case for empowering the rank
and ﬁle. But across the country there are hundreds of thousands of oﬃcers who want
to work collaboratively with the public in confronting both crime and police misconduct.
Community policing, like the older forms of law enforcement it aimed to supplant, took
too little advantage of those oﬃcers.97

These weaknesses were not inherent, 尽管, in the basic idea of community policing.
There were versions of community policing that took seriously the diversity of aspirations
within any given community, the disputed boundaries of the community, and the need to

The failure of community policing to view young people as stakeholders and partners is the central theme of
Forman, supra note 41.
SKLANSKY, supra note 1, at 155–88.

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protect members of the community from police violence and other forms of oﬃcial abuse.
There were versions of community policing that involved structured discussions among
people with conﬂicting ideas about how public safety should be pursued in a particular
locality—about what tactics the police should use, how police resources should be allo-
cated, and how oﬃcers should be held accountable.98 There were departments that made
conscious eﬀorts to bring together parts of the public that disagreed about policing tactics,
including those highly critical of the police.99 There were opportunities, too rarely
pursued, to strengthen community policing by treating young people as members of the
community with distinct concerns and distinct contributions to oﬀer in pursuing public
safety. There were versions of community policing and problem-solving policing that drew
heavily on the experience and enthusiasm of the rank and ﬁle, and there were initiatives to
rein in police violence that did the same.

In Lowell, 马萨诸塞州, 例如, police brought together residents of a largely
white neighborhood and a poorer, heavily Cambodian neighborhood to discuss which
neighborhood should be the site of a new police precinct that both wanted; the result
was an overwhelming consensus that the interests of the Cambodian neighborhood
should prevail.100 When residents of Fremont, 加利福尼亚州, complained to police about a
low-income apartment complex they thought, erroneously, was a hot spot of drug dealing
and sex work, police brought them into the complex to encounter the actual tenants.101
Some beat meetings at the heart of Chicago’s community policing program successfully
employed structured discussions among residents with conﬂicting ideas about public
safety, sometimes aided by professional facilitators; Chicago also used organizers to boost
participation at these meetings by poor people and people of color.102 A community
policing initiative in Riverside, 加利福尼亚州, involved oﬃcers reaching out to, and working
to address concerns of, not just seniors and other groups they thought would welcome
partnership with law enforcement but neighborhood activists who had long been harsh
critics of the police.103 More recently, the Community Safety Partnership in Los
Angeles—which has successfully reduced violence and increased public satisfaction with
the police at four public housing projects over the past decade—grew out of meetings at
which police oﬃcers sought out, listened to, and apologized to residents who were

98
99
100

101
102
103

The best discussion of this point is Thacher, Conﬂicting Values in Community Policing, supra note 90.
See id.
David Thacher, Equity and Community Policing: A New View of Community Partnerships, CRIM. JUST. ETHICS 3,
8–9 ( Winter/Spring 2001).
Id. at 9–11.
Forman, supra note 41, at 40–45.
Thacher, supra note 90, at 785–89; Jose Adolfo Gomez, Policing Accountability: An Empirical Investigation of
State-Sponsored Police Reform in Riverside, 加利福尼亚州 (2008) (doctoral dissertation, University of Southern
加利福尼亚州, Department of Political Science).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

distrustful and sharply critical of the police.104 Police in Boston reached out to Black clergy
to secure the participation of young people in an anti-violence initiative.105 And the most
successful programs of community policing tended to be the ones that drew signiﬁcantly
on the ideas and initiative of rank-and-ﬁle oﬃcers; that was also true of a promising
program to reduce police violence that was developed, and prematurely abandoned, 在
Oakland in the 1970s.106

Recommitting to community policing, with or without a broader and more sophisti-
cated understanding of community, does mean rejecting one key objective of many advo-
cates of police defunding: reducing how often oﬃcers interact with the public. 社区
policing can and should be reconﬁgured to address police violence, to respect the diversity
of communities, and to broaden who is treated as belonging to the community. 但
extensive contact between the police and the public is central to the very idea of commu-
nity policing; there is no other way for the police to consult with and partner with the
社区.

Community policing is fully consistent, 尽管, with shifting some responsibilities
away from the police to other agencies or community organizations. 的确, part of the
idea of community policing is that the police do not and should not have a monopoly on
the provision of public safety, and key parts of that job can and should be performed by
其他的. And—jumping ahead—part of the idea of problem-oriented policing was that
some kinds of crime and disorder are best addressed by agencies and organizations outside
执法, alone or in coordination with the police, and even when the police are
涉及, arrests and criminal sanctions should be used only when necessary.107

所以, a revival of community policing and problem-oriented policing can and should
include a reexamination of which functions, currently carried out by police oﬃcers, 可以
be better performed by others.108 Advocates of defunding the police have suggested
shifting responsibilities for mental health response, traﬃc enforcement, and school
security to agencies outside law enforcement, and those suggestions deserve careful
consideration. Much of the work in these categories does not require oﬃcers authorized
to employ “situationally justiﬁed force”109—the core, distinguishing feature of the police.
Others may be able to perform these functions more skillfully and with less potential for

104
105
106
107

108
109

JORJA LEAP ET AL., EVALUATION OF THE LAPD COMMUNITY SAFETY PARTNERSHIP ii–iii, 15, 63–64 (2020).
Forman, supra note 41, at 40–45.
看, 例如, SKLANSKY, supra note 1, 在 163, 167–68, 172, 184; Fisk & 理查森, supra note 39, at 760–66, 771–74.
看, 例如, HERMAN GOLDSTEIN, POLICING A FREE SOCIETY 71–91 (1977); Michael S. 斯科特 & Ronald V. 克拉克,
介绍, in PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING: SUCCESSFUL CASE STUDIES, supra note 34, at 1–3; Robin S. 恩格尔
等人。, The Impact of Police on Criminal Justice Reform: Evidence from Cincinnati, 俄亥俄州, 16 CRIMINOLOGY &
PUB. POL’Y 375 (2017); Sabel & 西蒙, supra note 70, at 194–95, 199.
See Barry Friedman, Disaggregating the Police Function, 169 U. PA. L. REV. 925 (2021).
EGON BITTNER, THE FUNCTIONS OF THE POLICE IN MODERN SOCIETY 39 (1970).

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暴力. Roughly a quarter of the people killed by the police show signs of mental illness,
for example.110 A growing number of cities dispatch medical and behavioral health pro-
专业人士, rather than police oﬃcers, in response to 911 calls involving people in mental
health distress, and the evidence suggests that these programs defuse situations that could
otherwise escalate into violence.111 Perhaps ten percent of police shootings originate in
traﬃc stops, and these stops also serve as principal point of entry into the criminal justice
system for many people of color. Many of these stops could safely be carried out by
unarmed, non-police personnel or replaced with violation notices sent in the mail.112
相似地, police oﬃcers in schools are a key element of the “school-to-prison pipeline”
that draws many children of color into the criminal justice system, and there is little
evidence that replacing them with educational personnel would make schools less safe.113
Shifting responsibilities away from law enforcement is diﬀerent than defunding police
departments, let alone abolishing them. 一方面, most of what the police do falls
outside the categories of mental health response, traﬃc enforcement, and school security.
Estimates of the percentage of 911 calls that involve people in mental health distress range
from roughly one percent to around twelve percent; the true ﬁgure is likely somewhere in
the middle of that range.114 Traﬃc enforcement takes up a larger share of oﬃcers’ time,
but probably under twenty percent.115 In 2016 there were twenty-seven thousand police
oﬃcers assigned to schools; that was roughly four percent of the six hundred ﬁfty

110

111
112

113
114

115

Amam Z. Zaleh et al., Deaths of People with Mental Illness During Interactions with Law Enforcement, 58 INT’L
J. L. & PSYCH. 110 (2018).
COLES ET AL., supra note 69, at 18–23.
Id. at 30–40; SARAH A. SEO, A PATH TO NON-POLICE ENFORCEMENT OF CIVIL TRAFFIC VIOLATIONS (2020); ZIMRING,
supra note 24, at 52–53; Jordan Blair Woods, Traﬃc Without the Police, 73 STAN. L. REV. 1472 (2021); 约旦
Blair Woods, Policing, Danger Narratives, and Routine Traﬃc Stops, 117 MICH. L. REV. 635 (2019); 大卫·D..
Kirkpatrick et al., Cities Rethink Traﬃc Stops by the Police, N.Y. TIMES, Apr. 15, 2022, at A1.
COLES ET AL., supra note 69, at 41–51.
A decades-old program in Eugene, Oregon, diverts ﬁve to eight percent of 911 calls to a mobile response team
overseen by a community mental health clinic. CAHOOTS, EUGENE POLICE DEP’T, https://www.eugene-or.gov
/4508/CAHOOTS (last visited Jan. 6, 2022). Compare Mike Maciag, The Daily Crisis Cops Aren’t Trained to
Handle, GOVERNING, Apr. 27, 2016 (stating that “mental health situations are responsible for about 1 在 10
police calls”), with Cynthia Lum et al., Can We Really Defund the Police? A Nine-Agency Study of Police
Response to Calls for Service, POLICE Q., https://doi.org/10.1177/10986111211035002 (即将推出, published
在线的 2021) (ﬁnding that calls relating to mental health concerns amounted to an average 1.3% 的 911
calls across nine law enforcement agencies). The estimates at the low end of the range almost certainly reﬂect
the fact that as much as sixty percent of 911 calls involving people in mental health distress may be miscoded by
operators. 赋予生命. Graham, The Stumbling Blocks to One of the Most Promising Police Reforms, ATLANTIC (Feb.
22, 2022), https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/mental-health-crisis-police-intervention/622842/.
Jeﬀ Asher & Ben Horwitz, How Do the Police Actually Spend Their Time?, N.Y. TIMES ( 六月 19, 2020), https://
www.nytimes.com/2020/06/19/upshot/unrest-police-time-violent-crime.html (reporting that traﬃc enforcement
took ﬁfteen percent of oﬃcers’ time in New Orleans, thirteen percent in Montgomery County, Maryland, 和
nineteen percent in Sacramento).

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

thousand police oﬃcers in the United States.116 Almost certainly there are other jobs that
could and should be transferred away from the police, 但很多, maybe most, calls to the
police are calls for someone with the deﬁning attribute of the police, the authority to use
力量. And when other agencies or organizations take on responsibilities for responding to
mental health emergencies, enforcing traﬃc laws, or keeping schools safe, they will some-
times need to call the police for backup—albeit less commonly than might be expected.117
有可能的, 而且, that the best results will be obtained by creating teams in which
police oﬃcers work alongside paramedics and mental health professionals; 这种方法
has been adopted in Dallas, 德克萨斯州, with promising results.118

Shifting responsibilities from the police, or leveraging police resources by having the
police work alongside other professionals, will often free up funds that can be shifted, 也.
It is hard to say how much of a constraint law enforcement budgets place on the ability of
local governments to fund other services. Nationwide, about one percent of state expen-
ditures and six percent of local government expenditures go to the police, but per capita
spending on law enforcement varies widely from place to place.119 Poor neighborhoods
generally will beneﬁt most if new services are provided without cuts to the police budget.
But even when the only way to fund new services is to shift expenditures away from law
enforcement, the focus should be on providing the new services, not on cutting police
budgets. 否则, police defunding could wind up looking like mental health deinsti-
tutionalization: program cuts without the promised reinvestments.

Problem-Oriented Policing
Community policing, done right, can make police more responsive and accountable to
the public, it can make people feel safer, and it can help groups with conﬂicting goals and
concerns work together on issues of public safety. It is less clear whether it can decrease
犯罪, although there is reason to expect that when people feel more secure, they will
spend more time on the street and in other public spaces, which in turn will make those

116

117

STRATEGIES FOR YOUTH, TWO BILLION DOLLARS LATER: STATES BEGIN TO REGULATE SCHOOL RESOURCE OFFICERS IN THE
NATION’S SCHOOLS, A SURVEY OF STATE LAWS 7 (2019); FBI, CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES 2016, tbl.25, https://ucr.fbi
.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/tables/table-25.
在 2019, twenty-four thousand mental health emergency calls in Eugene, Oregon, were diverted to a mobile
response team staﬀed with medical personnel and crisis workers, and only one hundred ﬁfty of these calls
resulted in requests for police backup. What Is CAHOOTS?, WHITE BIRD CLINIC (Oct. 29, 2020), https://
whitebirdclinic.org/what-is-cahoots/.

118 MEADOWS MENTAL HEALTH POL’Y INST., MULTI-DISCIPLINARY RESPONSE TEAMS: TRANSFORMING EMERGENCY MENTAL

119

HEALTH RESPONSE IN TEXAS (2021).
Criminal Justice Expenditures: 警察, Corrections, and Courts, URBAN INST., https://www.urban.org/policy-centers
/cross-center-initiatives/state-and-local-ﬁnance-initiative/state-and-local-backgrounders/criminal-justice-police
-corrections-courts-expenditures (last visited Jan. 7, 2022); Chris Edwards, Spending on Police by State, CATO
INST. BLOG ( 六月 5, 2020, 4:37 下午), https://www.cato.org/blog/spending-police-state.

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places safer. There is better evidence for the eﬀectiveness of problem-oriented policing in
reducing crime, particularly certain forms of problem-oriented policing, when they are
integrated with strong programs of community policing. The types of problem-oriented
policing with the strongest records of success are programs that concentrate law enforce-
ment resources on speciﬁc, crime-plagued locations (“hot spots”) and programs that focus
on particular groups of people responsible for a disproportionate share of a city’s gun
暴力.

The most famous program of the latter variety was Boston’s Ceaseﬁre initiative, 哪个
dramatically reduced youth homicides by interrupting cycles of retaliatory gang violence.
Ceaseﬁre identiﬁed a relatively small number of groups responsible for the bulk of youth
shootings in Boston and targeted their members with threats of criminal enforcement
along with oﬀers of economic support and social services if they refrained from gun vio-
伦斯. The program relied on consultation and coordination between the police depart-
蒙特, a range of other municipal agencies and nonproﬁt groups, and inner-city clergy.
Ceaseﬁre cut youth homicides in Boston by roughly ﬁfty percent. Those gains began to
disappear in the early 2000s when the program was discontinued, then were recovered
when the program was restarted.120 A variation on the Ceaseﬁre approach, 实施的
in Oakland, 加利福尼亚州, reduced both homicides and nonfatal shootings by roughly half.
The Oakland program focused on adult shooters rather than juveniles, reﬂecting diﬀer-
ences between homicide patterns in Oakland and Boston; it also reduced (but did not
eliminate) the role of the police and expanded the role of peer-to-peer counseling.121

Ceaseﬁre programs are not cure-alls: both Boston and Oakland have seen increases in
gun violence during the pandemic. 更重要的是, the experience in both cities dem-
onstrates the importance of developing programs in close consultation with community
团体, members of the public, and other municipal and county agencies, in part to tailor
the program to local circumstances and local concerns. This process often requires several
iterations of the program and can take several years. 而且, even successful programs,
like Boston’s, are diﬃcult to sustain over the long term without broad public support. 为了
all these reasons, Ceaseﬁre initiatives work best, and are most likely to have a lasting
impact, when they are paired with strong programs of community policing. That is also
true of problem-oriented policing more generally.122

120

121

122

安东尼A. 布拉加, Youth Gun Violence in Boston, 马萨诸塞州, in PROBLEM-ORIENTED POLICING: SUCCESSFUL CASE
STUDIES, supra note 34, at 15–27. This paragraph and the one that follows are adapted from David Alan Sklansky,
Addressing Violent Crime More Eﬀectively, BRENNAN CTR. FOR JUST. BLOG (Sept. 27, 2021), https://万维网
.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/addressing-violent-crime-more-eﬀectively.
Samantha Michaels, Whose Streets?, MOTHER JONES, Sept./Oct. 2020, at 24–63; ANTHONY A. BRAGA ET AL., OAKLAND
CEASEFIRE EVALUATION: FINAL REPORT TO THE CITY OF OAKLAND (2019); MIKE MCLIVELY & BRITTANY NIETO, GIFFORDS
LAW CENTER, A CASE STUDY IN HOPE: LESSONS FROM OAKLAND’S REMARKABLE REDUCTION IN GUN VIOLENCE (2019).
Cincinnati’s successful implementation of problem-oriented policing and a Ceaseﬁre-style program in the early
2000s illustrated all these points. See Engel et al., supra note 107; Sabel & 西蒙, supra note 70, at 193–200.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

Programs like hot-spots policing and Ceaseﬁre initiatives can themselves become abu-
sive forms of law enforcement, even—or maybe especially—when they enjoy broad public
支持. The theory of hot-spots policing calls for patrol oﬃcers to be concentrated in
high-crime areas, but it leaves open the question how they should patrol: 尤其,
how aggressively they should employ their arrest powers or their authority to conduct in-
vestigatory stops and frisks. The simplest way to answer those questions, 尽管, is with
lots of stops, lots of frisks, and lots of arrests, and unfortunately this is sometimes what
hot-spots policing has become.123 Ceaseﬁre initiatives, for their part, can wind up looking
like systems of arbitrary and draconian punishment for people the police think, but cannot
prove, are responsible for neighborhood violence.124 The best versions of hot spots and
Ceaseﬁre have minimized these risks of abuse, but the risks are real, and cities employing
these strategies need to keep them constantly in mind.

Diversity
Community policing and problem-oriented policing both rely on community
engagement, and that engagement is easier to obtain when police forces reﬂect the
diversity of the communities that they serve. Police diversity is important for other rea-
儿子们, 还有. A growing body of evidence suggests that female oﬃcers use less force
than male oﬃcers and that oﬃcers of color use less force than white oﬃcers, 尤其
against African Americans.125 Male oﬃcers partnered with female oﬃcers, and white
oﬃcers partnered with oﬃcers of color, are also likely to use less force.126 And diverse
police forces are less insular and parochial. They are more open to outside ideas—
including ideas that grow out of eﬀorts at community policing and problem-oriented
policing—and they have more-vibrant internal discussions. 此外, they are more
likely to have strong, vocal organizations of Black oﬃcers, Latino oﬃcers, or female
oﬃcers. Those groups, 反过来, can serve as bridges to identity-based groups in the
communities the oﬃcers patrol, and they are often eﬀective champions of reforms that
are opposed by police unions and other workplace organizations dominated by white,
male oﬃcers.127

The ranks of American police forces grew more diverse in the closing three
decades of the twentieth century, but unfortunately that progress, which was far from

123

124

125
126
127

SPARROW, supra note 34, 在 99, 116–19; 安东尼A. Braga et al., Hot Spots Policing of Small Geographic Areas
Eﬀects on Crime, CAMPBELL SYSTEMATIC REVS. (2019), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1046.
David Alan Sklansky, 犯罪, Immigration, and Ad Hoc Instrumentalism, 15 NEW CRIM. L. REV. 157, 202–03
(2012).
Ba et al., supra note 36; Hoekstra & Sloan, supra note 36.
Sklansky, supra note 35.
Id.

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完全的,128 has since stalled and in many cases is beginning to be reversed. Much of
the progress was the result of aﬃrmative action plans required by court orders or
adopted under the threat of litigation; many of those plans have since been abandoned
as the law has grown less supportive of race- and gender-conscious remedies for past
discrimination.129 Partly for that reason, American police forces on the whole look less
like their surrounding communities today than they did twenty years ago. Federal data
indicate, 例如, that two-thirds of police departments employing a hundred or
more oﬃcers grew whiter relative to their surrounding communities between 2007
和 2016.130

The problem is particularly acute with regard to Black oﬃcers. Black oﬃcers hired in
the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s are now retiring, and new Black oﬃcers are not joining in
anywhere near the numbers that would be required to make up for the retirements.
The NYPD, 例如, has fourteen percent fewer Black oﬃcers today than in 2008.
In Philadelphia there are nineteen percent fewer Black oﬃcers than in 2017. The drop
in Chicago has been twelve percent since 2019.131

Improving police diversity is often something of an orphan cause, opposed by people
on the right who oppose aﬃrmative action in general and viewed warily by people on the
left who fear that tokenism will substitute for real reform. But community policing,
problem-oriented policing, or any other eﬀort at transforming law enforcement is unlikely
成功, especially in the long term, unless it is coupled with a renewed commitment to
diversifying the demographics of American law enforcement.

Oversight and Accountability
Community policing and problem-oriented policing lost credibility in part by worry-
ing too little about police abuse, and especially about police violence. For new programs of
community policing and problem-oriented policing to succeed over the long term, 他们
need to be durable, and they will not be durable unless they are accompanied by eﬀective
strategies for addressing violent, discriminatory, and otherwise abusive forms of policing.
Diversifying police departments will help in this regard but is not suﬃcient. Policing needs
eﬀective mechanisms of oversight and accountability.

The most eﬀective mechanisms will be adapted to local circumstances, and they should
be continually improved, capitalizing on successes and correcting for failure. The “prob-
lems” addressed by problem-oriented policing and community policing can and should

128

129
130
131

Id.; Jeremy Ashkenas & Haeyoun Park, The Race Gap in America’s Police Departments, N.Y. TIMES (Apr. 8, 2015),
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/09/03/us/the-race-gap-in-americas-police-departments.html.
Sklansky, supra note 35, at 1235–38.
Leatherby & 欧宝, supra note 35.
Graham, supra note 35.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

include police violence and other forms of abusive law enforcement. But decades of
experience have already helped to identify a range of best practices for controlling abusive
policing and making police more accountable. Among them are the following:

(1) Strong civilian oversight. Most large police departments in the United States now
have some form of institutionalized public oversight, whether from a commission, 一个在-
dependent auditor or inspector general, 或两者. But many smaller departments still lack
anything along these lines. Community policing, which involves departments consulting
with and partnering with the public, is not a substitute for systems that place law enforce-
ment under the formal supervision of civilian oﬃcials.132

(2) Meaningful judicial review. 法院, by themselves, are notoriously weak tools for
guarding against police abuse.133 But transforming public safety requires the availability of
judicial forums for pressing claims of police misconduct, not least to make clear that the
警察, like everyone else, are not above the law. Doctrines of qualiﬁed immunity that can
make it practically impossible to sue the police also reinforce sensations of disempower-
ment and habits of disengagement that eviscerate eﬀorts at meaningful reform.134

(3) Transparent systems of internal discipline. Even without qualiﬁed immunity, 最多
instances of police misconduct will not wind up in court. This is one reason that law
enforcement agencies need their own, robust systems for detecting and remedying oﬃcial
虐待. And it is diﬃcult for these systems to be strong if they are opaque. Experience has
shown that civilians involved in police discipline are no tougher than command staﬀ on
rank-and-ﬁle oﬃcers—if anything, quite the opposite—but over the long term the involve-
ment of civilians helps to keep the system honest.135

(4) Independent investigation of police killings. While it is important that police
departments maintain their own, robust systems of internal discipline, public conﬁdence
requires that the most serious cases—when a police oﬃcer kills a civilian—be handled, 到
the extent possible, by investigators and prosecutors independent of the oﬃcer’s own
agency and the prosecutorial oﬃce that works regularly with that agency.136

(5) Tracking of problem oﬃcers. Abusive policing is not just a problem of “bad
apples”; systems and occupational cultures are to blame, as well.137 Still, a disproportionate

132

133
134
135
136

137

看, 例如, 沃克, supra note 71, at 85–91. On the importance of democratic oversight and strategies for
improving it, 看, 例如, BARRY FRIEDMAN, UNWARRANTED: POLICING WITHOUT PERMISSION (2017); Maria
Ponomarenko, Rethinking Police Rulemaking, 114 NW. U. L. REV. 1 (2019); Simonson, supra note 8.
看, 例如, Forman, supra note 41, at 9–16.
看, 例如, Joanna C. 施瓦茨, The Case Against Qualiﬁed Immunity, 93 NOTRE DAME L. REV. 1797 (2018).
看, 例如, SAMUEL WALKER, POLICE ACCOUNTABILITY: THE ROLE OF CITIZEN OVERSIGHT (2001).
AMARI L. HAMMONDS ET AL., STANFORD CRIMINAL JUSTICE CENTER, AT ARM’S LENGTH: IMPROVING CRIMINAL
INVESTIGATION OF POLICE SHOOTINGS (2016).
看, 例如, Barbara E. Armacost, Organizational Culture and Police Misconduct, 72 GEO. WASH. L. REV. 453 (2004);
Joanna C. 施瓦茨, Systems Failures in Policing, 51 SUFFOLK U. L. REV. 535 (2018).

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share of police violence and other forms of oﬃcial misconduct can be traced to oﬃcers
who break the rules repeatedly. Just as programs of community violence reduction have
often focused, 成功地, on the small number of individuals responsible for an outsize
share of violent crime, tackling police abuse is partly a matter of identifying and dealing
with problem oﬃcers. This requires reliable systems for tracking the oﬃcers within a de-
partment with unusually high numbers of civilian complaints, disciplinary infractions, 或者
episodes of violence, but it also requires ways to track these oﬃcers between departments,
so they do not simply move from agency to agency, leaving their disciplinary records and
risk-assessment ﬂags behind them.138

(6) Mandatory use of dash cameras and body cameras. Dash cameras and body cam-
eras, like every tool of police reform, are not cure-alls. Early expectations were that oﬃcers
would be less abusive if they knew their actions were being recorded, but the evidence on
that so far is equivocal.139 Moreover, there are serious, unresolved questions about the best
rules for handling the recordings these cameras generate and under what circumstances
oﬃcers should be allowed to turn them oﬀ.140 But dash cameras and body cameras can
powerfully counteract one of the greatest obstacles, 历史地, to holding oﬃcers ac-
countable: the dearth of reliable, objective evidence about what happened in interactions
between citizens and the police.141

(7) Bright-line rules. Even the most robust systems of after-the-fact review, whether in
the form of civil lawsuits, criminal prosecutions, or internal disciplinary proceedings, 将要
have limited eﬀectiveness if the guidelines under which police oﬃcers operate are vague.
尤其, it can be diﬃcult for judges, 陪审员, and disciplinary boards to second-guess
an oﬃcer’s decision about what constitutes “reasonable” use of force in a certain situation.
So it is important to supplement vague standards of this kind with more speciﬁc, 为他自己
bans on practices—such as choke holds and no-knock drug raids—that experience has
shown are deadly and unjustiﬁable.142

None of these mechanisms of police accountability, nor any of the other reforms
sketched in this article, can succeed in isolation. Decades of experience have shown that
innovative approaches to public safety, no matter how promising they seem for reducing
犯罪, controlling police abuse, or strengthening communities, are unlikely to last longer
than a few years, even in a political environment less polarized than today’s, unless the
reforms enjoy broad public support. And that kind of support materializes only when a
comprehensive package of reforms—drawing on the lessons of community policing and

138
139

Ben Grunwalt & John Rappaport, The Wandering Oﬃcer, 129 YALE L.J. 1676 (2020).
Cynthia Lum et al., Body-Worn Cameras’ Eﬀects on Police Oﬃcer and Citizen Behavior: A Systematic Review,
CAMPBELL SYSTEMATIC REVS. (2020), https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1112.

140 MARY D. FAN, CAMERA POWER: PROOF, POLICING, AND AUDIOVISUAL BIG DATA 156–246 (2019).
141
142

Id. at 82–111.
See SKLANSKY, supra note 9, at 95–107.

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POLICE REFORM IN DIVIDED TIMES

problem-oriented policing, embracing a commitment to police diversity, and including
robust systems of oversight and accountability—is hammered out and continually reﬁned
by the police working in genuine collaboration with a broad range of government
机构, community organizations, and advocacy groups. Cities that have sustained police
reform over the long haul—Los Angeles, Cincinnati, New York—all have well-established
systems of civilian oversight, and all have beneﬁted from reform processes pushed along
by judicial orders and monitoring. 天使们, Cincinnati, and New York all have seen
homicide rates spike over the past two years, and all three cities—especially Cincinnati and
Los Angeles—continue to have unacceptably high rates of police violence. But each of
these cities has better policing today than it did thirty, twenty, or even ten years ago.

Most of the chief elements of eﬀective police reform enjoy broad, bipartisan support,
and most are also strongly endorsed by people of color, especially African Americans, WHO
are the most burdened by crime and by police abuse. This is true of community policing
and problem-solving policing, and it is true of the leading proposals for increasing ac-
countability and oversight of the police—including mandating body cameras, requiring
independent investigations of police killings, banning choke holds and no-knock warrants,
and facilitating civil liability for police illegality by stripping oﬃcers of qualiﬁed
immunity—and it is true of suggestions to shift certain responsibilities, like mental health
response, away from the police.143 Evidence is weaker regarding the level of public support
for eﬀorts to expand the recruitment, hiring, and promotion of minority oﬃcers and
female oﬃcers, but those programs are unlikely to elicit strong opposition as long as they
avoid the use of quotas or other rigid preferences.144 There is therefore reason to hope that
a comprehensive program of police reform can be fashioned that will cut crime, rein in
police violence, reduce some of the nation’s worst forms of inequality, and—not least
important—enjoy the kind of broad public support that will allow it to last, even in times
as divided as ours.

143
144

Saletan, supra note 5.
Frank Newport, Aﬃrmative Action and Public Opinion, GALLUP BLOG (八月. 7, 2020), https://news.gallup.com
/opinion/polling-matters/317006/aﬃrmative-action-public-opinion.aspx.

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