Attempts to reform US police departments fail when they are unable to get community support. Perhaps it is time to take a different tack, argue two criminal justice scholars – one a former cop.
As a former NZ Police sergeant, I know firsthand how police fatalities shape one’s behaviour. The recent shooting of two officers in Auckland cuts to the heart of NZ’s trust-based policing policies.
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg apologized for his city’s ‘stop-and-frisk’ police strategy. Two criminologists argue it isn’t necessarily inherently racist – though New York’s program was.
When police coax information from low-level offenders with threats of harsh sentencing, it breeds distrust in the community and ultimately contributes to mass incarceration.
In one bloody week in June, 181 Rio residents were shot, including a baby in utero. It’s now impossible not to notice that city’s once-lauded favela “pacification” strategy has all but collapsed.
The Baltimore Police Department is found to have violated the civil rights of poor blacks. A historian explains why those findings are eerily similar to how the city treated blacks in the 1800s.
Director, Center for Applied Insight Conflict Resolution; Adjuct Faculty at the School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, George Mason University, George Mason University
Founding Director, Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) and Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University