Yes, the word “adequately” come to my mind, too. There is no reason whatsoever that simple shoplifting takes more than a month to get to trial, let alone a year. The crunch in Canada came when the Supreme Court here said that 18 months was too long. Instead of fixing the court system, whole swatchs of charges were dismissed.
Too often in the news (here in Canada too) when someone is arrested for somthing notable, it is reported they were either out on bail (recognisance) sometimes multiple times, or had multiple outstanding warrants. The other impression I got from the news is that the police are not actively searching for most petty wanted people, but just luck out when they run across someone who is already wanted - usually during a different investigation.
Bernard Goetz (Subway shooter) took to carrying a weapon when he was mugged in the subway - and after the incident, the persons arrested for it got out of the police station before he did. The police must have similar frustrations. I know someone who was tracking a trio of people who’d brokein into a club he ran. He reported to the police that he’d tracked one who was violating his bail curfew - the police said, “what’s the point? If we go and check on him and he’s not home, he’ll say he just moved, and the judge will believe him without checking on him.” Another got an exception to curfew to drive a taxi - but this guy checked, he did not work for the taxi company he said he did. I presume the prosectuor was too busy (or lazy) to fact check, and/or the judge didn’t care.
I always understood the “broken windows” to mean - fix the damn window! Theory was if the neighbourhood looked lawless, unmaintained, then low-life types would be more tempted to try things like break-ins because it looked like nobody cared enough. Same logic as painting over or washing grafitti as soon as it happens. It send a message that even the lesser offenses are not ignored. The theory was that fixing the window, not arresting the perp, was the means to limiting the general crime level.
Okay, not good with arithmetic, but the city of Vancouver is about 44 square miles. The VPD has 1400 “frontline officers.” Not sure what that means, but I doubt it means “1400 officers available to walk a beat and talk to the community.” But let’s say it does, and assume each one works an 8-hour shift, 7 days a week, to make the arithmetic easier. So 3 shifts a day means 466 officers to cover 44 square miles. How does walking a beat and covering that territory and talking with “the community” and responding to emergencies and reporting broken windows–part of broken window policing is making owners of buildings repair windows, clean up litter, etc. as md-2000 notes–work out?
Vancouver is roughly divided into 8 blocks per mile. Let’s have Officer Krupke walk up 8 blocks, then down 8 blocks in the alley. With time to talk to the community, rattle door knobs, write up complaints, that would take a minimum of 2 hours–I’m assuming 4 miles an hour is a very good walking pace, but Officer Krupke is packing 25 pounds of gear, has to stop, so half that speed?–so 2 hours to cover 1 8-block strip, street and lane. And when Officer Krupke starts up the street, they get a call to respond to an emergency at the other end of their 8 block beat, they pound up there…
You might consider that Krupke doesn’t need to visit every spot every day. He can stick to the main streets, knowing that the community in the residential streets can find him. If he’s there for the community to get to know and trust him, and report to him, he can be present once a week, and then people who need him specifically at other times can email him, or instafacetikxagram him, or whatever the kids are doing these days. If someone’s breaking into your house RIGHT NOW, you don’t want the beat officer, anyway.
I think the days of “Stop, Thief!” with the cop running behind are over. What we need is community building, and for that community to have a productive relationship with authority. There’s a fair critique that the job of the police is to maintain the status quo, which currently favours some and harms others. Working more closely within society’s various communities is probably a good way to alleviate that.
(That said, I belong to an organization in Vancouver that has problems with people sleeping, smoking, littering, graffitti-ing, doing drugs, and defecating on the rather small property. The organization doesn’t want ANY of this going on, but is composed of compassionate people and are more or less willing to tolerate / clear up after the first four if authorities will can stop the last two [the drugs mostly because of the fire hazard]. We don’t want to make worse the lives of people who already have it bad enough to be on the streets, but also don’t have the resources to help them. We were assigned a community police officer, who was absolutely USELESS. At the end of the day, there was nothing that he was willing to do, and he was unable to refer us to anyone who COULD do anything barring a volunteer organization that would come clean up drug paraphrenalia—and it was faster to do that myself.)
There’s a recent article in one of the Toronto papers about downtown businesses closing locations in Vancouver because of constant theft and vandalism, leaving dirty needles, and other concerns which the affected owners blame on drug users. It is a debate occurring in many cities in North America. Owners allege police are indifferent or do not respond effectively, possibly since the penalties are modest and call volumes high.
Many people believe addiction is not a disease, and prefer longer term social solutions, which are costly and controversial. Many are sensitive to issues around abuse of civil and constitutional rights to relocate or detain disadvantaged people, yet there is also a sense of NIMBY. Politicians differ about safe and effective ways to handle just the medical aspect, which is still an easier problem than the appropriate social response.
It’s hard to see a solution which is fair, cheap and/or easy. But it’s easy to understand the frustration of affected businesses and people who just want to feel safe while walking downtown, or family members concerned about the effects and sequelae of hard drug use of relatives. So what should the police do? The community? I don’t know. I’m not sure anybody has a perfect solution, or even a satisficing one.
The news only reports on cases where someone is charged while out on bail.
They don’t report on cases where someone is on on bail, obeys the bail conditions, and shows up for trial, without causing any further trouble. So it creates an impression of everyone out on bail committing criminal offences.
I’m sure the Canadian Centre for Justice Stats or Corrections Canada would have stats on this issue. That would be more helpful than selective media coverage, skewed to those who breach bail.
Goetz fled the scene, first to his apartment, then to Vermont, where he burned the jacket he had been wearing, and scattered the pieces of the revolver in the woods. He didn’t return to New York immediately, eventually turning himself into the police in New Hampshire over a week after the events.
And, one of the ones he shot didn’t walk out of the police station. He couldn’t walk at all.
Cabey had not been wounded. After Goetz shot the other three, Cabey was cowering on the floor of the subway car. Goetz looked at him, said “You don’t look so bad. Here’s another.”
I agree with you. My point was just to suggest the idea that somehow there could be a return to a mythical day of law and order was confused in several ways, including a simple observation about the reality of “covering” an area.
I agree. One of the biggest issues with our police system is that they are primed to see every situation as a physical threat issue first. Also, they don’t have the training for the most part to do social work.
Deescalation, patience, conversation and persuation, engagement as a person in need of help, not a threat to be neutralized. Someone calls 911 because their loved one is having an incident and waving a knife around but not really attacking anyone needs a Mental Health specialist, not a “he was waving a knife around and wouldn’t put it down. I had to shoot him/ taze him to get him to comply.”
The OP asked about police stopping petty crime. That seems to assume that the police are the feature of society best positioned to do that. As several posters have said, since, that’s not necessarily so.
The OP has not been back to post again, but I’ll ask whether the OP meant the small question: “Which police policies / procedures would work to reduce petty crime”, or the large question: “How should society minimize petty crime and how should they deal with the remainder?”
Different questions will almost of necessity yield different answers.
First and foremost, crime is stopped by neighborhoods. Crime is rampant in neighborhoods where people fear the police, don’t trust the government, and feel themselves as hopeless victims stuck there by poverty or racist policies. That allows gangs to flourish, criminals to hang out undisturbed, crimes to go unreported, businesses to close down, and landlords to stop putting money into their buildings. Neighborhoods can decay just as buildings do with neglect.
Neighborhoods come back when the populace turns around. Sometimes that happens when strong individuals create community groups that fight the decay. Sometimes that happens through gentrification as outsiders move in to undervalued housing and want to protect their investments. Sometimes that happens when cities run target programs and try to reverse the negatives. Sometimes that happens when a city is lucky enough to be prosperous and growing. Sometimes a new police commissioner comes in and tries to make an effort.
Schools are dependent on having parents who care about their kids, a truism that’s become a cliche. In the same way, cities are dependent on having communities care about their neighborhoods. In both cases no one answer is possible for how to get the right people to care. For cities to improve, some brave people have to step up and give of their time in order to get others to care and respond. Sometimes they succeed and often they fail. That first step is always necessary. The police are secondary.
This implies that crime is rampant due to people’s perceptions about poverty and / or racism. I’m not sure whether you meant to state “it’s all in poor people’s heads” or not, and so wondered if you’d clarify.
I find that poverty dramatically reduces people’s ability to deal with problems, because everything takes longer and so there’s less time to spare, and because even the money to repaint the fence / repair the broken window / whatever is less available. In my experience, poor communities and racialized minority communities actually are very strong, because they have to be, but that strength is largely invisible to outsiders because a lot of it is about emotional and social support, and because community members with addictions and incarcerations etc. are huge challenges that eat up a lot of resources: Fred may be in jail, but someone’s got to raise his kids.
I grew up in an ethnic working-class neighborhood. That neighborhood suffered the fate of many such in the Rust Belt. As with a small town, people either left it or became underemployed as the factory jobs evaporated. As the people left, the neighborhood businesses vanished. Homes deteriorated and eventually many were torn down. Half the lots of my old street are now vacant. There can be no community is such an area.
People keep announcing schemes to revitalize it, but none ever happen. Why would anybody move there? Those who are left either stick to the houses that are their only property or are transients looking for the cheapest housing. Not surprisingly crime in that area is among the highest in the city.
My old neighborhood, my old city are emblematic of the way that neglect and poverty (and drugs) hollow out communities and leave them vulnerable. The same forces can be found at work in center cities and rural towns and are beginning to be seen in older suburbs. Community needs a certain density to cohere, plus some stability over time, and some internal structure that exhibits control. Historical systemic racism is certainty a primal force, especially in center cities, but police in the whitest parts of America are having equal difficulty battling the opioid crisis, which is as much a symptom of this disintegration as are broken windows on city streets. People across demographic lines feel hopeless, and that lack of hope crumbles society. Poverty alone doesn’t create crime; the lack of hope of life getting better does.
Maybe there’s a better way to phrase it, and you can suggest it if you have one. I don’t have the knack of condensing giant societal ailments into a phrase.
BTW, pretty much most of Freakonomics has been thoroughlyly discredited. This podcast (If Books Could Kill) covers it. There are numerous links in the show description to studies debunking the book. But I recommend listening to the actual podcast. Peter Shimshiri is a lawyer and host of another podcast about the Supreme Court (“5-4”) and Michael Hobbes is a journalist and former reporter for HuffPost. They’re a blast to listen to.
Thanks. The first post could be read as “people are imagining the constraints of poverty / racism, and should get over it and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.” That didn’t seem likely, and the subsequent post clarified your viewpoint nicely, and putting the two together I find I wholly agree with you.