The clash between police and citizens in Ferguson, Mo., highlights an American dilemma about law enforcement. After the Missouri Highway Patrol took over policing last Thursday night, the streets of Ferguson became considerably more peaceful than they had been under the watch of the St. Louis Police Department.
As the crisis has starkly illustrated, we’ve been increasing the power of every police force in terms of weapons, authority, impact and indemnity. But the quality of policing hasn’t always kept up with the increased power – and nor has our ability to test and improve that quality. The U.S. should look to other countries for techniques to measure police probity and foster reforms to strengthen the quality of the nation’s law enforcement system.
Military-style SWAT teams were deployed 45,000 times across the US last year, and thanks to Defense Department donation programs, the police have access to ever more heavy equipment. Some 500 law enforcement agencies –including Ohio State University – are now proud owners of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, for example. The enhanced weaponry has contributed to the increasing lethality of U.S. law enforcement: The FBI estimates that 410 people were killed by US law enforcement officers in the line of duty in 2012. That same statistic for the UK is one person.
Alongside increased armament, police have been given wider authority over the past fifteen years: the spread of no-knock warrants where police enter premises without warning (in numerous cases leading to a firefight with innocent victims) and the powers granted under the Patriot Act. The penal system has also become increasingly harsh. Three -strikes laws and other minimum sentencing rules have lengthened prison terms for those found guilty of an offense. Finally, police officers’ indemnity remains considerable: their contracts tend to ensure gentle treatment over potential offenses like a cool-off period before they are required to make a statement and long administrative procedures before they can be suspended or dismissed.
The great majority of police are upstanding – doing the best job they can often in dangerous circumstances — but the U.S. lacks tools to ensure that every officer acts ethically without discrimination or corruption. According to the Global Corruption Barometer, seven percent of Americans who’ve had contact with the police over the past year claim they paid a bribe to a police officer. Most troubling, there is evidence that too many police are mis-using or abusing that power, particularly when it comes to race.
In New York, for example, the ‘stop and frisk’ program expanded so that there were nearly 700,000 cases in 2011 in which police with ‘reasonable suspicion’ stopped, interrogated and patted down people across the city. Four out of ten of those stops involved black and Latino males between the ages of 14 and 24 –a group that makes up less than one-twentieth of the city’s population. (The program is currently the subject of an appeals court case over its constitutionality, and the number of stop-and-frisks has dramatically declined over the past year). Analysis by John Donohue of Stanford University and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago found that the more white police are hired by police departments, the higher the arrest rate for nonwhites climbs, while the rate of arrests for whites stays constant. (Similarly, hiring more non-whites led to an increase in the white arrest rate). In Boston, officers are more likely to search a car if the race of the officer and driver are different.
The problem of rogue and biased policemen is considerably larger in the developing world. In South Africa at the start of the last decade, a little over 500 people died as a result of police action every year – per capita, that’s about eight times the police action death rate of the U.S. Or take India, where 62% of those who’ve been in contact with the police over the past year say they paid a bribe to a police officer or official, or Nigeria where the proportion reaches four out of five. If you look at surveys of corruption victimization, the police usually rank as some of the most corrupt public officials worldwide.
Nonetheless, there are things the U.S. can learn from the developing World –and India and South Africa in particular — when it comes to reducing police misconduct. South Africa’s Independent Complaints Directorate, for example, fully tracks cases where police kill suspects – unlike the U.S., where the FBI relies on voluntary reporting. Like good research on gun deaths, the politicization of data on law enforcement in the U.S. means that less information is available to analyze the causes and responses to police misconduct.
The Indian state of Rajasthan used crime surveys and decoy visits (in which hired actors tried to report fictitious crimes) as part of an effort to evaluate reforms designed to improve the quality of policing. The research suggested that additional training and freezing transfers between police stations both were effective in reducing fear and increasing trust of the police among citizens.
Some U.S. police departments have tried similar measures. The New York Police Department, and departments in Los Angeles and New Orleans, have randomly tested police by presenting them with the opportunity to take a bribe or steal money or drugs and watching to see if they do it. In a common example, Internal Affairs Bureau testers will claim to have found a wallet stuffed with cash and hand it to a police officer. The good news in New York is that hardly any officers fail the test. What’s unclear is if this a sign of honesty so much as the fact that police know this is a common test.
Rajasthan’s experiment wasn’t just about catching the odd dishonest cop – it used random testing to evaluate approaches to make all police officers do their job better. It is about time that police forces from New York to St Louis followed suit. Perhaps a start would be to use data to see if there’s evidence of considerable racial bias — longer wait times, less likelihood of registering a crime, or a different likelihood of keeping ‘found’ wallets containing pictures of black kids than white kids. Police should more systematically test what approaches – greater citizen oversight, training or other interventions — help reduce disparities and then share that information in a more transparent way. If we’re to give the police such extraordinary power over the lives of U.S. citizens, we should go to extraordinary lengths to ensure that power is used responsibly.
Kenny is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and author of The Upside of Down: Why the Rise of the Rest is Great for the West.
