by Rosa Brooks
In the early to late: Escobar, Gabriel, “Washington Area’s 703 Homicides in 1990 Set a Record,” Washington Post, January 2, 1991, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/01/02/washington-areas-703-homicides-in-1990-set-a-record/ee71dd1f-59c8-4f03-af62-05b0a6134365/.
By the late 1990s: Bromwich Group, The Durability of Police Reform: The Metropolitan Police Department and Use of Force: 2008–2015 (Washington, DC: Office of the District of Columbia Auditor, 2016), zd4l62ki6k620lqb52h9ldm1.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Full-Report_2.pdf.
MPD invited the: Memorandum of Agreement, United States Department of Justice and the District of Columbia and the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, United States Department of Justice, June 13, 2001, www.justice.gov/crt/memorandum-agreement-united-states-department-justice-and-district-columbia-and-dc-metropolitan.
While the review: Bromwich Group, The Durability of Police Reform.
That’s not a high standard: Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386 (1989), emphasis added.
I knew the statistics: A recent study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that among men of all races, ages twenty-five to twenty-nine, police killings are the sixth leading cause of death. Ingraham, Christopher, “Police Shootings Are a Leading Cause of Death for Young American Men, New Research Shows,” Washington Post, August 8, 2019, www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/08/08/police-shootings-are-leading-cause-death-young-american-men-new-research-shows/.
10-99
I was one: Since June 2018, several other women have successfully become certified.
Each year, nearly: “Police Shootings Database, The Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings-database/.
But policing is not: And most police departments try, genuinely (if not always effectively or appropriately), to improve public safety.
All told, the average: Downey, P. Mitchell, John Roman, and Akiva Liberman, Adult Criminal Justice Case Processing in Washington, DC (Washington, DC: District of Columbia Crime Policy Institute, 2012), www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/25371/412562-adult-criminal-justice-case-processing-in-washington-dc.pdf.
While the economic costs of arrests can be estimated, the cost in community trust and goodwill is harder to quantify. When police are perceived as too quick to arrest people for trivial and nonviolent offenses (disorderly conduct, driving on a suspended license, etc.), communities can come to view policy with fear rather than trust, which in turn affects their willingness to share information with police and help reduce more serious crime.
Nearly a third: Austermuhle, Martin, “Those with a Criminal Record in D.C. May Soon Find It Easier to Bounce Back,” WAMU 88.5, September 14, 2017, wamu.org/story/17/09/14/criminal-record-d-c-may-soon-find-easier-bounce-back/.
When police make arrests: Since officers rarely get any feedback on why their cases were no-papered, they don’t change their behavior in response. This is one of the reasons law is often an ineffective means of driving change in police behavior. If police officers are unaware that their reports contain legally insufficient statements of probable cause, for instance, they’ll continue to make arrests that don’t pass constitutional muster, but they may never know it. Even if they do learn that their cases were no-papered for lack of probable cause, they may not care. If the institutional incentives in their department favor making arrests as the when-in-doubt default response, subsequent prosecutorial dismissals may be irrelevant to street-level officers.
EPILOGUE
Minor civil infractions: We also direct police officers to enforce traffic laws, vendor laws, taxi regulations, and a range of other laws that could be enforced instead by unarmed civilian officials (just as parking enforcement and building code enforcement are largely relegated to civilians). A high percentage of arrests and use-of-force incidents arise out of traffic stops, many of which need not have been made at all.
The city of Baltimore: Hamaji, Kate et al., Freedom to Thrive: Reimagining Safety & Security in Our Communities (Brooklyn, NY: Center for Popular Democracy, 2017), populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/Freedom%20To%20Thrive%2C%20Higher%20Res%20Version.pdf.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rosa Brooks is a law professor at Georgetown University and founder of Georgetown's Innovative Policing Program. From 2016 to 2020, she served as a reserve police officer with the Washington, DC, Metropolitan Police Department. She has worked previously at the Defense Department, the State Department, and for several international human rights organizations. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal, and she spent four years as a weekly opinion columnist for the Los Angeles Times and another four as a columnist for Foreign Policy. Her most recent book, How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2016; it was also shortlisted for the Lionel Gelber Prize and named one of the five best books of the year by the Council on Foreign Relations.
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