Criminologist David Kennedy: if cops want the public’s trust, they must admit to centuries of abuse

German Lopez · Friday, September 16, 2016, 12:05 pm

A criminologist explains why addressing police shootings and high crime need to go together.

American policing is broken. Since 2014, cities around the country have exploded in protests and, in rare situations, violence over police shootings and misconduct. And the US Department of Justice has released report after report essentially proving many of these protesters’ criticisms — that police are racially biased, far too quick to use force, and frequently violate locals’ constitutional rights.

The Justice Department is trying to fix this. With the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice, federal, state, and local officials hope to work to mend the broken trust felt in many communities — particularly black neighborhoods — in a way that will not only make the police-community relationship stronger, but also help fight crime as well.

To accomplish this, the Justice Department has tapped renowned criminologist David Kennedy of John Jay College. Kennedy has worked on law enforcement issues for years to help make policing more transparent and effective. In particular, he’s known for his work on a policing strategy known as “focused deterrence,” which focuses on targeting the very few individuals and groups that drive almost all the violence in US communities. The strategy works: Study after study back it up, and the method got much of the credit for the “Boston miracle” that saw the city’s violent crime rate drop by 79 percent in the 1990s.

But strategies like focused deterrence can only succeed with the community’s help. In focused deterrence, the community — family members, church leaders, social services, and so on — is a key partner with the police in telling people at high risk for violence that they have two options: either stop the violence and get help from social services, or face jail or prison for potentially decades if they act out again. Without help from the community, that message can’t be conveyed clearly — and many people at risk of violence can’t be reached at all.

Given that, Kennedy said he has become increasingly convinced that the only way to really start building safer communities is by fixing underlying problems of distrust and lack of faith in police. Otherwise, police aren’t going to be able to get the community’s cooperation to deter, stop, and solve crimes — and relationships will keep languishing as people not only see the police as untrustworthy, but ineffective at fighting crime.

“This is what folks who rail against the focus on police violence — and pull up against that, community violence — get wrong,” Kennedy told me. “What those folks simply don’t understand is that when communities don’t trust the police and are afraid of the police, then they will not and cannot work with police and within the law around issues in their own community. And then those issues within the community become issues the community needs to deal with on their own — and that leads to violence.”

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http://www.vox.com/2016/9/16/12920574/david-kennedy-police-trust-crime