'Broken Windows' Fights the 'Ferguson Effect'
That's the most in any month since December 1971 -- when the city was almost one-third more populous than it is today. Yet arrests by Baltimore police in the first two weeks of May fell by 57 percent compared to the same period in 2014.
But as much as Baltimore officials need to tackle that disparity, signs of a nationwide chill on aggressive policing and a related surge in violence are spotty at best. Mac Donald only mentions in passing, for example, the many cities that experienced a decline in their crime rates last year.
And among those in which crime has risen, any relation to protests sounds mostly like speculation. For example, in Chicago, a city with a long and deep history of street activism, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune in August found notably few protests over shootings by police, which statistically have been in decline since 2011.
Police shootings in Chicago have largely been overshadowed by the much larger problem of gang-related street shootings. Wrongful-death lawsuits in which the city pays substantial sums, the Tribune reported, "often provide the only information on (police) shootings that becomes public."
"The most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness," writes Mac Donald in the Journal, is the intense agitation against American police departments over the past nine months." Well, "most plausible" to her, anyway.
Like Mac Donald and many others, I actually support "broken windows" policing in principle. But that's only as long as it does not lead to overly aggressive sweeps of individuals off the streets who were committing no crime other than to be, say, young, poor, male and minority.
I support the police and salute the heroic sacrifices many have made. But in light of videotaped incidents of excessive force that have famously been broadcast and webcast recently, police should not feel overburdened by the need to protect the basic rights of the public they are sworn to serve.
Instead, the rest of us should take up the burden of providing police with body cameras, among other useful tools, for their protection as well as ours.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)
(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
