Hunting for “Dirtbags”: Why Cops Over-Police the Poor and Racial Minorities

6 | The Future: Service-Oriented Policing

c h a p ter si x THE FUTURE Service-Oriented Policing You didn’t see anything! Get in the house!—comment from mother to son when son was attempting to help police regarding a shooting, as reported by Seaside officer he trend in the criminal justice system has been to continue to put greater numbers of poor individuals under its jurisdiction often through drug laws.1 This trend has been given many different names: “the criminal justice juggernaut” (Websdale 2001), “the culture of control” (Garland 2001), “management of the underclasses” (Feeley and Simon 1992), and the “waste management model” (Simon 1993). The focus, all these authors argue, is not on any of the traditional goals of the criminal justice system: retribution, rehabilitation, or deterrence. The new goal of the criminal justice system seems to be management of social undesirables , and we now understand how the police (consciously or unconsciously)playanactivepartinthatneworientation.Because law enforcement personnel claim they are acting on behalf of the safety of the masses, the public largely accepts this increased level of control over certain segments of the population (Garland 2001; Smith et al. 2005). A decade-long decrease in crime did not see a corresponding reduction in levels of criminal justice supervision. Rather,numbersofpeoplebothincarceratedandonprobationand parole have continued to rise, even though crime rates have flat- 136 hunting for “dirtbags” tened.2 With the current political climate, proactive police behaviors are understandable. The major findings of this book document how proactive police work, or specifically hunting, occurs in a large urban context. Officers do not hunt equally in all areas of a city. There are particular places that officers would not even consider hunting, however, there are also certain areas, mainly those where lower class people either reside or frequent, in which most of the proactive work is occurring. Officers even leave their assigned districts to hunt in areasthataredeemedbettertofind“dirtbags.”Ifwetakeequalprotection issues seriously, there is cause for concern that lower class residents are subjected to a greater level of police surveillance than are their middle and upper class counterparts. Equal protection guarantees extend to privacy rights, meaning the level of surveillance should also be ruled by equal protection principles. Unsurprisingly , a higher level of police presence will lead to an increased likelihood of police contact and arrest. Along with the inclination of proactive police officers to hunt in particular sections of town, it is also those people who appear to be “scumbags” who are subjected to proactive contacts. Proactive contacts are made with the sole purpose of finding lawbreakers ; and yet, such attempts are largely ineffective. Of seventyeightobservedproactivecontacts ,onlyfourresultedinarrests,which correlates to a 5 percent arrest rate. Both reactive and proactive observed contacts resulted in 5 percent arrest rate, which means that proactive contacts were no more effective in finding lawbreakers. Because proactive contacts rarely result in finding lawbreakers, their frequency and targeted nature suggest the result of proactivity is more akin to harassment of particular neighborhoods than an effective crime control tactic. Even judged against its own standards , to catch criminals, proactive work is unsuccessful. Hunting may not be a more effective means of finding lawbreakers, but it the future 137 surely exerts the power of the criminal justice system to manage the underclass through increased surveillance. The ineffectiveness of proactive policing calls into serious question why it continues to be practiced. Officers can hunt for hours without making an arrest or issuing a citation. Still, they continue toembracetheseactivities.Why?Towhatend?Giventheexpectations of the general public that the police “keep an eye” on certain peopleandcertaincommunities,thepolicearebehavingexactlyas they are expected. Regardless of the number of arrests or citations issued, hunting is effective in the new penology because it keeps segments of U.S. society watched and subdued. One of the most fundamentally problematic aspects of hunting is the fact that police officers are selecting who should be considered suspicious and more closely patrolled rather than citizens making those decisions. In a political climate that rewards the police for controlling the underclass and keeping “disorder” from the middle and upper classes, proactive policing is practiced in a discriminatory manner. Officers may not intend to make a greater number of contacts with people of color or poor people, but institutional pressures result in higher levels of policing of these populations. Again, the words of a former police officer emphasize the need for the police to saturate and harass poor and minoritydominated neighborhoods. Former Chicago police officer Juan...