The Terrifying History of Community Policing

And an Alternative Way to Do It

Well, of course, this is a bit of hyperbole. I figured modern policing doesn't really begin until 1829, when Sir Robert Peel established the first modern police force in England. His policemen were called peelers and their tactics were kind of rough sometimes. Prior to that the role of keeper of public order fell to soldiers of the local lords and dukes and barons, though a few large cities did have some rudimentary police force. In smaller communities the community simply had to put up with it, hide their valuables and their children when the local robber bands showed up. It was either passive defense which amounted to no defense at all or local citizens ban together and try to kill the invaders. You couldn't leave them alive or they'd be back to get revenge. Gangs of criminals would ride between little towns and villages and loot and pillage. In earlier times, knights in armor would ride around righting wrongs, saving damsels or executing brigands. Or in the case of "black" knights, would go the other way, committing wrongs and bullying the locals. It was all very medieval.

The French Revolution: The Reign of Terror

One of my favorite early attempts at anarchist created community policing is the French Revolution. The mob took over Paris, killed the king and queen and an assortment of nobles to clean house. Once that was done their leaders expanded the role of the so-called Committee of Public Safety to in essence police Paris. Their concept of policing focused on ferreting out those who did not subscribe to the wisdom of the mob. There were actual police in Paris, but they were quickly swept aside by the mob.

It was not long before the chaotic factions,, each jockeying for power, started turning on each other. Robespierre tried to use the terror of the guillotine to control the mob and bring his own faction to power. The mob that the French government had become, however, quickly turned on him and he wound up under the guillotine himself. 

The Soviet Revolution: The Red Terror

Here the Chinese do "community policing" as promised.

Significantly, the leaders of the Soviet October Revolution and the Red Terror raised up the ghost of Robespierre as a model revolutionary figure. Lenin even built a  monument to him out of concrete and plastic tubes. It crumbled and fell down after a few days and was never rebuilt.

The Chinese Revolution: The Great Leap Forward

The Chinese Communists under Chairman Mao decide the revolution needed a boost. The "People's Army" went round to the villages. They gathered everyone together one day and explained that now that they had reduced crime and prostitution, there was no need for the people (many of them former communist soldiers) to have guns. They asked the people to pile their weapons up in the town square as a symbol of confidence in the new communist government. The soldiers gathered up the weapons and left. The next day the soldiers returned to do a little community policing. They gathered up teachers, intellectuals, and anyone who owned more than one oxen, marched them out and executed them as counter-revolutionaries.

The Nazi Revolution: The Brownshirts

Hitler's Brownshirts

As Adolph Hitler pushed his way to the front of the Nazi Party and the chancellorship of Germany in the early 30s he was aided by a more disciplined group of thugs and bullies known as the Brownshirts. They ran around Germany burning books, smashing windows, looting stores and abusing Jews on behalf of the Party and in the name of establishing order in the community. The police, as usual, were bypassed and stood helplessly by. Once the party took power however, Hitler created his own more disciplined gang of hoodlums and on what was later called "The Night of the Long Knives" the Brownshirt leaders who were beginning to be troublesome were arrested and summarily shot while the rank and file were given a choice to sign up with Hitler's community policing solution, the Gestapo, or join their leaders in a ditch.

Mussolini's Blackshirts:

Mussolini's Blackshirts

The Blackshirts were the inspiration for the brownshirts. I think the shirts had extra thick pockets for holding all those medals up. The backshirts served as Benito Mussolini's enforcers until Italians heard the Allies had invaded and Benito soon found himself shot and hanging by his feet from a telephone pole. The blackshirts were kind of dilitantes wearing fancy shirts and insignia with ranks and organization derived from the Roman Legions. When the Italian government fell the blackshirts disappeared - summarily disbanded.

A Better Way to Do Community Policing

So much of what is happening now is a reflection of other chaotic revolutions of the past. There are more of them I could list, but the thought of all those thugs and bullies make me tired. The leaders inevitably maunder on about "the people" and their rights and promise some kind of Utopia. They often reject religion in favor of some new kind of religion or atheism (which by the way is a religion all in itself). Inevitably these revolutions become more Puritanical than the Puritans were. They seldom shrink from mass murder.  If a nation calls itself some variant of the Democratic People's Socialist Republic, you can bet it's neither Democratic, nor a Republic, nor of particular benefit to the "people".

The trouble is that when we reject God, when we set ourselves or some charismatic leader up in God's place, we find ourselves automatically under the influence of the Prince of Chaos. I remember a rock song from back in the 60s or 70s that had a line in it that went something like, "Satan, Satan is my name. Confusion is my game."

Bike cops build relationships.

The idea of community policing is actually a good one. With the healthy kind of community policing Cops in uniform walk or ride bicycles to patrol beats. They interact daily with the whole community rather than rolling around inside a car and only interact with the criminal community. That more "professional" approach to policing skews a cops perspective on his community.

Back in my home town in Texas, our local police department tried out beat cops on bicycles in neighborhoods where gangs were tagging bridges, overpasses and buildings. The cops, especially the ones right out of cop school loved it. They got to know the people in the neighborhoods they were responsible to. The neighbors came to view the beat cops as "their policemen". The kids began to see the police as part of the community - people they could trust if they got in trouble. The trouble-makers tended to move away from the beat cops. Unfortunately, bicycle cops made the "professionals" uncomfortable. For one thing they were all in good shape. The old-fashioned overweight "doughnut" cops couldn't keep up and, I think, they were afraid someone would put them on a bicycle too. For others, it was a new system that they didn't really understand. Some had difficulty believing that cops on the beat were being 'productive' since they were spending more time socializing with people in the neighborhood than they were fighting crime.

One thing we did notice was that people started ratting out the local hoodlums to the bike cops. The cops were able to identify problem individuals and stepped up surveillance on those folks. We discovered that you could remove 4 or 5 bad eggs from a town and dramatically reduce the crime rate in a mid-sized town.

I believe in community policing, but not in the sort being pushed by BLM and Antifa and leftist Democrats. Sending social workers into a crisis situation is a very very bad idea. I say that having worked in a large treatment center working with angry, delinquent and mentally ill youth. I learned how to talk enraged adolescents and kids down. I learned how to successfully restrain an out-of-control kid. A key part of the strategy for managing difficult youth was building a relationship between the staff who acted as safety officers and the troubled kids. If the kids see you as a friend and member of their community, the job is a lot easier.

Properly done, this sort of approach requires police to learn some psychology, crisis management and transactional negotiation techniques. This is very hard to do from a cop car. Don't get me wrong, cop cars are necessary to transport police to crisis situation in a hurry. But I think the primary emphasis in policing should be on placing neighborhood cops in communities. One thing I've seen done, especially in smaller towns, is placing cops to live in the communities they patrol. This makes policing something that takes place beyond the 7 to 3 shift. It becomes about cops making themselves a part of community life - doing youth work on the side, spending time talking to neighbors, doing volunteer works. This also reduces the risk the cop will face in doing his patrols.

If the community sees a police officer as their community's personal cop, they will protect him or her, warn the officer of dangers and will be more likely to come to his aid if bad guys threaten him. One of the problem with "professional" policing is the problem with the old-fashioned doctor/patient relationship.  The medical community has learned to do a better job of communicating with patients. The old doctor-as-god approach where the doc comes in, spends a few minutes, pronounces a diagnosis and leaves is badly outdated. Doctors are learning to spend more time with patients in and out of the office that was lost when doctors quit doing house calls and became more "professional".

ANTIFA does "community policing".

In the same way, when cops move in their community and during their service hours invest time in getting to know the community they are responsible for. When they participate in community life, show up for the science fair, attend football and basketball games down at the school both in uniform and out, drop by a neighbor's garage sale and show the flag all over the community, the community's attitude toward their cops changes. It's more time-consuming and police departments should reward officers for taking time to be a neighbor. If the beat cops knows that the communities they serve are their responsibilities, it changes the relationship in his or her mind. That's community policing done right, not this mob-coerced abolition of the police in favor of the sort of community policing that saw multiple shootings in the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (or CHOP or whatever catchy name they were calling it) within just a few weeks. Rioting that led to a mob storming city hall and demanding the resignation of the same Democrat Mayor, who had been praising their behavior for weeks, calling it a "summer of love." Given the massive outpouring of unfocused rage, I don't see a whole lot of love in it.

The current state-sponsored looting, rioting and anarchy has already seen the mob turn on "supportive" Democrat mayors in Seattle, Portland, New York and Atlanta.  Historically, mob/state relationships tend not to be long-lasting ones. There tends not to be a big separation of mob and state, until the mob accomplishes the state's goals and then it's up against the wall..... Well, you know the rest.

Shades of Robespierre!

© 2020 by Tom King