Where Policing Is Headed Next

Police officers’ role in society may be more like public school teachers’ than you think.

That comparison is part of a new vision of law enforcement being pitched by New Haven’s nationally renowned reformer, a vision of how ​“policing” is central to what it means to be a citizen.

Yale Law School Professor Tracey Meares unveiled that new police reform conceptual framework Tuesday night during the latest entry in the New Haven Free Public Library’s ​“Democracy in America / Democracy in Crisis: Conversations with New Haven Scholars” lecture series.

Speaking before an audience of roughly a dozen in the downtown public library’s basement conference room, Meares gave New Haven a sneak peak of a speech she plans to give to a much larger, academic audience at the London School of Economics in the coming weeks.

She also started laying the foundation for the deep thinking she sees necessary for not just reducing crime and holding rogue police officers accountable to the law, but also for encouraging an understanding of policing as primarily responsible for promoting the ​“public good.” That could involve everything from having police officers not carry firearms — to doubling down on public investment in schools and affordable housing.

Meares is already a nationally influential criminal justice thinker.

Her research on ​“procedural justice,” which focuses more on building police-civilian trust than on punishment, helped lead to the creation of the local violence reduction program Project Longevity and similar efforts in other cities.

She regularly travels the country, training cops on the importance of promoting fairness, public input, transparency, and dignity in their attempts to build a police force deemed legitimate by the communities they serve.

She was tapped by then-President Barack Obama in 2014 to serve on his Task Force on 21st Century Policing.

And she has helped shift the national conversation about policing over the past 15 years away from the idea that cops are simply crime-fighting warriors. 

Tuesday night, Meares built off of that decade-plus of pragmatic scholarship to argue that the criminal justice system as it exists today should not be outright abolished, even with the understanding that there are long through lines connecting 19th century slave patrols, Jim Crow segregation, and the mass incarceration of primarily African Americans.

Total abolition would open up the realm of public safety too wide for private actors to fill, she said.

“People who are in need of many things shouldn’t have to rely on, for example, private corporations to give them clean water,” she said. ​“They shouldn’t have to rely on Betsy DeVos deciding that she’s going to have portions of her salary given to people to go to private schools. And they shouldn’t have to rely on inadequate policing.”

Instead, Meares argued, criminal justice critics strive to place policing in a broader public context. She said policing is at its core a means of regulating behavior and enforcing order for the sake of the public health, safety, and general welfare of a state’s inhabitants. She said it should and must remain the domain of a government charged with promoting the ​“public good,” and not of a private sector concerned primarily with earning profit.

“Where do we get public schools?” Meares asked. ​“The police power. Where do we get clean water? The police power.”

A Tracey Meares Glossary

Blending sociology, psychology, law, history, and political science, Meares’ argument floated into some pretty heady terrain (at least for this reporter).

As a guide for understanding the core arguments made in her speech, here’s a glossary of terms used by Meares Tuesday night in her pitch for why police reformers should not ditch the government entirely in their bid to create a more just, equitable, and safe society; along with commentary provided by participants in Tuesday night’s discussion.

Procedural Justice

noun
the criminal justice theory that fairness and dispute resolution are key to successful, legitimate law enforcement.

Meares helped pioneer the development and popularization of this approach to law enforcement through her research and police trainings over the past decade.

She said that procedural justice rests upon social, psychological research that shows that people care about four factors when determining the legitimacy of a public institution like a police department.

Those include participation (“People report high levels of satisfaction in their encounters with authorities when they have an opportunity to explain their situation” and have input on policies), fairness (which includes public perceptions of neutrality, objectivity, consistency, and transparency in decision makers), dignity (“People care a great deal about how they are treated by an organization”), and good will (“People want to believe that the authorities they are dealing with are acting out of a source of benevolence towards them.”)

Meares argued that police departments should adopt principles of procedural justice to improve police-community relations in the wake of three decades of criminological theorizing that pushed the notion that crime reduction is the primary responsibility of law enforcement officers — a set of ideas that led to programs like former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s indiscriminate ​“stop and frisk” policies targeted at young black and brown men.

And yet, policy makers and police and civilians and scholars must go a step further than just procedural justice if they want to truly promote long-term public safety, she said.

Citizenship

noun
the status of being vested with a common set of rights, privileges, and legal protections granted to recognized subjects of a state or nation or commonwealth.

“My argument is that policing is a product of citizenship,” Meares argued Tuesday night. ​“And conceptualizing it and carrying it out as a public good makes citizenship real.”

Central to Meares’s speech was that policing as a practice does not have to be just the reduction of violent crime at the expense of civil liberties on the one hand, or, on the other, an institution so weighed down by its history of controlling racial and ethnic and religious and gender-expressing minorities that it must be abolished in its entirety.

Instead, she argued, policing must be thought of as a function of the state that builds a sense of common citizenship. She pointed out that state functions like public education and public health work have similar roots in the state’s obligation to promote the public good.

“Traditionally, the idea of police power was understood as the power of the state to regulate behavior and enforce order within its territory for the betterment of health, safety, and the general welfare of the state’s inhabitants,” she argued.

Yale historian Matthew Jacobson (pictured) asked Meares if anyone in her current circles of criminal justice reformers and advocates currently talk about the connection between citizenship and policing.

No, Meares replied. And that’s why she’s developing this theoretical push.

She emphasized that bringing the term citizenship back into conversations about policing is not meant to be unidirectional, with, say, police and advocates trying to restore citizenship protections for people recently released from prison whom they look at as lacking citizenship.

“What they don’t understand adequately is that reconceptualizing citizenship is a project for everybody,” she said.

She referenced the post-Civil War Reconstruction era (see below) as a model example for white Americans and formerly enslaved African Americans both adjusting their understandings of who qualified as a citizen.

“It’s not just about making people who are formerly enslaved understand themselves as citizens,” she said. ​“It’s also about understanding that John C. Calhoun was not a citizen in that world.”

Did you just say that Calhoun, the early 19th-century South Carolina senator, Yale graduate, and ardent white supremacist, wasn’t a citizen? asked former city prison reentry chief Earl Bloodworth (pictured). How is that?

“Because we can’t all have a common view of citizenship if one person or group of people understand themselves as people who can deny citizenship to other people,” Meares replied.

Reconstruction

noun
the era between 1863 and 1877 when the American federal government took a lead role in ensuring the liberty and social and political integration of millions of formerly enslaved African Americans in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.

Meares returned again and again over the course of her speech to the Reconstruction era as a model for the work that needs to be done today to transform policing into a state function that primarily acts, and is perceived by the general public as serving, the public good.

She referenced W.E.B. DuBois’s ​“magisterial” 1935 history of the era, in which he described the efforts of four million African Americans to ​“create spaces for themselves as citizens” by reestablishing families, founding churches, ​“creating schools, creating schools, creating schools,” purchasing property, defending newfound legal rights in court, and voting and electing hundreds of magistrates, local and state legislators, and Congressmen.

They didn’t do that work alone, Meares said. The Republican-led federal government played a prominent role in promoting the formerly enslaved population’s protections through the passage and active enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments.

“Reconstruction demands state involvement and state resources, and I think it demands a salient and visible relationship between citizens and the state,” she said.

Pivoting back towards the present day and the explicit subject of her speech, Meares said, ​“The question is whether police can be changed in a meaningful way that can also transform individual understandings of citizenship.”

Wooster Square resident Aaron Goode (pictured) asked what that work might look like today. Does it take the form of restorative justice? Of local residency requirements for city police officers?

“I would not advocate for residency requirements,” Meares replied, at least insofar as this policing-citizenship project is concerned.

The reform work needs to be more structural than that.

What if police departments had very few people who were armed with lethal weapons? she asked.

What if police departments followed the New Haven-Yale Child Study Center partnership model whereby social workers travel alongside with cops and work with kids at the sites of traumatic incidents?

What if police officers weren’t armed at all? Or if only social workers, and not police officers, traveled to those traumatic incidents?

“What if you really just rethink what this job is,” she said. ​“Understanding that the police power is about providing for the general welfare of a state’s citizens, which might be a real thoroughgoing commitment to public schools. Or to think about providing housing services really differently. I guess I want to say, that is policing.

“We have a really interesting and particular investment in seeing policing as something that’s associated with force, and deadly force,” she continued. ​“And it doesn’t have to be.”