Rethinking the Police (eBook)

An Officer's Confession and the Pathway to Reform

Daniel Reinhardt (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
224 Seiten
IVP (Verlag)
978-1-5140-0613-9 (ISBN)

Infos

A former officer grapples with the reality of our broken police culture Our society has long been stuck in cultural and ideological battles about police brutality and the police force's broken relationship with our communities. Rethinking the Police promises to start a more hopeful conversation. Daniel Reinhardt spent twenty-four years as a police officer near Cleveland, Ohio. He was long unaware of the ways the culture of the police department was shaping him, but gradually, through his own experiences as a police officer and through the mentorship of Black Christians in his life, his eyes were opened to a difficult truth: police brutality against racial minorities was endemic to the culture of the system itself. In Rethinking the Police, Reinhardt lays out a history of policing in the United States, showing how it developed a culture of dehumanization, systemic racism, and brutality. But Reinhardt doesn't stop there: he offers a new model of policing based not in dominance and control but in a culture of servant leadership, with concrete suggestions for procedural justice and community policing.

Daniel Reinhardt (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) served as a police officer near Cleveland, Ohio, for twenty-four years. After retiring from the police force, he was assistant professor at the Heart of Texas Foundation College of Ministry at the Memorial Unit, a prison in Rosharon, Texas. Currently, he is associate director of student life and applied ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, with his wife, Yvette.

Textauszug

From Promising
Beginnings to Abuse

THROUGHOUT MY TWENTY-FOUR-YEAR career as a police officer, I was thanked for my service on many occasions. In restaurants and drive-thrus, I often went to pay my bill only to learn an unknown person already paid it. Gestures like these are not necessarily based on anything an individual officer has done, but due to the recognition that an officer is part of a collective. A police officer represents a history and culture over 150 years old. During that time, many officers have served honorably, and some have even paid the ultimate price by dying in the line of duty. People recognize and appreciate these sacrifices by honoring representatives of the collective.

Most officers readily accept the gratitude and truly appreciate the sentiment. We love advancing this noble history, even though the kindness we receive may not directly relate to anything specific we have done. I believe this is a healthy attitude, and all officers should accept the compliment stemming from the connection with our history.

However, we should also take the bad with the good.

When the public recognizes our past of racism and abuse, officers tend to shy away from any association with these negative realities. Acknowledging our participation in the enforcement of Jim Crow laws and other disturbing practices of the past is difficult. Yet our history cannot be disconnected from who we are. Today, we can view video of officers wading into masses of peaceful African American protestors during the civil rights movement and beating them with batons. We are part of that history too. The uniform I wore every day represented the entire story—which is not an easy truth to digest. When these unfortunate events in our history are brought to light, officers tend to respond by noting they weren’t alive when these things took place, or that they aren’t the perpetrators of the incidents of brutality taking place today.

I understand the tendency to reject our past failures and accept only the honorable aspects of law enforcement. But we are representatives of a history and culture in all that it is and is not—the amazing acts of valor and the despicable abuses. We represent both those who gave their lives in service and those who abused their power. If we adopt an incomplete and inaccurate depiction of our history, we will cease to truly know who we are as a profession, a culture, and a people—the “family” of law enforcement, as we like to say.

THE JOURNEY FROM PEEL AND PEACE TO TENSION AND ABUSE

The modern idea of policing started with a Christian foundation, oriented toward servanthood, the cultivation of peace, and the judicious exercise of power. However, almost immediately the American police deviated from this philosophical foundation. Understanding the drift from this foundation into the sad history of abuses and reforms will help the reader appreciate how police culture was formed.

While serving as the British Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel created a modern police force in London in 1829. It emphasized peacekeeping and later served as the model for the first modern police forces in the United States.1 He drafted nine foundational principles focused on the prevention of crime, public approval and respect, public cooperation, the judicious use of force, impartial service to all members of society, friendliness, strong public relations, police unity with the public, and professionalism.2 Robert Peel’s principles reflected one foundational maxim: “To keep the peace by peaceful means.”3

Peel was a Christian, and his principles were a reaction, at least to some extent, to the objections of evangelical Christians concerning law enforcement practices. “British evangelicals long had protested Britain’s legal and penal system; its law enforcement strategy involved tactics that some citizens found intimidating. . . . Peel was sympathetic to these evangelicals.”4 The principles he drafted were partly a response to the concerns of these British evangelicals and became the foundation for American police departments promoting peace and harmony. That foundation, however, would not hold for long.

1845−1960: THE BEGINNINGS OF CORRUPTION AND REFORM

In 1845, New York City was the first modern police department built on Peel’s principles.5 However, the model for police in the United States differed from that of London in that they were municipal and not federal, thus controlled by local politicians, and even at this point known to be “more liberal in their use of force than were the English bobbies.”6 The police became tools in the hands of politicians and subject to their agendas, which led to selective enforcement by law enforcement and politicians taking bribes to reward positions in the police departments.7 Sadly, despite the promise of Peel’s foundation, modern policing in America was imperiled from the start.

Nonetheless, there were some promising aspects of early policing. For instance, the police tended to be heavily involved in social services. The Boston Police Department, for example, housed the homeless, while the New York Police Department entertained children at the police stations, looked after troubled youth, and started a “junior police program.”8 Police officers served their communities through more relational functions and were not simply focused on criminal enforcement.

However, in the 1930s reform efforts shifted the focus away from such services as corruption continued to worsen throughout the 1920s, prompting President Hoover to form a commission in response. The Wickersham Commission published the Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, which detailed how the police utilized “intimidation, brutality, illegal arrests and detention,” particularly when interacting with “particular groups of people such as racial and ethnic minorities.”9 Sadly, it only took American police departments a matter of decades to become thoroughly corrupt and brutal.10

By the 1930s, the need for police reform was glaring, and was instituted through more science-based policing, where the police focused on professional conduct, enforcement of criminal law, criminal investigation, and objective hiring practices.11 Reform efforts eventually wrestled control from corrupt local politicians and gave authority to police chiefs, who provided structure and accountability for officers.12 Additionally, motorized patrol increased an officer’s range and the ability of supervisors to oversee officers in the field. However, motorized patrol also had the adverse effect of separating officers from their communities.13 The reforms of the 1930s helped reduce police corruption, but the focus on crime fighting and motorized patrol further contributed to the dwindling of social services, distancing the officer from the community.

Sir Robert Peel had conceived of police success as an absence of crime, not the presence of enforcement. Police departments in the United States, however, deviated from Peel’s principles and measured success through arrests and other crime statistics. Gaines, Kappeler, and Vaughn describe the 1940s and 1950s as a professional phase in policing and provide a helpful description:

The professional phase of policing produced a more efficient police organization that was devoted to criminal apprehension. Officers were moved from foot patrol to vehicular patrol and a variety of technologies were adopted. Police officers were discouraged from getting involved with citizens for fear of breeding corruption. Also, efficiency of operation was considered more important than solving problems, and the application of human relation skills within the police organization or by its officers in their daily activities was viewed as being inefficient and therefore unprofessional.14

Even at this early stage of American policing, one can clearly see the drift away from community relationships, problem solving, and crime prevention toward impersonal enforcement. Police departments were crime-focused and insulated from outside control, but while their autonomy lessened corruption among the ranks, it also removed them from external accountability.15 The 1940s and 1950s also surfaced growing tensions among mostly White police departments toward racial minorities, even while garnering support among the middle class.16

The modern American police department may have been inspired by London’s police force and Peel’s nine principles, but it swiftly embraced a more liberal use of force. Amid the influence of local corruption and reform efforts, police continued to deviate from Peel’s principles, focusing on crime and enforcement of criminal violations rather than community relations and peacekeeping. Technology, the emphasis on more science-based policing, and professionalism further contributed to officers isolating themselves from the community. The social distance was most poignant in communities of color, and the tensions between mostly White police departments and African Americans took root in the decades leading up to the 1960s.17 The history of policing in America has been one of ever-increasing social distance, particularly with racial minorities, where tensions were growing in communities of color throughout the decades following the Second World War.

1960−1990: TURBULENCE AND CHANGE

The simmering pot came to a boil in the 1960s.18 The war in Vietnam, the increase of crime, the civil rights movement, and the assassinations of John...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.11.2023
• Verlagsort: Lisle
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• Schlagworte: Community Policing • criminal justice • Criminal Justice Reform • defund the police • history of policing • Institutionalized Racism • Police brutality • police in America • police in the u.s. • Police Officer • police reform • Racial Justice • Systemic Racism
• ISBN-10: 1-5140-0613-8 / 1514006138
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5140-0613-9 / 9781514006139