The failure of US policing

One of the missing pieces of commentary about the terrible events happening in the United States this week is what it reveals about the state of American policing, which is largely unreformed, lacking governance and is beset with confused and over-lapping structures and jurisdiction.

I have spent a lot of my life working alongside police forces from countries other than Britain, including the United States. There are lots of different models across the world, many countries with divided local, state and federal police, some countries with a national or sometimes more than one national police, all reflecting different histories and political settlements. This is true of the UK and true too for the US, but nowhere else in the western world has a policing system as chaotic as America.

The dominant image of American policing is provided by the New York Police Department, which went through major reforms in the mid-90s under Bill Bratton, the charismatic Commissioner. (Bratton was eventually fired for becoming a more prominent and admired figure than the then-Mayor of New York, one Rudi Guiliani.) The NYPD was modelled on the Metropolitan Police in London, and resembles it in many ways. It is a big city force, with lots of scandals in its history, but organisationally it is coherent and largely compatible with the geography it inhabits. The same goes for the police forces in Chicago, Los Angeles (mostly), Houston and half a dozen other US conurbations.

But that is not true about the rest of American policing. There are something in the region of 18,000 local police forces in the US, many with less than 20 officers. The small island of Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, provides some good examples. Its 15,000 residents (and its many, often celebrity, summer visitors) are served by five separate local police forces, the largest at Edgartown, again with something around 20 officers. For Martha’s Vineyard, self-contained and largely crime free, there is nothing wrong and much locally desirable with this model (although Edgartown did not have its finest hour over the Chappaquiddick incident).

For the United States, however, the impossibility of replicating best practice and eradicating worst practice through training to a national standard across many, many thousands of Edgartowns is starkly obvious. The events of the last week prove that this has been made worse by the response to 9/11, which has provided already heavily-armed police departments with the opportunity to buy and to deploy military-grade armaments. They are all highly trained on how to use guns, but likely to be much less well trained on when to use them.

And then we move up the law enforcement chain. In addition to local police departments, there are individual State police forces and Highway Patrols. The Sheriff and the District Attorney prosecutorial system both produce directly elected officials, often with their own police officers, and no one gets elected to be anything less than very tough on crime.

Then there are more than 50 separate federal enforcement agencies, ranging from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose national remit now extends to counter-terrorism because there is no American equivalent of MI5, to National Park rangers, from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the Department of Homeland Security to the Statue of Liberty Police.

There is a not-for-profit organisation, the Police Executive Research Forum, which issues guidance on some best practice. However, there is no national system of police governance and no Inspectorate to lay down national standards and doctrine for policing. After the most egregious of incidents, a department can be placed under federal decree, which amounts to temporary supervision of some aspects of that single department by the Department of Justice. Police chiefs come and go with political changes at mayoral level, but there is no real equivalent of the UK’s National Police Chief’s Council.

I was educated in part in the American school system and I have many friends there. I have taught briefly at American universities and I am an Americophile. I have worked alongside admirable law enforcement professionals in the US, including Bob Mueller and Bill Bratton. I am sure that the vast majority of American police are decent and humane and brave. However, they do not work in a system that facilitates learning, or continuous professional development. Some of them will be badly injured and perhaps killed this week as a result, along with many of the public they serve.

Perhaps the most depressing phrase I have heard in the last few days has been to hear American politicians roll out the concept of “rotten apples” to describe rogue cops, as if there is nothing that can be done to prevent infection in the barrel. That concept was exploded 50 years ago by the 1970 Knapp Commission into corruption in the New York Police Department, made famous by the film “Serpico”.

The Knapp Commission found that corruption needed not only “meateaters” (the corrupt cops and their criminal associates) but a culture of “grasseaters”, including supervisors, who did not want to rock the boat and were content to look the other way. The frequent, geographically widespread and often fatal police over-reaction to black suspects in the United States indicates a culture that does not try hard enough to minimise that.

The UK police have had their scandals — and how. They have faced difficulties over race and have had to deal with riots and corruption. But they have consistently tried to learn.

Except in the special circumstances of Northern Ireland, the UK police have never fired a baton round in anger and have only used tear gas once, to fire into a barricaded house. They have used military aid to the civil power only once, at the siege of the Iranian Embassy in 1980.

Contrast that with Minneapolis, where more than 4,000 National Guard personnel were deployed during last Sunday night, or with the scenes outside the White House. Looking at the US this week, it makes me want to weep for such a wonderful country.