A Crisis of Public Justice
by Richard Korn, Ph.D.
In an article titled "The Crisis of Public Order" (The Atlantic
Monthly, July 1995), Attorney Adam Walinsky, former legislative aide to
the late Robert Kennedy, has issued an apocalyptic warning to his country.
On the magazine's cover, decorated with three helmeted but faceless stone
heads surmounting an ashen wall, his message cries out in four terrifying
sentences:
WE HAVE FLED OUR CITIES. WE HAVE PERMITTED THE SPREAD OF WASTELANDS RULED
BY MERCILESS KILLERS. WE HAVE ABANDONED MILLIONS OF OUR FELLOW CITIZENS
TO EVERY KIND OF DANGER AND DEGRADED ASSAULT. AND NOW A DEMOGRAPHIC SURGE
IS ABOUT TO MAKE EVERYTHING WORSE.
The language recalls the passion of his martyred leaders and their faith
in the power and duty of dynamic government to save us from enemies. It
is a call to arms, documented to persuade, bristling with statistics, urgent
and shocking. Walinsky is asking us to retrieve our country from a plague
of internal Vandals by means of five million police officers at the cost
of scores of billions of dollars. He writes:
In the l960s the United States as a whole had 3.3 police officers for every
violent crime reported per year. . (Today) we have less than one tenth the
effective police power of thirty years ago; each police officer today must
deal with 11.45 times as many violent crimes as his predecessor of years
gone by ...If we wished to return to the ratio of police officers to violent
crimes which gave us peace and security in the l960s we would have to add
not 100,000 new police officers but about five million.
The operative phrase is "the ratio which gave us peace and security."
Walinsky devotes the remainder of his article to his thesis that our peace
and security are gifts of police protection. It is a belief shared by many
of the more affluent among us. Walinsky points out, "The American people
are already paying out of their own pockets for an additional 1.5 million
private police officers, to provide at least in part, the protection that
the public police are unable to furnish." But:
If current trends continue. . . most of the new officers will be. . . available
for the protection not of the citizenry as a whole-and certainly not of
citizens living in the most violent ghettoes and housing projects-but of
the commercial and residential enclaves that can afford them.
And he adds, in a vivid and memorable phrase, "Between those enclaves
there will be plenty of room to lose a country."
A terrible truth is now out. From the new Fortress America the poorer victims
of violence will be excluded. Walinsky expands on this theme, a hallmark
of the liberal tradition: compassion for the poor. Nevertheless, before
our solicitude inspires us to do something about the poverty of the poor,
he reminds us that much of the deadly violence springs from the poor themselves.
In a section titled One Long Descending Night he details the horror with
numerical virtuosity: a chronicle of murder, rape and robbery by "strangers."
Who are these killers without faces? One thing we know, says Walinsky. They
come from the underprivileged. And they are disproportionately black. Both
the content and the tenor of Walinsky's article suggest that a race war
is in progress here. The clear implication is that it is being waged by
blacks against whites. And despite his solicitude for the black and brown
underclass, he points out that middle-class America is not about to open
its heart to impecunious killers. First things first:
We have to stop the killing. Beyond doubt we must reform welfare, minimize
illegitimacy, change the schools, strengthen employment opportunities, end
racism. In the midst of this war, while the killing continues, all that
is just talk. And dishonest talk besides; there can be no truth to our public
discussions while whites are filled with fear of black violence, and blacks
live every day with the fear and bitter knowledge that they and their children
have been abandoned to the rule of criminals.
And to underscore his point that the liberal agenda must await the fulfillment
of the conservative law-and-order objective, Walinsky offers a hair-raising
analogy:
If some foreign enemy had invaded New England, slaughtering its people and
plundering its wealth, would we be debating agricultural subsidies and the
future of Medicare while complaining that the deficit prevented us from
enlarging the army or buying more ammunition? Would the budget really force
us to abandon New Hampshire?
The corpus of the argument is now fully laid out on the table. The great-great-grandchildren
of our slaves are levying war against us. We are left with no alternative
to destruction but the civil equivalent of military self-defense.
Walinsky's Proposal
Since the early l980s Walinsky has been advocating the creation of a Police
Cadet program which would award young people a college education after a
period of service in police departments. I was present when he and a brilliant
younger colleague, Jonathan Rubinstein, presented the concept (modeled on
the Job Corps and reminiscent of the G.I. Bill of Rights) to an audience
of faculty and police functionaries at New York's John Jay College of Criminal
Justice, where I was teaching at the time. The police rejected the idea,
as an unwarranted attack on their franchise, and most of the faculty went
along with the police. (The faculty, I am told, has since embraced the idea.
I defended the original proposal and I support it now.)
But Walinsky's expansion of the proposal, raising the numbers from the l00,000
already included in the 1994 Omnibus Crime Bill, to five million - together
with his conviction that an army of police officers will materially resolve
our crisis of public order - transfigures his original idea completely.
Among the many questions we must ask are these:
How many youth of the underclass will be permitted to apply-especially after
screening for "delinquency" and flirtation with drugs? How many
more will be bypassed as a result of the demise of affirmative action? Some
Blacks and Hispanics will, of course, be eligible, and a fraction will be
selected, and will serve on the periphery of the Black enclaves. We will
thus reproduce the situation which prevailed in South Africa prior to Mandela.
Numbers of low-rank black police officers- the equivalent of South Africa's
gurkahs-will patrol American Sowetos, sealing them off from white communities.
The change may not seem all that striking: de facto apartheid already exists
in America in two forms: in prisons and in black communities.
Deficiencies and Contradictions
Confidence in Walinsky's assurance that law-enforcement can significantly
restore public order, is weakened by: The past and contemporary history
of police violence, and collaboration with authoritarian governments;
·The record of police inability to police its own outlaws, bolstered
by a tacit immunity against prosecution for violations of the same laws
enforced on citizens, supported by such usages as
·The "blue wall of silence" a gangster-like ethic of "never
squealing on one another;"
·The reluctance of many police officers to risk themselves on behalf
of minority victims of minority violence. A willingness to "let the
jungle-bunnies kill one another rather than us."
·The demonstrated fact that police saturation of given areas is almost
invariably followed by the migration of crime to less saturated areas, leading
to the suspicion that
·Increasing the numbers of police has rarely been demonstrated to reduce
violent crime generally.
·The fact that areas with the highest rates of violent crime typically
reveal the largest police presence - and the equally significant fact that
areas with low crime rates have traditionally gotten by with little, and
sometimes with no police protection. Closely-knit communities enjoy a myriad
of informal social controls, obviating the need for "official"
monitors and agencies.
·The finding that increased enforcement of laws against drug use, prostitution
and gambling (activities frequently related to other crimes) invariably
result in police collusion with, connivance in, and corruption by, organized
crime figures.
Taken together, these considerations raise the suspicion that changes in
the level of police deployment are irrelevant to the fundamental causes
of crime and violence. Despite frequent expressions of concern for the underprivileged,
Walinsky's ideas betray an expedient hospitality to the prevailing political
ideology. His proposals, if adopted, would go far toward fulfilling the
social agenda of the Radical Right. His stress on the priority of public
order over social and economic justice reflects the right-wing's readiness
to blame victims not only for their plight but also tax them for forcing
us to arm against them. The argument is old. Once again, the witches are
blamed for the excessive zeal of witch hunters. The idleness of the poor
is cited to explain their lack of employment - a social disease that might
yield (as in the past) to forced labor.
Over a hundred years ago, the Russian philosopher, Alexander Herzen, leveled
his lance against his own generation of social demonologists, who, as it
turned out, were activists of the Left. "We are not the doctors,"
he wrote, "We are the disease."
An Ultimate Irony: The Breakdown of Order as a Result of Police Violence
Walinsky's whole argument rests on the validity of his thesis that increasing
the police presence will safeguard public order. A careful reading of history
requires questioning this as an unqualified principle.
In this writer's memory, virtually every large-scale breakdown of public
order, from Chicago to Detroit to Watts to Kent State, has been either a
response to police violence, or to the perceived failure of the justice
system to sanction it. Provoked by the initial exoneration of the LAPD who
beat Rodney King, the minority community exploded. From Soweto to Watts,
the message has been the same: "No Justice-No Peace."
Moreover, the possibilities of police violence tend to increase with the
number of police present. And despite their overwhelming numbers, the excuse
is almost invariably the same: "We acted in self-defense." In
l984 six NYPD officers, in riot gear, forced themselves into the apartment
of Eleanor Bumpers , a partially disabled 66-year-old black woman who was
resisting eviction for non-payment of rent. When she resisted the evictors,
the police sergeant shot and killed her. His justification? Fear of harm
to his officers.
Why are the strong so fearful? Are we to believe that six police officers
can be more terrified by a single old woman than four, three or two would
have been? The answer, drawn from research on deadly police violence, is
an astonishing "Yes." On the basis of many reports it seems clear
that the probability of unjustifiable shootings rises with the sheer number
of police arriving at the scene. And it is not only the chance of police
violence which increases: it is also their fear which escalates.
Fear as a Self-Amplifying Impetus Toward Violence
This seems to be the case not only on the local police scene but on the
international military stage as well. Continued reliance on force can have
a paradoxical effect, even when used against an opponent who cannot materially
harm the user. The natural response to the failure of one level of force
is to increase the force level. If the augmented force produces no apparent
decrease in resistance, the net gain is on the side of the weaker party.
At this point the aggressor feels even less powerful than he did before-and
ironically, his sense of inadequacy escalates in direct proportion to his
increased exertion. At some point the cause of the trouble seems to become
its only plausible cure. Addicts rely on increased dosages of drugs in order
to overcome the pain caused by-drug addiction. A military machine which
fails to crush a weaker opponent exhausts itself with new outbursts of violence-but
each escalation underscores its impotence. At My Lai, at Kent State, at
Waco, and in countless local police situations, vulnerable people had to
be shot because they were not sufficiently intimidated by the threat of
force. Their stoicism conveyed so shocking a disregard of power that the
men of power were themselves put in fear. And many had to die in order for
the fearful killers to regain their self-confidence.
The ultimate failure of Walinsky's solution is mandated by the paradoxical
effect of force on the forceful. Those who rely on its deterrent effect
do so because they believe that a sufficiency of force can terrify the resistant.
When the resisters are not terrified, the answer is to increase the terror.
When that fails to work, the forceful are themselves terrified.
Fear casts out rationality and compassion, and makes justice an unaffordable
luxury. But the only secure foundation of order is justice. The most profound
threat to public order in this country is the waning of our traditional
compassion for the oppressed. As fear displaces compassion, we fall back
on the most suicidal of defenses: the police state.
Some Alternatives to Walinsky
·After World War II we rescued a devastated Europe (including West
Germany) with the Marshall Plan. We need a Marshall Plan for America.
·We need a domestic Peace Corps.
·We require a new G.I. Bill of Rights for all casualties of our lost
War on Poverty. After we train them, let them rebuild the infrastructure
of this country: the roads, the railroads, the schools, the bridges, the
public structures and the homes. Let's finally make this country earthquake-proof,
tornado-proof, flood-proof, drought-proof, famine-proof.
·Walinsky's original Police Cadet Corps provides the germ of the idea.
But why restrict the training and the careers to law enforcement? Why not
the crafts and the professions? The Industrial arts? The Fine Arts? The
sciences? Why not the same educational opportunities we give the children
of the rich? One tragedy of ancient Greece was that the academies celebrated
by Plato were limited to the youth of the well-to-do. How many undiscovered
Socrates are daily taking poison in our central cities? Imagine what might
germinate from that intellectual energy if it were liberated on the imaginations
of our youth.
Or would we rather imprison it in penal colonies in a Fortress America?
