How police can restore our trust

Open letter to police and their superiors:

Honorable Public Servants,

          Police across the country are asking us how to restore trust in police and the governments they serve.  You can start with how you talk and write about us. 

Stop calling us males and females!  We are men, women, boys and girls, simple words that convey not only our gender, but whether we are adults or children, and our humanity.  Any animal and some plants are male or female.  Only people are men, women, boys and girls.

Don’t call us subjects.  We are people, person in the singular.  Calling us subjects makes us either a topic or inferior to our public servants, not people equal in right.  We are subject to the law, not to the people who enforce it, who are also subject to it.

Don’t call me an individual, which only means one, not even one person but one thing, and takes 5 syllables to do it.  The longer the word, the less it touches our hearts and changes our minds.

These words not only dehumanize us, they take the humanity and drama out of reports of our conduct.  When writing reports, you should feel and convey the humanity of the people you are writing about and the drama of our actions and yours, using few and simple words to do it.

We may not think about the words you use about us, but we feel excluded by them just the same.  You probably don’t think about the way they exclude us and elevate you, but the words you use show and affect how you think about us.

Enforce the law equally against and in favor of us all.  Unequal enforcement and protection of the law angers us even more than how you speak about us, because we think about it.

For instance, it takes at least two people in many cases for a piece of litter to hit the ground and stay there: the person who dropped it and the one who lets it lie on his property.  Sometimes they are the same person.  But the person who dropped it is likely to be cited if you see one drop it in public, while the one who lets it lie on his property until it rots is rarely even warned to clean it up, though the offense is ongoing and obvious.  What’s more, the one who dropped it is only likely to be cited if the person looks poor.

Enforce codes against property neglect as you go about your business, and do not make citizens do your job of complaining about disorder.  Unlike barking dogs and parking too long on the street, the offense is ongoing and obvious to all; citizen complaints are unnecessary. 

Enforcement of property maintenance codes by citizen complaint is unfair to the citizens who pay you to enforce the law.  It is particularly unfair to the poor, because complaining about a neighbor’s property in a poor neighborhood can be dangerous.  When poor people complain about property neglect, we get blown off, belittled, and sometimes threatened or attacked by the offender.  When rich people complain about a neighbor violating code, they get enforcement. 

Much has been said about the abuses of “Broken Windows” policing, and the superiority of Community Policing.  But both policing theories are featured in the same article, “Broken Windows,” by James Q. Wilson, published in the New Yorker in 1982.  In it, he started out writing about how unrepaired broken windows cause more vandalism and theft, and that a broken window on a car will cause it to be battered and stripped in a city where it would otherwise be respected.  He moves on to how people are more satisfied with police that walk their neighborhoods and talk to them instead of driving around in their cars. 

But he never mentions the disorderly neglect that gets a disorderly person to break the first window in an abandoned building: weeds and litter.  And he goes on to tell us that police should control disorderly street people by unequal enforcement of nuisance codes, concentrating on vagrants, prostitutes, and drug dealers.

We got Community Policing in the ‘90s, encouraged by federal grants for more police.  It went away after the grants ended, and you moved on to just oppressing street people and drug dealers.  The property bubble that started growing during the ‘90s allowed bankers, developers and speculators to take over our city governments and stop enforcement of property maintenance codes, allowing them to hold vacant lots without the expense of maintenance until they got the price they wanted.  Some never got that price, and those lots still grow and spread nuisance and noxious weeds and collect litter.  So do businesses whose owners don’t care to keep their lots clean.

The true function of government is to keep order, and its means are the necessary evil of nagging, backed up by force: fines and jail.  Rights are necessary evils, allowed and defended by governments to keep people from being so oppressed that they revolt.  

Street drug dealing and prostitution are created by bans on drugs and prostitution, laws that create disorderly black markets.   Repeal the bans and the prescription system; allow drugs and casual sex to be sold, regulated, and taxed like any other product or service; and street selling will stop.  Enforce and obey city and county codes against litter and weeds, and  disorderly people will not find the disorderly habitat that encourages disorderly conduct.

Talk and write about us as people, not things.  Enforce property and nuisance codes against rich and poor alike.  Repeal laws that create disorderly black markets that pull our children away from honest work in favor of risky riches.  Do these things, and we will love and trust our governments.