HOW NILS CHRISTIE DIED
Hal Pepinsky, pepinsky@indiana.edu, “peacemaking” at pepinsky.blogspot.com
May 31, 2015
I thank Mette Ofstad, whose family and mine befriended when they spent a year in Bloomington, for sending me this news of how Nils Christie died:
I just wanted to tell you that Nils Christie died on Thursday 27th May. Actually he was in the centre of Oslo when a tram hit him. It is so sad. He was a very well known person in Norway.
Nils Christie long ago became a big part of my family’s life, one of my most profound teachers.
It was a mystery to us at the Justice Studies Association meeting how Nils had died, only that it was sudden. Nils remains alive in my memories of our times together, and in all that he taught me to see and to question, most profoundly in myself, just as he has done with so many people in his many walks of life throughout the world. I celebrate the news that when he died, it was without warning and without suffering, as the vigorous and youthful educator he remains to me. Love and peace, hal
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Thursday, May 21, 2015
Cincinnati Policing
CINCINNATI POLICING
May 21, 2015
It has been my experience that
just when I am looking for particular examples of peacemaking, they come to
me. That was the case recently with the
story of policing in Richmond, CA, that I blogged about. I have further found that what I notice away
from home comes close to home if I’m looking for it. This morning, the locally broadcast BBC “Newshour”
contained a segment on the style of policing introduced by a chief who had
retired from the force in my home city, Columbus, Ohio. It turns out that the BBC has a series of
three video reports on how police in Cincinnati work, at http://www.bbc.co.uk/search?q=cincinnati%20police
. Here, too, is a report from Cincinnati
on the visit two days ago by US Attorney General Loretta Lynch, to celebrate
policing there as an exemplary police response to their own “broken window”
policing: http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/05/19/loretta-lynch-visit/27606525/
.
It is not that Cincinnati
policing is utopian. It is acknowledged
to be a work in progress. While the
initiative (rather than cooperation) that reorients policing toward public
safety and welfare surely also comes from community groups and organizations.
Once again, it is an irony that
I have had to go abroad to find out what has been going on right around me all
along. It reflects an underlying
truth: The heat of violence and demands
for punishment is so much louder than the fruits of peacemaking. At root, peacemaking means amplifying the
voices and stories less heard in the games of attaining power over other we
play in all our relations, especially in the minds of those of us who hold the
greater power, in the process of building trust in our shared humanity. It turns out that if you make a point of
looking for peacemaking, it might just find you.
My thanks to the BBC for showing
that peacemaking policing is real, with real effects, especially so close to
home. I encourage readers to check out
the BBC trilogy, colleagues to share with students. Love and peace, hal
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Friday, May 8, 2015
the "crime" fetish
THE “CRIME” FETISH
May 8, 2015
My recent critique of
NYPD-based, CompStat enabled, “broken windows” police (“’Broken Windows’
Unjustified,” May 6) rests on two decades trying to understand what “crime” and
“criminality” statistics mean, from a law-school class in 1967, through the
study “Explaining Police-Recorded Crime Trends in Sheffield (UK)” (Contemporary Crises 11, pp. 59-73, Jan.
1987; pdf’s of this and other articles
cited here available on request to those who can’t get them online).
The class on “crime and society”
was taught by the Executive Director of the President’s Commission on Law
Enforcement and Administration of Justice, James Vorenberg, and the Director of
its Task Force on Assessment of Crime, just before the Commission issued its
reports in 1967. There we were introduced
to national victim surveys, the first of their kind. Our primary question on the final exam was to
imagine oneself to be a congressional intern advising on the significance of
rising police-reported crime rates. I
wrote that the connection between what police reported and what actually
happened in communities they policed was unknown. I got one of my two worst law-school grades
in that course, which inspired my choice of sociology dissertation topic
several years later.
For my dissertation, in a “high-crime”
area of Minneapolis, I gathered over 80 items of information, starting with the
date, time, and code given in the call for service, describing and detailing
any interactions with complainants/witnesses, ending with what offense, if any
was reported. In 373 calls for service
during 500 hours of patrol, on all shifts, over a period of about one year, 97
offenses of all kinds were reported.
Ninety-three of those reports occurred after the dispatcher had named an
offense in the call, where the police founded a complainant’s naming of any
offense, while in at least 22 calls where the dispatcher had not named an
offense but complainants had described one, no offense reports were filed. In sum, when dispatchers sent police to check
on offenses and they found corroboration of any offense, they created crime
statistics. Without that signal from
dispatchers, police never reported offenses, regardless of what complainants
reported. The police, meanwhile,
believed that their decisions were simply based on the evidence at hand, and
were surprised by the results. The study
was published as “Police Patrolmen’s Offense-Reporting Behavior,” Journal of Research in Crime and Delinquency
13 (Jan. 1976, pp. 33-47). And so I
learned that police discretion whether to report create crime statistics can rest
heavily on factors independent of “the true” incidence or rate of crime.
I am grateful to my dissertation
adviser, Marvin Wolfgang, for the access he gave me to his copious files of reprints
of articles on the history of crime measurement from Europe to the United States. I supplemented my Minneapolis findings with a
critique of “The Growth of Crime [Measurement] in the United States” (Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Sciences, Jan. 1976, pp. 22-30).
I traced how the size and political weight of “the crime problem” had
grown, from judicial data beginning early in the 19th century, to
newly touted victim and self-report survey data. This comparison of measures of crime evolved
into a book, Crime Control Strategies: An
Introduction to the Study of Crime (New York: Oxford U. Press, 1980), where
a chapter at a time I “evaluated chances of controlling rates” of convictions,
arrests, police offense reports,” victimization reports, self-reports, and
recidivism, plus a chapter on cost-benefit analyses. In each category, compared choices of rate
numerators and denominators, type I and II error factors in applying statistics
using the measures, political considerations in implementation, and side
effects of policies based on those data, where I traced trends in victimization
and differences in self-reporting to changes in interviewing and in respondents’
relationships with data collectors.
Fundamentally, crime and criminality trends reflected trends and
differences in the behavior of the data gatherers and in how the data providers
perceived themselves in the eyes of their interrogators.
This was followed by two
longitudinal studies of police crime reporting.
The first was an analysis of police offense reports and arrests, with
William Selke: “The Politics of Police
Reporting in Indianapolis, 1948-1978,” Law
and Human Behavior 6 (Dec. 1982: 329-342).
Police data were supplemented by news reports from the Indianapolis Star
and News. When two-way radios in patrol
cars were introduced in the latter 1950s, “index” crime reports shot up. Criticized for failure to curb mounting
crime, the Indianapolis police turned their focus to making arrests, which rose
as reported offenses declined. Then
public complaints that police weren’t taking offense reports and weren’t
clearing offenses by arrest. In the
uproar, offense reports swung upward while arrests declined, until public alarm
over police losing control of crime swung the trends back. I labeled these recurring cycles t“the roller
coaster effect” of law enforcement reporting.
This brought home to me the inverse relationship between trends in index
offense rates, and arrests, most of which are for public order offenses rather
than “serious crime.” THIS NEGATIVE
RELATIONSHIP--BETWEEN INDEX OFFENSE REPORTING AND PUBLIC ORDER ARRESTS (AND THE
STOPS AND FRISKS THAT PRECEDE THEM)--EXPLAINS HOW COMPSTAT-GROUNDED BROKEN WINDOWS
POLICING PROMOTES CHRONICALLY EXCESSIVE, OCCASIONALLY HOMICIDAL, POLICE USE OF
FORCE, AND ATTENDANT WAVES OF PROTEST AGAINST THE WAY LAW IS ENFORCED IN LOW-INCOME
COMMUNITIES OF COLOR IN PARTICULAR.
In the Sheffield study cited
above, I had great assistance of the police in gathering extraordinarily detailed
monthly printouts of crime recording records, and in interpreting patterns
there from 1974-1979. In this and in
trends from earlier years, a variety of demographic changes failed to
correspond to social and economic shifts.
However, with a surge of more highly educated recruits, during their
first two years of probationary status, reports of “notifiable” offences
climbed dramatically. It was followed by
a wave of criticism that the police “clear-up” (crime solving) rate had fallen
below the normally acceptable fifty percent.
Patrol constables were reportedly instructed to avoid taking nuisance
reports for offenses that could not be cleared.
AS IN INDIANAPOLIS, records in Sheffield show an ensuing rise in arrests
on one hand, in offense reports being “no crimed” (wiped off the books) more,
and in previously reported offenses being “cleared” as “taken into
consideration” (TIC-ed) during suspect interrogations, while notifiable
offenses dropped, and clear-up rates rose back to acceptable levels.
I concluded the Sheffield study
by calling for a moratorium on using counts of crime and criminality to
evaluate and implement criminal justice policy.
I had also envisioned how police and community members together could
formulate and apply performance evaluation criteria that included a variety of
ways police could “protect and serve” communities (in “Better Living Through
Police Discretion,” Law and Contemporary
Problems 47, no. 4, 1984, pp. 249-267), for police and civilians to build
trust, respect and growing sense of safety and security together. Not only does “broken windows” policing
endanger police and civilian lives alike; statistical evidence that it works is
illusory.
It took me a long time to give
up on finding any connection between reported crimes and the lives of people in
the communities from which reports are taken, and has led me instead to focus
on ways human relations deteriorate or grow safer and more dependable in
parallel fashion at all social levels, in all social settings (a paradigm laid
out in Peacemaking: Reflections of a
Radical Criminologist, UOttawa Press, 2006; final page proofs for free
download at www.critcrim.org [site currently
down for maintenance; I have a copy]).
I am aware that how centrally
grounded criminological knowledge, and criminal justice policy and practice,
are grounded in the assumption that lower crime rates and more crime control
activity are evidence that the criminal justice system works. I want colleagues especially to know that I
have not arrived at my rejection of the validity of this research construct
lightly. Love and peace, hal
The Problem of Privatization
THE PROBLEM OF PRIVATIZATION
May 8, 2015e
The final 20-minute segment of
today’s www.democracynow.org
broadcast features Lisa Graves presenting the Center for Media and Democracy’s
(www.prwatch.org) report on charter
schools. Graves points to lack of access
to charter school records as the primary obstacle to monitoring the performance
of for-profit enterprises. Privatization
of education entails lack of accountability for use of taxpayer funds. Most glaring to this viewer of the Democracy
Now! Is graves example of how high “administrative expenses,” including subcontracting
student services can be, to say nothing of lobbying expenses.
Graves traces the root of the
growth of privatized k-12 education to the American Legislative Exchange
Council (see the Center’s report at www.alecexposed.org),
and to a couple of ALEC’s founding members, the Koch brothers (www.kochexposed.org), and theorist Milton
Friedman. ALEC pays legislators across
the country to gather with business leaders to draft model legislation. ALEC’s first major project, under leadership
of the Corrections Corporation of America, was to write laws to privatize
prisons, jails, and juvenile detention centers, which have thrived and become
notorious for underpaying and staffing, and for barring even legislators from trespassing
on their properties, let alone seeing their financial records.
In prisons as in education and
indeed in performance of any public service, privatization prevents oversight
of service providers whose primary corporate duty is to maximize profit. Denial of public accountability is the
primary cost of privatizing government services.
During my tenure at Indiana
University, I became able (with help from a state representative and the state
attorney general) to view the IU financial record of my choice, in this case
the president’s office account) on request.
The university subsequently opened promotion and tenure files to
candidates’ inspection. IU staff and
students were all entitled to due process in decisions made about them, and in
consideration of their grievances. The
difference being a public institution and working or living in a private
institution when I tried helping faculty in promotion and tenure cases and
grievances at private institutions.
Margaret Thatcher started the
global movement to privatize government services when she became British Prime
Minister in 1979. The problems today’s
democracynow.org interview with Lisa Graves raises about privatizing public
education apply to privatizing all public services. In principle, public services ought to be performed
and managed publicly. That’s the problem
of putting government enterprises up for sale.
Love and peace, hal
Wednesday, May 6, 2015
"Broken windows" policing unjustified
“BROKEN WINDOWS” POLICING UNJUSTIFIED
May 6, 2015
On the bright side, recent
events in Baltimore have drawn “broken windows” policing into question. The theory is that concerted efforts at
arresting people for minor offenses and for not taking care of their property
interrupt the decline of neighborhoods into more serious crime. Yesterday, NYPD Commissioner William Bratton,
defended the policy on grounds of its effectiveness in serious crime prevention
(http://www.wsj.com/articles/nypd-commissioner-william-bratton-arrests-for-minor-offenses-in-nyc-on-decline-1430407918
). Unfortunately, that claim was left
unquestioned in by the news media.
There are eight “index” crimes
that law enforcement agencies across the country are asked to report:
murder/non-negligent manslaughter, aggravated assault, rape, robbery, burglary,
theft, auto theft, and arson. In 1993,
NYPD adopted a data processing system called CompStat, now installed many
places around the world. Police commanders
get daily printouts. When figures first
came out indicating impressive decreases in “major crimes,” Bill Chambliss and
Roland Chilton found for instance that reported suicides had dramatically increased
which Chambliss used to illustrate how CompStat figures were rigged from the
outset (in
Power, Politics, and Crime, 1999,
at p.43). Looking back at old blog
posts, I found a link to a 2011 interview with former NYPD officer Adrian Schoolcraft,
who recorded both demands to meet arrest targets for a variety of petty
offenses, and to increase stops, and not to report index crimes of robbery and
rape. I highly recommend this
introduction to the art of using computer technology to make your crime and
arrest numbers, at http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/414/transcript
. It is an instance of the general
principle that crime and criminality figures can more readily be explained as
counters’ behavior than as representative of the behavior of those
counted. Under the CompStat regime,
members of communities of color become valued as suspects, and dismissed as
complainants, with no demonstrable justification. “Broken windows” policing is
counterproductive, period. Love and
peace, hal
Friday, May 1, 2015
China's earthquake preparedness
CHINA’S EARTHQUAKE PREPAREDNESS
May 1, 2015
Yesterday, I was struck by the
disdain with which a BBC reporter in northeast Nepal described the Chinese response
to the earthquake, where today in Nepal the death toll has climbed past
6,000. The reporter complained that
foreign reporters had no access to the Chinese-controlled part of Tibet
adjoining Nepal. Accordingly, the
Chinese claim that only 25 lives had been lost on its territory “could not be
verified,” she said, and to make matters worse, international agencies could
not gain access to send in aid.
I checked the New China News
Agency web site. Their primary story is of a tent city that they have set up on
the Nepalese border, complete with electricity and plumbing, even internet
service, to hold at least 1,000 refugees.
They indeed report 25 lives lost and two border towns destroyed. Their second story features the crew
celebrating having cleared the two-lane trade route into Nepal of landslides,
showing the road itself intact and open to traffic. My inference:
for a country its size, in an area remote from Beijing, the Chinese have
done a remarkable job both of building infrastructure, and of having a national
army and other forces at hand to respond to natural disasters in a way that
puts my country’s responses, let alone the response both internally and
globally in Nepal, to shame. For all we
in my part of the world celebrate how materially and technologically advanced
we are in the West, the infrastructure and disaster response of the Chinese is
a testament to the power of a government to support public infrastructure, and
to be accessible in time of need. And
sometimes, failure to open up to outside aid and publicity may indicate that
people are too busy taking care of business to be disturbed. Love and peace, hal
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