Trust and cooperation between law enforcement and citizens are the keys to a stable society

How 200-year-old police principles could have helped Ferguson
By

JamesH. Davis

                     

Police in Ferguson, Mo., used military equipment to impose order following the shooting of an unarmed black teenager in August. Their actions seemed to break a principle developed by Sir Robert Peel in 1829: ‘A civilian police that prevents crime and disorder is much preferable to repression of crime by military force and draconian legal punishment.’

The death of Michael Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Mo., have been analyzed almost exclusively through a racial lens, and race is clearly a critical element of the story.
But Ferguson also provides damaging evidence of an equally dangerous problem: America has a clear and increasingly corrosive divide between citizens and police forces throughout the nation.
A grand jury Monday night declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Brown, who was unarmed when shot Aug. 9.
Whatever your views, the fact is that large portions of our populace believe that a sworn police officer ordered a young man to his knees in the middle of the street and shot him six times in cold blood. The fact that they do illustrates a staggering low in public confidence in the police, and nowhere is that confidence lower than in economically disadvantaged communities like Ferguson, where many Americans see the police as a public-safety nuisance rather than as a solution.
Just as the power of the government rests on the consent of the governed, a set of guidelines developed nearly 200 years ago used by one of the world’s first professional police forces suggests that the power of the police rests on the consent (and cooperation) of the policed. These “Peelian Principles,” first delineated by British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel in the development of London’s first professional police force in 1829, are still taught in almost every entry-level criminal justice college course in America today.


Too many jurisdictions seem to have forgotten to actually use them.


There are the extreme cases: In my nearly 30 years in law enforcement, including time working on anti-corruption probes as a Chicago-based FBI agent, I’ve seen some remarkably bad behavior among law-enforcement officers. The FBI squad I supervised arrested 20 police officers in less than two years, mostly for the armed robbery of individuals the police had identified as being involved in criminal conduct. While in uniform, these officers would take product and cash from drug dealers or rob high-stakes card games, knowing the victims would have nowhere to turn.
Those rogue cops were well-known in the community for their illegal activities. They even wore their reputations as badges of honor.
Clearly, bad cops do exist.
But it’s also true that blatantly bad cops are a statistical anomaly. And the vast majority of police officers are honest and well-intended men and women who risk their lives on a daily basis to keep the rest of us safe.
So how do we begin to bridge this destructive divide between citizens and officers?
Perhaps it’s a return to these nine Peelian Principles. Here is the essence of each:

A civilian police that prevents crime and disorder is much preferable to repression of crime by military force and draconian legal punishment.

A police force’s power to fulfill its functions is dependent on public approval and respect of the police’s existence and actions.

Securing the public’s cooperation with the work of the police force is critical for the police to be effective.

The more help the police can get from the public, the less the threat of physical force is needed to achieve police objectives.

Police must consistently seek public favor by demonstrating even-handed enforcement of the law, and through courtesy, good humor and a willingness to make personal sacrifices in service to the public, regardless of the wealth or social standing of the individuals involved.

Police should use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion and warnings are insufficient to obtain an individual’s co-operation — and then only the absolute minimum degree of physical force needed.

Police should always maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police.

Police officers must refrain from seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary or the state. It’s not the job of the police to judge guilt or punish the guilty.

Police officers must always recognize that the acid test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not high-visibility police actions in dealing with them.

Of course, principles alone won’t turn around public sentiment about law enforcement in America today.
If police forces want broad-based legitimacy and support, the onus is on them to begin to build bridges. Principles like those above can lead the way.