Quality of Life enforcement

Does Quality of Life enforcement (and perception of crime reduction) increase or decrease the level of cooperation with the local police officers enforcing penalties for minor offenses? Additionally, does quality of life enforcement lead to racial profiling or heavy-handed enforcement policies in immigrant and (or) lower socio-economic communities? How?

Quality-of-life (Broken Windows) policing is not “Zero Tolerance” policing, according to William Bratton, who assets that “Zero Tolerance” is a term used by critics of the policy (2015, p.3). Bratton instead emphasized that discretion was key to reducing fear in neighborhoods (2015, pp. 3-4). This becomes notable due to the “ dangerous and increasing normalization of ignorance and violence” that can silence the law-abiding majority” (Police Executive Research Forum, 2004, p.76). Cooperation between police and local communities can be seen in that many quality-of-life arrests are derived by service calls reported by citizens (Bratton, 2015. p. 4). Underscoring this is the participation by minorities in placing service calls to NYPD, as “there are intractable racial disparities in who...more importantly, who suffers from—crime and disorder...72.3 percent of victims are black or Hispanic (Bratton, 2015, p.6).

However, such statistics do not automatically lead to a happy relation between police and minority communities. Nagy and Podolny point to the cases of Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo as incidents in which aggressive quality-of-life policing led to police brutality or the death of a suspect (2008, p.16). These incidents led to a wave of criticism of NYPD. In addition, the “stop and frisk” method associated with quality-of-life policing also led to charges of racial profiling. In Floyd v. City of New York (2013), the court found that reasonable-suspicion-based stops were based on on “the right people, the right time, the right location”, and thus racially based (p.82). It is interesting to note that the court found that while 80% of such stops were targeted against minorities out of a 60% population rate, it did not balance the percentage of stops against the numbers of either arrests (80%) or victims (72%).

Even so, Bratton asserts that “Police and community have more in common that unites us than divides us” He uses the example of Eric Garner, who died as a result of a quality-of-life contact to demonstrate this concept. Bratton compared the polling in the black community's attitude towards the specific incident, in which 90 % of respondents felt the police “had no excuse” for the incident with the black community's attitude towards quality-of-life policing, in which 56% of respondents supported the program (2015, p.7). This reflects the research of Weisburd et al on community views of the strategy as a whole, “We do not find, on the one hand, that the level of aggressive order maintenance policing delivered in our study increased citizen fear or reduced perceptions of police legitimacy” (2010, p. 146). It may appear then, that community perception of police is based more on individual incidents than on policy results or implications.

Bratton, W. (2015). Broken windows and quality-of-life policing in New York City. New York Police Department Retrieved May 28, 2015 from http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/qol.pdf

Nagy, A. R., & Podolny, J. (2008). William Bratton and the NYPD crime control through middle management reform (Yale case 07-015). Yale School of Management. Retrieved August 10, 2014 from https://icf.som.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/Case_Bratton_2nd_ed_Final_and_Complete.pdf

Floyd v. City of New York, 08 Civ. 1034 (2013)

Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). (2004). Community policing: The past, present and future. Retrieved May 25, 2015 from http://www.policeforum.org/assets/docs/Free_Online_Documents/Community_Policing/community%20policing%20-%20the%20past%20present%20and%20future%202004.pdf

Weisburd, D., Hinkle, J. C., Famega, C., & Ready, J. (2010). Legitimacy, Fear and Collective Efficacy in Crime Hot Spots: Assessing the Impacts of Broken Windows Policing Strategies on Citizen Attitudes (Grant No. 2007-IJ-CX-0047). Department of Justice. Retrieved October 3, 2014 from http://www.iadlest.org/Portals/0/Files/Documents/DDACTS/Docs/Legitimacy

%20Fear%20and%20collective%20efficacy%20in%20Crime%20Hot%20Spots.pdf

Does CompStat lead to false reporting in all departments that is employed in?  Has it led to all sub-units within a department reporting false data?  There isn't data to support that dissertation.

Yes, pressure can cause falsification, but it does not lead to it automatically

The silver lining here is that  in those cases where a police manager falsified data, the system was able to identify someone who placed career over duty to the public