The automobile and the end of policing

Matthew Yqlesias and Tyler Cowen both reflect on this quote from the book Cop in the Hood:

Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol — the cornerstone of urban policing — has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”

The car is anti-social. It takes people off of the streets and into their own little shell where they are alone. When the car door closes people tend to slip off into their own world, hence you see some drivers talking to themselves or rocking their head while they are driving.

With this in mind, a byproduct of the car culture is that it has created distant communities, both in a geographic and social sense. In many parts of the US, police and civilians don’t even have the choice of walking. They are tied to their car to get them from point A to point B. In pedestrian friendly communities, walking that route would give a police officer the chance to get to know those who live and work along the way — I think that’s called ‘community policing.’

Knowing the name of a cop who patrols your neighborhood would go some way in producing a better image of police in this country. For the vast majority of Americans, the only quasi-contact they have with police is while they are driving. This leaves the impression of who police are and what they are like to be defined by Hollywood.

I realize we’re too deep in the car culture to go back to beat patrols. But, police officers should realize that although the car allows them to respond quicker, it also isolates them for most of the day.