Campaign Zero and Police Policies
In today’s society, there has been an increasing unrest on how police officers are treating the citizens of their towns. There are more news reports of police using unnecessary force when it comes to arresting a person or unfairly searching someone due to their racial background. Many advocacy groups against this type of behavior have sprung up over the months. These groups aim to protect citizens from being unfairly targeted by police as well as to change the ways police officers handle certain situations. One of these groups is called Campaign Zero. This group has targeted various problem areas when it comes to the police officers and how they interact with the community. They have crated policies that would help the communities as well as the police officers to come to a better understanding on how crimes should be handled. This essay will examine one particular policy the campaign has created and evaluate whether it will be effective or not.
One of these policies that Campaign Zero hopes to adapt to change police behavior is to end the broken windows policing. According to the website, broken window policing is a way for the police to over-policing and criminalizing communities that are primarily of African-Americans. This use tactic is a way for police to use an excessive amount of force in situations that are mainly harmless and do not pose a threat to any bystander, victims, or police. “Police killed at least 287 people last year who were involved in minor offenses and harmless activities like sleeping in parks, possessing drugs, looking "suspicious" or having a mental health crisis” (“End Broken Window Policing”). In many of these cases, the victims of the broken window policing are suffering from symptoms that steam from drug use or mental instability. More often than not, trained healthcare professionals or social workers should be called to the scene in order to decrease the amount of tension and issues within the situation rather than having a police officer intervene first. In order to combat this rising issue, Campaign Zero has created policies that would help reduce the amount of times that police have to resort to using the broken windows tactic. The campaign have outlined a few incidents that do not require the police to break windows in order to keep a situation from becoming too intense. Some of these incidents include being called for a disturbing the peace issue, loitering, trespassing, marijuana possession, drinking alcohol openly in the streets, spitting, and disorderly conduct. The incidents mentioned do not put much in risk of harming someone or the police, therefore broken windows tactics should not be applied to those cases. When it comes to cases where mental health is an issue, Campaign Zero has already thought of solutions that will prevent the broken windows tactic to be used on them as well. The most prominent solution that has been created is to create a special team that is designed to deal with crisis situations involving people who are mentally unstable. By implementing this procedure, a team of specially trained healthcare professionals and social workers will be there to guide the police in how they should handle the situation. This policy could greatly reduce the amount of cases where mentally unstable people were harmed, or even killed, by an officer who did not know how to handle their disease. Lastly, the policy ending racially profiling as well as “stop and frisk” would reduce the amount of times the broken window tactic would have to be used. By stopping this procedure, it will limit the amount of how much a police officer can intervene in a person’s life simply by how they look. The people who would be protected by this policy are immigrants, people who live in high crime areas, and people with specific sexual identities and sexual orientation. This will also force police officers to document the reason why they stopped an individual to question or search them and to list whether they had a firearm or not. There is no doubt that more policies will be added and updated in order to fully protect the rights of the citizens against police officers who use their power as a bullying tactic.
The Campaign Zero advocacy for removing the broken window tactic provides legitimate reasons as to why this should be monitored more. There have been many incidents where someone innocent has been harmed and even killed when it came to police officers using that tactic. Many of these policies are realistic and have a chance of changing the way policy interact with the citizens. For example, the mental illness policy has a chance of being implemented since there does needs to be a way for police officers to know how to handle someone with a mental disability. Depending on the disability, the person may not be aware of what they are doing or understand what the police officers are asking them to do. In an article on the website Politico, writer George Kelling states the issues that come with the broken window policy. “Today, with the highly publicized deaths of a number of African-Americans at the hands of white police officers over the past year, so-called broken-windows policing has come under attack by activists and academics alike. Such police acts as stopping Michael Brown for jaywalking in Ferguson, Mo., and confronting Eric Garner for selling loose cigarettes in New York, are said to be examples of broken-windows policing run amok” (Kelling). The statement that Kelling makes proves that implementing a few policies will be difficult since racial profiling plays a huge role on who police officers suspect have committed a crime. There is many evidence that shows African-American males are statistically more likely to commit a crime than any other race. “In New York City and around the country, misdemeanor arrests have historically skewed toward African-American and Hispanic persons. This is well documented, for New York City, in a recent report from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “Trends in Misdemeanor Arrests in New York City”,” (Harcourt, 2015). Therefore by using statistics and models in order to prevent crime, the policy of stopping racially profiling will most likely not get implemented into changing police behavior.
Campaign Zero has provided many facts and reasons as to why broken window policy is flawed and should be abolished. The listed that many of the offenses that the policy get used on are actually innocent misdemeanors and should not be treated as a felony crime. The broken windows policy is especially harmful to those who are suffering from mental illnesses, therefore a change should be added on how police officers respond to cases where there is a mentally unstable person causing unrest in the community. Not only that, but profiling people also increases the number of times that the broken windows policy has to be used. The policy that Campaign Zero introduced will protect citizens from being targeted by the police simply because of their gender, race, and sexual orientation. However, that policy may have a difficult times being implemented as statistics backup why police officers profile people. All-in-all, Campaign Zero has offered many beneficial and realistic policies that have a chance of changing how the police interact with their communities.
References
End Broken Windows Policing. (n.d.). Retrieved April 19, 2016, from http://www.joincampaignzero.org/brokenwindows
Harcourt, B. E. (2015, August 17). Broken-Windows Policing Is a High-Arrest Program. Retrieved April 19, 2016, from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernard-e-harcourt-/broken-windows-policing-i_b_8000250.html
Kelling, G. (n.d.). Don’t Blame My ‘Broken Windows’ Theory For Poor Policing. Retrieved April 19, 2016, from http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/broken-windows-theory-poor-policing-ferguson-kelling-121268
