Thursday, July 16, 2015
Two Views on the Failure of Policing
Long before Eric Garner was choked to death by a police officer on Staten Island, or Michael Brown was fatally shot by a cop in Ferguson, or Walter Scott was shot in the back by an officer in North Charleston, or Freddie Gray slipped into a coma after his spine was severed in the back of a police van, it was abundantly clear—or it should have been—that antagonism between American law enforcement and young black men had reached a dangerous breaking point. No one who has been reading the news and is not deluding themselves could conclude that dramatic reform is not urgently needed, and the Obama administration, along with local police departments in jurisdictions across the country, has begun to explore potential reforms.
As it happens, the turbulence of the past year has coincided with the publication of two major books on the issue of policing in black communities. Alice Goffman’s On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is a work of sociology (Goffman is a professor at the University of Wisconsin), and Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America is a work of reportage (Leovy is a longtime journalist with the Los Angeles Times). Both books are based on years of deep research in poor, predominantly African-American neighborhoods, and both have been hailed as landmark contributions to our understanding of these fraught issues. Yet in terms of policy prescriptions, the books appear to arrive at diametrically opposite conclusions. Goffman argues that the inhabitants of America’s poor black neighborhoods have been policed too much; Leovy argues that, on the contrary, they have been policed too little....