Safety vs. privacy, resolved today
Should high-crime neighborhoods have a say in police staffing levels?
This week the New York Times featured a program which targets high volume of police attention and effort in a small geographical area, a Brooklyn housing development. This mostly takes the form of stop-and-frisks, designed primarily to reduce the number of guns in the development.
Data shows that the stop-and-frisks are useful in reducing crime within the projects but have not been effective in reducing crime for the precinct as a whole. The legal basis for the program appears a bit tenuous. Police are required to have reasonable suspicion before stopping a citizen. In the city-owned projects, police routinely use violations of housing code as a pretense for stops.
The piece presents residents of the development as conflicted between the increase in public safety and the decrease in privacy.
Should residents be given a role in deciding the nature of police involvement? One could certainly envision a neighborhood referendum putting the question of increased police scrutiny to the test.
(Certainly one could just say that increased police involvement is good in principle but should be conducted in some better way; I’d like to bracket that question for now).
There are certainly benefits to society as a whole to decreasing levels of crime. This seems to be a special case in that the program is ineffective outside the walls of the housing complex, but quite successful inside. The key stakeholders are quite clearly those inside the complex. With that in mind, I’d argue that it does indeed make sense to give communities some decision-making power. The proper balance between safety and privacy is one that local police departments are not likely to get right when working on a block-by-block basis. Given that decision-making must be this granular, it makes sense to offer that power to the communities the police serve rather than to the police themselves.
–John
Image from thomashawk used under a Creative Commons license.
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