Kristian Williams - Our Enemies in Blue - Police and Power in America

Of course, many community policing advocates fail to recognize the symbioticrelationship between the soft and the tough approaches. Goldstein, for example,cautions thata department could not long tolerate a situation in which officers in a residentialarea go out of their way to demonstrate that they are caring, service-orientedindividuals, while other officers assigned to a roving task force make wholesalesweeps of loitering juveniles in that community. !)!Goldstein is simply wrong. Recent studies of SWAT activity show that departmentscan tolerate the juxtaposition between outreach and smack-down. In fact, somedepartments deliberately choose this Good Cop/Bad Cop strategy. ! 51 Communitypolicing operations can legitimate such sweeps by mobilizing conservative elements of the community, especially businesses and property owners.! '.1 One IAPDofficer describes the role of community supportWhen the community cooperates and tells you who has been doing things,why they have been doing them, and how long they have been doing them,you jump at the chance to get the sons-of-bitches. The community don't helpthat much, so you got to take what you can get while you can get it! Becausethe community may change its mind, so you got to act quickly and decisively,or else you'll lose the opportunity. That's why when we know the communityis behind us, we're going to be aggressive, break their asses and put theirbutts in jail.!)4Or-beginning at the other pole, an initial crackdown can repress active opposition,opening the political space for Peace Corps-type efforts and outreach to"responsible" community leaders.!)' In military terms, the sweeps work to secureterritory., and community organizing efforts constitute a battle for the hearts andminds of the populace. 1\6If this description sounds exaggerated, We :;lluulJ cunsider New York PohceDepartment Deputy Commissioner Jack Maple's plans for "Operation Juggernaut":We'll take the city back borough by borough ....You go into Queens .... You stay there for six months with eight hundredofficers. There are some bad areas: the 103, the 110, the 113, the 114 precincts.You do everything that works: buy-and-bust operations, quality-of-lifeenforcement, warrants, guns, the whole thing. It works, we know it works.We do ourjob and take out the drug organizations and clean up Queens. Nowwe have it under control.After six months, you downgrade by about twenty percent, you leave sixhundred officers in Queens as a standing army and slide two hundred overto Brooklyn North, plus another seven hundred. We give Brooklyn Norththe same treatment for four months, leave several hundred there and slidethe rest to Brooklyn South and then Staten Island. When we've cleaned upthere, we leave some and move to the Bronx. We finish with Manhattan.Within a year we kill crime in New York.157Ukewise, the chief of police in one unidentified city described the role of paramilitaryunits in his community policing strategy:It's going to come to the point that the only people that are going to be ableto deal with these problems are highly trained tactical teams with proper220