Balancing public safety and individual rights in street policing.

Whether viewed from the desk of a police chief, a city mayor, or a citizen in a deprived, high-crime community, maintaining the balance between police effectiveness and fair policing is complicated and difficult to achieve, let alone to sustain over the long term. However, it is at the heart of good policing, for when policing goes out of that balance—as happened in Brixton, London in the 1970s (1) and more recently in Ferguson, Missouri (2)—the outcome can be a major breakdown in law and order, with wider, rippling consequences for our societies. Tackling this issue in his lecture on “Fair and Effective Policing” to the 2007 Stockholm Symposium, Ben Bowling argued for “good enough” policing (3), in which police aim to be sufficiently effective at preventing and detecting crime, while remaining sufficiently fair to maintain community legitimacy. As an illustration of the complexity and difficulty of the issues, Bowling went on to contend that the British police deployment of “stop and search” powers—the British equivalent of “stop, question, and frisk” (SQF)—was an example of “not good enough” policing (3), failing his benchmark for balanced and proportionate enforcement. Instead of good enough policing,Manski andNagin, in their article “Assessing benefits, costs, and disparate racial impacts of confrontational proactive policing” in PNAS (4), use an alternativemodel of “optimal policing” to explore how conflicts between public safety and community trust might be weighed and resolved. Bowling (3) used Herbert Simon’s (5) idea of “satisficing” as the framework to argue for his balanced approach to policing. In Simon’smodel, the goal is not “optimal” but the achievement of a satisfactory sufficiency, which is “good enough, rather than the absolute best” (6). In contrast, Manski and Nagin’s (4) use of the term “optimal” “supposes that the objective of proactive policing policy is to optimize a welfare function that recognizes both the social costs and benefits.” Their definition of “proactive policing” is much broader than SQF, including the use of arrest to deter others, the deployment of officers to hotspots, and “broken windows” policing of minor disorder by crackdowns. The debate about the appropriate balance in policing—good enough or optimal—is much more than a theoretical one for criminologists. After a significant crime drop over the last two decades, there are signs that violent crimes may be beginning to rise again in some United States and United Kingdom cities (7). As Fig. 1 illustrates, violent crimes involving knives appear to have risen in London since the second half of 2016. Hales’ accompanying analysis for the United Kingdom Police Foundation (8) has been given added weight by the United Kingdom Office of National Statistics (7), which reported that knife crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales had risen by 20% to the highest figure for 7 y. However, as Fig. 1 also shows, the London police use of stop and search had fallen to its lowest level since 2008. The fall in stop and search followed a deliberate political decision by the then Home Secretary, now Prime Minister Theresa May, to restrict the police use of proactive powers on the street (9). Her decision has parallels in the changes to New York Police Department policies, which followed a Federal Court judgment and a subsequent shift in approach to enforcement from New York Mayor de Blasio (10). The debate in the United States and United Kingdom over the effectiveness of police stop and search and SQF, together with the relationship between falls in the police use of the powers and changes in crime rates, is certain to persist. Most commentators have tended to adopt a simplistic and one-sided interpretation, focusing either on the benefits of police enforcement to crime reduction or the societal costs of disproportionate exercise of powers. As Brodeur (11) said in setting out his theory of policing, “the tensions that are present in policing have a way of imposing themselves and coming back to haunt one-sided approaches.” The strength of Manski and Nagin’s (4) approach is, first, that it is multisided, proposing a balance that is tipped by a range of costs and benefits rather than a binary scale between crime control and due process, and second, that it recognizes the importance of a detailed attention to the operation of key variables.