The Associated Press is asking whether our police will change the way they deliver service to the people of the cities and towns they patrol. The answer is a definite Yes and No.
Yes they will; but No; those who will be watching won’t perceive the difference.
Police work requires the continual processing of data drawn from your surroundings. What a police officer sees and does not see is far more subjective than those who have never done a tour in a radio car can possibly imagine.
As a patrol officer you process information constantly and on some days make dozens of decisions. Most are mundane and have to do with, say, judging whether or not a vehicle entered an intersection before or after the light turned red. Others have to do with deciding if a guy on a street corner is selling drugs or just has lots of friends who want to shake his hand.
I used this type of discretion regularly when I worked in Bedford Stuyvesant as an Urban Combat Soldier assigned to keep the ghetto from the taxpayers’ neighborhood. During a raid on an illegal gambling casino, my partner and I watched about fifteen men walk out the side door. We never made a move to stop them. When you are up to your hips in alligators you don’t need to hunt down anymore. How many of them were wanted felons we’ll never know. They just blended back into the ghetto to stay until we arrested them the next time around.
When the captain wanted more drug arrests there were always the Sunday morning sweeps. Three teams would hit the shooting galleries, round up the junkies and take a few in at a time. This made each trip a separate “crime fighting” drug arrest and earned...
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