Policing

For police, when it comes to law and order, ‘order’ historically comes first

By Allen Steinberg

December 24, 2014

Police misconduct has ignited a political firestorm in New York and many other cities across the nation, not seen in quite some time. Relations between the public and the police are fraught with tension, mistrust and violence. Many are outraged. Politicians and the media are posturing and promising reform. The police are angry, feeling besieged.

It is all pretty ugly — and thanks to modern media it appears that things are worse than ever before. We can now watch video of people being killed. Protests can be organized, recorded and broadcast instantly. Guns make deadly confrontations easier to provoke.

There are many reasons specific to this time that have brought us to this unhappy point in the relationship between the police and society. But the problem of police violence is hardly new.

In New York City, recent events have stirred memories of violent confrontations of the not-so-distant past, from Sean Bell and Abner Louima to the murdered policemen Rocco Laurie and Gregory Foster. Violence, however, has always been inherent to policing, and its troubled history goes back much further than anyone alive can remember.

Police brutality has long been a source of tension between the police and the public. It has regularly provoked political controversy, as it did in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. Then, and after, however, graft and corruption, not violence, have proved easier problems to address than the much thornier issue of brutality.

Modern militarily organized police forces first appeared in American cities in the 1840s, during the first great wave of urbanization and immigration in the United States. Their mission was not to detect or investigate crime, but to pacify what was then called “the dangerous class” — meaning young immigrants and unskilled workers. Violence was naturally intrinsic to this mandate…

Read more at: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/12/23/for-police-when-it-comes-to-law-and-order-order-historically-comes-first/