Deja vu. . . all over again

Sam Smith - The recent rise of police abuse as a political and media issue has given me a sense of deja vu all over again. Back in the 1960s, a minister trained by the noted community organizer Saul Alinsky, asked me to start a newspaper in our 75% black neighborhood east of the US Capitol to help his efforts. With a grant from a local church, the paper got underway and I soon found myself repeatedly involved in police reform issues, led by the need to stop the increasing trend of cops to trade street beats for patrolling in squad cars. A couple of decades later, I wrote about this:

The decline of the older city is intimately related to the problem of crime. One need not get into a chickenand- egg argument to recognize that the failures of urban policy contribute to crime and crime contributes to the failure of cities. The question is: how to be interrupt this destructive cycle? The conventional answers - more police and more prisons ~ not only haven't worked they are beginning to bankrupt a number of cities. As with the economy and the environment, we have to engage in lateral rather than incremental thinking if we are to come up with solutions that will really make a difference. There are a number of things that could be done, but none are more important than restoring the community to the focus of our attempts to obtain social order. Most law and order stems from personal and community values or peer pressure of one sort or another. Yet our prescription for law and order in the city tends to ignore the role of the community, using as its surrogate vastly over-extended police departments and courts. There is no substitute for organic social order, as even totalitarian countries have discovered. To create this organic system of justice, we must return to the community and build our justice system out from it. For two decades this journal has argued for community courts and neighborhood constables as a way of re-creating community law and order. Back in the 60s I took part in a debate with DC public safety commissioner Patrick Murphy and a representative of the International Chiefs of Police, making the argument that the centralization of the local police department and deployment of officers to squad cars was moving in the wrong direction. The police reporter for the Washington Post turned to the person next to him and asked, "Who is that nut?"