Modern Policing and the "Peelian Principles"

Ever heard of Robert Peel? He's not a household name in America. The Right Honorable Sir Robert Peel was a big thing in British politics of the mid-19^th century, which would logically make him completely irrelevant to anything in 21^st century America. And he would be, except for one thing he did in 1829 while holding the post of Home Secretary. He formed the Metropolitan Police Force in London, employing 1000 constables who, in his honor, came to be known as "Bobbies." It was the first modern police force in history; the prototype of all its successors. For those who know my opinion of police officers and police departments in general, indeed of the whole idea of police, it is true that in my opinion he did the world no great favor thereby. But sometimes you have to give points for good intentions. And it is clear that it was never Robert Peel's intention to unleash yet another oppressive force on the world.

He made this clear when, in organizing his police force, he published his nine "Peelian Principles:

1. The basic mission for which the police exist is to prevent crime and disorder.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon the public approval of police actions.
3. Police must secure the willing co-operation of the public in voluntary observation of the law to be able to secure and maintain the respect of the public.
4. The degree of co-operation of the public that can be secured diminishes proportionately to the necessity of the use of physical force.
5. Police seek and preserve public favour not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolute impartial service to the law.
6. Police use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice, and warning is found to be insufficient.
7. Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
8. Police should always direct their action strictly towards their functions, and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with it.

I've known about these "Principles" for many years: I often take them out, dust them off, and reflect upon the irony of their existence before shoving them back into the mental box in the dark places where I keep all those other failed bits of idealistic chest-thumping, like the U.S. Constitution. I was reminded of it yesterday, while reading this Pro Libertate essay titled "Why The Innocent Flee From Police:"

"Why did he run?" This question thrusts itself upon us every time an unarmed or otherwise harmless person is gunned down while fleeing from police.

Often that inquiry takes the form that assumes the guilt of the victim: "If he did nothing wrong, why did he run?" It's also common for that second version to contort itself into a nicely circular argument: "Well, he ran, and resisting arrest is a crime, so obviously he got what was coming to him."

For reasons unclear to a mind not enthralled by statist assumptions, most people simply assume that both reason and morality dictate an unqualified duty to surrender without cavil or complaint whenever armed, violence-prone strangers in peculiar government-issued garb seek to restrain one of us.

"Police brutality" in this country used to be a largely race or class thing. Cracker cops in Valdosta or Birmingham or wherever could get away with thumping all the uppity swarthy individuals they wanted, and the middle-class folks would take that as an opportunity to feel safer in their beds, snug in their delusion that the cops actually worked for them. But thanks largely to the "War on Drugs" and the horribly perverse incentives of civil asset forfeiture, not to mention the need to enhance department and local government revenues in these dark economic times when simply raising taxes isn't the simple option it used to be, this is no longer the case. Robbers go where the money is, and where it may be obtained most safely and easily. More and more that doesn't mean rousting Jamal from the south side for "driving while black;" it means rousting Mr. White Suburban Guy for "driving while affluent."

That would just be grounds for a moment of Schadenfreude except for other, more ominous trends in modern policing. For example, I just typed "Officer Safety is Paramount" into Google News. I only got two hits, which surprised me a bit. What didn't surprise me was that they were both from police- oriented publications. The same phrase occurs 33,700 times in a search of the web at large. A related search - Puppycide - got no hits in the news, but 13,400 on the web including this horrifying video which has been around for quite some time. My personal favorite, which I believe I've mentioned here before, involves an Ohio family who came home to find that police had tazed, then shot and killed their five-pound Chihuahua after it escaped from their back yard. I know I feel safer. And of course the whole country knows the case of the Calvo family, whose two Labrador Retrievers were shot during a botched drug raid. This would have been just another day in the life of botched paramilitary raids, except that Cheye Calvo happened to be the mayor of the town in which the raid occurred. That, at last, got the common practice of shooting dogs in the name of "officer safety" into the public eye.

Then there's the question of "respect for police authority." (167,000 hits, not that I'm counting or anything.) A perusal of these articles indicates that police sure as hell think there's a breakdown in respect for their authority, and they're going about trying to restore that respect all wrong. You know that old saying, "when your only tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?" Well, outside the law - that is, when dealing with "subjects" who don't happen to be breaking the law at the moment, but who aren't showing the officer the proper deference - police officers only have one tool: The threat of violence. That threat, and its reality, have become more immediate since the wide-spread advent of the Taser. Police have always had access to "less-than-lethal" weapons, IE nightsticks or bigass flashlights, but those have the disadvantage of leaving cracked heads and inconvenient pools of blood, which makes them sub-optimal for use against disrespectful little old ladies during traffic stops. Hey, there used to be some limits. But the Taser has provided law enforcement officers with a Pain Compliance Tool that normally leaves the chastened subject with hardly any damage at all. Physical damage, anyway. That using it for just that purpose would become a very common police procedure, was a no-brainer prediction. I was one of those who predicted it, and the cops didn't let me down.

But the point is, this "lack of respect" problem is circular, it's self-fulfilling. There's a reason average, every-day ghetto dwellers dislike cops on principle. It's not a big secret, and it's not because - as some cops would say - because the residents are all criminals. It's because they really hate being pushed around - and they get pushed around regularly. Any toppled dictator could tell you, you do not want to bring that sensibility home among the people - the middle class, the whitebread citizens, the majority - who should be your greatest supporters. But that's just what too many cops are doing.

And then when there's money to be made at it, well - civil asset forfeiture (1,010,000 hits) - well, then you just put the cherry on top.

"A conflict of interest between effective crime control and creative fiscal management will persist so long as law enforcement agencies remain dependent on civil asset forfeiture."
—John L. Worrall, Department of Criminal Justice, California State University, San Bernardino, Addicted to the drug war: The role of civil asset forfeiture as a budgetary necessity in contemporary law enforcement, Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 29, Issue 3, May-June 2001, Pages 171-187.

Okay, enough with the long words. Point is, not much separates a corrupted police department from just another gang of thugs. Yes, I know that's not the way law enforcement officers see it, but it's not their perceptions that are of concern here. It should come as no surprise at all to police officers that they perceive a general "lack of respect for police authority," and they should also expect it to get worse. It has nothing to do with the "subjects'" poor parenting or access to video games or anti-cop agitprop on the intertubz. What wrong-side-of-the-tracks-type people have known all along, the police are now teaching to whitebread suburbia: The Policeman Is Not Your Friend.

People concerned with any energy crisis in England could behave quite profitably toward their nation: Just connect a generator input shaft to the axis of Robert Peel's corpse, then sit outside his tomb reading excerpts from Radley Balko's The Agitator or David Codrea's Only Ones Files. Help him deplore the way the descendants of what he created, thinking he'd made a good thing, have forgotten every one of his principles, especially the seventh:

Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent upon every citizen.