The Garner decision illustrates need for Community Policing

The police cite the "Broken Window" theory when justifying police murders, but the Atlantic article they cite doesn't support the argument that police should be arresting people for minor crimes to prevent bigger crimes. The article was talking about how the way to prevent bigger crimes is to have community policing that keeps the locals feeling safe. As I noted in my previous post [http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-broken-windows-theory-was-corrupted.html]. The Atlantic quote is:

"one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing."

The article talked about the importance of on the ground policing "community policing", where the purpose of local constabulary is to maintain order and not just to make arrests or enforce top down laws. The Broken Glass theory before being distorted was premised on the very obvious observation that. Broken Glass theory was about the important of not letting "untended behavior go on in communities because:

""untended" behavior also leads to the breakdown of community controls. A stable neighborhood of families who care for their homes, mind each other's children, and confidently frown on unwanted intruders can change, in a few years or even a few months, to an inhospitable and frightening jungle."

It was tendered on the importance of police and communities being "community."

"The essence of the police role in maintaining order is to reinforce the informal control mechanisms of the community itself. The police cannot, without committing extraordinary resources, provide a substitute for that informal control. On the other hand, to reinforce those natural forces the police must accommodate them. And therein lies the problem"

But of course the "Broken window" theory applied was opposite. Instead of focusing on the need for police to provide local order it focused on two roles mentioned in the article

Many citizens, of course, are primarily frightened by crime, especially crime involving a sudden, violent attack by a stranger. This risk is very real, in Newark as in many large cities. But we tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.

And instead of regarding these people as citizens to be helped off the street and treated, the police began looking for ways to eliminate them. Sometimes literally.

Nevermind that the article was talking about the need for legitimacy, intimacy and involvement of police and being part of the community. The Atlantic article had talked about how even white police could patrol black neighborhoods if they knew the neighborhoods:

"The people were made up of "regulars" and "strangers." Regulars included both "decent folk" and some drunks and derelicts who were always there but who "knew their place."

The key is to respect the integrity of neighborhoods. And that is not what the police are doing. Choking citizens is not community policing. Though Staten Island is closer to community policing than what happened in Cincinnati or Ferguson.

I go into what I think we should do in more detail in The Neighborhood and the City The Village and The Town and We need local community government.

Sources:

http://www.lantm.lth.se/fileadmin/fastighetsvetenskap/utbildning/Fastighetsvaerderingssystem/BrokenWindowTheory.pdf

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-broken-windows-theory-was-corrupted.html

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/the-neighborhood-and-city-village-and.html

We need local Community Government

The Prince and I

The Prince and I

 

The prince and I shared a little time

As Six year olds do when in the adults world.

A child as smart as a whip with a winning smile.

And as always with such children,

I was blessed with his company.

 

He played video games with my children,

who are old adults now, this boy could be my grandson

...and I'd be proud.

Young, respectful, active, well behaved, not loud.

 

I gave him some attention as I give all my children.

But adult matters haunt my heart,..

I kept them private, my burden.

But we played a little. He shared his lego "gun"...

And "shot me" a few times, and I pretended to die.

But inside my heart felt like I would die.

A few days before, a boy with a toy was murdered by police.

A little boy who this boy reminded me of, I had to hide my tears.

It wouldn't have been fair to beat him with my fears.

 

If I could extend my heart to protect him I would

Boys like him will play with toy guns...

...but in our world it can be fatal.

His mother will never buy him a toy gun...

A "cop might shoot your eye out."

Elinor Ostrom and her 8 principles of Managing A Commons

Elinor Ostrom was a Nobel Prize winning economist who did extensive work on the reality & concept of the Commons. She died in 2012. This post is technical and is meant for wonks and for later reference. I'll be citing it in future posts. [Obituary in New York Times]

Eight Principles

The Economist writes a report on her that notes:

"IT SEEMED to Elinor Ostrom that the world contained a large body of common sense. People, left to themselves, would sort out rational ways of surviving and getting along. Although the world's arable land, forests, fresh water and fisheries were all finite, it was possible to share them without depleting them and to care for them without fighting. While others wrote gloomily of the tragedy of the commons, seeing only overfishing and overfarming in a free-for-all of greed, Mrs Ostrom, with her loud laugh and louder tops, cut a cheery and contrarian figure.[The Economist]

Elinor Ostrom did the work that is necessary for real progress. Where others prefer to make heros of heels, mythologize reality and form conclusions and then look for justifications, she used scientific method to analyze reality and draw generalizations that would help confront it. When premises didn't hold, she re-examined them. And the null hypothesis myth of a "tragedy of the commons" turns out to be such a myth.

Years of fieldwork, by herself and others, had shown her that humans were not trapped and helpless amid diminishing supplies. She had looked at forests in Nepal, irrigation systems in Spain, mountain villages in Switzerland and Japan, fisheries in Maine and Indonesia. She had even, as part of her PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied the water wars and pumping races going on in the 1950s in her own dry backyard."[The Economist]

She saw examples of how folks used common resources well, and how they used them badly. But she saw commonalities for when it was used well:

All these cases had taught her that, over time, human beings tended to draw up sensible rules for the use of common-pool resources. Neighbours set boundaries and assigned shares, with each individual taking it in turn to use water, or to graze cows on a certain meadow. Common tasks, such as clearing canals or cutting timber, were done together at a certain time. Monitors watched out for rule-breakers, fining or eventually excluding them. The schemes were mutual and reciprocal, and many had worked well for centuries. [The Economist]

And:

"Best of all, they were not imposed from above."

What works best of all is local governance, not central governments:

"Mrs Ostrom put no faith in governments, nor in large conservation schemes paid for with aid money and crawling with concrete-bearing engineers. “Polycentrism” was her ideal. Caring for the commons had to be a multiple task, organised from the ground up and shaped to cultural norms. It had to be discussed face to face, and based on trust. Mrs Ostrom, besides poring over satellite data and quizzing lobstermen herself, enjoyed employing game theory to try to predict the behaviour of people faced with limited resources. In her Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University—set up with her husband Vincent, a political scientist, in 1973—her students were given shares in a notional commons. When they simply discussed what they should do before they did it, their rate of return from their “investments” more than doubled." [The Economist]

The key here is the principle of subsidiarity, but not in the top down hierarchical (and bureaucratic manner) that modern governments have organized by since the days of the Assyrian Empire, but this concept of "polycentrism" is the notion that local people know what is best for local assets and need to be respected.

“Small is Beautiful” sometimes seemed to be her creed. Her workshop looked somewhat like a large, cluttered cottage, reflecting her and Vincent's idea that science was a form of artisanship. When the vogue in America was all for consolidation of public services, she ran against it. For some years she compared police forces in the town of Speedway and the city of Indianapolis, finding that forces of 25-50 officers performed better by almost every measure than 100-strong metropolitan teams. But smaller institutions, she cautioned, might not work better in every case. As she travelled the world, giving out good and sharp advice, “No panaceas!” was her cry.

I suspect her worldview was as informed by the "Small is Beautiful" book by EF Schumacher as mine has been. [Economist] Indeed she was part of a tag team with her husband Vincent Ostrom who died in 2012

8 Principles for Managing a Commons

 

Ostrom has 8 principles:

Summary
Ostrom Principle:	The principles restated:
Principle 1:	Well-defined boundaries
Principle 2:	Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions
Principle 3:	Collective-choice arrangements: Representation and Participation in rules and decision making
Principle 4:	Locally representative Monitoring Officers
Principle 5:	Graduated sanctions; measured and just sanctions for misbehavior.
Principle 6:	Conflict-resolution mechanisms; informal adjudication locally and formal adjudication of disputes available
Principle 7:	Recognition of rights; those involved in managing something have a stake in it that needs to be respected. And people have a right to self government.
Principle 8:	Nested enterprises
Source:	http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/main.html

Principle 1. Define clear group boundaries.

The article "Ecology and Society" [http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/main.html] defines these 8 principles with some detail.

Actual wording: "Well-defined boundaries"

“This principle, as Agrawal (2002) notes, originally stipulated the presence of well-defined boundaries around a community of users and boundaries around the resource system this community uses. Each component helps to internalize the positive and negative externalities produced by participants, so they bear the costs of appropriation and receive some of the benefits of resource provision. Each component was coded separately, with community boundaries coded as principle 1A and resource boundaries coded as 1B (Table 3). There was strong evidence for 1A and moderate evidence for 1B. Pinkerton and Weinstein (1995:25), for example, state, “Exclusion of outsiders from fishing space was the main mechanism used by the villagers to control fishing effort. This is one of the most common and universal mechanisms found in community-managed inshore fisheries.” [http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/main.html]

This principle is key to providing orderly and fair access and usage of a common resource.

 

Principle 2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

Actual Wording: "Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions"

The principle restates why we need to have local government involving locals. Ostrom uses technical language to note:

"Ostrom’s (1990:92) second design principle refers to the “congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions.” Like the first principle, this principle stipulates two separate conditions that Agrawal (2002) recognizes. The first condition is that both appropriation and provision rules conform in some way to local conditions; Ostrom emphasizes local conditions of the CPR, such as its spatial and temporal heterogeneity. The second condition is that congruence exists between appropriation and provision rules. We found very strong empirical evidence for both principles." [Ecology and Society Article]

To use legal language local rule is necessary to governing any well managed commons, and that includes local government of neighbhorhoods and business branches. These observations support the principle that local representative (Republican) government should be a right.

Principle 3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

This too supports the notion that local government should be representative, "with consent of the Governed". Ostrom writes:

Principle 3: Collective-choice arrangements

"Ostrom (1990:90) states, “most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules.” This principle is in the spirit of a large amount of literature on the importance of local knowledge in natural resource management (e.g., Berkes et al. 2000), in which local users have first-hand and low-cost access to information about their situation and thus a comparative advantage in devising effective rules and strategies for that location, particularly when local conditions change." [Ecology & Society]

Principle 4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

Ostrom's Principle 7: Minimum recognition of rights

In the University article this is labeled as 7 and it "stipulates that external government agencies do not challenge the right of local users to create their own institutions. An external government agency imposing its own rules on a community managing a CPR may suffer from a government failure of the kind discussed by Hayek (1945) and Scott (1998) if the externally imposed rules do not correspond to local conditions." [Ecology and Society Article]

These principles imply that both outside authorities and internal authorities must be accountable to the people of the community.

Principle 5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

Ostrom: Monitoring

"Principle 4A stipulates the presence of monitors, whereas 4B stipulates the condition that these monitors are members of the community or otherwise accountable to those members. Monitoring makes those who do not comply with rules visible to the community, which facilitates the effectiveness of rule enforcement mechanisms and informs strategic and contingent behavior of those who do comply with rules. Empirically, principle 4A was moderately well supported, whereas 4B was very strongly supported by the case data."

Now "Monitors" is essentially two roles; that of enforcing order, and that of adjudicating minor disputes.

"Monitors may not perform satisfactorily if they do not directly benefit from improved resource conditions. Thus, it may be important that monitors are accountable to those who most depend on the resource. Gautam and Shivakoti (2005), who studied two forest systems located in the Middle Hills of Nepal, found that the ability of local users to oversee monitors’ performance affected resource conditions. In Jylachitti Forest, local users hired two people for regular monitoring and paid them through contributions from each member household. In Dhulkhel Forest, guards were also hired, but they were paid by local authorities. Whereas Jylachitti local users were engaged in supervising the guards’ performance in controlling timber extraction levels, this was not the case in Dhulkhel, where overextraction was becoming an issue by the end of the study." [Ecology and Society Article]

Monitors have to be of the community and benefit in some way from performing their jobs.

"We have already seen that people prefer to spend more time negotiating consensus than establishing and imposing sanctions. Solidarity in this case cannot simply be interpreted functionally as being directly about cooperation over the mechanisms of water resource management. It is comprised of complex networks of cooperation based on family structure, labour-sharing arrangements and numerous interrelated associational activities such as church groups, savings clubs, and income-generating groups. The village apparently most successful at collective action regarding water supplies was also remarkable for its other cooperative activities, for its success in agricultural production and for the frequency and cheerful creativity of its public social occasions. Cleaver (2000:374)." [Ecology and Society Article]

Complex networks collaborate and when they do that bonds societies and is not just a business decision.

Principle 6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

(Study Principle 5): Graduated sanctions

Principle 5 stipulates the efficacy of graduated sanctioning systems. Sanctioning deters participants from excessive violations of community rules. Graduated sanctions progress incrementally based on either the severity or the repetition of violations. Graduated sanctions help to maintain community cohesion while genuinely punishing severe cases; they also maintain proportionality between the severity of violations and sanctions, similar to the proportionality between appropriation and provision rules from principle 2.

Fairness means that you have to give people a chance to participate and measure punishments.

Principle 7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

[Principle 6 in study]: Conflict-resolution mechanisms

"Principle [7] states that systems with low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms are more likely to survive. Conflict over an exhaustible resource is inevitable in CPR management, necessitating the presence of established mechanisms for conflict resolution to maintain collective action. This principle was moderately well supported by the empirical data. In the acequia irrigation communities in northern New Mexico, for example, there is a long history of recourse to external court systems under different national regimes to resolve inter-community conflicts. Several agreements reached by territorial probate courts more than 100 years ago are the basis for functioning, modern water-sharing agreements today (Cox 2010)."

The purpose of conflict resolution is to "de-escalate" situations and make sure that the system functions in a win/win manner and is not a win/lose conflict situation.

Principle 8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.

Study Principle 8: Nested enterprises

"Principle 8 states that in successful systems, “governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises” (Ostrom 1990:90). As for principle 7, which also deals with cross-scale institutional factors, the empirical evidence for principle 8 was moderately supportive."

The idea that power should be centralized is so obviously counter-functional but in most actual governments is subverted by ambitious authorities. The best way to adjudicate this is to ensure that smaller systems are part of larger systems and that the relationships between the parties are well enough defined so that each party involved doesn't have incentive or time to infringe on others.

"Many scholars, particularly those focusing on pastoral and irrigation systems, have stressed the importance of nesting smaller common-property systems in larger and still larger ones, given the high probability that the social systems have cross-scale physical relationships when they manage different parts of a larger resource system and thus may need mechanisms to facilitate cross-scale cooperation (Lane and Scoones 1993, Niamir-Fuller 1998). Part of the motivation for this principle, then, relates to principle 1 (user and resource boundaries) and is stated by Hanna et al. (1995:20) as: “It is important to ensure that a property rights regime has clearly defined boundaries, and that to the extent possible, those boundaries are consistent with the natural boundaries of the ecological system.” It is not just user and resource boundaries that are important; a match between these boundaries may be important as well, and institutional nesting is an important way to accomplish this in many situations." [Ecology and Society Article]

This nesting is necessary in order to maintain proper relationship boundaries and reemphasizes importance of establishing clear ones in the first place. It is a principle of Federalism at it's best.

"One additional clarification regarding principle 8 is that the nesting may occur either between user groups and larger governmental jurisdictions, or between user groups themselves. Many traditional irrigation systems, for example, contain multiple levels of organization that mirror the branching properties of an irrigation system (Coward 1977). This is somewhat different from co-management arrangements between user groups and a larger government body, described in extensive publications (Berkes and Folke 1998, Berkes 2002, Yandle 2006, Cinner et al. 2009). Intercommunity connections can be thought of as horizontal linkages, whereas connections between multiple jurisdictional levels can be thought of as vertical linkages. It is our understanding that, when she formulated this principle, Ostrom (1990) was referring to vertical linkages. We would generalize principle 8 to include both horizontal and vertical linkages because they may accomplish similar functions." [Ecology and Society Article]

Ostrom is laying out a design for confederation, collaboration, constitutionality and republicanism that we need to pay attention to.

Further reading:

http://www.economist.com/node/21557717

Nobel Prize Page

Obituary in New York Times

She taught in Indiana.

I think I met her but I'm not sure. We lost a lot of people in 2011-2012

Paper that illustrates her 8 principles authored by 3 of her students: http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol15/iss4/art38/main.html

http://www.indiana.edu/~workshop/people/lostromcv.htm

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/story-vincent-and-elinor-ostrom

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons

Miles to go before I sleep

My Favorite poem, by Robert Frost is this one:

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

BY ROBERT FROST

 

“Whose woods these are I think I know.

His house is in the village though;

He will not see me stopping here

To watch his woods fill up with snow.

 

My little horse must think it queer

To stop without a farmhouse near

Between the woods and frozen lake

The darkest evening of the year.

 

He gives his harness bells a shake

To ask if there is some mistake.

The only other sound’s the sweep

Of easy wind and downy flake.

 

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.”

Source: BY ROBERT FROST [http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621]

I like a lot of Robert Frost's poetry but this one pops up in my mind whenever I feel discouraged, tired, or frustrated. Life isn't easy. Cold winds blow and the snow, or rain, or drought, hot winds or fire, all carry perils. It ain't easy. But life is a journey and we have promises we've made individually and other ones we made implicitly. Promises to our parents, children, grandchildren. Duties to fulfil, obligations to loved ones and friends. Our sense of "mission" or "purpose" is tied up with whether or not we are willing to commit to such promises and take on such duties. Virtue is when people live up to the promises of a role and actually keep those promises.

And so this little poem speaks to the need to go on and to a lot more than the need to go on. It would be easier to stay and sleep in the snow. Or to stay at home and do nothing. But if we did that, we'd never get the chance to stop from time to time and watch the snow fill up the woods with a lovely blanket and fill the world with beauty and wonder.

Why My late wife was a Master Teacher

My wife gave me more than 12 years of discoveries, and that is part of why she was a phenomenal teacher. Her students may not have liked everything about her (she was strict) but with her education was a constant discussion. Her way of teaching was to constantly learn. We'd attend conferences and museum presentations, author presentations and seminars; and she'd bring materials back to her classroom from those study venues -- and bring the students to them, when she could, herself. I think of her today as I realize I've learned a lot about learning and education from her. I'm trying to honor her, not just by keeping and sharing what she learned, but by continually learning and sharing what I learn myself. When you stop learning you stop being a master teacher. Long ago I saw that there were three kinds of teachers,

1. ordinary teachers who teach what some other teacher ordered them to teach.
2. Teachers who can teach other teachers.
3. And those who can teach the teachers of teachers.

My Wife was one of the third kind.

We need local community government

Chris Hayes is talking about this general subject right now. In my previous posts I talked about how the facts and observations "Breaking glass" concept (corrupted by Giuliani & Law enforcement) as described in the Atlantic were actually pointing at the need for community policing And before that I've talked about the faulty theories in "Zero Tolerance" policies. But the article also describes the consequences of centralization we see with the Ferguson Murder by Cop incident. Paraphrase "police no longer know the people in the neighborhood." They may know the Church Pastor, the local stores. But they don't know the people. He's suggesting reforming the police, but he's pointing to the difficulty of policing in dangerous neighborhoods, and the Broken Glass story describes how lack of local order destroys neighborhoods. Peter Moskos writes a great book, but reforming the centralized police won't fix the problem. The problem is broader than policing. It is the fact that neighborhoods do not have an automatic right to self rule and an automatic right to representation in the general government. What is needed are local police. I'd even call them constables. We should have local watchmen and the police should be there to respond to calls and come when there is an emergency. We should have semi-volunteer watchmen in neighborhood funded by the city and the local neighborhood. Local neighborhoods need local "judge, jury, police and representation" with local posts where these attributes can be practiced and those local authorities need the power to keep order and represent the neighborhood. Not necessarily to make arrests or even carry a gun.

Local authorities aren't perfect either, and local general government is sometimes necessary to oversee such local government as is devoted to providing order and governing local communities. That general government is needed to provide oversight, guidance, discipline over misbehaving officials and appeal avenues, but they can't do that if they are also wearing local government hats. The conflicting demands of providing order and enforcing general laws creates built in conflicts that gets worked out either in weird legalistic behavior (such as claiming a girl bullied herself for not being willing to throw the book at the bullies under Zero tolerance laws. To deconflict this we need to recognize that local government is a right not a privilege for communities. Therefore it has to be enabled by the general government and the courts. We also have to realize that the principles of republicanism dictate we separate "judge, jury and executioner" roles, and never give them to a single individual by himself.

Discussion

In Federalist 27 I find the term "Ordinary Magistry" employed at the end of his paper:

"The plan reported by the convention, by extending the authority of the federal head to the individual citizens of the several States, will enable the government to employ the ordinary magistracy of each, in the execution of its laws." [Federalist 27]

To me this indicates that at least one founder intended the constitution to be taken literally in it's guarantees of a "Republican Form of Government" to the States, and based on the principle invoked on a similar guarantee down to the local community. A state is not republican unless it's subdivisions are republican, and they are not republican unless they provide effective representation to the citizens of their subdivisions and that requires respecting local government. The principle of Subsidiarity is not explicit in the constitution but it appears that Hamilton at least assumed that the Federal Government would be collaborative and not duplicative or combative.

All this advocates for the reform of our government to more systematically represent communities bottom up, rather than provide eternal fighting between over-centralized State Governments and an over-centralized Federal Government bureaucracies. The answer to bad government is good government and our constitution embraced the principles it did because they are basic principles of good government.

More:

http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/importance-of-ordinary-magistracy.html

The Neighborhood and the City The Village and The Town

Last night, while the awful news about Ferguson was being broadcast I was researching the "Broken Windows" theory. Reading the original research and articles on the subject in the Atlantic's archives [see http://holtesthoughts.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-broken-windows-theory-was-corrupted.html] and I saw the same pattern of dysfunction and poor constitution of our Democracy in the way that the information had been applied. I had a "eureka moment" even as I was hearing the anguished cries of youths who feel trapped in neighborhoods where they are treated as colonies of the central government. The Atlantic article was talking about Ferguson! Our neglected towns, villages, countryside and cities all suffer from "broken windows", disinvestment, neglect. And people reacting badly to that sense of despair and abandonment. As the author noted:

"one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)"

The article was suggesting something that local Police Departments are incapable of meeting. Why? Because they aren't local enough. And also why? Because general governments at the local level can't afford to provide the necessary services, and it requires a community to do so completely. As with everything else in our country what is happening in Ferguson's black neighborhoods and also in Ferguson's white neighborhoods, isn't a breakdown in democracy from too little democracy but a breakdown from a failure to replicate republican principles intelligently and fairly. The article states it:

"From the earliest days of the nation, the police function was seen primarily as that of a night watchman: to maintain order against the chief threats to order—fire, wild animals, and disreputable behavior."[Atlantic article]

We used to do it through informal Government agencies, but that was cludgy. Now we don't do it at all for our poor neighborhoods while the rich hire guards and put gates at the entrance of their neighborhoods.

"For centuries, the role of the police as watchmen was judged primarily not in terms of its compliance with appropriate procedures but rather in terms of its attaining a desired objective. The objective was order, an inherently ambiguous term but a condition that people in a given community recognized when they saw it. The means were the same as those the community itself would employ, if its members were sufficiently determined, courageous, and authoritative" [Atlantic article]

The Need for a Security Militia and Volunteerism

It's not like the need hasn't been identified. The Atlantic Article talks at length about the kinds of policing necessary to establish neighborhood order and create healthy neighborhoods. And he is describing a less professional and more volunteer police force. More street beat than police cruiser. More "Guardian Angels" than Officer Francis Muldoon. They put it in historic terms talking about "public order" versus solving crimes. The folks who created the Guardian Angels had hit on the problem. We need to have local law enforcement of local informal ordinances at a level below that of the general government.

I don't propose a return to older policing models. I have something larger in mind, starting with the creation of a local reserve police constabulary. The Atlantic Article talked about what happened when DC implemented Foot patrols:

"Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars"

The beat officers weren't effective in arresting people. That was the job of detectives and they needed help from backup in cruisers to deal with major crimes or chase down infractions. But what they could do was to establish and maintain local order. The Atlantic article goes at lengths to envision what this order should look like and I talked about this yesterday but what we need are local constabulary. Local officers who can act as neighborhood watchmen, do patrols, and who have the "real police" as backups. We already have this in some suburbs. Trayvon was murdered by such a local constable. But you see that indicates why this needs to be part of a police reserve function. Zimmerman was a poorly trained reserve with no local authority. A young man like Trayvon saw him and he had no local authority, he probably saw him as some stupid punk sticking his nose in other people's business. A local constabulary would be as well trained as the police. Just volunteer, auxiliary and local.

But as the incident with Trayvon last year illustrated. Neighborhood watches aren't enough. The old method of policing where police wore police, judge and executioner hats at the same time was no more just than current policing. The Atlantic Article also notes that the old constables who were in place before "modern" professional policing were often brutal and the rules varied from neighborhood to neighborhood in arbitrary ways. What I'm talking about is applying the principles of replication and subsidiarism. The role of a beat cop is necessary to neighborhoods and local governance. But that should be the province of local governors and neighborhoods. Not the general government. The city "general government" should be there to support local government and to intervene when locals are over their heads, not as first response. The beat cop should be a local militia function not a citywide function. But the local militia should be organized as Hamilton and the constitution suggest:

"provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the Militia, and for governing such Part of them as may be employed in the Service of the United States, reserving to the States respectively, the Appointment of the Officers, and the Authority of training the Militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress"

We need a Judicial Militia, organized on constitutional principles. At the local level we need constables, but we also need volunteer barristers, local justices who can act as either impromptu judges or mediate disputes. No person should combine in their person "judge, jury and executioner" -- that is a constitutional principle that is behind separation of powers. If Ferguson, instead of having a large, scared and "professional" police force who never leave their cars except when arresting someone, had neighborhood watchmen and proctors or informal justices (this is the principle of volunteerism, one volunteers, is trained at State Level and maybe Federal Level, and then released into the local reserves) backed by local informal legislatures each headed by a councilman from that subdivision -- we'd see a different kind of law enforcement and more community participation. We also need a health and ER militia and to bring back volunteer fire and rescue companies, but that is for another days argument. The "Guardian Angels" were on the right path. Instead of the professionals fearing them and marginalizing them we should train them, pay them for "such part as employed" in Governing, and set them up as an auxilliary and adjunct to local police forces.

I have to keep this post short as I want people to read it. So I'll stop now, but we have to reestablish the primary importance and separate role of neighborhoods in governing cities, towns and the country.