The robocop on the beat: Part 1, seen being seen
By: David A. Smith
Does deterrence come not from seeing but being seen?
Do you feel more secure seeing me?
Our parents thought so; for them the cop on the beat was a reassuring figure, heir to the town crier’s All’s Well.
All is well
Today technology has replaced the beat cop with the video camera, the forensics team, and the DNA swab, in part because their evidence is documentary, hence harder to impeach. But there’s another side to policing – prevention – and for that the essential action is not that of seeing, but of being seen, as spotlighted by these article from the Wall Street Journal:
Police in
‘Armadillo’ Plays Well in
Cops Use Old Brink’s Truck to Shame Suspects; Video Cameras Add to the Drama
PEORIA,
What makes this amazing is that the Armadillo’s effects are entirely prospective and preventive, arising solely from being seen.
Police here call it the Armadillo. They say it has restored quiet to some formerly rowdy streets. Neighbors’ calls for help have dropped sharply. About half of the truck’s targets have fled the neighborhood.
Crime hides in darkness, and since cannot banish the night, we can make it leave a residue by day.
“The truck is meant to be obnoxious and to cause shame,” says Peoria Police Chief Steven Settingsgaard.
Reviving the good old motive of shame: Settingsgaard
Shame to whom?
It’s a 12,000 pound Brinks truck full of video cameras, affectionately known as the Armadillo.
Police got a call at 2:30 one morning from Mary Smith, a 58-year-old computer operator at a Butternut Bread Bakery. Fighting back tears, she asked for relief from her neighbors’ incessant yelling.
How can you resist entreaties from someone who works at a place like this?
She and her husband, Terry, 61, a Butternut baker, have lived in their home on North Wisconsin Avenue for 30 years, and have seen the neighborhood fall into drug trafficking. The police suggested using the Armadillo.
That weekend, the truck pulled up to the offending neighbor’s house. A police officer knocked on the door and told the residents a nuisance report had been filed. Within 24 hours, the Smiths say, the house was quiet.
The Armadillo is an innovative application of the broken windows theory of policing and security:
Via a study reported in The Economist, we have sociological evidence, and it’s both interesting and important:
A place that is covered in graffiti and festooned with rubbish makes people feel uneasy.
Do graffiti and rubbish go together? That’s a question, too, isn’t it?
Correlated?
The idea that observing disorder can have a psychological effect on people has been around for a while. In the late 1980s George Kelling, a former probation officer who now works at Rutgers University, initiated what became a vigorous campaign to remove graffiti from New York City’s subway system, which was followed by a reduction in petty crime.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Did the sequence imply causality?
Some years back I formulated a more general version of this as the law of the observant herd:
The law of the observant herd
In any large body of people, the herd adopts its behavior only after first observing how the system treats saints versus sinners.
Saints: those who do right whenever they can. 10% of the population.
Sinners: those who do wrong whenever they can. 10% of the population.
The herd: everybody else.
The herd observes how sinners are dealt with. In this case, sinners are noticed. Not arrested, mind you; curiously, not even threatened. Just noticed.
Crime doesn’t like being noticed. So crime relocates.
Hopefully, with as little swag as possible
The occupants moved out soon thereafter.
The armadillo does what the residents can’t: it observes, it witnesses. And in a metallic Christian way, it turns the other cheek and it takes punishment.
“The difference was like night and day,” Mrs. Smith says. The landlord, Phil Schertz, credits the Armadillo.
Landlords have a responsibility too, and we can only deduce Mr. Schertz’s story. For him to evict the rowdy occupants, he had to observe them being disruptive. So either he needs to live in the house (we deduce that he doesn’t), or he needs the neighboring Smiths to swear out a complaint. If they don’t, he can’t take legal action. So for the time being, we’ll give the landlord a pass.
“The ugliness of the Armadillo is what makes it unique,” says Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “A police car is not a particular stigma, but if people see that thing in front of your house, they know something bad is going on in there.”
Sometimes … but like any other animal, crime is a creature of habit.
We make our own wheels and our own grooves
But it can disrupt illegal activities temporarily.
Disrupt crime’s routine and you reduce crime.
Citizens appear to like the idea, and police say they have a four-week waiting list of requests for the Armadillo.
‘Appear to’? Journalistic caution. A four-week waiting list is proof.
The Illinois River rises cleanly in
Like many low-growth formerly rural cities,
The Armadillo applies the broken-windows theory responsively and movably:
The biggest problem, as
Invitations to break in
More fallout from the subprime fiasco.
Prices flat: volume down,
Loss of homeowners to foreclosure means loss of occupants, and loss of ‘eyes on the street,’ that essential element of community so stressed by Jane Jacobs and others.
In the summer of 2006, police were brainstorming ways to rattle a suspected drug dealer. They had exhausted traditional strategies, including undercover operations, and were left empty-handed and frustrated.
Threats are meaningful only when they are credible. Just as rules you don’t enforce are worse than useless, rules you can’t enforce make a mockery of law and order.
Over the last half century, we have gradually and steadily increased the rights of the accused or suspected, and imposed procedural requirements on police. Whatever one may think of their importance in a balance civil society, there is no denying the practical effect that police may know someone is a criminal but be legally unable to move against him.
Except by shaming and naming:
They decided to park a retired police car in front of the suspect’s house.
A novel idea, and it had the desired effect of triggering a defense response. There was just one problem: the ferocity of that response.
About 24 hours after the car had been put in place, all its windows had been smashed, the tires were flat and the body was dented.
Not really a symbol of law and order
Such an extreme case of broken windows theory could not go unchallenged.
“It was embarrassing to tow a police car,” Chief Settingsgaard says. “But I saw it as a success because it was proof how much [the dealer] really disliked the police car’s presence.”
You have to like a police chief who not only tries a novel urban-laboratory experiment, but also sees the explosion that resulted not as a humiliation of authority but as a rousing success:
That worked!
The experiment cost one (retired) police car; its benefit was one rattled drug dealer.
The passive aggression of observation – being seen – trigged in the drug dealer an active aggression – extreme vandalism. That escalation was a misdemeanor (if not a felony; law is not my specialty) with indisputable evidence. I wonder if the drug dealer, seeing the crumpled and destroyed car and realizing it was proof positive of somebody’s violence, began to worry, Raskolnikov-fashion, about his eventual punishment by an implacable authority.
Was I seen?
The guilty flees where none pursues?
What happened next is truly surprising.
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