I would like to suggest a new model approach to the issues of crime and policing. Called “Policing First,” it basically posits that the first way we should tackle these issues is by making sure that our police department has the necessary resources to protect us. When that’s been accomplished, we can turn our attention to what are conventionally called the “root causes” of crime.
Instead, Oakland has been doing exactly the opposite. The progressives maintain that there’s no point in doing anything about crime as long as its “root causes” remain extant. Such “root causes” include poverty, but progressives always stretch the tent to include racism as a root cause of crime.
The main problem with this analysis (and there are many problems with it) is that, even if you accept the premise that crime has “root causes,” it’s very difficult to determine what they are. People will disagree over whether single-parenthood, for example, is a “root cause” of crime. People will certainly disagree over the concept that “racism” or “structural racism” even exists, much less can be considered a “root cause” of crime.
So when I suggest a “policing first” model, I mean that we ought to strengthen our law enforcement capabilities to the maximum, while we hash out the more philosophical issues of “root causes.”
As in the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, when the epidemic hit hard, epidemiologists and scientists couldn’t agree among themselves about its causes or treatments, but what everyone in San Francisco managed to agree on was that some immediate response was needed to help people stricken with the disease. As an early volunteer with the Shanti Project, I’m well aware of that response: it was to provide sick men with hands-on services that enabled them to survive even as they fought the disease. I washed dishes, shopped, did laundry, changed sweat-soaked sheets, cooked, dusted and vacuumed their apartments, scrubbed toilets and bathtubs, and was there for anything they needed me to be, including talking. This was a first response to the crisis, a “help first” approach that could not wait until the actual physical cause/s of AIDS were determined.
Identifying HIV, much less coming up with medicinal treatments, took many years, but that didn’t mean we could stop caring for our ill brethren. In the same way, “policing first” accepts that it could take decades, or even generations, to figure out and address the “root causes” of crime, but that doesn’t mean we can’t address it immediately. And the only to do that is, obviously, through adequate policing. I am aware that crime is down in Oakland, as it is throughout the country, but I accept that crime follows a sine curve: up for a while, level for a while, down for a while, and then the process recurs. Nobody really knows why, any more than we know why the weather happens as it does. So for those of us who would like to deal with our current level of crime—still high—and to prepare for what we know will be future spikes, I strongly suggest the greatest possible investments in the Oakland Police Department. This will rub progressives the wrong way, but they’ve been so wrong, so many times for so long, that there’s no reason we should trust them about anything anymore.
Steve Heimoff