What Holds Policing Back?

I am excited about this new book by Malcolm Sparrow. He’s one of my favorite police academicians and will be sure to add to the growing body of police knowledge —  Handcuffed: What Holds Policing Back, and the Keys to Reform.

The following is from the book’s introduction on Amazon.

“The police shooting of an unarmed young black man in the St. Louis, Missouri, suburb of Ferguson earlier this year sparked riots and the beginning of a national conversation on race and policing. Much of that conversation has focused more on social issues. Malcolm Sparrow, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is a former British police detective, argues in this new book that there is another dimension that played a role not only in Ferguson but in many other high-profile police killings of unarmed blacks: the character of policing itself.

“Sparrow shows how police departments across America have shelved the traditional ideas of community policy—the cop on the beat how knows his or her neighborhood and its inhabitants—and also simple problem solving when it comes to crime to focus on crime reduction. That has meant a reliance on quantitative methods where police define how well they are doing by tallying up how many traffic tickets have been issued (Ferguson), or arrests made for petty crimes (Eric Garner selling nontaxed cigarettes in New York). The list goes on.

“Police departments need to shed this reliance on crime reduction metrics and mindsets and turn back to making public safety, and public cooperation, their primary goals (my emphasis).”

Note: Malcolm K. Sparrow is professor of the Practice of Public Management at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and faculty chair of the school’s executive program “Strategic Management of Regulatory and Enforcement Agencies.” His previous books include Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing (with Moore & Kennedy, 1990); The Regulatory Craft (Brookings, 2000); and The Character of Harms (Cambridge University Press, 2008).