Hard Won Lessons: How Police Fight Terrorism in the United Kingdom

Introduction: Do Police Matter?

By George Kelling, Ph.D.

Do police matter? Can they prevent crime—or, for that matter, terrorism? The long-prevailing view of the police department’s role in society was spelled out in the famous “Principles of Law Enforcement” of Sir Robert Peel, founder of London’s Metropolitan Police (Scotland Yard). “The basic mission for which the police exist,” Peel wrote in 1829, “is to prevent crime and disorder.” Accordingly, Peel proposed that the test of police efficiency should be “the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action dealing with them.”

As Peel’s model of Anglo-Saxon policing was adopted in U.S. cities during the nineteenth century, this assumption prevailed as well. Police could prevent crime by their presence, by persuasion, by reducing opportunities for crime, and by law enforcement—arresting wrongdoers. Although U.S. policing narrowed its focus almost exclusively to law enforcement during most of the twentieth century—or at least tried to—few police doubted that police really mattered in crime control.

In the 1950s, however, researchers began to ask basic questions about the police “business”—what they did and what it accomplished. Initially, they studied “the law in action,” focusing on “what police actually did.” These police-function studies showed that police actually spent most of their time providing services, such as managing disputes, rather than “fighting crime.” Later, during the 1970s, research on widely practiced tactics—including rapid-response calls for service and automobile patrols—suggested that these tactics had little, if any, significant impact on crime.

These empirical findings became grist for the mill of new theorists who posited that crime was the result of collective “root causes” like social injustice, racism, and poverty. The practical implication of such root-cause theory was that crime could only be prevented if society itself were radically changed. These views became memorialized in President Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice and became the virtual dogma of criminal-justice thinking. In academia, many scholars wedded this root-cause thinking to the empirical research: police, as the research shows, can have little impact on crime. All police and criminal-justice agencies could do was react to crime after it occurred—much like firefighters reacting after the outbreak of a fire. When it came to preventing (and thus reducing crime), police did not really matter.

Though root-cause theory dominated official criminology during the 1970s and 1980s, the consensus was not absolute. A dissenting movement of criminologists wondered whether the root-cause theorists, in their “de-policing” of crime control, had not perhaps thrown out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. Indeed, without anyone really being aware of it, the groundwork was slowly and quietly being laid for a return, in the 1990s, to an updated “Peelist” model. This new model accepted the empirical research but interpreted it against a background theory that retained Peel’s time-honored assumption. Rather than concluding from effectiveness studies that policing did not matter, these dissenting theorists incorporated the empirical findings into several “big ideas” that might make police matter more effectively. Three of these ideas, in particular, greatly influenced police work in New York City during the Giuliani years.

The first was the idea of “problem solving,” advanced by Professor Herman Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin Law School. Goldstein—who had been among the first empirically-oriented police theorists—argued that the proper business of police was problems, not incidents. Response-oriented policing, in Goldstein’s view, approached police work as a series of disconnected incidents that had neither history nor future. In fact, most police incidents had both: they had evidenced themselves before in one form or another and likely would resurface in similar terms. Thus, incidents of spousal abuse, noisy and boisterous bars, prostitution, burglary, to give just a few examples, were often, in reality, signs of an ongoing problem that, if suitably addressed by police, could be managed or solved.

The second idea, “broken windows,” was formulated by Professor James Q. Wilson (then at Harvard and later at the University of California, Los Angeles) and myself in an article published in 1982. In that article, we suggested that failure to control minor offenses such as prostitution and disorderly conduct destabilized neighborhoods by creating a sense of public disorder. Pushing the theory further, we argued that people were likelier to turn to crime in neighborhoods where toleration of petty crimes—such as graffiti scrawling and window breaking—indicated a lack of effective social control. Restoring order, we believed, would not only reduce neighborhood fear but would substantially reduce crime. In 1989, I worked with New York City transportation authorities and later in 1990 with Transit police chief William Bratton to implement the “broken windows” theory in the New York City subways—and when Bratton became NYPD chief in 1994, he moved to make the theory part of standard NYPD practice.

The third innovation was a new way of managing police resources and tactics, known as “CompStat.” Implemented by Bratton when he became NYPD police chief—and subsequently adopted by police departments across the country—CompStat was perhaps the single most important organizational/administrative innovation in policing during the latter half of the twentieth century. Like other managers of large, geographically dispersed organizations, Bratton had faced the problem of how to ensure that his centralized vision of policing was carried out in all seventy-six NYPD precincts. To solve this problem, Bratton invested enormous authority in precinct commanders, devolving resources and decision making to the precinct level. He also mandated weekly planning meetings, in which precinct commanders had to identify problems as well as discuss their plans for dealing with them. This administrative mechanism focused the NYPD on substantive community problems rather than traditional bureaucratic machinations. Precinct commanders, previously preoccupied with what happened at One Police Plaza (central police headquarters), riveted their attention on their precincts: woe be it to the precinct commander who wasn’t on top of his or her precinct’s problems. These changes reoriented not only precinct commanders, but borough chiefs and top commanders as well: if precinct commanders looked bad, it reflected on the borough chiefs, and so on up the line.

Shortly after Bratton implemented these new ideas, crime in New York City began its historic dive. From 1990 to 1992, crime in New York City subways declined by 30 percent, with arrests and ejections rocketing from 2,000 per month to 10,000–15,000 per month. Following the problem-solving approach led to the realization that enforcing laws against turnstile jumping would net more serious criminals. Indeed, one out of every seven people arrested in the subways for fare evasion was wanted on a warrant. Often, these warrants would be for very serious crimes, such as murder or rape. One out of every twenty-one fare evaders, at least initially, was carrying some type of weapon—ranging from a straight-edge razor on up to automatic weapons. This process allowed the police to have a good chance of catching significant offenders without exorbitant effort or expenditure of resources. Now, well over a decade later, crime in the subway system is down almost 90 percent from what it was in 1990. Citywide, homicides are at a forty-year low. Overall, New York City is arguably the safest large city in America.

Subsequent research has shown that each of these ideas, particularly broken-windows policing and CompStat, played an important role in reducing crime in New York City to these unprecedented levels.

Since 9/11, police are facing a new challenge: global terrorists using weapons of mass destruction that could result in thousands—or tens of thousands—of casualties. While enormous amounts of ink have been spilled defining the new responsibilities and relationships that should obtain between federal agencies (FBI, CIA, NSA, and the Pentagon), there has been much less attention paid to the role that police must play in homeland security and protecting critical national infrastructure.

This is unfortunate, because terrorism’s equivalent to fare jumping in the New York City subways are illegal border crossings, forged documents, and other relatively minor crimes that terrorists use to fund their operations. Once inside our borders, it is the police—not the FBI or CIA—who have the best tools for detecting and prosecuting these crimes.

Ultimately, homeland security is less dependent on appointing a national intelligence czar than it is on empowering local police with the training and conceptual tools to prosecute potential terrorists in the cities and towns where they live.

Police can use problem solving to identify terrorist precursor crimes, broken-windows policing to create hostile environments for terrorists, and CompStat to collate counterterrorism intelligence and target police resources effectively.

The practices—the know-how—are out there, but they are fractured among the many layers of law enforcement that characterize America’s federal system of government. What is needed now is an “all-channel network” where expertise and intelligence can be disseminated quickly and effectively throughout the law-enforcement community, from coast to coast, and from police chiefs to officers at the street level. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we must all learn how to hang together or we will most assuredly all hang separately.

In response to this need, the Manhattan Institute and the Police Institute at Rutgers University have instituted an ongoing series of meetings for police chiefs and state homeland-security officials operating along the I-95 corridor of the eastern United States. These meetings bring together the foremost experts on crime prevention and tactical counterterrorism from the U.S. and abroad to discuss how police can maximize their ability to detect, deter, and, when necessary, recover from terrorist attacks.

The following paper is the first in a series of forthcoming “best practices” manuals for police departments that will be published by the Manhattan Institute. It is based on a meeting held at Rutgers University on June 3, 2004, for the “I-95” group, where counterterrorism experts from the United Kingdom gave presentations on how police can:

• effectively identify critical infrastructure
• work more effectively with the private sector to protect high-risk targets
• create a hostile environment for potential terrorists
• identify precursor crimes for terrorism
• use crime prevention techniques to deter terrorists

Their comments were immensely helpful, and we would like to extend to our U.K. comrades (Brian Howat, Head of Unit, National Counter Terrorism Security Office; Kevin Bolton, Detective Sergeant, National Counter Terrorism Security Office; and Vincent Smith, Inspector, British Transport Police) our sincere thanks for traveling so far to render vital assistance to their fellow officers.

If there was one thing that our friends from the U.K. constantly emphasized, it was that the American police officer doesn’t have to abandon any of the crime-prevention tools that he has successfully developed over the past decade to meet the challenge of al-Qaida and its cohorts. Ultimately, it is these crime-prevention tools—along with police professionalism, training, and wealth of real-world experience—that will make America’s police forces the nation’s most valuable homeland-security assets.

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