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During my years as a police chief, I found that police misconduct often had its roots in subtle indications by supervisors to officers that the sort of "extralegal" tactics common to quality-of-life policing were acceptable. Cops in minority neighborhoods would detain, question and push around people on the street without reason. If a young man asserted his legal right to leave, cops "kicked ass." Inevitably a number of officers felt justified in using illegal and at times fatal force. It was constantly necessary to emphasize to the officers that we were peace officers, servants of the community--not soldiers in a war against crime and drugs. Cities in free nations will never reflect the orderliness of Berlin under the Nazis or Moscow under the communists. In America police methods must comply with the law and community standards. They must not arise from a rigid concept of public order formulated within the police culture.
Many of the current brutality cases show officers in an almost maniacal rage. The message of politicians to police that they are soldiers in a war may be driving these angry and violent expressions of contempt. It is common in war to dehumanize the enemy. And all wars produce atrocities.
In the end, it is not tough cops who prevent crime; it is citizens' respect for the law. And these brutality cases do incalculable damage to police credibility with poor and minority citizens--those most in need of protection and without whose cooperation the police cannot be effective. We need to impress upon cops, in New York and everywhere else, that a free society is directed by its citizens.
Joseph D. McNamara, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, served as police chief of San Jose, Calif., after retiring from the N.Y.P.D.