Remember that phrase on the old television cop show, “Dragnet,” that sort of summed up crime fighting in a terse, coherent fashion?
“Just the facts, ma’am, just the facts.”
No 50-page sociology class tracts on crime and its consequences. No angst about the plight of the poor or the negative impacts of “bad” neighborhoods. No task forces appointed to finesse the standards for probation and parole. No, what the cops wanted to know was what exactly the bad guy looked like, which way he went, and whether he had a tattoo on his butt, for purposes of the inevitable “lineup” where he would be pointed out, tried, sentenced, and transported to a prison that wasn’t inclined to waste much time “rehabilitating” him.
The Dragnet team seems so naive. They didn’t seem to know that there were tens of thousands of criminologist scholars, urban planning consultants, social workers, “community activists” and “tough on crime” politicians hanging around, with much more on their minds than arresting the bad guys. And they aren’t always particularly coherent, either — in a “just the facts” kind of way.
Consider Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, at a recent Capitol press conference, flanked by big-city mayors, prepared to launch yet another extraordinary initiative against urban crime.
Did Dannel want to tell us, “just the facts?” Hardly. As he put it so coherently, the new Connecticut plan is about “bringing the community into context for those individuals so they know that the behaviors they have heretofore engaged in with little consequence will be engaged in with great consequence.”
As near as anyone could tell, the idea is that if Malloy wanders the mean streets of the big cities, giving that particular talk often enough, the befuddled criminal element will be so sick of listening to him that they will voluntarily surrender and beg to be sent to prison, where they can escape crime-fighting rhetoric and simply enjoy the good food and good friends one finds in prison.
The new strategy is called “focused deterrence.” Loudspeakers will be placed in appropriately awful neighborhoods, with the threat of 24-hour-a-day broadcast of speeches and recited white papers about how to fight crime. Criminals will be motivated to give themselves up, and reluctant neighbors will snitch on other neighbors — all in a concerted effort to prevent New Haven Mayor John DeStefano from threatening them with “our full wrath.”
The premise seems to be that we know who the really, really bad guys are — because a relatively small percentage of the urban huddled masses are the truly criminal, crazy, amoral types who commit most of the violent crimes.
There’s nothing new in this, of course — that’s the odd thing about crime fighting. In Connecticut, and across the country, police occasionally rouse themselves to conduct “sweeps” of bad neighborhoods, looking for whatever class of criminal we happen to be mad at. The sweeps are invariably “successful,” because the cops already know who they’re looking for.
Why does it take a public relation campaign to motivate the cops to action? That’s one of those crime fighting mysteries.
I’m sure this new campaign is going to be very, very successful. Who can forget Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s similar Capitol press conference in 2006, in which she announced a “sweeping initiative” to fight urban crime, which, of course, is “absolutely intolerable,”
What? You mean you forgot? That’s very disappointing. I’m sure the new campaign will be much more compelling, in a “heretofore engaged” kind of way.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
