Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mary Cole, of Montpelier who is a Vermont educator.
On Aug. 9, 2014, two black teenagers entered a market in their small Midwestern city at about 11:50 a.m. The surveillance video shows that one of them, Michael Brown, grabbed a handful of cigarillos on the way out.
By 12:15, his body was lying face down on a street in Ferguson, Missouri. His death ignited an explosion that began in Ferguson and soon engulfed much of the country.
In response, President Barack Obama created the President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing in December of 2014. The report from that task force, which came out in May of 2015, offered the country a playbook for improving the relationship between communities and law enforcement. It set forth a set of recommendations divided into six “pillars.” The first of these is: Building Trust and Legitimacy.
No one knows what might have happened under a different administration but in the summer of 2020, there’s little in the way of trust.
Many are now calling for us to “ reimagine” what a police system might be. But maybe we don’t have to look to the future. Maybe we can look to the past.
In 1829, Robert Peel, head of London’s newly created Metropolitan Police Commission, also recognized the essential need for trust between the police and those they’re charged to protect. His commissioners’ 9 Principles of Policing offer us a vision of a relationship built on trust.
According to those principles, a police force exists:
- To prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to their repression by military force and severity of legal punishment.
- To recognize, always that the power of the police to fulfill their functions and duties is dependent on public approval of their existence, actions and behavior and on their ability to secure and maintain public respect.
- To recognize, always that to secure and maintain the respect and approval of the public means also the securing of the willing cooperation of the public in the task of securing observance of laws.
- To recognize, always,that the extent to which the cooperation of the public can be secured diminishes proportionately the necessity of the use of physical force and compulsion for achieving police objectives.
- To seek and preserve public favor, not by pandering to public opinion; but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to laws, in complete independence of policy and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws, by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of the public without regard to their wealth or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
- To use physical force only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to obtain public cooperation to an extent necessary to secure observance of law or to restore order, and to use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
- To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only the members of the public who are paid to give full time attention to the duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
- To recognize always the need for strict adherence to police-executive functions, and to refrain from even seeming to usurp the powers of the judiciary of avenging individuals or the State, and of authoritatively judging guilt and punishing the guilty.
- To recognize, always, that the test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, and not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.
Is it even reasonable to think that this ideal could become a reality in our country? Think of neighborhoods in which shoplifting ends in an execution on the street. Think of the challenges of addiction and homelessness. Think of the political corruption that’s always been as American as a Fourth of July parade.
Maybe a better question would be: “How much do we want this kind of policing?”
We don’t want to be in the mess we’re in. The mothers of Black men don’t want to fear for their children every time they go out the front door. The families of police officers don’t want their sons and daughters shot in the line of duty or their faces on the evening news because they’ve been accused of homicide.
The 21st Century Task Force report was designed to be used as a playbook for change.
Can Robert Peel’s 200-year-old principles be used as the vision?
