Editor’s Note: In PoliceOne “First Person” essays, our Members and Columnists candidly share their own unique view of the world. This is a platform from which individual officers can share their own personal insights on issues confronting cops today, as well as opinions, observations, and advice on living life behind the thin blue line. This week’s essay comes from PoliceOne Member William McKnight, a former police officer who recently returned from five years service with the Civilian Police Mission in Iraq. Do you want to share your own perspective with other P1 Members? Send us an e-mail with your story.
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By William McKnight, J.D.
In the Army, I recall one of my Training NCOs begrudging the fact that we always seem to be training to refight the last war. My Training NCO was right. He was a Vietnam Vet who’d been trained for a jungle war by German-fighting WWII vets; now he was teaching me to fight Russians in Europe — something I bypassed in favor of fighting Arab insurgents in the deserts and urban streets of Iraq). The war on crime is no different, as police agencies too, always seem to be fighting the last war.
Today, this nation is on the cusp of the newest uptick in criminological evolution.
Historically, the formalized method of trend analysis owes to Berkley, (Calif.) Police Chief August Vollmer (1876-1955), who, as “the father of American policing,” organized police reports to aid trend analysis, and mapped crime locations with colored pins, allowing him to use crime information to create patrol districts. When Vollmer mobilized his beat officers on bicycles in 1909, he laid out beats in accordance with the number of calls anticipated from each part of the city. 1. The analysis also enabled Vollmer to muster the tools needed to deal with an evolving crime problem, fighting Berkley’s early twentieth century infestation of marauding gangs with radio communication, bike and automobile patrol units, and the use of fingerprints in investigations. 2.
American law enforcement has undergone amazing change since Vollmer’s day — much of it the natural result of slow evolution. But the impetus behind Vollmer’s radical changes was merely the first of three sociological phenomena which served as a springboard for change within the police and criminal justice worlds: WWI and the Vietnam War — and, now, the Afghan and Iraq Wars.
In 1918, troops came home from the trenches in WWI as changed men. War does that, you know.
They came home to an antiquated criminal justice system, security system (bank alarms a joke) and an economy about to blossom — just before it burst. Shortly thereafter, alcohol prohibition would play an important role in crime, as would Italian and Sicilian immigration demographics.
The convergence of these factors (outdated security systems, an unstable economy, immigration of violent international gangs, and the return of war-hardened men who had gotten over the emotional reservations about killing people and bonded closely with their comrades) created an evolutionary “wave” of change in criminal action and apprehension. The criminal justice system of Vollmer’s era was still doing business as it had been in the late 1800s, but the days of Machinegun Kelly, Al Capone, Chicago Gangland wars, and the modified tactics and weapons—using automobiles to escape apprehension, automatic “Tommy Guns” used against “coppers” with six-shot revolvers — changed policing, prisons, and security systems forever.
The advent of fingerprinting in the 1900s and of crime laboratories in the 1920s greatly augmented the police capacity to solve crimes. The introduction of the two-way radio and the widespread use of the automobile in the 1930s multiplied police productivity in responding to incidents.3. Moreover, Vollmer pioneered the use of the polygraph and fingerprint and handwriting classification systems. The crime laboratory he started in the Berkeley, California, Police Department was the model and training ground for the nation. In 1932, the FBI inaugurated its own laboratory which eventually became recognized as the most comprehensive and technologically advanced forensic laboratory in the world. The 1930s saw the widespread police adoption of the automobile and the introduction of two-way radios.4. All of these advents were created in response to a crime wave that occurred just after WWI.
For some reason, returning WWII and Korean War vets returned to a quiet, stable society. Ah, but then came Vietnam.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the highest crime rates in recorded history.5. Coincidentally, at the same historical moment, American Vets, like mythical John Rambo, were again coming home from war. These men, like all war veterans, had worked through the emotional process necessary to commit violence — and they learned skills necessary to employ violence; skills that most civilians (including cops) do not possess (although most street cops — like those in the film First Blood — think they do). And these vets were returning to a different world, a world in the flux of tremendous destabilizing change — and a world with mind-altering drugs readily available. The result was a wave of violence that caught the Sheriff of Mayberry quite off guard. And this “wave” of change not only gave us Kevlar vests, back-up communication devices, sophisticated tracking equipment and a greater ability to use informants; it transformed the nation!
In the 1960s and 70s, with crime at an all-time high (at least the highest in recorded history), the government bled millions of dollars into newly created programs designed to reverse the spiking crime trend. The Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 created the Office of Law Enforcement Assistance. Then in 1968, the Omnibus Safe Streets and Crime Control Act created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration—an agency dedicated to providing financial assistance to various local crime control programs. In the late 1970s, the many disparate crime reduction and crime prevention programs were united under the Integrated Criminal Apprehension Program (ICAP). The result of these efforts was to transform the system!
The Criminal Justice system itself reeled from an amazing tidal wave of change inside the nation’s criminal courts during the 1960s and 70s: In 1965, Brady v. Maryland (discovery required); in 1963, Gideon v. Wainwright (defense lawyer required at public expense); in 1964, Miranda v. Arizona (warnings required before interrogation), and; in 1961 Mapp v. Ohio produced the exclusionary rule of evidence. When you think about it, the legal changes of the 1960s-70s alone revolutionized both crime and criminal apprehension in ways that could scarcely have been predicted — and no police officer would ever protect and serve in the same fashion as had his predecessors prior to the 1960s.
Police practices, naturally, had to change in the face of a new tidal wave of crime perpetrated by a new kind of criminal; and “it is estimated that the workload crime imposed on the police has increased fivefold since 1960.”6. The 911 system was developed to integrate and centralize radio-telephone communications, radio procedures were developed to combat interception by combat vets trained in communications-disruption, Kevlar vests were introduced to protect police officers increasingly being shot by a new generation of violent criminal, and almost 50 years after its invention, the auto-cocking pistol was finally in widespread circulation among street cops — in direct response to the fact that the criminal element had outgunned the police!
In other words, we can look at snap-shots of pre-WWI “Keystone Cops,” the post-WWI “Untouchables,” the pre-Vietnam Barney Fife, and the Vietnam era Adam 12, and post-Vietnam Hill Street Blues as illustrative of the evolving waves of police response to evolving waves of criminality.
Crime dwindled in the late 1980s (despite our waging a ‘drug war”) and 1990s, Crime Analysis, supra; and yet “[c]riminologists and social scientists predict an increase in crime over
the next 15 years.” 7. This ought not surprise us, for our country has again been at war; for almost a decade now, between Iraq and Afghanistan.
Naturally, as one recently returned from almost five years in Iraq, I am not implying that all vets are predisposed toward criminality. But I am saying that returning war vets have been exposed to many of the same phenomena faced by WWI and Vietnam vets: A loss of the emotional barriers restraining “normal” men from violence, an influx of immigration of international criminal elements (Russian gangs, Latino gangs, and Arab refugees who grew up with insurgency warfare), an unstable economy and, alas, an entirely new set of phenomena: The exposure to a set of tactics, technologies, and skills acquired in an urban insurgency war (improvised explosive devises, ambushes of armed and armored units by civilians who fade into the populace, a willingness to terrorize through violence a civilian population) that are likely to make them different than any previous wave of criminal — should they choose that path.
Most street cops today have, like the street cops illustrated in First Blood, grown accustomed to being the “toughest gang in the hood.” Their weapons, tactics and equipment have given them the edge, increasingly, since the 1980s. Few street cops today are “afraid” of the criminal element, and believe themselves prepared to deal with anything that is handed to them. But this confidence may not be well founded; for, invariably, they are likely to be training to fight the “last war,” rather than preparing to meet the new challenges of a post desert wars evolution of crime and criminal apprehension.
Prudent analysts, planners, and police trainers would be wise to contemplate the possibilities and probabilities of the new wave — the next generation of criminal action and apprehension.
1Law Enforcement Assistance Administration. Crime Analysis in Support of Patrol, 1977, pg. 8., cited by macrimeanalysts.com/historyofcrimeanalysis, accessed 5/9/10
2. Ibid
3.Police Technology, infra.
4.Ibid.
5.Ibid. See also FBI Uniform Crime Reports.
6.Police Technology- History of Technology at 1, http://www.police-technology.net/id59.html accessed on 5/9/10.
7.Ibid.
About the Author
William McKnight received his Juris Doctor from NW School of Law at Lewis & Clark, after receiving his Bachelor of Science in Political Science at Utah State University. He is a former police officer, investigator, and criminal defense lawyer who recently returned from five years service in Iraq with the Civilian Police Mission.
