Connect the Dots 101

The Trump administration talks tough on crime but shrugs off the work of real law enforcement. By Jill Leovy

Over the dozen years I spent covering the police as a beat reporter in Los Angeles, I came to realize there are two kinds of officers: showboaters and real cops.

The showboaters strut around and talk tough. They think they know a lot but they don’t. They get in your face when you turn up to cover a story and wax poetic about bad guys, knuckleheads, and gangsters. They praise blanket measures, crackdowns, sweeps. I had to learn how to get past them and find my way to the real cops, who tend to be quieter but know more.

America is having a showboater moment, summed up by federal agents imprisoning alleged immigrant gang members and shipping them abroad. To make itself look strong, the government plays up the danger they pose. Meanwhile, it shrugs off the unglamorous work of following due process and avoiding mistakes.

But any idiot can pull off a police state.

Governments that imprison indiscriminately and ignore due process have been known to post extraordinarily low murder rates: In the late 2000s, Syria’s dictatorship reported a criminal-homicide rate half that of the United States. Eliminating crime isn’t difficult if you eliminate freedom.

True policing means fighting crime within a constitutional system—safeguarding freedom and security at the same time. This is more sophisticated than mere goonery, and it takes a legal sensibility. Real cops aren’t just security guards, scarecrows, or social workers. They are legal professionals on par with prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges.

…Real cops don’t skirt the rule of law; they wield it in defense of the weak….

And the flashy roundups they favor are in sharp contrast to the way real cops work. The latter are subtle and focused; they don’t squander limited resources on nonviolent or low-priority targets. The Trump administration claims to be focused on gang members, but even that can be too wide a net. When I was reporting in California, the gang members listed in the old state database outnumbered annual gang-related homicides by more than 100 to one. That’s because only a small fraction of gang members were actually shooting people. The rest were lesser criminals, opportunists, hangers-on, partiers, teenagers seeking protection or just trying to fit in. I know of some boys who joined gangs under threat—and a few who were murdered because they refused.

Americans are right to be outraged by criminal homicides, though, including the fraction that illegal immigrants commit. The country has a real murder problem that has been neglected for too long, and certain groups, particularly Black men, have paid a disproportionate price.

But showboating isn’t the answer. Any goon can impose repression. Real cops impose the law. That’s the kind of toughness we need now.