The Depart­ment of Jus­tice report on Bal­ti­more police prac­tices has prompt­ed pre­dictable reac­tions from Left and Right.

The report con­firmed sus­pi­cions on the Left that police uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly harassed African-Amer­i­can males. From the Right came reflex­ive defens­es of the police.

Both have a point.  And both miss the point.  As does the report itself.

The Jus­tice Depart­ment alleges that the Bal­ti­more Police Depart­ment engaged in a pat­tern and prac­tice of unlaw­ful and uncon­sti­tu­tion­al behav­ior.  The report found “sys­temic defi­cien­cies” – police are poor­ly trained, poor­ly mon­i­tored and not held “account­able for mis­con­duct.”  The city has not sup­plied its offi­cers “the nec­es­sary equip­ment and resources they need to police safe­ly, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly and effec­tive­ly.”  Those short­com­ings have result­ed in “con­sti­tu­tion­al and statu­to­ry violations.”

Sub­stan­ti­at­ing such “pat­tern and prac­tice” alle­ga­tions requires no evi­dence.  Mere arith­metic will do. If police fre­quent­ly stop and search African-Amer­i­cans in a par­tic­u­lar neigh­bor­hood, DOJ infers insti­tu­tion­al racism.  The neighborhood’s open air drug mar­kets and ele­vat­ed lev­els of vio­lent crime are at best inci­den­tal to its analysis.

“Willing To Do What It Takes”

DOJ has demand­ed that the city aban­don its “zero tol­er­ance” pol­i­cy.  Advo­cates of the pol­i­cy believe that attack­ing dis­or­der (e.g., arrest­ing peo­ple for minor offens­es like loi­ter­ing) pre­vents more seri­ous crimes.  DOJ con­tends that such poli­cies lead to uncon­sti­tu­tion­al actions by police reflect­ed in “large num­bers of stops, search­es and arrests.” It has insist­ed that Bal­ti­more offi­cials end the practice.

The city will com­ply.  Bal­ti­more May­or Stephanie Rawl­ings-Blake asked the DOJ to under­take the inves­ti­ga­tion.  She has pro­nounced her­self “will­ing to do what it takes to reform my depart­ment.”  That means spend­ing scarce resources to cat­e­chize police on a fresh list of “do’s and don’ts.”

The new police prac­tices won’t stop the car­nage.  Bal­ti­more suf­fered 344 homi­cides last year – a per capi­ta record. Most per­pe­tra­tors and vic­tims were young, black males. Mur­ders occurred more fre­quent­ly after a man named Fred­die Gray died after suf­fer­ing injuries while in police cus­tody.  The April 2015 inci­dent pro­voked riots and blood­shed. Baltimore’s homi­cide rate has remained ele­vat­ed ever since.

Nor is the spike in mur­ders of young African-Amer­i­cans lim­it­ed to Bal­ti­more.  An aca­d­e­m­ic study com­mis­sioned by DOJ found that the “homi­cide increase in the nation’s large cities was real and near­ly unprece­dent­ed.”  It is too soon to say whether a broad retreat from “zero tol­er­ance” poli­cies among urban police forces con­tributed to this increase.

A Conflict For Conservatives

As a con­ser­v­a­tive, I find myself con­flict­ed.  I am offend­ed both by those who hurl charges of racism to legit­imize crime, incite vio­lence and enrich them­selves (see Sharp­ton, Al) and by police who resort to exces­sive – and some­times lethal — force.

Indeed, the whole idea of a police force occu­py­ing our streets is a rel­a­tive­ly recent one. The Founders did not imag­ine that gov­ern­ment would deploy qua­si-mil­i­tary forces to estab­lish min­i­mal lev­els of pub­lic safe­ty.  Dete­ri­o­rat­ing social con­di­tions in some com­mu­ni­ties neces­si­tat­ed this intervention.

Gov­ern­ment is prone to abuse its pow­er, over­spilling con­sti­tu­tion­al lim­its.  The notion that police can stop some­one because he looks like the sort who might be up to no good is con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly suspect.

But plac­ing exces­sive con­straints on police risks putting cit­i­zens at the mer­cy of vio­lent thugs.  Both are paths to tyranny.

The Point DOJ Missed

And that is the point the DOJ, as well as most com­men­ta­tors on the Left and Right, seem to have missed.

The fun­da­men­tal issue is not police pro­to­cols, but the efface­ment of social norms in many neigh­bor­hoods.  Com­mu­ni­ties where such norms have bro­ken down have no good options. They can tol­er­ate con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly ques­tion­able police tac­tics or slide fur­ther toward a bru­tal dystopia.

In the com­mu­ni­ties where most Amer­i­cans live, the pre­vail­ing (though hard­ly uni­ver­sal) norms include get­ting a job to sup­port your­self and your fam­i­ly, defer­ring child­birth until after mar­riage, car­ing for your chil­dren with­out pub­lic assis­tance and main­tain­ing your prop­er­ty. Broad adher­ence to such val­ues is essen­tial to a peace­ful soci­ety. Gov­ern­ment nei­ther devised these norms nor enforces them.  On the con­trary, these val­ues sup­ply the nec­es­sary social con­di­tions for con­sti­tu­tion­al government.

Our gov­ern­ment, para­dox­i­cal­ly, has spent hun­dreds of bil­lions of dol­lars sub­si­diz­ing behav­ior that flouts these norms.  It rewards choic­es that cor­rode per­son­al and social respon­si­bil­i­ty.  These sub­si­dies present them­selves as blos­soms of com­pas­sion but yield a bit­ter fruit: whole com­mu­ni­ties ter­ror­ized by young men with guns.

Government Counterinsurgency

Gov­ern­men­t’s response to the prob­lem it helped incu­bate is an armed coun­terin­sur­gency. Lib­er­als are uneasy with this.  Con­ser­v­a­tives should be.

But the dis­cus­sion should expand beyond argu­ments over mat­ters of race, law enforce­ment tech­niques and gov­ern­men­t’s role in main­tain­ing order. It should instead cen­ter on the cause of vio­lence in our streets: the ero­sion of cul­tur­al norms on which free­dom and self-gov­ern­ment depend.  There are no reme­dies for com­mu­ni­ties in which those norms have worn away, only a sim­mer­ing caul­dron of per­pet­u­al conflict.

If I lived in Fred­die Gray’s neigh­bor­hood, I would both resent the police and want them to pro­tect me from the likes of Fred­die.   I would hold these two con­flict­ing impuls­es with equal fer­vor.  I would be relieved when the cops shot some kid who had been mak­ing my life and those of my neigh­bors mis­er­able.  I also would resent the police for shoot­ing that kid and sus­pect they did it out of con­tempt for peo­ple of my race.  My resent­ments would arise from the mis­ery of liv­ing among armed men — some crim­i­nal, some dis­patched by the gov­ern­ment — fight­ing for con­trol of the streets.

I’d wish they all would go to hell.