I came across this excerpt from the book Amazon.com: Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District: Peter Moskos: Books from one of the blogs I frequent. While I don't know how well fleshed out the critique from Sherman is, it certainly rings familiar with a lot of our early COIN experience in OIF and got my wheels turning thinking about the similiarities between policing and COIN.
Given some of the lukewarm/negative feelings towards cops in some other threads, I think that it is a fascinating parallel. Even if there is a bias because the only time you may interface with a cop is when getting a ticket while potentially ignoring the fact that your street may be safe, how do you overcome it. I think the car patrol vs. foot patrol is a great dichotomy, since with the former there is little to no interaction and the relationship is impersonal, while with the latter, there is interaction and it is on a personal level.
Here's the author's blog: Cop in the Hood
Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol -- the cornerstone of urban policing -- has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, "The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime."
Here's the author's blog: Cop in the Hood
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