Police Reform Needs to Come From Within

No one wants authoritarian law-enforcement agencies that violate civil rights or oppress minority communities. Neither does anyone want high rates of crime, especially violent crime. Those who advocate police reform need to accept both truths, because if people feel the streets are unsafe, then the reforms—regardless of their merits—become right-wing talking points. A criminal-justice system that fails to check rising crime will, as we’ve seen, face a backlash.

So what’s a police reformer to do? Some may wonder at my weighing in on this. In certain circles, I am regarded as the worst kind of police authoritarian, largely because I was New York Police Commissioner under Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the 1990s and I supported the strategy of “” policing. But in my experience, lasting police reform comes from within. Cops understand better than anyone that when you set out to remake a police agency, you don’t want to undercut what it does well