Twenty-five years ago, police scholarship and those who produced it had a very particular bent. The big ideas had innocuous titles like “broken windows” and “community policing,” presented by a group of well-credentialed, largely white and male social scientists, the most famous of whom were James Q. Wilson, George L. Kelling and Richard J. Herrnstein. The middle-initialed experts advanced a sort of domino theory for crime, that hiring more police and enforcing laws against vandalism and loitering would create an aura of order, thereby preventing the really bad stuff like theft and violence.
These theories came to be widely applied at the local, state and federal levels, most famously in New York City under mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg. Crime fell off a cliff during these years, while prison populations exploded, disproportionately shuttling huge numbers of Black and brown men and women through the criminal justice system. Exploding prison populations were not the only problem: Americans were still being killed or injured by law enforcement at levels far higher than in other developed nations, the harm once again falling disproportionately on non-whites, while crime and violence remained persistent in many poor and segregated communities.
Today, the most often-cited policing scholar is probably Alex Vitale, a professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and the author of “The End of Policing,” who takes a wildly different view of crime and punishment than the Wilsons and Herrnsteins of yester-year.
Vitale has been writing about police for more than two decades, but it was the rash of protests over police killings beginning in 2014 that led to Vitale becoming a household name on the left. His widely discussed book argues that police reform is a largely fruitless endeavor when applied to a law enforcement system that is designed more for social control than public safety, and that the root causes of crime (economic degradation, segregation, lack of public services) cannot be stamped out by more cops. Verso, Vitale’s publisher, has also helped fuel his status as a celebrity wonk, offering discounted and free digital copies of “The End of Policing,” giving many young activists a text to support their goals of police defunding and abolition.
Like Vitale, the journalist and policy analyst Radley Balko was sniffing out problems with police long before Ferguson, George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. Balko found a home researching police misconduct at the libertarian Cato Institute, whose scholars and fellows have been critiquing American law enforcement longer than any other major think tank. In 2013, building on his journalism and work at Cato, Balko published “Rise of the Warrior Cop,” a treatise on the disturbing militarization of police. Balko discusses the legal and political decisions leading to the evolution of American cops into armor-clad agents of chaos. Balko now writes about police and criminal justice for the Washington Post.
Returning to academia, three scholars at Yale are together leading scholarly debates on how to analyze and reform police. Monica Bell and Tracey Meares are both professors at the university’s law school. Bell, who also holds a Ph.D. in sociology and social policy in addition to her legal training, has put special focus on legal estrangement in criminal justice, arguing that interactions between cops and people in poor and minority communities are largely shaped by those citizens seeing police as an exclusionary force. Meares, like Bell, is concerned with how the public perceives and interacts with police, which is why she co-founded Yale’s Justice Collaboratory, a project fusing social science research with policy to better bridge gaps between communities, individuals and law enforcement. A well-known expert on police and criminal justice, Meares was also a member of President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
Rounding out the Yale trio is Phillip Goff, a psychologist whose work focuses on understanding racial bias. Goff’s research led him to create the Center for Policing Equity (CPE), a “research and action think tank” that analyzes mounds of data in its National Justice Database to understand racial disparities in law enforcement and how to make changes. Goff is also a senior fellow with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s policy research center, the Thurgood Marshall Institute.
Like Goff, University of California, Berkeley law professor Franklin Zimring is a data-focused policing expert. Zimring is a prolific scholar on criminology, writing on mass incarceration, juvenile justice, crime reduction and, of course, police. His 2017 book, “When Police Kill,” is an exhaustive study of deaths at the hands of cops, showing that police disproportionately shoot and kill Black and Native men, and kill citizens at rates far higher than other comparable countries.
Also in the legal realm are Rachel Harmon and Barry Friedan, professors at the University of Virginia and New York University, respectively. Harmon is a former prosecutor in DOJ’s civil rights division and now directs UVA’s Center for Criminal Justice. She’s at work on a casebook about laws governing police, and along with seven other policing experts (including Meares and Friedan), released the recent joint report “Changing the Law to Change Policing,” a guide for “immediate, concrete steps federal, state, and local governments can take to address enduring problems in policing.”
Friedan is the founder of NYU’s Policing Project and a highly sought-after commentator on everything law enforcement. His book “Unwarranted: Policing Without Permission” argues that the mass surveillance state unveiled by Edward Snowden in 2013 and recent protests over policing are highly interconnected events. The explosion in both spying and policing are, in fact, part of the same problem, which is that Americans have little say in how they are “protected,” and that citizen and judicial oversight of law enforcement must be reestablished.
Finally, no list of scholars would be complete without a historian, and few understand the history and background of police better than Harvard Professor Khalil Gibran Muhammad. Muhammad’s book, “The Condemnation of Blackness,” traces the role of American police back to slave patrols and the enforcement of Jim Crow segregation, weaving a narrative consistent with Vitale’s argument that the structure of American law enforcement is inherently corrupted. Muhammad has outlined his view of policing for outlets like NPR and Vox, providing a vital historical context for understanding the legal, political and moral questions surrounding the role of law enforcement.
