The New Police and Implications for a Conception of Law

Abstract

In the effort to reduce levels of fear, disorder, and crime, policing in the United States has in certain places in recent years shifted in strategy and tactics from the emphasis on making arrests for violation of formal criminal law to more informal means of addressing the disorders and incivilities that plague contemporary, particularly, urban life. Policing has also to some degree embraced the public policy that James Q. Wilson and George Kelling capture with the phrase “fixing broken windows.” This shift that many believe responsible for stunning reductions in crime in certain cities such as New York, and which is argued for on the basis of a new problem-oriented/community policing model, has called into question not only the professional law enforcement model that had been the prevailing paradigm in the United States, but also the formal positivist jurisprudence and the liberal individualist values by which that paradigm is justified.