The Legitimacy Crisis That Occurred Within The Police In The 1960's

The legitimacy crisis that occurred within the police in the 1960s was a result of the injustice that minorities experienced at the hands of the police. Often times beaten and brutalized by the police, African Americans started demanding equal rights and wanted discrimination based on color to stop. Protests and marches were organized to bring attention to the mistreatment they were receiving. White police would show up to try to contain and monitor these protests that often ended in riots. Protests would start out peaceful but would end in violence when the police used excessive force to try to control the protesters. As stated in Bill Moyers report, “the promise of jobs is what lured African Americans to move from the South to the North.” The move north was to get jobs in the large industrial cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and Milwaukee. So many people were moving into these urban areas that the job market started to dwindle and factories started closing. These cities became more segregated because white Americans moved out of the urban areas to seek jobs. Black Americans didn’t have the resources to allow them to move to where the jobs were so this escalated racial tensions.
The professionalization movement was supposed to stop some of the corruption in police departments. By requiring officer to have more education, more training, and by restructuring the police departments, it was thought that if police were more professional they are better equipped to handle law enforcement and crime prevention. Putting police in cars instead of having them walking a beat was another part of the professionalization movement. However, this only isolated them even more from the public and widened the gap between the public and police. As a result of the rioting and deaths of hundreds of protestors, President Johnson put together a commission to look at current conditions in police departments and to make recommendations on how to improve police agencies.
The official name for the commission was the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders but is better known as the Kerner Commission. President Johnson wanted to know why the riots were happening and how could they be stopped. The president thought militant groups had to be behind the rioting. The Kerner Commission found that to be not true at all. What was behind the rioting was “racism, poverty, and injustice in our cities”.(Kerner) The Commission brought to light just how much poverty and hopelessness there was in the inner cities. It exposed “white
racism”. Community policing was meant to bring the police and the public closer together. It was intended to take the police out of the mindset of just responding to emergency calls and arresting criminals and to get them more involved in the community and have hands on approach to preventing crime. Police were more like community social workers trying to work with the public on the pressures and problems that come from living poverty. Several programs came out of community policing including community intervention teams, police/social work teams, and zero tolerance policing. With all the good that comes out of community policing there’s some bad too. Some officers feel like they aren’t social workers and shouldn’t have to hold the hands of criminals. Others feel that community policing offers opportunities for the police to be more proactive and sensitive to what people in the community are going through.