Crats vs. Crafts: Jerry Brown's Robo-Cop Vision

Jerry Brown, the last of California's chief executives to govern before the complex of growing prisons, gated suburbs and extreme crime panics came to shape political life in California , is now heading back to Sacramento fill the role of the state's Attorney General, a position now largely defined by its crime posture. A liberal who believed in minimizing the ambitions of state penal policy in the 1970s, Brown returns having passed through a recent purgatory as a Mayor of Oakland; a city which struggles to with constantly cycling of thousands of young men between its most vulnerable neighborhoods back from California's overcrowded, violent, and racially organized prisons. The last year of Brown's mayoralty, and his successful run for AG, were burdened with a significant spike in Oakland homicides and robberies. Brown's new control vision, brewed during his painful struggle with Oakland's crime and punishment problems, is outlined in Chip Johnson's column in the November 10th, SF Chronicle (read it now). Brown's Robo-Cop strategy emphasizes technology and surveillance to intensify what he considers the insufficient supervision by state parole officers and inadequate staffing of the Oakland police department. Case in point, Brown has pushed through the deployment of high tech system designed to pin point gun shot origins (one imagines that the Israeli's use things like this to launch retaliatory strikes against rocket launchers---and by the way the strikes occasionally go awry). Brown apparently believes this will permit pin point police responses that will incapacitate or deter Oakland's oversupply of young shooters. Brown may be right that the vision will resonate well politically at a time when Californian's just overwhelmingly adopted Proposition 83 which among other features will require felony sex offenders who have done prison time to wear GPS locators for the rest of their lives.

California badly needs a new vision on crime and punishment from the state level, and the experience of urban California with the war on crime ought to be the starting point. For my money, however, Brown's Robo-Cop vision of the future, has more in common with the largely media driven fantasies from which the state's current embrace of mass incarceration and gated suburbs then it does with the lessons to be learned in Oakland's streets. For one thing, Brown ignores the role that prisons and parole already play in cycling young men in and out of Oakland the harm that cycling itself does. Parole isn't tough enough in supervising ex-inmates according to Brown, or else we wouldn't have a 70 percent recidivism rate. Ding. Wrong. Much if not most of that recidivism rate is already driven by technical violations that are already detected by parole division all too well. More importantly, cycling itself may be producing violence by deforming social networks through a process relentlessly churning the population of sexually active and potentially economically productive young men in communities that are already suffering deficits of labor force participation (see recent the forthcoming book by Todd Clear).

For another thing, who says investment in technology will always buy you more security than investment in humans. If Oakland is under policed lets hire more police and let them do the kinds of highly discretionary intelligence driven and intelligent policing that has worked in New York. Frank Zimring's new book, The Crime Decline, mounts powerful evidence that New York's success in more or less doubling the national crime decline int he 1990s was due largely to more police and better police tactics, especially focused use of aggressive arrests. While most of these arrests were for minor crimes (that mostly did not result in prison time) they drove the guns off the streets of New York. Brown's gun spotting strategy is all "crat" i.e., technocratic reliance on automated systems and no "craft," i.e., no reliance on encouraging innovative use of police craft. Indeed, the system could strangle the residual craft tradition in Oakland policing as officers struggle to respond to the beeps coming from sex offender GPS as felony sex offenders succumb to temptation and visit a Burger King a few yards too close to a park or school or those coming from Jerry Brown's gun fire spotters. By the way this is not a rant against technology. What I'm calling "crat" is a way of subordinating human intelligence to tools and rules. Technology can and is being used to enhance the effectivess of craft traditions by enhancing communication and intelligence sharing. (for an innovative Bay Area firm doing this check out, ooTao)

The Execute-tive Branch: Can Sadam's Death Sentence Help the President

Many commentators have viewed the sudden announcement of a verdict and death sentence in the capital trial of former Iraqi President Sadam Hussein for the mass killing of Shi-ite's in the town of Dujail after a failed attempt on Sadam's life in 1982 as an advantage for President Bush and the Republican Party (whose fate seems tied to his in an election being viewed as a referendum on Bush's rule). Some, including respect NYT columnist Paul Krugman (November 6, 2006) have suggested that the administration may have consciously created such a result as an "October suprise" designed to shift the momentum of an election widely seen as headed toward gains by the Democratic Party in Congress.

Whether or not the timing of this result was politically manipulated to serve either embattled Shi-ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki or embattled Republican President George W. Bush, it testifies to the solid relationship between executive authority and the death penalty that has been a distinctive feature of "governing through crime" American style. The rise of crime, and especially violent crime, as a priveleged social problem against which government must mobilize, has cast the death penalty as a powerful tool of response. While in the past capital punishment may have been self defeating in highlighting the oppressiveness of those in power, in contemporary American democracy it has become a key bond between executive office holders (particularly governors and presidents) and their electoral publics. The ability to seek and deliver capital punishment against feared murderers has become one of the keys to the success of American governors in defining themselves as the most worthy candidates for the highest executive office, that of President. This is marked by a striking reversal of the post New-Deal pattern in which successful Presidential candidates were almost always identified with their career as federal politicians. From Truman through Ford this pattern suggested an eduring shift from state to federal experience as a prerequisite to presidential power. But starting with Democrat Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory over consummate federal politician Gerry Ford, governors have won all but one presidential election. The 1988 election was charged with issues of crime and capital punishment. Governor Dukaki's link to the parole of Willie Horton was widely credited with preventing a succesful counter attack.

Look for the administration to continue to emphasize capital punishment as a key tool in the war on terror (in the absence of any evidence that this is likely to deter terrorists).

Federal Politicians v. Governors as Presidential Nominees and Winners 1980–2004

	Republican	Democrat	Winner
1980	Reagan	Carter	Reagan
1984	Reagan	Mondale	Reagan
1988	Bush I	Dukakis	Bush I
1992	Bush I	Clinton	Clinton
1996	Dole	Clinton	Clinton
2000	Bush II	Gore	Bush II *
2004	Bush II	Kerry	Bush I

• Bold indicates that the candidate’s most important political experience previous to the run for president was in the federal government.
• Italic indicates that the candidate’s most important political experience previous to the run for president was being governor of a state.
• *Bush lost the popular vote and won the electoral college only after intervention by the Supreme Court

President Bush lauded the verdict in terms that highlighted its significance for Iraqi governance, describing it as an anchor of democracy in Iraq: "It's a major achievement for Iraq's young democracy and its constitutional government."

But while it may help bolster support for Bush and the Iraqi prime minister, its role as a deterrent to future human rights violations is in doubt considering that death squads are murdering hundreds of Iraqi's with the apparent tolerance of the Iraqi prime minister.