Guardsmen as Cops

Barry Latzer and Peter Moskos have this article in the National Review. Sending in the National Guard for law enforcement has some benefits, but it is not an optimum solution.

But there are limits to what soldiers can do.

First, troops do not have police powers and cannot enforce laws or arrest lawbreakers. They are not trained in the chain-of-custody protocols needed for evidence preservation. Nor can they do the detective work needed to track down suspects.

Second, national guardsmen cannot prepare a case for the prosecutor. This is a vital job for which the police have training. Cops are taught how to interview victims and other witnesses, gather physical evidence, and preserve the chain of custody, and then testify in court to help obtain a conviction. Soldiers can’t do this, and without convictions, offenders cannot be sentenced and incarcerated for their crimes.

Third, police officers know their communities; guardsmen are usually out-of-towners who do not. Police know the young guys who have guns and engage in gang fights. They develop sources of information that enable them to prepare for trouble. So why don’t they just arrest the bad guys? Because “knowing” the troublemakers and putting them behind bars for a specific act are two different things.

Fourth, we need police to respond to calls for service. These include emergencies such as fires, sudden illness, and crimes in progress, but also quality-of-life issues that require not an arrest but good old-fashioned policing. Police know the community, and the community knows the police. Police know where to respond and how to respond. Guardsmen can’t and won’t. Only the police can do the service function effectively.

Finally, ordering hundreds of guardsmen into a city is extremely expensive. The cost of deploying the D.C. National Guard, not including troops from other states, is more than $1.8 million a day. This is greater than the entire daily budget of the D.C. Metropolitan police. We are not against spending more money on policing, but let’s put it into policing!

So what is the long term solution? More actual police officers. Latzer and Moskos suggest:

A smart way to do this is for the federal government to pay for the cities to recruit and hire more police officers and civilian police employees. President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill — among many other things – paid for 100,000 police officers when there were around 600,000 sworn police officers nationwide. The plan wasn’t perfect. The money was distributed around the country, not concentrated in neighborhoods where police were most needed, and it took six years to hire the 100,000th police officer. Still, thousands of cops were hired after 1994, and crime went down.

“Wasn’t perfect” is an understatement. The Clinton bill provided up-front money, but the long-term responsibility for maintaining the extra officers fell back on state and local governments.

And state and local government is where that responsibility belongs. State and local governments need to provide more funding for law enforcement by cutting wasteful, unnecessary, or at least lower priority spending elsewhere. Bullet trains, ethnic studies departments, “prevailing wage” laws that require government projects to pay well above the actually prevailing wage and on and on. Needed revenue can also be raised by cutting back government policies that depress economic growth for insufficient reasons, such as symbolic carbon dioxide restrictions that only save a meaningless drop in a global bucket.