Law and Order: a good thing but also a siren call

Two people are running for mayor in my city. One is the "law and order" candidate and the other isn't. I plan to vote for the law and order candidate and largely because he's the law and order candidate.*

Of course, both candidates claim to want to make my city safer. Each, when pressed, will probably say he supports the "rule of law." But the "law and order" candidate is much more likely to promote aggressive enforcement and much more likely to strengthen the prerogatives of the police department and its officers. If he's successful, we just might see fewer carjackings and fewer muggings. I actually might feel safer.

The other candidate claims to want to address crime "holistically," 

not only looking at "root causes" but also trying to involve the community in how they are policed. That sounds nice. I'm skeptical of what it will look like in practice, though. To the degree his plan will make us safer, I suspect it will be because it will resemble the plan of the "law and order" candidate. Maybe it would be "law and order" lite. And "community policing," whatever good things come out of it, seems primed to empower the "best citizens" to use the police to target the more disfavored residents in any given neighborhood. Maybe it doesn't necessarily do that, and maybe the end result is less unfair, but it creates a strong incentive a way for local people to target and marginalize others.

Put simply, I trust the "law and order" candidate's approach to actually work when it comes to curtailing crime. It's not that the other candidate isn't sincere. It's that I think the "law and order" candidate will be better at it.

The problem, though, is that it will come at a real cost. If it's successful, it will probably result in more people being confronted by police who shouldn't be. It will result in more innocent people being punished. Even if they get their day in court and are acquitted or charges dropped, they'll have had to endure a process that, as the phrase goes, "is the punishment." A disproportionate number of those people will probably be black and brown. And while I think the focus on "disproportionate impact" is sometimes wrongheaded (a problem isn't suddenly not a problem just because it affects white people "proportionately"), it's wrong to promote a system that in practice targets one group over another. And my city's police department has a, shall we say, checkered history with non-white populations. If I were a person of color, I would be wary of any effort to empower the police, even though I might also welcome more safety, too.

The question isn't whether those problems are real. They are real. The question is, rather, how to minimize those problems and balance them out against the potential good. It's how much that those bad things will happen versus the good things. I also realize that I am less likely to feel the brunt of any negative effects.

I used to be a "police skeptic." I still am, but I'm not voting that way, at least not this time around. The old saw goes that "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged." I haven't been mugged (not yet, knock on wood), but I feel less safe. I'm voting for the law and order candidate. I'm only hopeful that there's a way to foster law and order while also fostering civil rights and respect for the constitution and civil rights.

*The other major concern is his opponent's strong and in my opinion unmindful ties to the public employee unions in my city and particularly the teachers union, but that's a story for another blog post.