The Benefits of Being Monitored

“FOR ME, NOTHING’S gonna change,” says a police sergeant, hands on hips, huddled with colleagues in a station in a scruffy, violent district on Chicago’s West Side. He sounds relaxed as the city begins its term under a “consent decree”, a court-ordered process that imposes federal monitors to oversee police reforms. “If you’re a good officer, it won’t change anything,” agrees another man in uniform.

“对我来说，没有什么可以改变的，”一警长双手叉腰说。在芝加哥西区一个邋遢，充斥着暴力地区的一个车站里，他与同事挤在一起。他的话里透着一种轻松，因为芝加哥开始依照“满意法令”——即法院法令程序，要求联邦监督员监管警事改革。“如果你是一名好警员，它改变不了什么，”另一位男警员赞同道。

As they will soon discover, much in fact will have to be done differently if a history of often unconstitutional policing in the Windy City is to end. Even as Los Angeles and New York have cut murder rates to historic lows over the past three decades, Chicago’s remain three times higher. Officers have long proved trigger-happy and quick to cover up colleagues’ wrongdoing. One calculation in 2016 found that they fired at a member of the public every five days, and had killed 92 people in the previous six years. And young black men are overwhelmingly the victims of police abuse.

他们很快就会发现，如果风之城经常出现违宪警事的历史即将终结的话，事实上必须采取做法要截然不同。尽管洛杉矶和纽约过去三十年的谋杀率降至历史最低水平，芝加哥仍然高出三倍。长期以来，警员们碌碌无为，掩盖同事的不法行为速度极快。在2016年的一项计算发现，芝加哥的警员每隔五天就会向一名市民开枪，并在此前六年里杀了92人。年轻的黑人绝大多数是警察滥用权力的受害者。

Reform in Chicago has been hampered by strong police unions and politicians who dared not make enemies by confronting the 13,000 men in blue. Chicago long failed, for example, to train its officers properly. Eddie Johnson, the superintendent, recalls he was educated in use-of-force rules as a novice at the police academy in 1988 but not retrained for 28 years, until he became the top cop in 2016.

芝加哥的警务改革不仅受到强大的警察工会的阻碍，还有不敢与1.3万名警察为敌的政客。例如，芝加哥一直都没有对警察进行适当地培训。警督埃迪·约翰逊回忆称，他在1988年接受了警察学院新手的使用规则教育，但28年未接受培训，直到他成为2016年的级别最高的警督。

Mr Johnson’s appointment came after protests over an egregious killing, in which a white officer was filmed shooting a disoriented black teenager, Laquan McDonald, 16 times in 2014. (The officer was convicted of murder, a rarity in Chicago, last October.) Since then a new “pointing policy” discourages quick draws, though it has caused consternation in the force. Mr Johnson said recently that officers grumbled so much, “it is the bane of my life.”

约翰逊获得任命之前发生了一场令人震惊的杀戮事件的抗议活动——一名白人警察在2014年对一名失足黑人青少年Laquan McDonald开了16枪。（该警员在去年10月被判谋杀罪，这是芝加哥极为罕见。）此后，一项新的“开指政策”没能获得快捷过审，不过，它引起了警察部队的恐慌。约翰逊最近表示，警察抱怨太多，“这是我生命中的祸根。”

Though he talks of other recent improvements, such as officers’ use of body cameras, he admits that difficulties linger. These include ongoing use of “racist techniques” and the fact “we treat part of the city inappropriately”. He means his police are most likely to abuse Latino or black residents. This, Mr Johnson reckons, is the fault of a few rotten apples. “We need to identify the bad actors and get them out.”

他谈到了一些其他新的改进，如警察使用贴体照相机，不过他承认困难仍然存在，包括一直使用的“种族主义技巧”和“我们不恰当地对待城市里的一部分人”的事实。他的意思是他的警察队伍最有可能对拉丁裔或黑人居民滥用权力。约翰逊认为，这是一些害群之马的错。“我们需要找出这些坏警察并清除出警察队伍。”

In reality, the problems are structural. The compensation doled out for wrongdoing by his force provides an illustration. Since 2010, such settlements plus interest have amounted to over $930m (not far off the $1.5bn annual budget for the police). In 2015 the city agreed to pay reparations of $5.5m to victims of a detective, Jon Burge, who led a team known as the “Midnight Crew”. For much of the 1970s and 1980s they beat, burned, raped, electrocuted or subjected to mock executions 118 suspects, probably many more, to get confessions.

实际上，这些问题是结构性的。由他的警队为不当行为的付出的赔偿就是一个明证。2010年以来，此类和解款，外加上利息，总额超过9.3亿美元（与警方年度预算15亿美元相差不远）。2015年，芝加哥市同意向Jon Burge警探案的受害者支付550万美元赔偿金，前者是“Midnight Crew”刑侦队的负责人。在20世纪70年代和80年代的大部分时间里，他们殴打、烧毁、强奸、电击或遭受模拟处决118名嫌疑人，可能还会承认更多的滥用权力行为。

Such systemic failings explain why the mayor, Rahm Emanuel, at last agreed to a consent decree. He says that after “seven attempts in 100 years to reform”, he is proud that bigger changes will come. The decree was in the works for two years, as first the Justice Department and then Illinois’s attorney-general demanded it. It allows federal monitors to insist on openness and accountability across many departments, not only the police, says Walter Katz, who negotiated for the city. The experiences of other cities which have had decrees, such as Los Angeles, suggest it will last a decade or more.

这种系统性的违法行为解释了芝加哥市长Rahm Emanuel最终同意执行“同意令”的原因。他表示，在经历“100年里七次改革尝试”之后，他自豪会有更大的改变。该法令实施了两年，最初是司法部要求实施，之后是伊利诺伊州检察长要求。代表芝加哥参与谈判的沃尔特卡茨表示，这项法令允许联邦监察人员坚持众多部门的开放和追责任，而不只是警察部门。其它曾实施该法令的城市（例如洛杉矶）的经验表明，该法令会持续十年或更长的时间。

Consent decrees were made possible by legislation from 1994 (passed after riots in 1992 in Los Angeles, sparked by the acquittal of police officers who had beat a black motorist, Rodney King.) The Justice Department each year has typically picked two or three targets for reform from 18,000 police departments. It usually responds to a prominent case of police malpractice. According to a Justice Department review of two decades’ use of decrees, there have been 69 formal investigations and 40 decrees covering police departments.

1994年的立法让“同意法令”的实施成为可能（该法令是在1992年殴打黑人司机的警察罗德尼·金无罪释放引发洛杉矶发生骚乱后通过。）司法部每年通常会从1.8万个警察部门里选择两到三个进行改革，通常会挑出现了重大警察错误行为案件的地方。根据司法部一项二十年的法令使用情况的评审报告，对警察部门有69起正式调查并实施了40次法令。

Do they work? Because they apply to only a few of America’s 18,000 police departments, it is hard to prove that consent decrees lead to fewer police shootings. (America’s police killed 998 people in 2018, on a par with recent years.) But Stephen Rushin of Loyola University in Chicago, author of a book on consent decrees, says their benefits far outweigh costs. He says police use less “categorical force” when being monitored, meaning acts that send members of the public to hospital rather than a morgue. Surveys also often show that public support for the police rises when decrees are in place. And Mr Rushin argues that cities can expect to pay less in civil suits after decrees take effect.

这些手段有效果吗？因为它们仅用于美国1.8万个警察部门中的极少数，很难证明“同意法令”使得警察枪击事件减少。（美国警察在2018年枪杀了998人，与近年来相当。）不过，一本关于同意法令的书的作者，芝加哥洛约拉大学的斯蒂芬·鲁申（Stephen Rushin）称，这些法令带来的好处远超过了成本。他表示，警察在受监控时会更少使用“规定力量”，即将公众送到医院而不是太平间。一些民调还经常表明，当法令发现作用时，公众对警察的支持率会上升。拉申认为，在同意法令生效后，各个城市预计会支付更少的民事诉讼费用。

What of objections that constrained police are less able to get on with arresting criminals? Heather MacDonald, author of “The War on Cops”, has argued that violent crime rises when police pull back from “proactive” measures such as stop-and-frisks of potential suspects. In 2016 she said that increases in violence in cities like Chicago or Baltimore could be because police felt hamstrung.

哪些反对限制警察会让他们逮捕不了罪犯的观点呢？《警察战争》一书的作者希瑟·麦克唐纳（Heather MacDonald）认为，当警察退出“积极性”措施（如潜在嫌疑人的停止作案）时，暴力犯罪率上升。 2016年，她称芝加哥或巴尔的摩等城市的暴力事件增加可能是因为警察感到受到了伤害。

Mr Rushin, aided by evidence from the past couple of years in which crime began to fall again, rejects that. He agrees that consent decrees hurt police morale and could make officers leave. His study of “depolicing” did suggest a short-lived but “significant” uptick in some crime rates, when police complain of “growing pains” from external oversight. But he suggests this involves property crime, not the violent sort. In the case of gun violence police typically reacted to shootings, and did not act proactively to prevent them. Nor does he see arrest rates generally falling.

在过去几年的，犯罪率开始再次下降。在这些证据的支持下，Rushin拒绝接受这种观点。，对于同意法令伤害了警察士气，并可能让警察离辞的说法，他表示同意。他对“去警察”的研究确实表明，一些犯罪率会在短期内“显着”上升，当时警罕抱怨外部监督“越来越痛苦”。不过，他认为这涉及的是财产犯罪，而非暴力类犯罪。在枪支暴力案件里，警方通常会对枪击行为做出反应，并没有主动采取行动阻止他们。他也没有看到逮捕率普遍下降的情况。

Beyond Chicago, the chance for new research on decrees will be limited. Under Barack Obama the Justice Department was keen on decrees, but Donald Trump’s administration has frozen them, saying state or local authorities, not federal ones, should take charge. That stance won Mr Trump support from police unions, just as it infuriated civil-rights activists.

除了芝加哥，对法令进行新研究的机会将是有限的。根据巴拉克?奥巴马（Barack Obama）的说法，司法部热衷于各项法令，但唐纳德·特朗普政府冻结了这些法令，称应该承担现任的是州政府或地方当局，而不是联邦政府。这种立场赢得了特朗普对警察工会的支持，同时激怒了民权活动家。

That need not mean the end of reforms, however. Individual cities can study the Justice Departments’s 69 investigations of police departments and find ideas for change. The best processes are often the most open. In Chicago the first draft of the consent decree was made public, passed round 13 focus groups (including police officers) and took hundreds of hours to negotiate. Mr Rushin thinks more open-minded police departments, state and local governments can find lessons to apply for themselves, even without federal pressure.

然而，这并不意味着改革的结束。各家城市可以研究司法部门对警察部门的69次调查，并找到改革的想法。最好的流程往往是最开放的。在芝加哥，同意法令的第一稿被公之于众，通过了13个焦点小组（包括警察）并花了数百小时进行谈判。 Rushin认为，即使没有联邦政府的压力，更多思想开放的警察部门，州和地方政府也可以找到适合自己的教训。

编译：杨健

编辑：翻吧君

来源：The Economist (Mar 21st 2019)

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