Policing, crime and public health
| Author | Lisa Maher,David Dixon |
| Published date | 01 May 2005 |
| Date | 01 May 2005 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/1466802505053494 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
A R T I C L E S
Criminal Justice
© 2005 SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi.
www.sagepublications.com
1466–8025; Vol: 5(2): 115–143
DOI: 10.1177/1466802505053494
Policing, crime and public
health:
Lessons for Australia from the ‘New
York miracle’
D AV I D D I X O N A N D L I S A M A H E R
University of New South Wales, Australia
Abstract
This article examines the influence on policing in Sydney, Australia
of the crime control strategies developed in New York City in the
1990s, which are popularly credited with having significantly
reduced crime rates. The ‘New York miracle’ is considered as an
‘enthusiasm’, a positive relation of the moral panic. Claims that the
NYPD reduced crime with a strategy based on ‘zero tolerance’ or
‘broken windows’ are critically examined. The second half of the
article presents a case study of how international developments in
policing impacted on a heroin market in Cabramatta, a suburb of
Sydney which, in the 1990s, became known as Australia’s ‘heroin
capital’. The study shows how transferred policies are implemented,
how elements of them may conflict, and how the crucial transfer
may be not so much of particular policies, but rather of less specific
perceptions and attitudes, in this case a confidence in the ability of
police to reduce crime. It concludes by focusing on the collateral
damage (particularly to public health) caused by police crackdowns
on drug markets. Research is reported which found an alarming
increase in the incidence of hepatitis C among intravenous drug
users as a result of policing activity in Cabramatta.
Key Words
comparative criminal justice • drug policing • moral
panics • public health • zero tolerance
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Criminal Justice 5(2)
Introduction
Criminal justice is a significant site of interaction between Australia and the
United States of America: concepts, policies and rhetoric are transmitted,
shared and exchanged. This article examines a specific example of this
interaction—the influence of New York City on policing in Australia, with
particular reference to Sydney.
The article is in three parts. The first places criminological relations
between Australia and the United States (and specifically New York City) in
historical context. The second provides an assessment of some lessons that
can be (and, in some places, are being) learnt by Australian policing from
New York. The third tightens the focus, in a case study of American
influences on the policing of an Australian heroin market.
According to William Bratton, ‘If you can make it in New York, you can
make it anywhere’ (1997: 42). In this characteristically brash assertion
about the transferability1 of policing strategies, he referred to (and claimed
that his police department was responsible for) a truly extraordinary
contemporary phenomenon—the reduction in crime in New York City
during the 1990s. In the seven major categories (murder, robbery, forcible
rape, felony assault, burglary, larceny and grand larceny auto), crime
declined by 68 per cent between 1993 and 2003. In 1990, there were 2245
murders: in 2003, there were 572, a fall of no less than 75 per cent (NYPD,
2005). New York City, it seems, has become the crime control capital of the
world.
New York: moral panics and enthusiasms
‘New York: a lesson for the world’2
There is unmistakable irony in New York being held out as an exemplar of
crime control. Not long ago, New York was identified with crime, not with
crime control, and was widely regarded as the crime capital of the world,
a symbolic location redolent of danger and street crime. When the Sunday
Times held out New York in 1973 as ‘a lesson for the world’, no
compliment was intended: it referred to a headline from New York’s Daily
News ‘Thugs, Mugs, Drugs: City in Terror’ (Hall et al., 1978: 24). New
York’s street crime was presented as expressing a general social crisis—in
race, welfare, drugs, education, policing, urban change and the breakdown
of ‘law and order’ (Hall et al., 1978: 27).
In Australia, England and elsewhere, New York’s crime was taken as ‘a
benchmark for future local developments and as a menacing harbinger of
the future’ (Hogg and Brown, 1998: 28). This fitted with the more general
‘structure of attention’ (Hall et al., 1978: 21) in which people look to the
USA in order to predict the future of their country and in which events are
presented as ‘incipiently “American” in character’ (Hall et al., 1978: 26).
Dixon & Maher—Policing, crime and public health
117
(T)he United States is taken as a sort of paradigm case for future trends in
the Western world . . . In the 1950s the US stood, and was reported, as the
symbol of affluent success; in the 1960s it became the symbol of a modern
industrial capitalist society ‘in crisis’.
(Hall et al., 1978: 21)
There is a long history of ambivalence towards the USA. New York City, in
particular, has been the subject of nightmares and dreams alike. It has been
described for example as ‘the cancer capital, a laboratory where all the
splendours and miseries of the new age are being tried out in experimental
form’ (Alan Brien, quoted in Hall et al., 1978: 18).
Concern about American influence is longstanding:
caricatures of ‘Americanization’ have come to carry enormous authority
within postwar deliberations on the decline of the old ‘way of life’. These
caricatures have offered a convenient metaphor of social change, carrying
with them dire warnings of what social change might bring in its wake, with
the ability to compress into a single image the ravages of modern trends such
as high-speed living, urban anonymity, television violence, endangered
streets, weakening affluence and shallow emotional content.
(Pearson, 1983: 20)
Such fears were not monopolized by conservatives of the right: they have
been expressed across the political spectrum, including for example com-
plaints about the subversion of ‘authentic’ working class culture, notably in
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1957). Such fears of the corrupting effects
of Americanization can be traced at least back to Matthew Arnold’s
Culture and Anarchy (1869; see also Pearson, 1983: 124).
Moral panics and ‘enthusiasms’
As now classic criminological studies showed, moral panics occur when an
activity or condition—such as juvenile delinquency or ‘mugging’—comes to
represent a broader set of concerns and fears about social change (Cohen,
1972; Hall et al., 1978). In the moral panics about crime that recurred
repeatedly in England and Australia between the 1960s and 1990s, the
USA (and New York in particular) was a constant point of reference. In
England, there was a ‘continual search for parallels and prophecies: will
what is happening in the US happen here. In the words of one famous
headline, “Will Harlem come to Handsworth?”’ (Hall et al., 1978: 25).
Australian headline writers followed suit: the warning that parts of Sydney
were becoming ‘like the Bronx’ became a clich´e (Hogg and Brown, 1998:
24). Indeed, one deprived public housing estate in Sydney’s south-west was
nicknamed the Bronx.
As in the English tradition of ‘explaining’ street crime as the product of
Afro-Caribbean immigration, Australian commentators classify partici-
pants and activities as ‘unAustralian’. New reports of violence involving
young people of Arabic or South-Eastern Asian background are routinely
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accompanied by critical comment about the ‘unAustralian’ character of
what happened.
Australia and England have consistently looked to the USA for strategies
and tactics of crime control. As Hall et al. commented about the definitive
example of ‘mugging’, ‘If the career of the label made a certain kind of
social knowledge widely available in Britain, it also made a certain kind of
response thoroughly predictable’ (1978: 28).3 From one perspective, look-
ing to the USA makes some sense: both the operational and the research
budgets available to law enforcement make those in Australia look pitiful.
Criminal justice is a significant academic and policy field in the United
States: graduates, doctorates, books, journals, Web-based material and
research studies proliferate. For those committed to the current fashion of
‘evidence-based policy’, the USA provides an accumulation of evidence
unmatched elsewhere (Sherman and Eck, 2002). Unfortunately, quantity
does not ensure quality. Moreover, there is an unmistakable, peculiar irony
about seeking guidance from a country which ‘routinely executes offenders
and incarcerates its citizens at a rate 6 to 10 times higher than comparable
nations’ (Garland, 2001: ix) and which maintains a criminal justice system
in which racial minorities are grossly over-represented.
In accounting for developments in contemporary criminal justice, we
would propose a new concept, the ‘enthusiasm’, which is a positive relation
of the moral panic.
Societies appear to be subject, every now and then, to periods of enthusiasm.
A policy, program, person, or group of persons emerge to become defined as
a potential solution of social problems; its nature is presented in a stylized
and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; policy debates are manned by
editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accred-
ited think-tanks and experts pronounce their analyses and contributions;
ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the enthusiasm then
disappears, submerges or expands and becomes more visible. Sometimes the
object of the enthusiasm is quite novel and at other times it is something
which has been in existence long enough, but suddenly appears...
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