Should We Fire the Police?

           If you lived in England in Middle Ages, you probably lived in one of two places: a shire or a bailey.  A shire is a small village or town, simple enough.
 A bailey (also known as a ward) was the fortified outer wall of a castle that allowed space for inhabitants, while the royal family lived inside the interior wall, the keep. Just like today, human geography broke into two basic groups: rural and urban, and the differences then were similar to what they are now: rural = agrarian, urban = professional.

But there's another noteworthy difference. If you add to each of these terms the word "reeve", an Old English word that translates as a sort of man-at-arms, you get "shire reeve" and "bail reeve", or our modern day "sheriff" and "bailiff" (or "warden" if you call your home a ward instead of a bailey). A bailiff now is a kind of jailer, but back then he was more like municipal police.

Believe it or not, this conception of police from medieval England persists to this day.  You see, rural people have always been more leery of authority, and urban people less so.  Urban folks benefit from having the seat of government physically near, so their concerns are often addressed more readily*. The direction of cause and effect here is irrelevant. A sheriff has to deal with well-armed malcontents in addition to actual criminals, and he often does so on his own or with a small posse.  Bailiffs (city police), have the audience and the support of the king, or mayor (or both, if you live in Chicago), and are generally better armed than the people they police.

Thing is, rural Anglophones don't take kindly to authority figures encroaching on their rights, but kings (and Chicago mayors) don't take kindly to those who encroach on their power.  So when we look at law enforcement and ask, "quis custodiet ipsos custodies?"** the country folk respond, "We, the [gun-owning] People." The king answers this question, "I do."

These diverging attitudes are what has led to our American tradition that sheriffs are elected, but city chiefs of police are just another employee of the mayor. Coincidentally (or not), sheriff's departments typically enjoy greater approval from their jurisdictions than do police. They also typically have fewer unsolved crimes, and fewer crimes overall. But most of all, they are usually less corrupt.

Are you a mayor with a low crime rate? You're a great mayor! A high crime rate? Sounds like you need to fire your Chief of Police, it's probably his fault. You yourself are a criminal, you say? The chief can help with that too...

Usually municipal bureaucrats just go about doing their business, but police chiefs are high visibility, and their employees carry guns, so it's a little different. If you were a police chief who wanted to keep his job, you might be tempted to do some unlawful things to keep the more grisly crimes at a minimum, or to cover them up, as the case may be.  Sheriffs, on the other hand, have to run for reelection, and unlike mayors, are narrowly focused on law enforcement as their measure of success.

So should all law enforcement have elected heads? Should we fire the police, so to speak? Many years ago England stopped electing any law enforcement.  After years of increased corruption and crime, they eventually decided to bring back the practice of electing the head of certain local law enforcement officials, with accompanying success^††.

Of course, our urban crime problem is born of many factors, and it’s unlikely that a measure like this would resolve all the differences in rural and urban society. Nevertheless, it carries the wisdom of the ages as it has proved a successful aspect of our legal tradition, the best in the world.  For example, the President of the Chicago Police Board has said that Rahm Emanuel’s approach to Chicago’s historic murder problem is “fundamentally flawed” and “sets the CPD up for failure.” What if the Chief of CPD could respond to such a mayor’s grandstanding that he is responsible to the people, not the city government? It’s a question worth asking.

If, like me, you believe that most policemen are good people doing good things, then you may agree that they deserve to be led by someone who feels the same, and accountable to those they have sworn to serve and protect.

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Note: I've had this post on my mind for a while, but was finally prompted to write it as I struggled to explain to a family member why one of our ancestors was named Bailly for being a both a jailer and a stone mason. The answer is I don’t really know.  It could be because we was a bailiff, or because a bailey is a part of a castle that it refers to stone construction, or both.


*In fact, rural England didn't have a routine justice system until Henry II sent judges on a regular circuit of the countryside to hear cases that would require distant travel by the parties or otherwise go unaddressed (this is where we get the term "circuit court").


**Who guards the guards?



^††When deciding what to call these “new” elected officials, one of the advocates, Daniel Hannan, pointed out that they already had a name, “sheriff”. It was decided that it sounded too American.