8 - Advocate Old wine in new bottles: policing and the lessons of pulling levers

Summary

Introduction

Pity the poor soul who, ten years ago, would have predicted that hard-core street cops would be making a practice of sitting down with serious violent offenders and telling them politely to cease and desist. Yet, increasingly, that is what cops are doing: and, more to the point, doing successfully. The “pulling levers” strategies piloted in Boston in the mid-1990s and implemented since then in a range of other jurisdictions are racking up impressive results in preventing violent crimes. From one vantage, these strategies are innovative, sometimes bordering on the bizarre, as in the face-to-face meetings between authorities and offenders that many rely upon. From another, they are really very traditional, relying on old and simple ideas about offenders and their motivations, and about authorities and their powers, and how the latter can influence the former. Old and new meet in the design of the strategies, where ivory-tower research methods rely on the street savvy of front-line cops; in images of offenders, where very traditional and concrete ideas about serious crime meet new and abstract notions; in the partnerships that carry out the work, where traditional actors do some very traditional things in significantly new ways; and in the underlying logic of the strategies, which seeks to do something entirely old-fashioned – deter crime – in a strikingly original way.

Pulling levers strategies are one fruit of the problem-oriented policing movement.