A recent Wilmington City News release highlighted some of the successful reforms taking place at the city police department. As a former officer, and someone who now studies and writes about reform in American policing, I thought I might weigh in on these claims. In order to be brief but still helpful, I first need to describe three interrelated concepts that together provide a framework for this discussion.
They are the game, the playbook and the scorecard.
Briefly, the game refers to the structure and logic of action on the field. Think of how the structure and logic of football is different from that of baseball. In baseball, it is certainly not “common sense” for players to tackle baserunners as they round third and head for home. On the other hand, tackling a player with the ball from the opposing team to prevent a score is common sense in football.
Next, the playbook refers to the various strategies, which align with the game’s structure and logic, designed to achieve the goals of the game. Teams playing the same game often use different playbooks with varying degrees of success.
Lastly, the scorecard provides metrics for team and individual successes. The scorecard guides action on the field by outlining what counts as distinctive and worthy of high status, reward, and recognition.
Earlier:Wilmington names longtime police captain as new chief, city’s first Hispanic police head
This is how it works in Wilmington:
The game
The Wilmington city code, along with WPD policies and procedures provide the structure, rules and logic for the law enforcement game. The WPD website is explicit in describing its mandate as “… providing law enforcement services to Delaware’s largest city” (emphasis added) and its mission “… to raise the level of public safety through law enforcement and thereby reduce the fear and incidence of crime.” (Again, emphasis added.)
The playbook
The central features of Chief Robert Tracy’s playbook are databases, district integrity and community relations. The way it works is that the police use the most recent crime data to examine trends in local communities. Officers are held to account for increases and decreases in crime in their assigned districts. The playbook for addressing crime includes many strategies that prioritize the enforcement of laws. It also includes community relations initiatives. However, in the law enforcement game, the police often view these activities as legitimate ways to achieve the (police) goal of increased arrests.
The scorecard
The scorecard at WPD includes department, district and unit-level measures such as the number of calls for police and victim services, the number of community meetings, crime rates, clearance rates, gun arrests, and citizen complaints against officers. However, official commendations are awarded to officers and units within the department almost solely for law enforcement activities such as in-progress felony arrests and the seizure of illegal guns and drugs.
The mayor’s office and WPD’s 2022 annual report tout the successes of Tracy’s playbook in reducing gun violence and significantly improving crime clearance rates.
Using the figures below, we can examine these claims more closely.
Tracy arrived in Wilmington in April 2017. Shootings had already begun to decline at this time, hitting a low point in 2018.
Then, the number of shootings and victims rose until 2000 then began a modest decline over the past two years.
What is interesting about Figures 1 and 2 is that they show jurisdictions in Delaware, but outside of Wilmington, as experiencing the same trends in shootings as Wilmington, although, presumably, using different playbooks.
Figure 3 shows the trends in gun related murders. Again, it may be true to that gun-involved murders declined in the past year. However, it is also true that gun murders increased from 2018 to 2021 and that the same trends reported in Wilmington were also experienced in jurisdictions throughout the state. Finally, the claim that violent crime clearance rates improved with the Tracy playbook is questionable.
Figure 4 depicts the clearance rate for violent crime climbing in 2018 and remaining steady into 2019. However, it appears the clearance rate is lower in 2000 and 2021 than it was in most years back to 2011. Property-crime clearance rates appear to have risen slightly since 2018.
Historically, police reform in Wilmington has only been about changing the playbook and not the game or its scorecard. This has certainly been the case over the past four decades, with playbooks for problem-oriented, zero tolerance, and “broken windows” policing; jump-out squads; and now Compstat, and predictive policing, all serving as exemplars of police reform.
Each of these playbooks prioritize law enforcement outputs over racial justice and other positive community outcomes. Each has also fallen out of favor over the years mostly because they do not actually work as promised.
To the detriment of Wilmington communities desperately in need of help, the only thing that has survived over many decades is the law enforcement game. Only through a new game with scorecards and playbooks — that downplay law enforcement while emphasizing building and restoring community relationships, that solve neighborhood problems through the coordination of dense networks of local resources and support and that repair harm from structured violence and racial injustice — will policing be transformed in Wilmington in ways that make communities and the police safer.
James Nolan is a former Wilmington police lieutenant and is currently a professor and chair of the department of Sociology and Anthropology at West Virginia University.
