What is Triage Policing?
The natural end point of de-policing.
In modern American policing, there are a myriad of terms used to describe what cops do on a daily basis. Two big terms are known as proactive policing and reactive policing. These can be seen more as headings, with a variety of policing strategies falling beneath either heading. I'll touch on a few of them to give context and provide some history in the process. Then I’ll answer the question in the title of this article.
Proactive Policing
Actively seeking out crime in order to thwart it has not always been the norm in policing. Experiences may have varied, but way back in the day before hand-held radios and patrol cars, professional police departments would wait at the station for a call on the landline telephone, and then respond as needed.
In more densely populated cities, foot patrols were common, which provided some level of proactivity. However, most of the policing in America was done on a "come when you call” reactive basis.
Proactive policing has ebbed and flowed throughout the decades modern American policing has existed. It often would come into vogue during a crime wave. From the 1980s to the 1990s, the crack epidemic contributed to a startling crime wave in many inner cities1. Parts of some cities were described as war zones even2.
In response to this spike in virtually every crime category, the NYPD started keeping track of crime statistics through a now common method called COMPSTAT and started incentivizing its officers to conduct proactive work supported by a well-known 1982 paper that coined the term Broken Windows Theory3.
After a decade or two of intensive proactive police work, and a massive increase in the number of law enforcement officers after the passing of the 1994 Crime Bill, the crime rate fell rapidly. Violent crime statistics basically halved between 1990 and 20184.
All of this suggests that proactive policing is an effective crime control method. And most law enforcement officers would agree with that sentiment. The oft repeated mantra of "cops go where the crime is" can be considered the unofficial slogan of proactive policing.
Reactive Policing
In the case of reactive policing, officers react to crime rather than proactively thwart it. Any defensive tactics or martial arts instructor will tell you that action beats reaction, so the idea of reacting to crime instead of proactively rooting out crime would seem suboptimal. But before disregarding this tactic immediately, it is worth addressing why a growing number of social justice activists find this tactic preferable.
The "come when you call" approach to policing sounds similar to how firefighters operate. They don't drive around the city in their bus-sized red trucks looking for fires. They sit back and wait for someone to call them when a fire happens. If you stop the argument there and don't really question it, it almost makes sense.
But what most people are leaving out when they make this comparison is the fact that firefighters are proactive. It just doesn't appear that way because firefighters fight fires and cops fight crime.
Building codes that require sprinkler systems to be installed is a form of proactive firefighting. Running fire drills at schools is a form of proactive firefighting. Removing dead trees from a wildfire-prone area is a form of proactive firefighting. Firefighters only appear reactive because society has done such a good job of proactively preventing fires in the first place.
A lesson we could take from our societal approach to firefighting is that crime fighting is also a societal effort.
Triage Policing
This is the natural extreme of reactive policing because it is born out of a lack of resources available to even conduct reactive patrols. The downward spiral of police effectiveness began with calls to defund police departments in the wake of the riots in 20205. As a result of the constant berating of a once lauded profession, cops are quitting at an alarming rate6.
To make matters worse, it is becoming simultaneously challenging to bring new hires on to fill the gaps. Without enough officers available to respond to calls for service, calls get triaged as they come in, and officers are sent to the highest priority incidents as they become available to respond.
Those in the medical field will be familiar with this concept. The medical definition of triage is the assignment of degrees of urgency to wounds or illnesses to decide the order of treatment for an influx of patients when hospital resources become limited. Police departments do something similar. More urgent calls for service are given a higher level of importance and require a faster response. Lower priority calls are left to wait until someone is available to respond7.
Never mind proactive law enforcement. Triage policing will mean that even if a department transitions completely to a reactive model, there won't be enough resources available to respond to even the highest priority calls. If two shootings happen in one sector of a city, for example, it might become the norm that one gets a police response, and the other doesn’t due to a lack of resources.
This doesn't even account for the second and third order effects of a lower police presence. Forget community policing, for which some more reasonable activists are advocating. Forget traffic enforcement that directly contributes to a reduction in traffic fatalities8. Forget any of the benefits that come from having an officer come when you call.
Triage policing means that only some 911 calls will get a response because there just won't be enough officers to respond to even the most basic calls for service.
It's important to remember that triage, in the medical sense, assumes that a percentage of patients will die because there aren’t enough resources to go around. In a law enforcement context this means when you call 911 you might not get a police response at all.
References
1. Grogger, J. & Willis, M. (1998). The Introduction of Crack Cocaine and the Rise in Urban Crime Rates. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://www.nber.org/papers/w6353
2. Aydlette, L. (2017, October). Photos: Remember when CityPlace area was ‘war zone’ of crime, crack? The Palm Beach Post. https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/lifestyle/2017/10/19/photos-remember-when-cityplace-area-was-war-zone-of-crime-crack/4909837007/
3. Kelling, G.L., & Wilson, J.Q. (1982). Broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety. Atlantic Monthly, 249(3), 29-38.
4. Statista Research Department. (2022, October). Reported violent crime rate in the U.S. 1990-2021. Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-crime-rate-in-the-usa-since-1990/
5. Levin, S. (2020, August). The movement to defund police has won historic victories across the US. What's next?. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/aug/15/defund-police-movement-us-victories-what-next
6. Westervelt, E. (2021, June). Cops Say Low Morale And Department Scrutiny Are Driving Them Away From The Job. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009578809/cops-say-low-morale-and-department-scrutiny-are-driving-them-away-from-the-job
7. Lewis, R. (2023, March). Family waits nearly 2.5 hours for APD after suspected drunk driver causes head-on crash. CBS Austin. https://cbsaustin.com/news/local/family-waits-nearly-25-hours-for-apd-after-suspected-drunk-driver-causes-head-on-crash
8. Snider, A. (2022, June). Research Confirms Roadway Safety Benefits of Traffic Enforcement. Governors Highway Safety Association. https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/NCREP-enforcement22