textfiles/law/jan02.law

January 1990

                                                      
                  THE FUTURE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT: 
                     DANGEROUS AND DIFFERENT            

                              By 

                     Alvin and Heidi Toffler


     Before we begin, a question.  Does anyone reading this think 
the years ahead are likely to be tranquil?                        

     If so, quit reading, or prepare to disagree. For what 
follows contradicts the complacent views of straight-line trend 
spotters and pollyanna politicians. It is based on the premise 
that we are moving into some of the most turbulent years in the 
history of this Nation.                                           

     If correct, we can expect this turbulence to put enormous 
new strains on our entire law enforcement and justice system. It 
will make law enforcement far more complex, dangerous, and 
different.                                                        

     To understand why, it isn't necessary to replay familiar 
statistics on choked courts, overcrowded prisons, tight budgets, 
and all the other problems besetting the justice system today. 
Rather, the growing crisis in American law enforcement has to be 
seen in context.  For it is only a small part of a much larger 
phenomenon.                                                       

AMERICA--A NATION OF CHANGE                                       

     The fact is that almost all the major systems on which our 
society depends from the transportation system and the health 
system to the postal system and the education system are in 
simultaneous crisis.                                              

     We are witnessing the massive breakdown of America as we 
knew it and the emergence of a strange, new 21st-century America 
whose basic institutional structures have yet to be formed. The 
1990s will either see a further deterioration of old systems and 
the social order that depends on them, or a serious effort to 
restructure America for the 21st century.                         

     Either way, we are likely to put tremendous new pressures on 
people in their jobs, homes, and communities with results that 
will show up in tomorrow's crime statistics. Failure to prepare 
in advance for the turbulent '90s could produce a grave 
breakdown in public security.                                     

     America-As-We-Knew-It--the one we grew up in, the one we 
still remember from 1950s television or from those ads showing 
pert young bobby soxers sipping Coca Cola at the soda fountain 
was an industrial America. It was the place that built the best 
cars, shipped the most steel, turned out the longest production 
runs of consumer products, and fitted everyone (more or less) 
into a nuclear family. It was basically a blue-collar America. It 
was ``Smokestack America.''                                       

     This Smokestack America has since been battered by the most 
accelerated technological revolution in history. Computers, 
satellites, space travel, fiber optics, fax machines, robots, bar 
coding, electronic data interchange, and expert systems are only 
the most obvious manifestations. All this has been combined with 
globalization of the economy, rising competition, and many social 
and cultural changes as well.                                     

     The ``New America'' emerging from these upheavals has an 
economy increasingly based on knowledge. When many of our 
grandfathers came to this country, speaking a foreign language 
and knowing nothing of American culture, their intelligence 
didn't count for much in the job market. What employers mostly 
wanted was muscle. Millions at the bottom of the pile were able 
to find work because they had muscle. They actually entered into 
the economy before they entered into the culture.                 

     Today this is becoming impossible. More and more jobs 
presuppose skills, training, and education.  As ``muscle work'' 
disappears, fewer openings remain for those on the bottom rung. A 
young person must now enter into the mainstream culture before he 
or she can enter into the legitimate economy. And millions don't. 
The results are clear in our inner cities.                        

     It is simple-minded to blame crime on poverty. There are 
plenty of societies in which poverty does not produce crime. But 
it is equally witless to assume that millions of poor, jobless 
young people not part of the work-world culture and bursting 
with energy and anger are going to stay off the streets and join 
knitting clubs.                                                   

     Fully 25 years ago, some futurists began forecasting massive 
dislocations, calling for radical changes in education, and 
trying to warn the country. Futurist analysis and forward 
thinking on the part of U.S. Government agencies could have 
prevented at least some of today's problems. Unfortunately, 
these early warnings were ignored, and today's law enforcement 
agencies are desperately struggling to pick up the pieces.        

     Will the same thing happen in the '90s? Only worse?          

     The systemic crisis facing America will not just affect 
ghetto kids. The new complexity of everyday life (you need a 
manual to operate the simplest gadget) affects everyone, and the 
passing of Smokestack America has left millions of middle-class 
Americans stranded and disoriented. Expecting one  kind  of  
life, they find themselves plunged into another, frustrated and 
future-shocked.                                                   

     Indeed, as early as 1970, we warned that the American 
nuclear family was about to be ``fractured'' not because of 
permissiveness but because of radical changes in the work force, 
technology, communications, and economics. The subsequent 
collapse of the nuclear family and its replacement with a family 
system made up of many different models two-career couples, 
childless couples, much-married couples, etc. has had a massive 
impact on law enforcement.                                        

     One of its consequences has been a frightening increase in 
the number of singles and loners in society and a loosening of 
all social bonds. Forced to be highly mobile, torn away from 
their root communities and families, and lacking support systems, 
more and more individuals are being freed from the social 
constraints that kept them on the straight and narrow. These 
individuals are multiplying, and that fact alone suggests further 
social turbulence in the years ahead.                             

     We all know that law enforcement is society's second line of 
defense. Crime, drug abuse, and sociopathic behavior generally 
are first held in check by social disapproval by family, 
neighbors, and co-workers. But in change-wracked America, people 
are less bonded to one another, so that social disapproval loses 
its power over them.                                              

      It is when social disapproval fails that law enforcement 
must take over. And until the ``social glue'' is restored to 
society, we can expect more, not less, violence in the streets, 
more white-collar crime, more rape and misery and not just in 
the inner cities.                                                 

IMPACT OF TECHNOLOGY                                              

     It is said that generals always try to fight their last war 
over again.  This is what the French did in the 1930s when they 
built their immense and costly ``Maginot Line.''  French 
generals, steeped in trench-warfare thinking, paid little 
attention to the weapons of the future--air power, highly    
mobile land forces, blitzkrieg tactics. As a result, their guns 
were pointed in the wrong direction, and the Nazis swept across 
France in a few weeks.                                            

     The question facing law enforcement professionals is the 
same one that faced the French military: Is law enforcement in 
America still fighting today's wars with yesterday's weapons?    

     The high-speed technological revolution alone a revolution 
that has barely begun will introduce new weapons and methods for 
police and criminals alike. Already experimentation with 
electronic monitoring of parolees had begun, and the FBI is 
exploring expert systems to help solve crimes.                    

     Science fiction writers and some futurists talk about a 
future in which drugs and electronic brain stimulation can be 
used to control behavior 24 hours a day (an Orwell-ian prospect), 
or about undersea prisons and space prison colonies.  In 
addition, breakthroughs in genetics, birth technologies, bizarre 
new materials, software, and a thousand other fields will shake 
up our economy yet again, dislocate additional millions, and 
provide new opportunities for creative criminals.                 

     Many of these will raise the deepest of legal, political, 
and moral issues. Is the theft of a frozen embryo kidnapping, or 
mere burglary? What bio-monitoring technologies should be 
admitted as evidence? What new invasions of privacy will become 
technically possible? What are the consequences of such 
technologies for democracy and the unique American Bill of 
Rights? How must present criminal codes be changed to deal with 
previously unimaginable issues? Can the Constitution itself 
remain unchanged?                                                 

     On the one hand, what makes America special is its profound 
commitment to individual freedom.  On the other hand, when social 
disorder reaches intolerable levels, citizens begin to demand the 
most punitive, most intrusive, most anti-democratic measures.  

     Only by beginning now to analyze future technological and
social changes systematically can law enforcement become
anything more than a series of too-little, too-late crash
programs. By thinking these matters through in advance--jointly
with other agencies of government--law enforcement officials can
begin to influence the social and political policies that would
prevent, not merely suppress, crime.

     Only by exploring long-range options can we begin to define 
the limits of governmental power and individual rights. Only by 
thinking ahead will our law enforcement system be able to 
protect both American society and its constitutional rights.      

     For law enforcement agencies and civil libertarians alike, 
dedicated to preserving not only order but also democracy, it is 
essential to step into the future now.                            

SOCIAL CHANGE                                                     

     Futurism, or long-range thinking, is not only a matter of 
technology. Even more important is a grasp of social changes 
bearing down the freeway toward us.                               

     With the collapse or restructure of the major systems in 
society, we must also expect higher levels of community conflict 
as power shifts dramatically away from old industries to new, 
from bureaucratic organizations to more-flexible ones, from the 
uneducated to the educated, and potentially, from law-abiding 
citizens to those who would take advantage of widening cracks in 
the system. In short, law enforcement professionals starting out 
now face approximately 25 years of a society that is confused, 
rent with conflict, struggling to find a new place in the world, 
and bombarded by destabilizing technological changes and 
economic swings.                                                  

WHAT LIES AHEAD                                                   

     No one knows the future. No crystal ball can provide firm 
answers. Forget straightline trend extrapolation and the people 
who peddle it. Trends are usually spotted when they are already 
half over.  Trends top out or convert into something radically 
different if they continue long enough. They do not provide any 
explanation of why anything is happening. They typically do not 
reveal interrelations. More importantly, in periods of 
structural upheaval, trends are cancelled, reversed, turned 
upside down, and twisted into totally new patterns.  That is the 
definition of an upheaval.                                        

     But the fact that no one can be sure of the future, and that 
simplistic trend projection doesn't work, shouldn't leave us 
helpless. First, there are many other techniques to help us model 
change. Second, ``prediction'' isn't what futurism is all about, 
in any case.                                                      

     Futurists cannot hit the bull's eye all the time. But far 
more important than trying to forecast, they can help us to 
imagine more possible scenarios and alternative tomorrows. This 
widening of our imagination is crucial to survival in a period of 
accelerated, destabilizing change. It smartens our decisionmaking 
in the here and now.                                              

     To illustrate the point, 25 years ago, in an article in 
which we coined the term ``future shock,'' we called for more 
attention to be focused on the future, more long-range thinking. 
Ten years ago, we sat in the home of a former Japanese prime 
minister and were lectured by two top Japanese industrialists, 
who warned that American industry would suffer badly in the 
competitive battles ahead if its managers continued to bury their 
heads in the present. Today, this theme has become common among 
American managers, and Uncle Sam, himself, is beginning to echo 
it.                                                               

     Specifically, Richard Darman, the President's Budget 
Director, has urged a shift in the national attitude toward the 
future. Attacking what he calls ``now-nowism,'' Darman defined 
that disease as ``our collective short-sightedness, our obsession 
with the here and now, our reluctance to adequately address the 
future.''                                                         

     Therefore, we believe that it is necessary for every arm of 
law enforcement, Federal, State, and local alike, to assign some 
of their best thinkers to the task of probing the future, and to 
plug their findings into decisionmaking at every level including 
at the very top.                                                  

     When agencies begin to focus on the future, some questions 
naturally arise. What should a community's law enforcement budget 
be? How should law enforcement personnel be trained? What skills 
will be needed? What new technologies will they face and need? 
What new forms of organization will have to be created? How 
should forces be deployed? What provisions should be made for 
continually updating missions?                                    

     Practical questions such as these can't be answered 
intelligently if an agency's total attention is consumed by the 
present no matter how hard it is pressed if, in other words, it 
too is guilty of ``now-nowism.''                                 

A FINAL THOUGHT        
                                           
     It is the proud function of law enforcement to help 
guarantee the survival of the same democratic system that imposes 
limits on its action. These very limits make our system of 
justice better than that of some banana republic characterized 
by death squads, terrorists, and narco-nabobs.                    

     To guarantee democracy's future in the dangerous decades to 
come, all the agencies that form part of the American justice 
system need to rethink their assumptions about tomorrow and to 
pool their findings. They must not only know that they can never 
get it ``right'' but also realize that the very act of asking the 
right questions, or shaking people out of their mental lethargy, 
is essential to survival.                                         



About the authors:

     Alvin and Heidi Toffler are the authors of such inter-
     nationally renowned works as Future Shock and The Third 
     Wave.