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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.