Thousands of police officers said in an open letter ‘over-relying on incarceration does not deter crime’ after Trump claimed tougher approach was needed

A coalition of senior law enforcement officials told Donald Trump on Wednesday that reducing arrests and imprisoning fewer Americans were key to promoting “law and order”, after the presumptive Republican presidential nominee claimed a tougher approach was needed.

Two days after Trump declared himself “the law and order candidate” in the race for the White House, groups representing tens of thousands of police officers and prosecutors said in an open letter that rehabilitation and shorter prison sentences would help reduce crime.



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“Though this may seem counterintuitive, we know from our experience as law enforcement officials that over-relying on incarceration does not deter crime,” said the letter to Trump and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

The law enforcement officials urged the candidates to help shift funding from the tackling of minor crimes to dealing with the most violent and serious offenders, and to push for a reform of sentencing laws to reduce the prison population and give low-level offenders “a chance for redemption”.



Wednesday’s letter was signed by the leaders of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, the National District Attorneys Association, along with Law Enforcement Leaders to Reduce Crime and Incarceration, which is a pro-reform grouping of current and former senior officials, and the Police Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve policing.

While Clinton has presented a plan for criminal justice reform in line with what the letter requests, Trump has frequently voiced opposition to such changes while pursuing the Republican nomination and said that he remains “tough on crime”. While he has not set out detailed plans, the property developer has written in the past in support of a “zero tolerance” approach to minor crimes.



Ronal Serpas, a retired police chief of New Orleans and Nashville, who chairs the Law Enforcement Leaders group, said in an interview that ignoring advances made since the “tough on crime era” thanks to better research and data would be “the same as saying: ‘Well, the Wright brothers learned how to fly a plane, so that’s the plane we’re going to fly in today’.”

Asked how his coalition of officials intended to convince skeptics who endorse traditional “tough on crime” policies, Serpas said: “We are 30,000 professionals who do this every day. We didn’t just pop into this. Nobody can say we are soft on crime, but we want to be smarter on it.”

Serpas said reform was particularly urgent “in the wake of the tragedies last week”, referring to the killing of five police officers at a protest in Dallas, following the fatal shootings of Philando Castile in Minnesota and Alton Sterling in Louisiana.



David Brown, the Dallas police chief who has received plaudits for his handling of the attack in his city and its aftermath, is a member of Serpas’s group.



In seeking to distance herself from notorious comments she made in support of the tough-on-crime policies of her husband Bill’s administration in the 1990s, Clinton has proposed reforming mandatory minimum sentencing laws, boosting rehabilitative programs and making police officers go through enhanced training programs and wear body cameras.



Trump, by contrast, has avoided such commitments. Asked on MSNBC last November whether he, like many other public officials, had changed his views and now supported criminal justice reform, Trump said: “No. I’m tough on crime. I mean I’m a believer in ‘tough on crime’, I really am. You look at what’s going on in the inner cities right now, it’s unbelievable. Boy, it’s like the wild west.”



Trump has, however, indicated that changes should be made to laws on marijuana possession in light of its legalisation in several states.



In his book from 2000, The America We Deserve, Trump argued forcefully for “tranquilizing the criminal element” in society. He wrote in support of imprisoning more people and of so-called “broken windows” policing, the controversial approach to aggressively tackling low-level neighbourhood offending that was taken by former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Several criminologists have since disputed that the approach is effective.



“The next time you hear someone saying there are too many people in prison, ask them how many thugs they’re willing to relocate to their neighborhood. The answer: None,” Trump wrote.