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The Fire Service, Police, and the Local Welfare State
Urban governments are constantly faced with the need to solve or regulate social problems that may threaten community life. Fire is one such problem. In Detroit, firefighters respond to a major building fire on a daily basis, most of these in numerous abandoned properties and lots. These incidents endanger the lives and property of neighbors and can eventually decimate entire city blocks. Although Detroitâs fires appear to be fortuitous, they are predictable. Many of them, according to fire officials, are arsons, including those linked to fraudulent motives (Kinder 2014). Many occur simply because of deterioration or because of an inhabitantâs misuse of fire for heat or cooking after utilities have been cut off or no longer work (LeDuff 2008). Detroitâs government stands powerless in the face of the cityâs fires. It can keep putting them out, but this does nothing to prevent them from occurring in the first place, or to address the underlying conditions that increase their likelihood (Kurth 2015). Furthermore, Detroit is not an anomaly. Its fire problem is analogous to fire outbreaks that have occurred in other cities, such as Boston and New York, often in response to socio-economic changes and breakdowns in government regulation or service.
Much like fire, drug use and misuse can run through a community like a wildfire and it is hard to contain. The most recent concerns over drug use have to do with methamphetamine use and heroin addiction, said to have reached crisis levels in some communities.1 Again, we are faced with the question of what to do about these problems. Since the 1980s, incarceration has been the primary policy used to regulate the use and flows of illegal drugs. Such an approach has been deemed a failure by conservatives and liberals alike, blamed for causing a surge in incarceration rates, exacerbating racial inequities and failing to address the problems of drug dependency and addiction (Tonry 2011). Governments have therefore looked for alternative solutions to the problem of illicit drug use. Some solutions have simply involved changing laws such as the legalization of marijuana. But this does not address the problem of âharderâ drugs and what to do about them. Furthermore, the legalization of marijuana creates new regulatory problems and public health questions about long-term use. Other solutions to Americaâs drug problem have been more âmiddlerange,â including the use of police officers as would-be drug counselors who can provide information about remedial resources, work to support local outreach initiatives and divert users to treatment and detoxification services (Beckett 2014; Goetz and Mitchell 2006).
This book is about the ways in which state agencies shape social problems, including the reproduction of social inequality. It is built primarily around two cases. The first has to do with the regulation of urban building fires, and the second has to do with community policing as a form of social outreach, especially as this concerns illicit drug users and alternatives to punitive drug control policies. Although these topics may appear to be unrelated on the surface, they have relevance to theory-building about the state and to broader dynamics of social inequality in the following ways. One, fire and drug problems both serve as significant threats to the stability of community life, and are often caused by similar social forces, including economic disinvestment, poverty, and population displacement. Two, we continue to rely on government to regulate these threats and mitigate their effects on social life. Three, as with other social problems, the public often grows dissatisfied with governmental responses to regulating fires and drugs. Fire departments may bathe in public and media praise after dousing a major blaze only to find themselves the objects of criticism when it is discovered that they failed to abate fire code violations that gave rise to the incident. These matters of suppression versus prevention, or reactivity versus proactivity, are also pertinent to concerns over drug control. Critics of Americaâs âwar on drugsâ have long held that we cannot âarrestâ our way out of problems of illicit use and abuse. Rather, community-based solutions are required that emphasize expanded substance abuse treatment and other social supports, including employment opportunities, adequate housing, and education (Currie 1993).
Fire and police services require new organizational orientations and structures to shift from a reactive to a proactive focus in response to community problems. For example, a crime and fire prevention orientation on the part of fire departments and police departments means more interaction with organizations outside the state, landlords and property owners, businesses and ordinary citizens. This focus on collaboration and preventing problems before they occur goes back to the Kerner Commission Report2 in 1968 and its call for a holistic approach to dealing with the nationâs urban problems such as fires, crime, substandard housing, unemployment, poverty, and racial discrimination. Old methods of simply suppressing fires or crime where and when they appeared would no longer work. Indeed, for many urban residents, these old methods appeared to represent a form of state bias and repression. Police officers cast themselves as crime-fighters, but heavy-handed enforcement measures were rejected, prompting urban uprisings from Watts, Los Angeles in 1965 to Detroit in 1967. Fire departments put out fires, but this did little to address the economic disinvestment, substandard housing conditions, and white collar criminality that gave rise to many of the incidents occurring in urban neighborhoods.
The urban crisis of the 1960s and 1970s prompted the federal government to increase social welfare spending at the local level on programs designed to reduce poverty, provide adequate housing, create jobs, and protect public safety. However, the 1980s brought about retrenchment in welfare state spending, ushered in by the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and the emergence of the neo-liberal state. Dreier and colleagues report that âin 1980, federal dollars accounted for 22 percent of big city (over 300,000 population) budgets; by 1989 federal aid was only 6 percent.â States failed to raise enough revenues to compensate for losses in federal support, and this led to the cutting of urban social welfare departments and workers, housing inspectors and other essential urban services and public supports (Dreier et al. 2014, 153). Pressures would increase on agencies in the public safety sector to pick up the slack resulting from government cut-backs and to meet citizen demands. It is no accident that community policing initiatives emerged in the 1990s as a way to facilitate citizen access to a range of urban services, including those for social welfare (Klinenberg 2015; Skogan and Hartnett 1997).
Neo-liberal, market-based solutions are now viewed by many in and outside government as the best way to solve social problems and deliver public services, echoing Ronald Reaganâs pronouncement that government causes more problems than it solves.3 Many communities have begun to experiment with feebased emergency services ostensibly as a way to reduce fiscal strain and save taxpayersâ money (Lester and Kraus 2016; Ivory et al. 2016). Nevertheless, Americans still rely on the state to protect them from harm. This is most apparent in the urban context where residents take it for granted that âfirst respondersââfirefighters and police officersâwill come to their aid for any number of personal or public emergencies. But where do these assumptions come from? As I will argue in the following pages, fire protection and policing services were at one time largely private, and only became public with the expansion of the modern state. We now view public safety agencies as guardians of popular sovereignty, responsible for protecting the lives and property of all citizens regardless of their social class or status (Lineberry 1977). When public safety agencies appear to fail in this mission the public grows angry. For some conservatives, this anger has presented an opportunity for returning many public services to the private sector where it is argued that providers will be more efficient and responsive to citizen âconsumers.â Nevertheless, what most citizens want from the public safety sector is impartial treatment and occupational expertise (i.e., well-trained fire and policing officials). There is no evidence that market-based approaches to public protection can fulfill these goals, and indeed, they tend to result in less citizen accountability and adequate government oversight (see debate in Mason 2012 on private prisons).
Before proceeding, it is useful to clarify some terms. First, âpublic safety infrastructureâ or âpublic safety sectorâ refers principally to fire control and policing services done at the local level. The term âfire serviceâ refers to fulltime, urban fire departments that are an integral part of local governments, especially those with dedicated fire investigation and inspection units, but also to state-level and federal agencies that influence the writing of fire codes and the determining of fire control policies. By âthe policeâ I am primarily referring to urban departments, especially those that have attempted to integrate community policing objectives into their policies and practices.4 In talking about the police, my discussion is not limited to law enforcement, but also the other broad range of services that the police provide, including, in particular, the delivery of public health and mental health services. Second, I use the terms âgovernmentâ and âstateâ interchangeably. Although government is a term typically used to reference public policies and agencies, âthe stateâ represents a specific institutional construct responsible for fostering social integration and imposing social control through rational-legal and secular authority structures (Durkheim 1997[1893]; Weber 1946).
The Public Safety Sector and the Welfare State
Every year the nationâs fire and police departments respond to hundreds of millions of calls for service from citizens.5 These calls are not only for fires and crime, but also vehicle accidents, medical emergencies, interpersonal disputes, mental health crises, family crises, disruptive behaviors, environmental hazards and a host of other matters (Kiesling 2015; Greene and Klockars 1991; Mastrofski 1983). In addition to their reactive posture, public safety agencies also seek to regulate social problems in the proactive sense. The police patrol with the objective of maintaining law and order, and fire departments conduct inspections to make sure buildings are safe. Public safety agencies are also the first lines of defense against the âbig eventsâ that beset a community, such as weather or civil emergencies.
Michael Lipsky (1980, 8) has argued that local public service agenciesâsuch as fire and policing agenciesârepresent the âfurthest reaches of the welfare stateâ given their importance in protecting the lives and fortunes of citizens. Yet, the public safety sector is rarely theorized as part of the welfare state. How can this be explained? The welfare state is generally defined as those aspects of governance designed to protect the citizens of advanced industrial societies against the risks and insecurities of modern life, both economic and physical. Wilensky (2003, 211) defines its âessenceâ as the assurance of âminimum standardsâ of income, housing, nutrition, education, health and safety. Nevertheless, the role of the welfare state in offering physical protection in the direct sense, i.e., through the provision of emergency services or regulatory enforcement, has often been ignored by academics and the public alike. To the extent that it receives attention, it is framed in terms of economic security, for example, having medical insurance to guard against ill-health or having accident insurance to pay for job-related injuries. Moreover, in the United States we look on the welfare state as a system of benefits available only to those who meet certain qualification criteria, e.g., based on age, disability or inadequate income (Katz 2001). No such restrictions are placed on emergency services or regulatory enforcement, which are taken for granted as universal protections available to all those residing in, working in or visiting a particular jurisdiction.
Beyond a focus on the provision of social services and supports, Esping-Andersen (1990, 3) argues that an adequate theory of the welfare state must consider the ways in which it secures basic citizenship rights. In the American context, in particular, this means moving beyond the âstandard conceptionâ of social policy, i.e., a consideration of social insurance (e.g., social security for the elderly) and public assistance programs (e.g., income subsidies for the poor), to examine the various ways in which government is involved with the functioning of all aspects of economic and social life (Amenta et al. 2001, 228). Examples include the public schools and supports for higher education (Wilensky 2003), consumer, workplace, and housing protections (Neumann 2005; Marcuse 1986), state and local government services such as worker compensation programs and public health systems (Katz 2001; Lineberry 1977), upholding civil rights, e.g., defending women against violence and sexual harassment (Brush 2002; OâConnor et al. 1999) and softening societal âshocksâ such as wars and economic downturns (Wilensky 2003, 211). Fire and policing services can also be added to this list, which are vital to the protection of life, liberty, and property in democratic societies (Lineberry 1977, 10).
The view of the welfare state as a system of basic citizenship entitlements has its foundation in the work of T.H. Marshall (1983 [1950]). Marshall argued that modern democracies evolved to support three interdependent sets of rights: civil, political, and social. Civil rights have their foundation in the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment and guarantee individual liberties such as speech, religion, and even the right to free labor. Political rights evolved as a mechanism to protect civil rights, culminating in the great democratic movements and revolutions that occurred in eighteenth-century Europe and the United States. The expansion of market economies, however, created extraordinary levels of social inequality that could not be mitigated purely through the exercise of individual freedoms. Moreover, individual self-expression could be used as a way to justify social inequality, and a lack of resources among the working classes had the effect of undermining political rights (Hicks and Esping-Andersen 2005). As a result, the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries were characterized by increasing demands for social rights as a means to engender âequalizationâ among social classes. These became realized through collective bargaining arrangements and a commensurate rise in state-guaranteed benefits and protections designed to defend against the ârisk and insecurityâ endemic to market economiesâin short, a welfare state (Marshall 1983[1950], 257â258). Marshall (1983[1950], 248, 258) argued that social rights were not about absolute equality in the Marxist sense, but instead about engendering âfull membershipâ in the commu...
