You’ve seen the headlines:
“Police Announce Targeted Enforcement in High-Crime Areas.”
“Operation Clean Sweep Targets Known Offenders.”
“Strategic Policing Initiative Focuses on Repeat Criminal Activity.”
And in Kalamazoo, Michigan this week, targeted enforcement made the headlines, with police alleging that “far too many” teens are carrying illegal guns.
A “Strategy” sounds reasonable, right?
That’s the point.
“Targeted enforcement” is one of those polished law enforcement phrases that sounds surgical, objective, and data-driven. But scratch the surface, and you’ll often find something else entirely: racial profiling, poverty-based policing, and the same old systemic biases just dressed up in bureaucratic language.
What They Call Targeted Can Be Experienced as Harassment
Let me tell you a story.
During my Criminal Justice Master’s program, I went to school with a cop who worked in Seattle named Trevor. Trevor often bragged that they went to poor neighborhoods because “that’s where all the crime was.”
Trevor was, to be blunt, a schmuck. To say I did not like being in Trevor’s shortsighted company, would be an understatement.
I doubt he ever heard the term root cause analysis let alone used it before making a statement.
Also, can we please stop hiring cops like Trevor? Okay, thanks.
Because when police say they’re focusing enforcement efforts on certain neighborhoods, they never, ever mean the wealthier side of town. They mean places where more Black and brown families live. They mean low-income communities.
They mean people already under constant surveillance.
Officers are sent into these communities under the pretense of strategy; not to solve crimes, but to create arrest statistics. It’s about making numbers look good on paper. And when that becomes the primary goal, people always become the target.
Crime unequivocally happens in wealthy neighborhoods. It’s just not being over-policed to catch it. As a result, crime in poor neighborhoods is always overrepresented compared to what’s happening in affluent ones.
Let’s Be Honest About the “Data”
You’ll hear officials claim that targeted enforcement is based on “crime trends” or “data.”
But here’s the trick: the data itself is already skewed.
If police have historically overpoliced a community, they’ve generated more arrest reports, citations, and “incidents” in that area, which they then use to justify more policing in that same area.
This my friends is called a feedback loop. Think of it more or less, as a fancy self-fulfilling prophesy.
And the people inside of that loop do not get a break, they get a bullseye on their back.
The same thing is happening to the homeless population in Kalamazoo, where charging your phone in public is illegal, or sleeping on a park bench can get you thrown in jail.
All because America has essentially zero social safety nets.
From “Stop and Frisk” to “Strategic Enforcement”
New York’s infamous “Stop and Frisk” program was once sold to the public using the same language: targeted enforcement. We now know it was a massive, unconstitutional profiling scheme that disproportionately affected young Black and Latino men.
We also know the fallout: lives disrupted, jobs lost, families fractured and zero meaningful impact on reducing crime.
The Cycle of Code Words
Just like how “urban decay” replaced “Black neighborhood,” and “officer-involved shooting” replaced “police killed someone,” targeted enforcement is just another euphemism another PR-friendly veil for aggressive policing tactics rooted in bias.
If you’ve been followed, stopped, or searched for “matching a description” that just so happens to look like you, you already know what this is. The only thing targeted enforcement strategically enforces is the illusion of public safety while communities suffer.
Bringing It On Ourselves: Societal Failures Cause Crime
As we near the end of this discussion, I want to round back to the concept of Root Cause Analysis.
What we really need, is to find out WHY things are happening instead of just targeting. Why do these kids in Kalamazoo feel the need to get tangled up in this?
I’m going to go out on a limb and say these kids are living in poverty and their parents have been through the system.
As a result, they’ve been dragged through it long before becoming involved, traumatized and left without options.
And we’ve been failing all of them by not addressing desperation and poverty.
So What Do We Do?
We name it. We call it what it is.
We educate and challenge city councils and police departments that rubber-stamp these bullshit, pseudo data science programs.
We demand transparency around enforcement data and where it happens.
We uplift community-led alternatives that invest in people, not punishment.
Because when your ZIP code, skin tone, or socioeconomic status decides how much “enforcement” you get, that’s not safety.
That’s systemic injustice repackaged for public relations.
Want to fight back against performative public safety?
Download The Citizen’s Guide to Taking On Your Local Government and get ready to challenge targeted enforcement at the source.
