It is unfortunate that my city, Houston, does not practice "broken windows" policing and that its mayor and his puppet police chief have chosen not to institute the proven "CompStat" management program which has been so successful in New York, Los Angleles and in many other U.S. cities. A civic minded real estate broker, who has made it his personal crusade to have the Houston Police Department adopt CompStat, sent me a copy of the below paper from the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research. Due to its length, I am reproducing it in two parts.
In the following viewpoint George L. Kelling and Ronald Corbett assert that crime in American cities is declining and provide suggestions as to how urban areas can continue to prevent crime. According to the authors, lowering the rates of urban crime requires cities to target small crimes such as panhandling and public drunkenness, remove illegal weapons and guns from the streets, hold the police accountable for the crime rate, and involve community residents in crime-fighting efforts. They contend that those efforts have been responsible for decreasing crime rates in urban America. Kelling is a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Corbett is the executive director of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts.
As you read, consider the following questions:
What should be "the guiding vision of law enforcement," in the authors' opinion?
According to Kelling and Corbett, how does "broken windows" policing reduce the number of criminals in the general population?
As explained by the authors, how did the New York City Police Department reduce the problem of drug dealing?
Here is Part 1 of George L. Kelling and Ronald Corbett's paper, "This Works: Preventing and Reducing Crime," Civic Bulletin, March 2003. Copyright © 2003 by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.
The most impressive achievement of city governance during the urban renewal of the 1990's was the enormous decline in crime. Over the last decade [from 1993 to 2003], police departments across the country adopted innovative new crime prevention strategies and realized unprecedented results. Despite those successes, however, much work remains to be done in reducing crime and increasing public safety. While some cities across the nation have made great strides, driving down the national crime rate to levels unseen since the 1960's, there were many that missed out on the national trend, reducing crime only marginally, if at all. Moreover, from [2002 to 2003], with several notable exceptions, crime rates have plateaued, and in some cities have even begun to track upward once again. If the success of urban America is to continue, it is essential that police departments and civic leaders not rest on their laurels, but rather continue to improve and refine their crime prevention strategies, adopting the most effective methods displayed in recent years.
Two principal goals must guide the creation of strategies to replicate the most impressive crime prevention successes of the 90's: Order maintenance and the creation of law enforcement structures to support it. The guiding vision for law enforcement must be to maintain order within each city, not to catch criminals. Creating an environment that is not conducive to illegality, rather than seeking to punish illegal conduct after the fact, is the key to preventing crime. Having adopted this vision, implementing it on the streets requires that local police units have the resources to do their job properly and the freedom to use them innovatively, and that they be held strictly accountable for the results, whatever they may be. This naturally requires careful tracking of crime patterns and close communication within police departments in order to target resources appropriately and to place responsibility accurately. It also requires the integration of other law enforcement and public sector agencies, as well as the local communities, into an order maintenance framework. By adopting the combination of an order maintenance philosophy and a flexible, accountability-driven law enforcement structure, cities that have made little progress to date can achieve reductions on par with the most dramatic declines in urban crime during the last decade, while those cities that have already experienced such successes can continue to force crime down to ever lower levels.
PROACTIVE POLICE
The purpose of law enforcement is, ultimately, to prevent crimes rather than to solve them. Solving crimes and punishing criminals is a necessary, but by no means sufficient, aspect of defending the citizenry. In order to effectively reduce crime, law enforcement must focus its efforts on maintaining order within its jurisdiction, eliminating as far as possible the conditions that allow illegality to flourish. To achieve this goal police departments and other law enforcement officials must adopt strategies designed under this vision, rejecting a reactive, after-the-fact, policing approach. They must target factors, such as small-scale public disorder and illegal guns and drugs, that spawn both contempt for the law and ever greater crime trends. They must also work to ameliorate communal problems even before they become criminal, and to employ the advantages afforded by the parole and probation system to exercise control over those people who are statistically most likely to commit crimes. Finally they must manage those problems they cannot solve, accepting that perfect crime prevention is unobtainable and focusing on ensuring that criminal conduct they cannot eliminate has the minimum possible effect on the community.
There is a natural temptation for any police department to focus their efforts on responding to reports of crimes. Certainly it is the least complicated approach. When a crime is reported, the police respond as quickly as possible to stop the crime if it is in progress, or to work the case and catch the perpetrator. Such activities naturally represent a large part of the necessary work of any police force. However, when this kind of response-oriented policing becomes the central mission of law enforcement it will have an extremely damaging impact on the success of crime prevention. Removing criminals from the streets is a means to reducing crime, not an end in and of itself, and police departments cannot afford to focus on it to the exclusion of other, equally important methods of crime prevention. It is crucial, therefore, that the focus of law enforcement officials be on proactive measures, rather than reactive ones.
ADOPT "BROKEN WINDOWS" POLICING
One of those proactive methods, and probably the single most important tool for maintaining order available to law enforcement, is the "Broken Windows" approach to policing. "Broken Windows" policing focuses on small "quality of life" crimes, such as prostitution, public drunkenness and urination, aggressive panhandling, and the like, putting large numbers of cops out on the streets at all times and ensuring that the city's public spaces are free of any illegal activity. When communities fail to enforce laws against these so-called minor offenses, accepting a low level of disorder as inevitable and not worth the trouble of addressing, the result is that the disorder increases and major offenses, from robbery to murder, follow in its wake. Taking action against crime at its most innocuous sends a clear message that illegal behavior will not be tolerated, reducing the incidence of every level of crime.
At the same time, many of those arrested for small crimes prove to be wanted for other more serious offenses. In this way "Broken Windows" policing both reduces the number of current criminals in the general population and creates an environment in which new criminals are far less likely to emerge. The most comprehensive, and successful, application of this policing approach has been in New York City, where a recent analysis of its decline in crime found that between 1989 and 1998 over 60,000 violent crimes were prevented solely by the use of "Broken Windows" policing.
Beyond its effectiveness in reducing crime, this approach to policing is extraordinarily effective in securing many of the subsidiary benefits of a less crime-ridden city. Citizens not only are safer, they feel safer. Robbery of local shops is not merely less likely to occur, storeowners believe they can operate without constant concern. By freeing the streets from low-level disorder as well as high levels of crime, police provide city residents with the freedom from fear that is essential to a flourishing urban environment.
A key principle, intimately linked to "Broken Windows," underlying effective crime prevention is that the proper business of police is problems, not incidents. Response-oriented policing approaches police work as a series of disconnected incidents that had neither history nor future. In fact, most such incidents have both. The factors that lead to a certain crime will usually evidence themselves in one form or another and likely would resurface in similar terms. Thus, incidents of spousal abuse or noisy and boisterous bars, for example, are often indicative of an ongoing communal problem that can be managed or solved before it blossoms into broader illegality. Doing so requires police to engage in activities, from mediating disputes to issuing friendly warnings to loitering teenagers, that do not directly address criminal activity. The tremendous results generated by Boston's "Pulling Levers" program, which explicitly embraced problem solving, provide a perfect example of its effectiveness. Just as adopting "Broken Windows" allows police to stop major crimes by controlling smaller ones, accepting problem solving as a legitimate role and goal for the police can stop bad situations from blossoming into crime.
(Continued in Part 2)
No comments:
Post a Comment