COMMUNITY POLICING

Rana Sampson, founder of Community Policing Associates, is a consultant on community and problem-oriented policing for police agencies and communities around the country. A former National Institute of Justice Fellow, White House Fellow, and police officer in New York City, Ms. Sampson holds a law degree from Harvard and a BA from Columbia. She notes:

Community policing is a partnership forged between citizens, the police, and municipal service providers and others to tackle crime, fear, and disorder in our communities. Characterized by police-community collaboration and problem-solving, it is based on twenty years of research into police effectiveness and evolved out of a recognition that police needed to do things differently if they were to make a significant impact on crime and other problems they‟re asked to handle.

In the past, police waited until crimes occurred and then chased the bad guys. If no crook was caught, they took a report. This reactive model for crime intervention provided too little too late; many citizens and police officers

became dissatisfied with it. Today, police are being trained to analyze crime problems in a more sophisticated way. They look for patterns and target repeat offenders. The result is a better focus on understanding why certain places in our communities are crime-prone.

In one Florida community, a rash of robberies made residents wary of outdoor activity. Rather than hoping to come across the crooks through ineffective random patrols, the local police examined robbery data. They found that over 50 percent of the robberies were at convenience stores. Of the forty-seven stores, forty-five had been robbed at least twice, some as many as fourteen times. After careful study, the police identified significant differences between the stores that were robbed and those that weren‟t. The stores that weren‟t robbed had better lighting in the parking lot, a clear view of clerks, and minimal-cash-on-hand policies. The most significant difference was that robbers tended to avoid convenience stores with two clerks on duty in late-night hours. After implementing the police department‟s recommendations, the city experienced a 70 percent decrease in convenience-store robberies from the previous year.

In other communities, citizens are highly active in community-policing anticrime efforts. The police cannot fight crime alone and are now willing to acknowledge that creating a safe place to live is everyone‟s responsibility. On one block in Philadelphia, mothers banded together to form a pots-and-pans brigade to disrupt street-corner drug dealing. In Portland, Oregon, police sponsor training for landlords and apartment managers to help them understand how to rid their property of illegal activity, including drug activity. In San Diego, merchants, with the help of the police, sought temporary restraining orders against prostitutes who were hailing clients in front of their stores.

In some communities, businessmen look for creative solutions to annoying and recurring crime problems. Grocery store owners, at the suggestion of the police, are playing classical music to dissuade youthful loiterers from hanging out in their parking lots. Owners of some pay phones on corners where drug dealing is prevalent are modifying the phones so that only outgoing calls can be made: users and dealers cannot be called back to set up drug deals, thus dampening dealer profits. And in communities all over the country, residents are using hundred-year-old, dormant nuisance laws to abate drug houses, brothels, and loud party houses in their neighborhoods and gang activity.

Community policing relies on problem-solving as its key component and represents a sea change in how police do their work, a welcome change for both police and communities.

In 1994, Richmond, Virginia, woke up to one of the worst murder rates in the United States, 149 homicides for a city of 200,000. That‟s stratosphere high—San Diego averages 150 homicides per year and has a population of 1,200,000.

Richmond attacked the problem as a community—they called it Operation Full Alert. It involved almost every crime-suppression idea of recent years: police strike forces in “hot spots,” roadblocks, bicycle patrols, citizen patrols, curfews, pay phone restrictions, arresting truants, mentoring, boot camps, specialized courts to keep everything moving fast. Richmond‟s goal is a 25 percent decline— they‟re not there yet, but the crime increases have stopped. In all types of crimes, Richmond is finally experiencing declines. However, not everyone is happy with Richmond‟s zero tolerance. The local and national officers of the ACLU plan to challenge the measures as too extreme.

From my twenty years of experience in law enforcement, it is clear that law enforcement and community members know who their local criminals, gang members, and drug dealers are. But they‟re often stopped from taking effective action by federal courts and laws that protect the individual‟s civil liberties at the expense of the com- munity‟s needs and rights to protect families. Police officers must show reasonable cause even to detain a gang member just to talk to him, let alone check him for an illegal weapon.

Over and over, communities have tried to suppress local crime, only to have their efforts stopped by one individual unhappy about interference with unlimited civil liberties. In 1994, for example, a gang-ridden, drug-infested Chicago housing project was stopped from taking tough, rights-intrusive, hard-line measures to protect their homes and families from gang warfare when a civil liberties attorney defended one gang member‟s right to come and go as he pleased. The rights of the children in that project came in second. Many children are exposed to violence and twenty-four-hour-a-day fear. As one teacher said, “When our children return to the projects and are exposed to violence, we can forget about any homework being done.” What does that bode for their future? And what about our society‟s future when our most important resource sees more violence and feels more fear than

anything else in their lives?

Community policing, and when necessary, hard-line policing, is the answer to control the currently out-of-control crime in most cities. Without it, we will experience the crime-wave predictions by 2005, predictions echoed by the experts in our best educational institutions, Department of Justice officials, and even the president and Republican candidates opposing him. Unfortunately, they cannot agree on what to do.

The preceding three ways to a safer future are long-term (a few years). The next three ways are needed immediately.

Three Immediate Needs

If we and our leaders are serious about stopping skyrocketing random, senseless, and explosive violence, our first priority must be getting guns, gangs, and recidivists off the streets. Forty percent (average) of murders in all cities of 100,000 or more are committed by guns in the pockets of warring and thrill-seeking gang members or recidivists— the career criminals committing up to 80 percent of all violent crimes. A large percentage of gang members are also recidivists, which makes them double the threat to the rest of us.

Many gang members/recidivists in jails awaiting trial communicate to their partners on the outside who the witnesses against them are.

In May 1995, a Miami drug dealer and gang member was in custody, awaiting trial. He was made aware of a doctor willing to testify against him. Federal officials say that within weeks, the doctor was gunned down with a silencer-equipped pistol in front of a Miami restaurant. That same month in Los Angeles, two women who had agreed to testify against a gang member and drug dealer were gunned down in separate attacks, in what investigators call a „silencing of witnesses.”

September 26, 1895, Boston, Massachusetts: Paul McLaughlin, a state prosecutor on an antigang task force, was shot to death entering his car by a teenager wearing a hooded jacket. Police say, “It appears to be an assassination.” It‟s not the first murder of a gang prosecutor; four others have been assassinated since 1980.

“A line has been crossed,” said Robert L. Ullman, formerly head of the Criminal Division of the U.S. Attorney‟s Office in Boston, „. . . an execution-style slaying of a prosecutor used to happen only in Colombia. . . are we far off from that?”

A few days after the McLaughlin execution in Boston, Mike Runnel, a district attorney leading a gang crackdown in New Mexico, had his office torched.

In the 1920s, organized crime usually bought off witnesses, police, and government officials; now our street gangs just kill them off.

Lt. Sergio Robleto, LAPD homicide detective and supervisor, was blunt in a recent interview (Los Angeles Times): “…never seen the ferocity of attempts to kill witnesses… In our bureau alone, we had to evacuate and relocate thirty-nine witnesses and their families, due to death threats by gangs.” When asked, “How many witnesses are killed?” Lieutenant Robleto said, „It‟s too high, too negative. If I released that information, we would drive them [witnesses] underground.”