A Focus on Hot Spots
Researchers suggested: Perhaps the authorities should pay less attention to individual criminals and more attention to the hot spots where they operate.
Dr. Sherman, Dr. Weisburd and colleagues have tested the idea in randomized experiments in Jersey City; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Sacramento; and cities in Britain and Australia.
Typically, a list of hot spots was identified, and then half were randomly chosen to receive extra police attention, like more frequent patrols. Other strategies were also used, like improving street lighting, fencing vacant lots or arresting people for minor violations.
As hoped, there were fewer crimes and complaints at the hot spots chosen for extra attention than at those that were not. And once police officers started to show up often and at unpredictable intervals, they did not need to stay more than 15 minutes to have a lasting impact.
Nonetheless, the hot-spot strategy was initially met with skepticism by police veterans.
“We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there.
But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010
Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by
showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.
“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”
After more than two dozen experiments around the world, criminologists generally agree that hot-spot policing is “an effective crime prevention strategy,” in the words of
Anthony Braga, a criminologist at Harvard and Rutgers who led
a review of the research literature last year.
Many experts also see it as the best explanation for the crime drop in New York. Although the city’s police did not participate in randomized experiments, they did use computerized crime mapping to focus on hot spots in the 1990s. This strategy was intensified with a program called Operation Impact, which was started in 2003 by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.
Commissioner Kelly gives the strategy credit for the continued decline of crime despite the reduced police force.
There is supporting evidence from
Dennis C. Smith, a political scientist at New York University who led an analysis of trends in the dozens of precincts where the city’s police focus on “impact zones,” as the hot spots are called. Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it.
The Stop-and-Frisk Debate
One part of the hot-spot strategy in New York has been highly controversial: the stopping and frisking of hundreds of thousands of people each year, ostensibly to search for weapons or other contraband.
Some critics say that the tactic has been used so often and so brusquely in New York that it has undermined policing by arousing disrespect for the law, especially among young black and Latino men, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Research shows that people who feel treated unfairly by the police can become more likely to commit crimes in the future.
“The million-dollar question in policing right now is whether there are ways to get the benefits of
stop-and-frisk without the collateral costs,” said
Jens Ludwig, an economist who directs the University of Chicago Crime Lab. He found benefits from the tactic — a decline in gunshot injuries — in
an experiment with the Pittsburgh police.
“Getting the police to stop people more often and search them for illegal guns does help keep guns off the street and reduce gun violence,” Dr. Ludwig said. “That’s not to say whether or not stop-and-frisk is worth the costs that the practice imposes on society. But there’s a complicated trade-off here that needs to be acknowledged.”
Defenders of stop-and-frisk, including Mayor Bloomberg, argue that when it is done properly and politely, the practice prevents crimes that disproportionately hurt the city’s minorities.
“If New York went back to the policing of the 1980s,” Dr. Smith said, “there would be hundreds of thousands more victims of serious crimes every year, and the great majority of them would be African-American and Hispanic.”
Police officials note that if the homicide rate of the 1980s persisted, 1,200 additional New Yorkers, most of them black or Latino men, would have been killed last year — when the police recorded 417 murders. Further, if the city’s incarceration rate had followed the national trend, an additional 100,000 black and Hispanic men would have been sent to prison in the past decade, Dr. Zimring calculates.
Whether or not other cities adopt New York’s specific stop-and-frisk tactics, social scientists say the rest of the country could benefit by adding police officers and concentrating on hot spots.
Dr. Ludwig and
Philip J. Cook, a Duke University economist, calculate that nationwide, money diverted from prison to policing would buy at least four times as much reduction in crime.
They suggest shrinking the prison population by a quarter and using the savings to hire another 100,000 police officers.
Diverting that money to the police would be tricky politically, because corrections budgets are zealously defended in state capitals by prison administrators, unions and legislators.
But there is at least one prison administrator, Dr. Jacobson, the former correction commissioner in New York, who would send the money elsewhere.
“If you had a dollar to spend on reducing crime, and you looked at the science instead of the politics, you would never spend it on the prison system,” Dr. Jacobson said. “There is no better example of big government run amok.”
That is the same lesson that William J. Bratton draws from his experience as New York’s police commissioner in the 1990s. “We showed in New York that the future of policing is not in handcuffs,” Mr. Bratton said. “The United States has locked up so many people that it has the highest incarceration rate in the world, but we can’t arrest and incarcerate our way out of crime. We need to focus on preventing crime instead of responding to it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/nyregion/police-have-done-more-than-prisons-to-cut-crime-in-new-york.html?pagewanted=all
The new tatics although working it seems to lower crime has mad a lot of people angry with the police department.....
Is the NYPD Out of Control? New Lawsuit Takes on Bloomberg's 'Private Army'
Rodriguez v. Winski calls for the creation of an independent federal position to oversee the NYPD.
May 4, 2012 |
Like this article?
Join our email list:
Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email.
When Mayor Michael Bloomberg
referred to the NYPD as his “private army” and the “seventh largest standing army in the world,” he managed to provoke scorn from all but his most slavish admirers. Though his description was wildly
inaccurate regarding the size of the department, his overall Putin-esque characterization of the cops as a extra-municipal tool to be deployed at his whim struck many as remarkably and accidentally honest.
Bloomberg does deserve some credit for managing to hoodwink a large number of New Yorkers into believing he's some sort of benevolent technocrat instead of the corporate oligarch he so clearly is. But when it comes to handling Occupy, Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly – and the NYPD at large – are facing a new level of resistance.
Fifteen plaintiffs, including five elected officials, members of the press, an Iraq war veteran, and Occupy Wall Street activists are
suing the city in federal court, alleging gross misconduct ranging from false arrest and imprisonment to possible conspiracy between the police department and JPMorgan Chase to chill citizen's rights to peaceably assemble. The suit is known as
Rodriguez v. Winski and calls for, among other measures, the creation of an independent federal position to oversee the NYPD. The department is out of control, the suit alleges, and is incapable of holding itself accountable.
I'm also a plaintiff in the case and can testify from first-hand experience that the NYPD is out of control. This is obviously not news to the hundreds of thousands of young men of color who are stopped and frisked by the cops every year, and it's always important to stress that the kind of suppression a political movement like Occupy faces is both quantitatively and categorically different than the oppression marginalized communities face. So the stories laid out below come with the caveat of “police brutality in New York isn't new, but it's crazy and maybe we can get this under control.”
In some ways what makes this lawsuit so extraordinary is the inclusion of four city council members, one of whom was beaten bloody and arrested by the police. Ydanis Rodriguez, the lead plaintiff in the case, was prevented from witnessing the eviction of Liberty Square by the NYPD on November 15, 2011. Rodriquez represents the 10th Council District in Manhattan and on the night of the raid he went to Liberty Square to exercise his right to observe police actions as granted to him by the council charter. By the end of the night Rodriguez was bloodied and in police custody, thereby rendering him incapable of fulfilling his duty to his constituents to act as a monitor.
More outrageous still is what the department did as damage control. When
Time magazine picked up the story, it posted a photo of Rodriguez on the ground getting arrested. The complaint alleges that police officials contacted
Time, requesting the dramatic photo be removed. Several hours later the story was accompanied by a photograph from an unrelated event showing Rodriguez speaking pleasantly with officers. Until this complaint was filed and
reported on, this incident remained unknown.
Suppression of the Press
The NYPD's contempt for the press has been well
documented. Ray Kelly's widely circulated
memo telling his officers to allow the press to do their job has been uniformly ignored, which shows either Kelly's lack of control over his forces, or, more likely, the bad-faith in which it was written and distributed. From arresting so-called mainstream journalists like plaintiff Stephanie Keith, to
harassing freelance photographers, to preventing the press from witnessing police
misconduct, to
manhandling reporters and their crews, to threatening to
confiscate press badges, to (in my case) getting arrested for
not having press credentials,
it's fair to say the NYPD considers the First Amendment more of a friendly suggestion than a constitutional right.
