San Francisco is on the verge of transmitting real-time information from a slick communications center to police on the streets, reports the city's Examiner. Beat officers have long complained that information that helps them talk to a witness or run down a suspect is either unavailable or gets lost in translation. But now a San Francisco crime data center is being developed that instantly shares information between local departments in the Bay Area, state and federal agencies, and the officers on the streets. A similar system has helped reduce crime dramatically in New York City, and such a system is in place in Mesa, Ariz., former department of San Francisco Police Chief George Gascón.
On Friday afternoon, the creator of system, Lance Heivilin, was out walking the streets of the Tenderloin. “If you’re not out actually touching the street and seeing what’s really happening, technology isn’t going to help,” said Heivilin. He recently left Mesa to work for the San Francisco Police Department and is director of the new Bay Area Regional Information Crime Center. Also, he runs a consultation firm, Fusion Center Concepts Inc., which developed a free crime-mapping system available to the public on the SFPD’s website.
Read full entry »A new era in the New Orleans Police Department began this week. New police chief Ronal Serpas opened to the public all district and department-level COMSTAT meetings, weekly stat-heavy sessions in which top brass discuss the latest in neighborhood crime, reports the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The open-door policy is a huge departure for the police department, which, despite distrust among citizens, has long held data and information on crimes close to its vest.
Maj. Bobby Norton, backlit by a wall-mounted monitor that displayed a map dotted with icons depicting reported crimes in one police district, hopes citizens come in for a peek behind the curtain. "As you can see, there is a lot of work that goes into this," he said. Though members of the media far outnumbered citizens at Tuesday's meeting, Norton said he hopes the transparency will be a step in restoring confidence in the agency. Each of the seven other police will follow suit. The district sessions are smaller weekly meetings that precede a department-wide COMSTAT meeting, also held each week. That too, under Serpas, is open to the public.
Read full entry »New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly maintains that his city's crime statistics are accurate, blaming criticism from retired police commanders in a survey reported last week on the bad taste that the CompStat program left in their mouths in its early days. Writing in the New York Daily News, Kelly complained that the survey did not have respondents "disclose when they retired, to see to what degree the conduct of early Compstat meetings may have driven their responses." The survey also failed to document whether respondents' awareness of problems was based on personal experience or hearsay, Kelly said.
In a rebuttal, criminologists John Eterno and Eli Silverman stand by their survey work. They tell the Daily News that the police department "has responded to concerns by saying it has ratcheted up the pressure to maintain data integrity. These audit practices are worthy - but they reinforce our central proposition: that the department is spending more energy on the symptoms - statistical distortions - than on the source of these symptoms, Compstat pressures."
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A recent study challenges the statistics behind New York’s decline in serious crime. But two prominent scholars argue the study doesn’t tell the whole story.
Allegations this week that New York City police officers manipulated crime statistics to avoid the appearance of crime increases inevitably raise questions about New York's widely touted crime decline.
No one doubts that murders, robberies, burglaries, and other serious crimes in New York have fallen since the early 1990s. The question is whether the official crime figures can be trusted to tell us just how much safer the city has become.
That question cannot be answered fully by interviewing retired police officers or reopening closed cases. Even the most scrupulous audits of police records cannot recover unrecorded crimes. And there is no way to count, much less reinvestigate, all the serious crimes that were improperly classified as lesser offenses five or ten years ago.
It would be useful if we had independent and reliable data on crime trends not subject to police manipulation. Fortunately, we do.
Since the early 1970s, the U. S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics has compiled crime data from national surveys of persons age 12 and over. The anonymous National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) asks respondents if they were victims of certain types of crime over the past six months and, if so, whether they reported the crime to the police. The surveys are valuable not only for revealing crimes that are not reported to the police but also for validating trends in police-recorded crimes.
Representative NCVS data for residents of the New York metropolitan area, the vast majority of whom live in the five boroughs of New York City, show crime drops since the early 1990s just as large as those derived from the police statistics. For example, the accompanying figure shows New York's burglary trends based on police statistics and NCVS data between 1980 and 2003. (The survey data are not available for New York for more recent years and have been expressed as three-year moving averages to smooth out year-to-year fluctuations.)
Both the police and the survey data exhibit the same pattern of change over time, including sizable burglary declines since the early 1990s. Moreover, the burglaries that victims say they reported to the police correspond very closely to the number of police-recorded burglaries throughout the 24 year period. We find a similar pattern of results when comparing trends in robberies and aggravated assaults from the victim surveys and police statistics.
The victim surveys cannot settle debates over the reasons behind the crime drop, nor do they relieve the NYPD of the responsibility to thoroughly investigate charges that some officers may have doctored the official crime statistics. Crime victims and the general public must be convinced that the police faithfully record all crimes reported to them.
But the victim surveys provide reassuring evidence that New York's crime drop is real and not an artifact of police manipulation. And they can offer the same kind of independent evaluation when the crime rates of other large cities are called into question.
Richard Rosenfeld is professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and President of the American Society of Criminology. Janet Lauritsen is professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
Read full entry »Homicides and other violent crimes plunged in 2009, accelerating a decline that began in 1993. In this two-part series, we ask: what's going on?
Late last year I was thinking about Bernie Goetz. In 1984 the pale, sparrow-like Goetz became a folk hero for doing what many fearful New Yorkers had only fantasized about: pulling out a 38 caliber Smith & Wesson Special and pumping a bullet each into four wolf-pack muggers who had crowded around him in a subway car demanding $5 in return for that special dose of humiliation that was so gleefully and routinely dispensed to victims back then.
Two decades later, Bernie Goetz and those days of despair and mayhem—when entire neighborhoods were abandoned by the police—seem like ancient history. (Although the crime anxieties are, sadly, justified in many of our still-neglected urban ghettos.)
What triggered my thoughts about Goetz and those years of fear, were the headlines that flashed across America as 2009 closed, all heralding the news that America’s homicide and violent rates had dramatically plunged -- more than doubling the decrease recorded in 2008. The drop in the murders was particularly striking. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, the homicide rate fell nationwide by 10 percent below the already low levels of 2008.
Why? In this story, and a second part tomorrow, we provide a snapshot of views from some of the country’s leading criminologists and law enforcement analysts on the factors commonly held up as reasons for the Great American Crime decline of 2009.
Our Special Report coincides with the 5th annual John Jay/Harry Frank Guggenheim Symposium on Crime in America, which begins today (Feb 1), and where some of the experts cited here will address the issue in greater depth. We will be featuring regular reports from the Symposium this week, and next. So please “watch this space.” We welcome your own comments.
Three factors made the declines particularly startling. The first was the steep plunge in the 2009 figures. There had already been a sharp nationwide decline in murder and robbery rates of over 40 percent between 1993 and 2000. But 2001-2008 saw only slight decreases.
Second, simultaneously with the down slide in homicides in 2009, the nationwide violent crime rate (combined reported murders, aggravated assaults, forcible rapes and robberies) decreased 4.4 percent during the first 6 months of last year from the same period in 2008.
“It really is quite a phenomenon,” says Carnegie Mellon University criminology professor Alfred Blumstein, one of America’s leading experts on crime trends. “There are seven larger cities [where homicides] have dropped by more than 20 percent, and seven cities where robberies [a reliable bellwether of violent crime] are down more than 15 percent.”
The Unemployment Factor
The third startling factor was the back story: the crime decrease occurred in the midst of an unemployment rate that had doubled between December 2007 and December 2009, to 10 percent—a number that, when coupled with underemployed and discouraged workers, was closer to 16 percent. Joblessness, moreover, was hitting particularly hard the young minority men traditionally associated with violent urban crime.
Unemployment among African American males aged 16-24 was over 34 percent; and for those 16-19 who were actively seeking work, the figure was over 50 percent. For decades high unemployment had been cited as a causal factor in crime rate increases, and low unemployment as a reason for crime declines.
The 2009 figures, however, seemed to turn that notion on its head.
The other eyebrow-raiser: The crime decline was widespread, encompassing cities in every region of the country. To be sure, troubled cities like Detroit, New Orleans and Cleveland bucked the trend and recorded increased murder rates. Nevertheless, even if 2009 eventually proves an anomaly, it’s clear that something remarkable had had transpired. But what?
According to leading experts polled by The Crime Report, no one knows yet. “There’s been very little systemic research that underlies the arguments we’ve been hearing about the current downward trends,” criminology professor Richard Rosenfeld of the University of Missouri-St. Louis told me. “[Previous] research had shown that murders, other violent crimes] and larcenies had increased during economic downturns. The question that cries out for a good answer is why we might be seeing a break in that pattern. The task for social scientists is to find commonality [of causes across the board.]”
Given the lack of data, neither Rosenfeld or the other experts I contacted were willing to venture an all encompassing, big-picture explanation for 2009’s crime decline. It’s still too early, the trends too deep and the spectrum of cities experiencing the downturn too broad and disparate. As John Jay Professor David Kennedy points out, “the continuing evolution of police deployment tactics [to take one example] is a plausible explanation for those cities that are practicing it,
And he adds: “There are cities with significant drops in crime [that aren’t using these deployment tactics]. So it’s hard to make the argument that that [or one any other factor] caused the 2009 crime drop as a whole.”
Even if no single factor accounts for this phenomenon, the contrast between then and now is startling. In New York City, for example, where 2,245 murders occurred in 1990, homicides plunged a striking 19 percent from 2008, to just over 460 in 2009—the lowest number since the city began keeping reliable homicide statistics in 1963.
During the bloody riot year of 1992, the City and County of Los Angeles, combined, registered over 1,500 murders. By the end of 2009 that number had plummeted by two-thirds, to about 500, as the city’s homicides dropped 17 percent, and the county’s by 23 percent – extraordinary decreases given that county’s population as a whole has increased by about one million over the past two decades.
In Chicago, where killings averaged over 900 in the 1990s, homicides fell by almost 12 percent to 453 in 2009. Atlanta experienced a 14 percent drop, Philadelphia an 11 percent decline, Boston a dip of over 10 percent, Denver fell by 19 percent, Orlando, Florida by about 35 percent, and Camden, New Jersey by 40 percent. (Boston too had a dip of 10 percent, although it was coupled with a rise in sexual assaults.)
Most astounding was San Francisco, where murders plunged by over 50 percent. Even its crime-plagued, Bay Area sister city, Oakland, saw killings fall from 123 to 109.
Although the experts I spoke with could give no singular explanations for this nationwide phenomenon, they did offer some assessments and analysis of what might be driving crime down in particular cities, as well as what they think has not been responsible for the decline.
“When you talk about the factors reducing crime it’s a whole range of things,” prominent Los Angeles civil rights lawyer Connie Rice told me. “But the police have the most direct relationship with crime rates and hence the greatest power to influence them, if the police departments have their core competencies organized and focused on crime.”
Do Cops Matter?
Rice worked closely with William Bratton’s LAPD, and has been a key independent advisor in reforming the department and in forging partnerships with the department and the African American community—a role she continues to play under the new chief, Charlie Beck. It’s been the LAPD’s mastery and implementation of these “core [police] competencies,” Rice believes, that have driven down crime rates in Los Angeles.
“When a department is focused on reducing crime,” she continued, “they have to understand the reality of crime in their city -- mapping, hot spots, deployment plans and focusing on the top 10 percent most violent. Then they have to dedicate their resources to fighting crime by staffing-up the patrol force. They also have to truly engage with their communities, not just in meetings and not just in listening to them, but in the ways that truly matter to the community. ‘Change the outlook on the community from a target to a partner’ – that was Bratton’s mindset.”
One way the LAPD earned the respect of the African American community, says Rice, was by focusing on officer involved shootings and misconduct in a serious way, which ”allowed the community to trust the police, and to work with them in truly significant ways that impacted crime fighting.”
Closely related, as Rice tells it, was the LAPD’s willingness to partner with her and other community activists to establish a “Gang Intervention Academy” which trains ex-gang members to engage in violence reduction by “tamping down retaliatory killings, stopping rumors, working with families, and intervening between warring gang factions.” They’ve been especially effective in LA’s black communities—which is important, according to Rice, “because most of the drive-by shootings and headline violence in LA has been caused by African American gangs.”
John Jay College Distinguished Professor Todd Clear agrees that Bratton’s deployment tactics, as they have been institutionalized by the NYPD under Commissioner Raymond Kelly, have played an important crime-deterrence role in New York. “What the NYPD has done,” says Clear, is to focus on high volume crime areas and to strategize ways of holding police accountable for what they do to deter crime. And all the research tells me that one of the reasons crime keeps going down in New York is because the NYPD keeps developing and perfecting these [crime reduction] strategies.”
“Both the New York and Los Angeles Police Departments have very sophisticated management,” says Blumstein. Bill Bratton was a contributor to that in New York, and important contributor in LA as well. Those departments also have lots of resources. If the want to mobilize a large task force they can muster the intelligence and the force to stop retaliation killings, and they can pull it together very quickly. So that could have contributed to the steady decline in homicides that those two cities have experienced since 2000.”
Bratton himself is of course the most forceful proponent of the impact of smart policing on the crime rate. “I think that I’ve proven conclusively in New York and Los Angeles, as well as in Boston and the New York Transit Police, that cops matter,” Bratton, now a security consultant in New York, told The Crime Report. ”[They] can have a very significant causal effect by focusing on crime. It’s no aberration that crime is down in New York for 19 straight years and in LA for eight straight years. I’ve done it by using the same tactics: broken windows, COMSTAT and hot spot policing, and working and partnering with communities.
“I don’t deny that there are many factors that create an impact on crime,” continued Bratton. “But in LA there was nothing [to account for] crime going down other than the police and police-related initiatives. Aging? The population of LA is not aging. A good economy and low unemployment? LA had double-digit unemployment years before the rest of the country. But for eight years we saw no increase in any crime influenced by economic conditions such as shop-lifting, burglaries and breaking into foreclosed homes.”
If you look around the country, the cities with the best records in driving crime down have entrepreneurial police leaders: they demonstrate a willingness to try new things in conjunction with cooperation with their communities, gang interventionists, academics and other professionals: George Gascon in San Francisco; Anthony Batts in Oakland; William Lansdowne in San Diego; Charles Ramsey in Philadelphia, Cathy Lanier in Washington, DC, Gary McCarthy in Newark, Jody Weis in Chicago, Ed Flynn in Milwaukee and Ed Davis in Boston.”
But like Rosenfeld, Kennedy offers a caution. “In large cities like LA and New York, there is no question that the kind of [smart] policing they’re doing corresponds with what the research shows is effective policing, such as “hot spot policing”, which works in reducing crime without displaying it,” He says. But he believes policing is only one of many factors impacting crime. “There are strong environmental factors over which the police have no control.”
Culture Change
Connie Rice suggests one such factor that may help account for Los Angeles’ crime drop is the change in culture among Latino street gangs. They have turned from shooting rival gang members because someone leered at a local chola, or walked down the wrong side of side of 18th street, to becoming more tightly controlled, hierarchical organizations along the lines of Russian or other eastern European criminal gangs. Rice attributes some of the drop in street violence, particularly in the Latino-gang-infested areas of LA County policed by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department -- where homicides plummeted 23 percent—to this greater control of street gangs by these organized crime and prison gangs.
“Latino gang control of the streets is now surging,” Rice told me. “Leadership is stable; wars for control are now relatively settled. The organized part of gang crime is getting off the streets. Their business model is changing, and the top people are doing a whole lot of cyber crime. There’s been a 1,500 percent increase in that kind of crime from gangs over the past year. “
Rice adds that, although local, territorial street gangs are still the majority, “this deeper cultural entrenchment of gangs is now having an impact [on lowering street violence].”
Rice sees a far different but accompanying phenomenon in the African American areas of LA. “Twenty years ago,” the African American population of LA was intimidated by both the LAPD and the gangsters,” she says. “People would see a tragedy but not speak up because the LAPD treated them so atrociously, and because the gangsters would kill them if they did. It always struck me how powerful a cultural weapon it would be if they pushed back against the pathological culture of gangs.”
According to Rice, the new, more respectful way the LAPD has begun to work with the community has also helped change the picture. “People in the black community will now pick up the phone, and call the LAPD quietly. They still can’t testify, because they still can’t be protected against witness retaliation; but the LAPD and DA are getting much more information and Intel on crime in the community as a result.”
Clear notes that cultural criminologists, such as his colleague John Jay Distinguished Professor Jock Young, also link cultural change to lower crime rates. Those arguments, which claim that the attraction to violence is waning among low-income African American youth living in inner cities, are “intriguing,” says Clear, though he quickly adds, “I haven’t seen any great evidence to back (them) up.”
Similarly, David Kennedy, who spends a lot of time on the street in hard-hit communities, is convinced that a cultural change is occurring, even though he can’t prove it. “You talk to anyone in these neighborhoods – grandmother or gangbanger, and eventually they say, ‘I’m tired, I’ve had it.’ People just don’t want to live like that any longer.”
Alfred Blumstein wonders whether cultural change could be connected to larger factors in American society. He suggested that we might be seeing an “Obama Effect” that could be causing some young African American males to see a future of possibilities, as opposed to dead ends. If that that’s the case, Blumstein suggests, it could be serving as a “countervailing force to the job-frustration effects of the recession.”
Another [culture-related] factor emerging in the research, says Richard Rosenfeld, “is that cities with significant increases in immigration have had lower crime rates. It’s part of the story in New York and L.A. Twenty years ago South Central Los Angeles was poor and black. Today it’s predominantly immigrant Hispanic. Immigration trends [areas] towards revitalization, and decentralizes the concentration of entrenched poverty. Immigrant communities—even in disadvantaged areas—have seen increases in small business [that help] stabilize areas and change the character of communities.”
Tomorrow: Does mass incarceration matter?
Joe Domanick is the Associate Director of John Jay College’s Center on Media, Crime and Justice, and The Crime Report’s West Coast Bureau Chief. He can be reached at domanick@usc.edu.
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Charlie Beck, the LAPD’s newest boss, is a member of one of the country’s most exclusive police fraternities: the disciples of Bill Bratton
On November 17, following the unanimous approval of Los Angeles City Council, Charlie Beck, a 32-year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department, was sworn in as chief of the LAPD. “It was a love feast,” City Councilman Richard Alarcon told the Los Angeles Times. “I can’t think of any other situation where a chief has been welcomed so much.”
Nevertheless, Beck will be facing some daunting tasks over the coming years that will test his popularity—not least an LA fiscal crisis that threatens to stall the steady growth in police numbers that has played an essential part in lowering the city’s crime rate to 1950s levels.
To understand the city leaders’ almost-giddy enthusiasm for their new hire, and what he faces as he leads the country’s third largest police force into the second decade of the 21st century, it’s important to remember the man Beck is replacing.
William J. Bratton, who led the LA force from 2002 to 2009, set the stage for Beck’s biggest challenge: to institutionalize the LAPD as a great big-city police department. The Boston-born Bratton rose to become one of America’s most well-known cops after first catching national attention in the early 1990s, when his pioneering management and officer deployment strategies as head of what was then New York City’s Transit Police made that city’s subways feel safe again for millions of riders. Subsequently, as New York Police Commissioner in the mid-1990s, he sparked the city’s transformation from one of America’s most crime-ridden metropolises to one of the safest.
Bratton was considered an outsider when he was hired in 2002 to reform a notoriously insular LAPD. The force, then approximately 8,500-strong, was known for its paramilitary culture and a confrontational policing style that had produced hundreds of shocking police shootings and chokehold deaths—and two of the worst American riots of the 20th century.
The same year Bratton was hired, the US Justice Department forced a consent decree on the LAPD, mandating tough reforms overseen by a federal judge. Even for someone with Bratton’s skills, the picture was dispiriting: the city was again in turmoil over its police department, officer morale was in a shambles, and Angelenos were skeptical they would ever see fundamental reforms in the LAPD.
But by the time he announced his departure last August to pursue really big money in the private security world (far beyond the $312,000 he was making annually as chief), Bratton had achieved a remarkable turnaround. The consent decree was lifted after a federal a judge ruled on July 16, 2009 that the department had met the requirement for instituting reforms ranging from regular audits of police use of force to dealing with the mentally ill. And in a city long wary of its police force’s arrogance of power, its failure to hold officers accountable and its resistance to civilian oversight, he’d convinced a liberal mayor, the city council, and a police commission headed by an outspoken African American critic of the department, to expand the department to 10,000 officers—a goal that had eluded all previous chiefs.
He assembled a creative command staff of insiders and civilians and, in sharp contrast to previous chiefs, he not only listened to critics, but brought them into the fold. He then introduced real community-policing partnerships to diverse communities throughout the city, ending 30 years of hostility between the LAPD and the city’s black leadership. And he did all this while keeping a previously combative rank-and-file union, the Police Protective League, on his side. Finally, by implementing the deployment and management reforms he pioneered in New York, he accelerated the decline of LA’s violent crimes—already falling under his predecessor – to just over 26,500 in 2008, compared to more than 70,000 in 1995. Bill Bratton, in short, had placed the LAPD on a transformative course.
The question now: can Charlie Beck lock in Bratton’s reforms?
An Unlikely Heir
Beck was 49 when Bratton arrived in LA, and no one then would have placed a bet on his future police career. He’d been on the force for 25 years, yet had not risen higher than a captain’s rank. Moreover, in a department with a command staff stuffed with master’s degrees, Beck hadn’t even completed college. (He just recently earned a bachelor’s degree from California State, University, Long Beach.)
He was about as old-school LAPD as they come. A tanned, dark-haired man with a full moustache, Beck not only looks like a typical LA cop; his roots in both the force and Los Angeles go deep.
The son of a former LAPD deputy chief, he grew up in suburban LA. He’s the father of a daughter who is an LAPD officer, and of a son who is about to graduate from the police academy. And to underscore the family connection, Beck’s sister recently retired from the LAPD, and his wife is a retired LA County sheriff’s deputy.
Beck started his LAPD career as a young officer in Watts, an area of low-income housing projects so tough it a riot was named after it.
“Working in Watts was brutal,” he once told me. “I had partners killed, I saw people in the very worst circumstances, and we [officers] became filled with hate, and were despised in return.”
He went on: “It took a long time for me to understand how circumstances can dictate a person’s life. Initially, all you care about are the nuts and bolts of what you’re doing. But after you become comfortable with the nuts and bolts, you start wondering, ‘why does this conveyor belt keep bringing me all these broken parts; and how can I affect what’s going on, on the other side of the conveyor?’ ”
Beck turned out to have an enormous capacity to adapt and change. That was recognized early by Bratton, who made a practice of freeing his captains in the field to experiment with new ways of providing public safety. Under Bratton’s supportive leadership, Beck began a meteoric rise from captain in 2002 to deputy chief in 2006. Among his successes was the rejuvenation of the Rampart Division, which in the late 1990s had housed a large nest of brutal, drug-dealing cops so bad that the “Rampart Scandal” it produced led to the federal consent decree. Beck also led the cleanup of MacArthur Park, one of LA’s crown jewels, which had turned into a haven for drug dealers, prostitution and gang activity..
Beck went on to became the Deputy Chief of South Bureau, where he oversaw a sprawling, economically impoverished area of black (and increasingly Latino) Los Angeles that was the epicenter for both the 1965 and 1992 riots. There, among other innovations, he partnered with gang-intervention workers.” “I used to believe they were exactly like the guys I was trying to arrest,’ he told me, “then I went to Chicago and saw they were having success using them in collaboration with the police, and that it could work here too.”
Collateral in the Bank
He also closely collaborated with neighborhood leaders in reducing crime. “They cooperated because they saw us as genuinely involved in [their problems],” he told me several years ago. “You can’t just go in there and just talk nice to people. You need collateral in the bank, and we had that. These folks are very low-income and have been marginalized for years. A lot of it is just having an open dialogue, treating them like they’re your equal, and not like they’re some lower species that you’re in charge of watching at the zoo, which is definitely the way we did it in the past.”
As a result, homicides decreased significantly in black communities like Watts.
Most observers believe that Beck is up to the job. He’ll have a five-year term to cement Bratton’s legacy and build his own—at which point he could be rehired for a second five-year term, before being term-limited out. At this stage, he seems to have no credible enemies or critics. He may be an even better politician than Bratton, whose Boston/New York brashness and impatience would sometimes surface with City Council members he felt were obtuse, stupid, or who simply refused to give him what he wanted.
Beck, by contrast is warmer, more politic, self-effacing, even a bit paternal, and has a native Angeleno’s undisguised love for the city and the people in it—something Bratton never pretended to have. Beck’s ambition has always extended no further than becoming chief of the LAPD; For Bratton, achieving the chief’s insignia was widely recognized as just a step in his long-range ambition to be known as a historic, game-changing big city police chief—and perhaps become rich when he stepped into private life.
The first part of that ambition, arguably, has been achieved. Bratton can now count his disciples among police chiefs around the country. On the east coast, they include Gary McCarthy in Newark, and chiefs in Baltimore, Hartford, Connecticut, Providence, Rhode Island, Raleigh, and North Carolina. On the west coast, former LAPD Deputy Chief George Gascon, an ardent Bratton protégé, was sworn in as chief of the San Francisco PD in August.
Meanwhile, Beck comes into the job with some hard-earned credentials of his own. In Rampart and South LA, he proved his deep commitment to community policing. His strong ties to rank-and-file officers have earned him the respect of the Protective League. And his championing of the consent degree reforms have earned him the enthusiastic backing of liberals, Latinos, immigrant groups and African Americans.
My bet is that Beck will follow in Bratton’s shoes. But it won’t be easy to institutionalize Bratton’s legacy. The new LAPD boss will have to continue the data collection required by the consent decree that held officers accountable for their actions, squash any remnants of the old hard-charging LAPD policing philosophy, and deepen and institutionalize problem-solving, community-oriented policing.
Above all, he’ll have to do all this with less money. The LAPD currently has a fraction under 10,000 officers. Without funding for new hires, attrition and retirement will quickly eat away at that number. That will force Beck to make tough decisions on where to cut. Policing on the cheap with a small number of officers has historically caused big problems for the city and the department. A smaller force could revive the kind of reactive, mechanized policing—and a department alienated from the community—that led to the notorious beating of Rodney King and the 1992 riot.
Beck seems to understand all this. “The LAPD is maturing,” he told me back in 2007. “We look at things in a much broader way now because of Bratton. But there’s still a lot of the same furniture in the department, and old-school LA policing is much easier to do. It’s much more difficult to solve a problem than just react to it.”
Joe Domanick is the author of “To Protect and to Serve: The LAPD’s Century of War in the City of Dreams,” which won the 1995 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best (“True Crime”) Non-Fiction Book. He is an Associate Director of the Center on Media, Crime and Justice.
Read full entry »Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, who announced his resignation after seven years in L.A., is being given the media equivalent of a standing ovation as he leaves. The city's Times said in an editorial, "Bratton was the right person in the right place at the right time." Bratton "made important improvements as chief," said La Opinion. "He was able to change the damaged image of the LAPD and improve the relationship of the police with minority communities." Writing in the Times, noted criminologist James Q. Wilson called the crime decline under Bratton "extraordinary." He called Bratton "the best thing that happened to the LAPD since William H. Parker," the legendary chief.
The L.A. Daily News enthused, "The law enforcement veteran tackled the issues and, city officials and civic leaders say, succeeded in restoring the image of the Los Angeles Police Department." The paper listed a number of Bratton's accomplishments, including implementation of reforms after the Rampart scandal, adjustments of policies and practices, and his application of the "broken-window" approach to policing, which was cited in the crime decline.
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Each year journalists from around the world gather at the Investigative Reporters and Editors Conference. The Crime Report's Julia Dahl reports live from Baltimore on the panels sponsored by the Criminal Justice Journalists.
4:40 p.m.
The day’s final panel, Can Repeat Criminals be Stopped, focused on parole and probation.
“Although we talk a lot about the prison population being at two million plus, there are more than five million people on probation or parole at any given time,” said Ted Gest. “So the general theme is, how do you manage these people?”
Joe Neff, a reporter for North Carolina’s Raleigh News & Observer, discussed the series of stories his paper did in the wake of the murder of Eve Carson, who had been student body president at UNC, Chapel Hill.
“It turned out that the two people who were charged with the crime were on probation,” said Neff. “Their cases were handled terribly, so the Department of Corrections tried to get out in front of the issue, saying that, yes, these two had basically had no supervision at all, but that these were just two cases out of 117,000. That these were anomalies.”
Neff’s paper asked, is that true? Or were these cases more representative?
“We found that there were major failings in the probation system. People – even those on intensive supervision – would go a year or more without seeing a probation officer.”
Neff and his colleagues discovered a huge vacancy rate in the probation office, as well as a sorely outdated (pre-Windows) computer system. They also identified numerous instances of warrants being obtained on probationers but never filed. In some cases, the probationer went on to commit murder. Despite these issues, according to Neff, the probation office never went to the legislature to ask for more funding.
“If you think the system’s bad in North Carolina, all you have to do is drive south to South Carolina,” said Doug Pardue of the Charleston Post and Courier, which published a series about South Carolina’s “broken” parole and probation system in August 2008.
“We went to our morgue and looked up about 25 cases and we had our story like that,” said Pardue. “The criminal justice in our state, it’s basically a sinking ship…the system is broken at every single turn.”
Pardue said that when they finished their story, state legislators promised more funding for the parole and probation systems, but then “the recession hit, and today the same probation officers that had 170 cases each, now have 240.”
According to Judy Sachwald, former parole and probation director in Maryland, the American Probation and Parole Association recommends a caseload of 1-50 for moderate to high-risk offenders.
Sachwald said that the National Institute of Justice is currently studying proper probation caseload size and that their report – which she said “will provide a target for policy makers to aim for” – should be out in late fall.
12:30 p.m.
Panel two, The Flaws in Forensic Science, unpacked the recent, scathing report by the National Academy of Sciences which called the nation's forensic science system "badly fragmented."
Penn State's Robert Shaler, who was on the committee that prepared the NAS report, pointed to several aspects of the report that he hadn't seen reported in the media, including the fact that forensic testing may or may not be conducted by scientists, and that opinions given in court were based on experience and training that may be shallow and incomplete. He also pointed to the report's finding that many forensic experts testify without making statements about the probabilities involved.
The Baltimore Sun's Melissa Harris picked up on Shaler's point, discussing the ongoing case of the murder of Kenneth Harris, a former Baltimore city councilman. "The whole case is based on DNA," said Harris. "They get on TV and say that the suspects' DNA is all over the crime scene" but, in the case of one suspect, "the chance that the DNA could be someone else's is 1 in 164."
Shaler puzzled over the fact that, despite the report's recommendation that a National Institute of Forensic Sciences (separate from the Department of Justice) be created, the majority of forensic scientists -- as well as the International Association of Chiefs of Police -- do not support the creation of such an institute. "Why don't they want it?" he asked. "Somebody should be looking into that."
"Forensic science is not a law enforcement tool," said Shaler, who believes crime labs should be separate from police departments. "It's a criminal justice tool."
Patrick Kent, of the Forensics Division of the Maryland Public Defenders office, says that the national forensics community has taken a "cynical but pragmatic route" saying they agree with the report, "but are they going to change anything? No. The report is damning, the report is scary, but nothing is going to change unless there is more [media] reporting."
He continued: "Call any lab in the country and ask them if they agree with the report. They do. Then ask if they've adopted one single recommendation. Ask them. They have not."
"Science is about doing research with objective standards, none of which exist in [forensic] communities," said Kent. "It’s sad we needed an entire commission to say you need to get your ducks in a row before you come into the courtroom."
Thomas Mauriello, an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and a federal forensic investigator, ended the session by handing the power to the reporters in the room: "We can’t forget that the jury’s education, knowledge and training comes from you. Forty percent of the science on CSI doesn't even exist. The only thing they understand about forensics comes from what they read in the paper and what they see on TV."
11:15 a.m.
The first panel of the day, Understanding Crime Statistics, focused on the problems with data included in the Uniform Crime Report, Supplemental Homicide Report, and other national crime measurements.
Moderator Ted Gest reported that on June 1 the FBI released preliminary UCR figures for 2008 but that “those crime figures are very incomplete. Really, it’s a report of crimes that were brought to the attention of local law enforcement – that’s a huge caveat. Some local law enforcement doesn’t even report them to the FBI.”
Michael Rand, chief of victimization statistics at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, discussed the limits of the UCR, saying that "only half of all violent crimes are reported to the police" and that the survey does not break down crime by city or state, though he said the bureau is currently redesigning the survey to reflect more local statistics.
James Lynch of John Jay College of Criminal Justice's Center on Media, Crime and Justice also lamented BJS's lack of local data but said "efforts are underway to bridge that gap." He said that a National Academy of Sciences Committee will be releasing a report which looks closely at BJS and other national crime statistics in three weeks. Lynch recommended reporters look at the National Incident Based Reporting Program, which he said is more detailed and easier to use than UCR. He also said that while BJS gets complaints from reporters what they need is "push back" telling the agency what journalists would like to see.
Brant Houston agreed that BJS data is "deeply flawed." He asked Rand, "How flawed is the Supplemental Homicide Report?" After a short pause, Rand answered, "It's incomplete."
Gest then alluded to the recent revelation that the Detroit Police Department had failed to report more than a hundred homicides, saying, "What's a couple hundred murders between friends?"
Mark Fazlollah of The Philadelphia Inquirer pointed to a series his paper did looking at the falsification of crime statistics in Philadelphia, which led to revelations of similar mis-reporting in Atlanta, Baltimore and New York. "The phony stats were known for many years," said Fazlollah. "Aggravated assaults were easily changed to simple assaults...Precinct commanders used to joke about this, but behind those statistics are real victims."
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After three years and more than $30 million, the largest and most troubled apartment complex in West Sacramento has been transformed into a place where low-income families can live in comfort and security, reports the Sacramento Bee. Mayor Christopher Cabaldon and developer Cyrus Youssefi plan to cut the ribbon today on Courtyard Village, a complex of 300 renovated apartments. That address was well known to local police, who responded to calls from residents on a nightly basis.
Crime, drugs, fights, abandoned cars and other problems were the norm there, and the buildings were falling apart. Youssefi, with a record of rehabilitating troubled properties, stepped in and agreed to buy the apartments in 2006. His firm, CFY Development, spent more than $30 million, taking advantage of an $8 million federal tax credit for rehabilitating low-income housing. The city contributed $2.5 million to the project in a public-private partnership that the parties said was the largest of its kind ever completed in the city. Similar projects may follow, city planners said Wednesday.
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Police agencies and media across the nation are increasingly using geocoding software to provide a multi-dimensional, computer-based look at key statistics. But is it all it’s cracked up to be?
Los Angeles Times reporter Ben Welsh and his colleagues weren’t looking for a gotcha story when they started parsing the data inside the LAPD's online crime map. Like many tech-savvy reporters, Welsh was simply hoping to take advantage of what seemed to be a vivid, dependable instrument for turning up urban trends, such as crime patterns, and producing hard-to beat stories.
But Welsh stumbled across a glitch in the LAPD’s computer crime mapping system that has revealed some glaring imperfections in geocoding, a technology currently being used to track crime in many of the nation's cities. Geocoding, which links places on a map (like a police station or shopping center) to a specific geographical code, such as latitude and longitude, has commonly been employed to pin-point high crime neighborhoods where police need to marshall extra resources.
Welsh, who joined the paper in 2007, had been using computer mapping to great effect. Over the past year, he and a team had compiled multimedia databases on local casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the victims of last year’s Metrolink rail crash in Chatsworth, Calif., and they’d mapped California schools and drug war-related deaths in Mexico.
“There was a desire among the editors to take these databases and turn them into news products on the web,” says Welsh.
In the fall of 2008, Welsh began examining the LAPD’s crime data with the intent of building a web database for the paper’s readers. But during his analysis, Welsh found several flaws: “I did routine checks of the data, and realized there was one point on the map that had dozens of dots."
It turned out that the neighborhood, which happened to be the area around City Hall and the new LAPD headquarters in downtown Los Angeles, wasn’t actually a hot-spot for crime. Rather, the location had simply become a default point for addresses the system didn’t recognize. Or, as Welsh puts it, “a catch-point for locations that didn’t geocode well.”
The article describing the problem appeared on Sunday, April 5 and touched off discussions among law enforcement officials, crime analysts, academics and techies all across the country about the efficacy and accuracy of geocoding.
Welsh's discovery wasn't exactly welcome news. Law enforcement use of the technology has surged over the past decade. According to a study by the Gartner Group, 90 percent of U.S. police departments are expected to use GIS systems by the end of 2009. Compare that to 1998 when, according to the Crime Mapping Research Center, only about 13 percent of the 2000 police agencies surveyed in the United States used computerized crime maps, and fewer than half of those shared their maps with the public.
Digital maps have been used to redraw police districts in Tuscon, Arizona and Charlotte, North Carolina, and they’ve been credited with helping reduce crime in East Orange, New Jersey. And unlike the system pioneered by the New York City Police Department's fabled CompStat program, today’s crime maps are not limited to internal police use. Cities like Los Angeles, Savannah, Georgia, and Lincoln, Nebraska, to name just a few, make their maps available to the general public.
“Part of what we are is trying to empower citizens,” says Judy Paul of the Savannah Police Department. “We hope it will help people make smarter decisions about their safety.”
From Cork Board to Cyberspace
Mapping crime is nothing new. Law enforcement agencies have had two-dimensional area maps with incidents or arrests marked by push-pins on their walls for decades. Then, as now, the maps were useful in identifying and illustrating “hot spots” of crime within a particular area. They served to focus attention on specific problems (a spate of burglaries in one neighborhood; a cluster of assaults in another), and, to various extents, helped commanders make more informed decisions about deployment of resources and personnel.
But paper maps have obvious limitations. Individual officers can’t exactly carry them around to reference when rolling from neighborhood to neighborhood, and there was certainly no way to for an officer to compare the incidents of, say, assault in one area to the number of probationers on a certain block, or to the income profile of the neighborhood.
Geocoding software, whether it’s as accessible as Google Earth or part of an analysis package created and maintained by a private company like ESRI or Pitney Bowes’ MapInfo, allows not only broad distribution of the data, but gives analysts a tool to layer databases atop one another, thus providing a more comprehensive profile of a neighborhood – what David Cook, a law enforcement specialist at ESRI, calls “an environmental approach to criminology.”
Of course, even digital maps can't make decisions about data -- they can only present it. Rutgers University Professor Marcus Felson points out that without trained analysts to access the data, geocoding is not terribly useful: “The idea of stats is to tell a story and make sure that story is comprehensive. Maps help with that, but analysts, and universities that train them, connect the dots.”
Errors and Omissions
Most everyone you speak to about geocoding admits that accuracy is a problem, and most were also not surprised that the LAPD had such a major glitch in their system. There are many ways data can get entered incorrectly (an officer’s sloppy penmanship, an accidental inversion by a tech). American University Professor Chris Simpson points out that “information in these types of systems is approximate, but masquerades itself as being precise.”
Lincoln, Nebraska Police Chief Tom Casady agrees: “Geocoding by its very nature is inaccurate, it’s the estimate of a spot on the earth where a crime occurred.” For example, Casady says his department doesn’t want to make the exact address of a rape victim public, so they’ll map the block on which the crime occurred, not the actual house number.
"Overall, the maps are 98.3 percent accurate," says Casady. "But within that margin of error could be 1000 cases you've missed."
Paul Zandbergen, an associate professor of geography at the University of New Mexico, sees the accuracy issue as an outgrowth of the fact that there is no standardization of data collection or software in police departments around the country.
“Certain jurisdictions are very sophisticated, others are not,” says Zandbergen. In Florida, for example, he notes that “every single county has different software” for mapping crime. Savannah's $12,000 system works by dipping into the department's computer-aided dispatch system every two hours, extracting and then plotting the data. So, instead of mapping actual arrests or locations of crime, the system maps only calls for service. In contrast, the technology used by the Lincoln, Nebraska police maps calls for calls for service, incident reports and arrests, plus parolees and sex offenders.
And nobody seems to agree about how to plot crimes for which there is no easy location, like identity theft, cyber crime and fraud .
Unlike the health field, which has mapped disease for years and developed widely used protocols for the endeavor, Zandbergen says that local law enforcement agencies are pretty much “left to their own devices” when trying to build a crime data and mapping system.
“The number of people who get trained in geo-spatial technology is very small, and many of them end up getting hired by national agencies like the CIA or Homeland Security,” observes Zandbergen. “That means that in most jurisdictions, people learn to push the button on the software without a clear understanding of how it works.”
Zandbergen, who is editing the first issue of a new journal called Crime Mapping, says the National Institute of Justice has a few scattered training seminars. Meanwhile, crime analysts across the country share tips and quirks of the technology on a national crimemap listserv. To an outsider it can sound like another language: "Is there a way to run a regression in ArchGIS 9.3?” asked a recent listserv poster.
Bud Bliss, the sole analyst at the Beaverton, Ohio police department sees his work as a resource for cops on the beat. In the training workshops he leads for new officers, he tells them that if they see something going on in their patrol district they can come to him for background information on the area. He also frequently lends his 10 years of experience to listserv members, writing detailed responses to questions posed by other analysts and interested parties.
And despite the inaccuracies he knows exist even in his own map, Lincoln's Chief Casady is a believer. The technology, he says, is a valuable tool for police and citizens: he's even used it to alter some personal habits.
"I used to leave my garage door open all the time, while I was cooking or just in the house on a nice evening," says Casady. "I looked at the map one day and saw there had been robberies in my neighborhood. I knew from years of police experience that thieves often steal through the garage, so after I read that, I stopped leaving it open."
New Media Enters the Fray
And now, police departments aren’t the only ones mapping crime. SpotCrime.com, CrimeReports.com and UCrime.com are all non-law enforcement websites that use either police data or news reports to map crime in various cities throughout the country and around the world, marking each crime with icons: at SpotCrime.com, a fist represents an assault; a cloaked man represents a burglary.
Colin Drane founded SpotCrime.com in November 2007 after having the GPS stolen out of his car and learning of a brutal rape in his Baltimore neighborhood. Drane knew Baltimore had one of the nation’s highest crime rates, but he couldn’t put all the crime into context: “I wanted a map,” says Drane.
SpotCrime.com uses Google Maps software to plot crime and distributes neighborhood reports through Twitter and RSS feeds. Drane’s other crime mapping website, UCrime.com, is even training a new breed of reporters: links on the site encourage would-be watchdogs to “click here” if they want to “be a crime reporter” for their university.
“I think is encourages the police department to be more transparent, and the more transparency, the better for democracy,” says Drane, who now has 30 people in several countries working for him.
With increased transparency, however, comes greater oversight – of both civilians and police.
“What is going on here is an increased ability to surveil people,” says Simpson. “That is a social change that is fundamental.”
But, continues Simpson, “the availability of these tools to do surveillance is in part to monitor the police. Policing becomes fairer, more modern and more just when interest groups can look at the facts of the situation and have those facts as they enter into policy making.”
Chief Casady agrees.
“I’ve seen citizens use the map at a city counsel meeting to protest zoning changes,” says the chief. “I couldn’t help smiling, thinking, they’re making good use of the data.”
The LAPD did not return calls for comment on Welsh's story and the accuracy of their online map. While they are undoubtedly less than enthusiastic to talk about a problem with their system, considering the proposal by President Obama to fund modernization and upgrades of various aspects of policing, that the little glitch (which Welsh says has been remedied) may actually turn out to be a boon to the evolution of geocoding.
Julia Dahl is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.
Listen to experts discuss stimulus spending and crime in communities of color.
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