One of the St. Louis area's longest-running anti-crime programs will soon be coming to an end, with the filing of a final few forms and the spending of the...
Read full entry »The New Orleans Times Picayune praised "NOLA for Life," a multifaceted, multi-agency strategy announced by Mayor Mitch Landrieu to reduce the city's stubborn homicide rate, which is 10 times the national average. NOLA for Life is a combination of new and existing programs that will be overseen by police Superintendent Ronal Serpas, Criminal Justice Commissioner James Carter, and Health Commissioner Karen DeSalvo. It breaks down into five broad categories: Stopping shootings, investing in prevention, promoting jobs, rebuilding neighborhoods, and improving the police department.
The Police Department is expected soon to be under a federal consent decree, the details of which will shape the continued reform of what was a badly broken agency, the newspaper says. Landrieu pointed to a new crop of police recruits, a beefed up homicide unit, the greater use of technology and a new crime lab as signs of the "new NOPD." The Times Picayune says the "importance of transforming the department cannot be overstated, but taking a holistic approach to crime is smart." The murder reduction strategy includes efforts like Ceasefire, which uses "violence interrupters" to try to stop shootings before they happen, and Saving Our Sons, which provides mentoring, midnight basketball, and job assistance. It includes conflict resolution programs in schools and a lot maintenance program to fight blight.
Read full entry »Neighborhood watch programs have long been the eyes and ears of local law enforcement, keeping tabs on suspicious behavior. The shooting death of unarmed...
Read full entry »A Las Vegas-based online alert system called AlertID pulls information from law enforcement and public safety agencies for distribution to users at no cost through text or email, reports the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Users can sign up at AlertID.com and designate the area where they want to be kept informed. The site updates every 15 minutes.
The services it provides are free to both law enforcement agencies and users. AlertID's chief mission is not to make money, founder Keli Wilson said, but to make communities safer. "One of our goals is to help Las Vegas get off the most dangerous cities list," she said. The company offers sponsorship programs for other businesses to advertise on the AlertID website and on mobile and tablet applications. Some 60,000 Nevadans have signed up for AlertID. The company plans to expand nationwide, working with sheriff's offices, fire departments and other agencies to notify users of crimes or events that affect their quality of life: burglaries, fires and sex offenders' registered locations among them.
Read full entry »The National Association of Attorneys General is asking congressional appropriators to back the federal Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (Byrne JAG) program...
Read full entry »The plan calls for virtually every local government agency - including the Police Department, libraries, Parks Department, Public Works Department, public housing and the school district - to focus resources on the 100 blocks. The rationale is that most of the city's crime is somehow linked to those areas. If those neighborhoods can improve, then crime throughout the city will fall. "We don't want to displace crime, so it just moves elsewhere. We want to hack it at its roots," said Oakland police Sgt. Chris Bolton, chief of staff for Police Chief Howard Jordan. That means job fairs, cleaning graffiti and other blight, a free summer camp for kids, extra police officers on patrol, enhanced efforts to track parolees, more block parties and other efforts. Similar tactics have reduced crime in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, said Reygan Harmon, Quan's public safety policy adviser.
Wilmington, De., with the nation's third-highest violent crime rate among similarly sized cities in 2009 and 2010, will try the successful anticrime strategy used in High Point, N.C., Police Chief Michael Szczerba tells the Wilmington News-Journal. High Point has used the "focused deterrence" strategy to eliminate five violent drug markets, cut gang crime, and reduce robberies. It plans to target chronic domestic-violence offenders this month.
David Kennedy, the John Jay College of Criminal Justice professor whose work underpins the strategy, says it has to be viewed as a fundamental way of doing police work, not a special project. "When it becomes a program or a grant-funded project or somebody's pet, it gets swamped by business as usual," he says. "It is a tough switch to make, but lots of people have made it, so it's far from impossible."
Read full entry »By Stephen Handelman
A pioneering approach that brings police, community leaders and troubled youth together is demonstrating
remarkable results in many U.S. cities.
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu is getting a positive response to his call for New Orleanians to take a more active role in the city's quest to curb street violence, with hundreds offering to volunteer for crime-fighting and youth-mentoring initiatives, says the New Orleans Times-Picayune. The mayor's office has nearly 600 written commitments from residents who indicated a desire to donate to a nonprofit, start a Neighborhood Watch program, or provide job opportunities for young people and ex-offenders.
Officials are following up with people who filled out a commitment card since Landrieu sounded the alarm last month at a rime summit. That event attracted a crowd of about 2,000, including neighborhood activists, students, criminal-justice officials and family members of murdered children. The Landrieu administration said business, education, and community leaders also have made commitments to help end the cycle of violence and murder in New Orleans. Landrieu also is providing ex-inmates with employment options. Ex-offenders make up half of the 12-member work force hired earlier this month for a program established to cut, clear and maintain overgrown lots in the Lower 9th Ward.
Read full entry »With declining staff and failing facilities, the Memphis Police Department's CO-ACT program wasn't working very well. So police director Toney Armstrong decided to do away with CO-ACT -- short for "community action" -- and replace it with something else, reports the Memphis Commercial Appeal. The program began in 1994 as a way to reach out to communities and neighborhoods through closer contact with officers. It included 16 substations that were supposed to offer community programs and outreach.
Armstrong is fleshing out his new program, including deciding on a name for it, but he hopes it will be operational within the next month. Officers will be assigned to the program. Previously, they were allowed to request that assignment. "This allows us the flexibility to choose officers suitable for that kind of work," Armstrong said. "(Officers) will have to show a lot of compassion. Have to have a lot of patience. It's something you have to want to do." Armstrong listed several programs he'd like to see instituted by the new stations, including health fairs, food drives, coat drives, school-supplies drives, and efforts to provide air conditioners for the elderly.
Read full entry »Some 27 percent of Ft. Worth's homicides took place in one part of the city's southeast side. In response, anti-violence programs within the community have blossomed, says the Ft. Worth Star-Telegram. Organizers say their programs are struggling, though. They say they have rejected all the excuses that African-Americans use to account for the violence in their neighborhoods. "All of the things that I hear them talk about happened to me as a young man," said Will Lawson, 35.
As a funeral service provider who picks up the dead after the fighting has paused, Lawson has a unique perspective. "I've got people between 22 and 36 who are thrown away like garbage," Lawson said. "I've seen bodies that have been completely ripped apart. I see an anger in our young people. My question is, Why are they so angry?" Lawson has joined others in the black community who worry that some of the best and brightest in their neighborhoods make an almost obligatory stop in prison on their way to adulthood -- or worse. The leaders of these groups preach, plead, teach, beg and bribe to save whomever they can. They focus on the black community because that is where they live, but all races participate in their programs, they said.
Read full entry »Some Indianapolis inner-city pastors are livid at being passed over in the first round for crime-fighting grants this year and have vowed to let City Hall know about it, reports the Indianapolis Star. "It doesn't make any sense to deny funding to the organizations that are out on the street in the black community every day doing things that work," said the Rev. Charles Harrison of the Ten Point Coalition, which received $124,000 last year. "We cannot let this stand. The community will be outraged."
The Indianapolis Parks Foundation sent emails to 88 community groups Friday telling them they won't be getting any of the $1.7 million from this year's Community Crime Prevention Grant program. The 27 groups that made the cut will submit final applications by April 20. An estimated 15 to 20 final recipients will be announced a month later. The foundation is reducing the grant total from $4 million last year to $1.7 million this year. A seven-member selection panel trimmed 115 applicants -- seeking $12 million -- to 27 asking for $3 million. Last year, 68 organizations got funds. Foundation President Cindy Porteus said the Ten Point Coalition "is a great organization with great programs," but the panel had to consider a number of factors. Chief among them were whether the applicants could show results and keep the program running if the grants dry up next year.
Read full entry »Some community groups are turning to online crime-tracking tools or creating neighborhood watch groups on the Internet that give them instant access to crimes reported in their neighborhoods and suspicious activity, says the Sacramento Bee. Susanne Burns of Carmichael, Ca., took action after her home was burglarized last May while her family slept.
Burns set up a Neighborhood Watch group of homes in her gated community. "We started emailing and this list grew basically out of control," she said. "It started with me emailing the 22 homes in our little community. It just mushroomed, and I think that's when it hit me." Now she has created the Carmichael Watchgroup, a Facebook page with 342 members that notifies residents of community meetings with the Sheriff's Department, crime-tracking website, and criminal reports. News about stolen bikes, garage break-ins and other crimes are posted regularly. At Christmas, video from one home's security cameras was posted showing a burglar breaking into a house and leaving on a bicycle with stolen property.
By Lisa Riordan Seville and Hannah Rappleye
Troubled Flint, Michigan explores innovative ways to reduce what some call ‘contagious’ violence.
On a rainy night last April, four teenagers ordered two strombolis and one pizza from a local Little Caesar’s in Flint, Michigan.
But according to prosecutors, the teenagers intended to rob the deliveryman, 33-year-old Michael Nettles.
Nettles died that night, after being shot multiple times in the back.
This sort of senseless killing has earned the small, economically troubled Michigan city notoriety as —in the words of the president of the police union—a “killing field.”
The city ended 2010 with 66 homicides, surpassing its all-time high of 61 homicides in 1986. The rate nearly doubled from 2009. Six of those homicides were allegedly committed by Elias Abuelazam, a serial stabber, who terrorized Flint through the first half of the year.
Flint, with a population of just over 100,000, is not the only U.S. city with a homicide problem. But the sheer number of deaths has left Flint struggling to address the epidemic in the face of dwindling resources. Local leaders, residents and law enforcement are now hoping that community-based programs will make a difference. Their efforts are part of a growing national effort to find innovative solutions to the problem of viral violence.
The reasons advanced for Flint’s troubles are familiar: economic woes, the prevalence of guns, and increasingly violent flare-ups among youth in the city, particularly young black men. But the convergence of all these factors appears to have made things worse.
“We try to say that we don’t have a gang problem here, or a drug problem, but I think we have a little bit of both,” says Ira G. Edwards, pastor of Flint’s Damascus Holy Life Baptist Church.
The pastor believes much of the violence involving young people arises from petty turf squabbles and the urge to retaliate against perceived insults, rather than organized gang violence.
“It’s like, ‘You kill my dog, I’m gonna have to kill your cat,” he says.
“Infectious” Homicides?
The Minnesota-based Center for Homicide Research, a group that tracks and studies homicides, calls the tit-for-tat violence “infectious” homicidal behavior.
The Center, which uses a staff of unpaid researchers, tracked homicide patterns based on data extracted from news reports published in the The Flint Journal between January and mid-November 2010. Their subsequent report , describing Flint’s homicides as showing evidence of “contagion,” attracted wide attention.
Since the researchers did not correlate their findings with police or court data on the motives or circumstances of the killings, the conclusion may be speculative. Nevertheless, Dallas Drake, a sociologist who is the primary author of the study, told The Crime Report that the patterns unearthed by researchers suggested that homicidal behavior in Flint occurred in clusters.
“There are at least three, possibly four, clusters of homicides,” says Drake. “I don’t think we’ve ever noticed that before in other cities. Maybe it’s just time for it to be discovered.”
Pastor Edwards, who is also a member of Flint Area Congregations Together, a community group, says the cluster concept mirrors what he sees first-hand.
“One person goes and gets shot, and then there’s a retaliation,” Edwards says. “And then they calm down.
A snapshot of homicides from the first half of 2010 show victims in Flint were largely young, black and male. Most were killed by gunfire, and many were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“We don’t know the motives for sure,” Daniel Kruger, a professor at the Prevention Research Center at the University of Michigan, says of the Flint murder epidemic. “We do know that retaliation in general is a major motive for violence. Violence begets violence.”
But Kruger says violence and vengeance are inevitably tied to rents in Flint’s social fabric.
“The economic engine is basically stalled,” Kruger says. “Honestly, any approach that’s really going to solve the big picture, I think, really does have to include a serious economic revitalization.”
A Blighted City
Until the late 1970s, Flint was a booming auto town. At its height, General Motors employed 80,000; now, it employs less than 9,000 in the area. As industry left, so did more than 100,000 people. Flint’s population shrunk by half, bringing blight, unemployment and an eroding tax base in its wake.
Unemployment in Flint was 11.8 percent in December. The poverty rate is 35.5 percent, high even for cities in Michigan. For black residents, it is above 40 percent. One in every 186 properties in Flint was in foreclosure at the end of last year, according to Realty Trac. Thousands of homes stand empty. Many have burned. The state of Michigan is currently weighing whether to grant Flint $20 million in bonds to cover the city’s budget deficit. Otherwise, Flint may face a state takeover.
Shrinking budgets in both the city and state have compounded these problems, forcing cities to make bruising cuts to both policing and social services.
The murders in Flint have strained already tense budget negotiations in the city. Last March, Flint laid off 46 police officers, 23 firefighters and closed two fire stations, after Mayor Dayne Walling failed to negotiate a new contract with the city’s public safety unions.
The following May, violence exploded in Flint, with nine homicides and over 100 reported assaults in 30 days, prompting some city and state officials to call for assistance from the National Guard.
Community Solutions
Ideas abound about how to fix Flint. The report from the Center for Homicide Research recommends the city invest in technology like surveillance cameras and license plate scanners, which could assist the overstretched police force in gathering evidence and targeting high-risk areas.
Drake also suggested the city find additional ways to attract federal resources. Flint has considered implementing Project Exile an approach to curbing gun violence that began in Richmond, Virginia in 1997. States throughout the country have followed Virginia’s lead, prosecuting those caught with illegal guns under the federal Gun Control Act of 1968, which imposes five-year mandatory minimum sentences on those convicted.
Locals have called for the city to re-open its jail. Flint now uses the overcrowded county jail, which often cannot accommodate the number of those arrested. They have also started to participate in several innovative community policing projects.
One is called FLINT Ceasefire, a community-based crime intervention program, based on a model already operating in some 80 cities under the National Network for Safe Communities. The model, developed by Prof. David Kennedy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has been lauded for its success in reducing drug- and gang-related violence in urban neighborhoods. Under the model, gang leaders or others who have been identified as the primary sources of criminal activity are “invited” by police to a no-holds-barred session with community leaders. They are given a stark choice: cease their criminal activities and enter job training and counseling programs, or face certain prosecution.
The Flint program in particular is modeled after Operation Ceasefire, which was implemented by Prof. Kennedy and local police in High Point, North Carolina, a city nearly the same size as Flint and beset with similar problems. Since Operation Ceasefire began in 2003 the decline in violence has been dramatic.
With the help of federal grants, the FBI, and law enforcement experts from across the country, Flint hopes to see the same results with its own version of Operation Ceasefire. At the same time, the University of Michigan has teamed up with community groups and city schools to develop programs aimed at preventing a younger generation from falling into destructive patterns of violence.
Prof. Peter Hutchinson, for instance, of the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, directs a violence prevention initiative with seventh graders that started at one middle school in Flint, and is spreading through the county.
The prospects for Flint may also be improved by the city’s slow, but marked, economic recovery. Downtown Flint has begun to experience a revitalization. A new condo complex downtown is filling up fast. The city has begun razing abandoned houses, and community groups are planting public gardens. The city recently got its first full supermarket.
Even though auto jobs are gone, education may become the key to Flint’s future economic growth. Civic leaders say the city is developing into a college town, much like Ann Arbor. Just as a number of factors converged to push Flint into a cycle of violence, it will inevitably require many forces working together to pull the city back. But these days, the anger and frustration of city residents is actually an encouraging sign.
“The people here, if they sound angry and upset, I think that that’s because things aren’t improving fast enough for them,” says Hutchinson, who has lived in the city since 1973.
“They see the potential here,” he added. “We just have to find our way.”
Lisa Riordan Seville and Hannah Rappleye are freelance reporters living in Brooklyn, NY.
Whether they're organizing neighborhood watch groups, hiring security guards, or arming themselves, many Detroiters are fed up with crime and are taking matters into their own hands, reports the Detroit News. "We're just trying to preserve our community, rather than just complaining about the crime problem," said Pamela Malone, whose neighborhood association hired a private firm to watch the neighborhood two years ago. "We realize the city is strapped, so we're dealing with reality — if there aren't enough police officers, what can we do to protect our property and quality of life?"
Attorney Gerald Evelyn said citizens often feel the need to take action because there aren't enough police to respond to emergencies quickly. The average response time for dangerous runs in Detroit is 24 minutes from the time a 911 call is received, according to statistics released in April. Nationwide statistics are not available, but Atlanta police have an 11-minute average response time and in Washington, D.C., police respond in an average of eight minutes. Raphael Johnson, a community activist who has organized patrols in several Detroit neighborhoods, said, "No one is going to come and save us, so we have to help ourselves." The frustration with crime isn't just a Detroit phenomenon, said David Benelli, a retired New Orleans police lieutenant and member of the victims rights organization Crimefighters. "People feel like the perpetrators have more rights than victims," Benelli said. "If you have a person who commits a crime, and both the perp and victim are injured, the perp gets all his medical expenses taken care of, whereas the victims have to fend for themselves.
