Cited: Time
William Bratton was given the idea by Maple, an employee, for the data-driven policing. When Bratton became police Commissioner under Mayor Giuliani in 1994 these ideas which citywide. This is where CompStat evolved from and became a real-time database of crime statistics and other intelligence for pinpointing trouble spots and targeting resources for the Police Department. Precinct captains and district commanders found themselves in the hot seat and results followed. The crime rate went way down. New York, known as the city of fear, became one of the safest major cities in America. And Commissioner Bratton was put on the cover of Time.
A new survey of retired New York City police supervisors, however, confirms what many skeptics have suspected for years. Pressure from the twice-weekly CompStat reviews inspired a certain amount of fudging (exactly how much is unknown). Police hunted for bargains on eBay so that they could adjust theft reports to reflect lower values of stolen goods, magically transforming major crimes into minor ones. A fight involving a weapon–aggravated assault–might become a mere fistfight by the time the police report was filed. Nevertheless, behind the gamesmanship was a genuine drop in crime. (Murder is down an astonishing 80% from its peak in New York City, and it’s very hard to fudge a murder.) Similar declines have been recorded in many other cities.
Versions of CompStat now shape police work in metropolitan areas from coast to coast. In the Maryland suburbs of Washington, for example, Prince George’s County chief Roberto Hylton sings the praises of “a technology that we call Active Crime Reporting, which provides information every 15 minutes, so I can see, even from a laptop away from work, the whole crime picture of the county. I can shift resources. It actually provides me with the trends, patterns that have occurred the previous week, previous day, maybe even the previous year.” Paired with a program to improve trust and communication between police and crime-plagued communities, the data-driven approach is working, Hylton says.
The New Economy of Crime
Criminologists will tell you, however, that the tale of CompStat is not the whole story. New York City’s crime rate actually began to drop a couple of years before Giuliani became mayor. And rates began falling in cities without CompStat at about the same time–though not as rapidly as in New York. For a while police were changing tactics, the criminals were shifting gears too.
The high-crime hell of the 1980s and early ’90s was a period of chaos in the illegal drug trade. Powder cocaine was generally measured and sold in multiple-dose amounts behind locked doors, but crack was relatively cheap and highly portable. Upstart young dealers saw an opening and shouldered their way into a business long dominated by established kingpins. Trading valuable drugs for ready cash in plain sight was a recipe for robbery and intimidation. Dealers armed themselves for protection, and soon every teenage squabble in crack territory carried a risk that bullets would fly.
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From that low point, the drug business has settled down in most cities. Distribution is better organized. Crack use has fallen by perhaps 20%, according to UCLA criminal-justice expert Mark Kleiman, as younger users have turned against a drug that had devastated their neighborhoods. Opiates and marijuana are illegal, just like cocaine, but they don’t turn users into paranoid, agitated, would-be supermen. “A heroin corner is a happy corner” where junkies quietly nod off, says David Simon, creator of the TV series The Wire, who used to cover cops for the Baltimore Sun.
Criminologist Conklin believes that two statistics in particular–median age and the unemployment rate–help explain the ebb and flow of crime. Violence is typically a young man’s vice; it has been said that the most effective crime-fighting tool is a 30th birthday. The arrival of teenage baby boomers in the 1960s coincided with a rise in crime, and rates have declined as America has grown older. The median age in 1990, near the peak of the crime wave, was 32, according to Conklin. A decade later, it was over 35. Today, it is 36-plus. (It is also true that today’s young men are less prone to crime. The juvenile crime rate in 2007, the most recent available was the lowest in at least a generation.)
“The effect of unemployment,” Conklin adds, “is problematic.” Indeed it is. Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute dissected this issue in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed. “As the economy started shedding jobs in 2008,” she wrote, “criminologists and pundits predicted that crime would shoot up, since poverty, as the ‘root causes’ theory holds, begets criminals. Instead, the opposite happened. Over 7 million lost jobs later, crime has plummeted to its lowest level since the early 1960s.” To Mac Donald, this is proof that data-driven police work and tougher sentencing are the answer to crime–not social-welfare programs. Conklin thinks it may be too soon to tell. “The unemployment rate began to spike less than a year ago. We may yet see the pressure show up in crime rates,” he says. It’s fair to say, though, that the belief in a simple cause-and-effect relationship between income and crime has worn pretty thin.
The danger of chronic joblessness is that jobs are a part of the social fabric. Ideally, they connect people to constructive projects and well-ordered institutions. They foster self-discipline and reward responsibility. Some optimists theorize that crime rates might continue to drop in coming years as police pit their strength against a dwindling army of criminals. In his recent book, When Brute Force Fails, UCLA’s Kleiman argues that new strategies for targeting repeat offenders–including reforms to make probation an effective sanction rather than a feckless joke–could cut crime and reduce prison populations simultaneously. Safer communities, in turn, might produce more hopeful and well-disciplined kids. It’s a sweet image to contemplate in this sour era, but a lack of jobs is a cloud over the picture.
A more realistic view might be the one dramatized in Simon’s HBO series, The Wire. In 60 episodes spread across five seasons from 2002 to 2008, the program humanized this tangled question of crime fighting with penetrating sophistication. CompStat-obsessed politicians fostered numbers-fudging in the ranks. Cool-headed drug lords struggled to tame their war-torn industry. Gangs battled for turf under the nodding gaze of needy junkies. Prisons warehoused the violent and nonviolent with little regard for who could be rehabilitated. It made for award-winning drama, but it also was a reminder that in every American city, neighborhoods remain where violence still reigns and it simply isn’t safe to walk around. And national crime statistics mean nothing to the millions of people who live there.
The crime problem hasn’t been solved in these places, in fact, the fight has barely begun. The nations violence nature has been cooled by many factors that have come together more must be added to those factors. They need more creativity pragmatism and heartfelt concern for victims of inner-city crime. The prospect is daunting, and the will to keep working at the persistent pockets of lawlessness will be sorely tested during this economic crisis. Some may think it is hopeless while others compare this time to 20 years ago just before things began to get better and say there is still a chance.
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My Take: I do not know if these guys know what they’re talking about. It seems a little strange that the crime rate would go down when unemployment goes up. On the other hand, it would be logical because there would be less for thieves to steal because people would not have the money to buy them. I do know that even unemployment seems to giving money to people who need a divorce lawyer.
Of course, that only benefits one spouse who gets a alimony lawyer. That means the other spouses stuck hunting for a job. Many people hunting for a job will do just about anything except break the law. I have seen businessmen who lowered their expectations enough to where they will put in exterior doors just to earn a little extra money. It is not that difficult to put in wooden doors, so anybody can do it. But the idea that somebody is willing to do anything for a little extra money is a good thing.
I am sure that Lehigh County PA criminal attorneys are not happy they don’t have that many customers when the crime rate goes down. But I am sure is that the youth of America will keep a Lehigh County PA juvenile law attorney in the black.
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