How crime is vanquished
By Conor FriedersdorfKudos to The Washington Post for dedicating its Sunday magazine cover to a profile of D.C. police chief Cathy Lanier — given the high crime rate here policing is the most important local issue by a longshot. But how annoying that the authors don’t debunk the notion that crime is an intractable social ill that police haven’t any power to affect.
Consider this excerpt:
Former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood Jr. said that expectations for big-city police chiefs are unrealistic. Crime is rooted in poverty, inadequate schools and dysfunctional families, creating deep problems no police department can cure. "People think police are the ultimate answer to crime and violence. For me, it is building a crime-resistant neighborhood, to mobilize communities to take responsibility."
Since the late 1990s, more than 18 police commanders have left the New York City police department to run their own agencies elsewhere. This unprecedented migration has spread the Compstat revolution—the data-driven transformation of policing begun under New York police commissioner William Bratton in 1994—across the nation.
East Orange, New Jersey, has 70,000 citizens by official counts, about 95 percent of them black, and deep pockets of poverty. Crime there—much of it violent—had started skyrocketing in 1999, reaching a per-capita rate in 2003 that was 14 times that of New York City and five times that of Detroit. East Orange’s mayor recruited Cordero to quell the violence; Cordero started work in 2004. The results were astonishing. By the end of 2007, major felonies had dropped 68 percent, and homicides 67 percent, from their 2003 high—possibly a national record.
Given the track record these techniques have had in numberous dangerous cities, you’d think DC’s police chief would be scrambling to implement the NYPD diaspora model, and that journalists profiling her would at least ask whether she’d considered doing so. Barring that they should at least ask what empirical evidence undergirds the strategy that she plans to pursue instead.
Tags: crime, NYPD, police, Washington D.C.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
[…] Friesdorf, writing at Culture11’s editorial blog The Confabulator, passes along a similar anecdote from the District: Former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood Jr. said that […]
October 27th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
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