Friday, Jul 4, 2008
Ironically, New York and Boston both owe their 1990s police department overhauls to the same man, William Bratton. It was Bratton who changed the Boston police force's mission by placing an emphasis on selective crime prevention over haphazard response. Bratton left Boston for New York, where he served as that city's acclaimed police chief from 1994 to 1996, before ego clashes with Giuliani forced him out.
Since replacing Bratton in Boston, Evans has become hailed as an innovator in his own right. A modest, low-key product of South Boston, a tightly knit Irish neighborhood, Evans has been less of a publicity hound than Bratton. He has been willing to cede his power, for instance, decentralizing the police force by breaking up the department's five jurisdiction zones into 10 smaller districts, and is quick to share credit for his department's successes.
Like Boston, New York also practices neighborhood (or community) policing, which gets officers out of their patrol cars and onto the streets. But Boston police have given a higher priority to building relationships with neighborhood residents than to the "zero tolerance" crime prevention strategy that prevails in New York. Better known as "broken windows" policing, the strategy is to crack down on small offenses like jaywalking or public drinking, which are often used as an excuse to "stop and frisk" thousands of people in a hunt for guns. The result is that thousands of innocents are harassed: More than 27,000 New Yorkers, largely minorities, were frisked by the NYPD's street crimes unit last year; only about 4,600 were arrested.
In Boston, the guiding principle has been integration, not intimidation. Ministers, street workers and community leaders have made an explicit compact with the police: They will identify lawbreakers in their neighborhoods and accept decisive police action against those criminals. In return, however, the police refrain from the kind of sweeping and indiscriminate stop-and-frisk tactics that bred such anger during the 1989 Stuart manhunt.
David Kennedy, a senior researcher at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government who has been intimately involved with Boston's policing efforts, describes the police philosophy this way: "In Boston the logic is, 'We know where the action is and we're going to carefully act in ways that can be very meaningful indeed to those people and places. But if you're in that neighborhood and you're not involved, we're gonna walk right by you.'"
Commissioner Evans cites curfews as an example of this strategy. Although youth curfews are in vogue in troubled cities like Baltimore and New Orleans, Evans says they clash with his department's philosophy. "Instead of those types of enforcement tactics that go across the board and target everyone, we do focused intervention," Evans says. "We put area restrictions and time curfews on young people who earn them instead of every young person in the city."
Evans has also focused on nontraditional crime-prevention tactics. He recalls a 1994 meeting with officers in his department's gang unit at a moment of rising violence in Boston's low-income Roxbury neighborhood. "I asked them what we could do," Evans says. "And I expected them to say, 'More cops, tougher judges and more jail space.' But what they said to a person was, 'We need jobs and alternatives for these people. We need to provide them with hope.'" The result has been a network of programs for youths and young adults, from business-sponsored summer jobs to "midnight basketball" to whitewater rafting trips.
Evans is particularly proud of his department's new practice of using federal block-grant money -- dollars traditionally used for salaries and overtime -- to award its own grants to local community groups who submit specific plans for assisting in crime-prevention. (This year the department will give out $1 million to 20 local groups.)
Leroy Stoddard, director of community services for Urban Edge, a Roxbury community development corporation that has received grant money, says the work can be as simple as shooing unwanted loiterers off building stoops and moving illegally parked cars -- tasks that are "below the threshold of police attention." As someone who works on the city streets every day, Stoddard can attest to the larger success of Boston's cooperative approach. "It's important to educate people and ready them for police enforcement," he says. "It's better for residents to be aware that the police are coming rather than be surprised by a crackdown."
What does this all amount to? Not just a plunging crime rate -- homicides are down from 152 in 1990 to 34 last year, and all violent crimes and robberies are down more than 80 percent since 1990 -- but also a steady drop in complaints about officer misconduct, by more than 50 percent since 1990.
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