Go to qualitypolicing.com

Tag: foot patrol

  • “Not on my post, you don’t”

    Thinking about lobbies and public housing and policing….

    Take the Jackie Robinson Homes, “an 8-story building with 189 apartments housing some 440 residents.” Last year there was an issue with kids raising hell. Residents were scared.

    So lets say there are 600 people living there in the Jackie Robinson Home (since many live off lease). Put a cop there. What else are police doing that is more important? To hell with whatever patrol structure currently exists. To hell with the desk jobs and even specialized units. Three cops can work 14-hours, six-days a week. One officer working less than 40 hours a week can still be responsible for one building. And you’ve still got the entire NYPD as backup. A police officer out of car — with a name and face, a human being — this is how you build relationships and solve crimes while practicing aggressive order-maintenance community policing.

    From DNAinfo:

    A tenant of the Jackie Robinson Houses provided DNAinfo with video Tuesday showing the indoor bicycle riding and other rowdy conduct that residents said has been routine at 111 E. 128th St. since October 2014.

    …

    The commanding officer of the building’s police service area only found out about the teens’ behavior Tuesday [December 2015, a year later] and no residents had previously filed any formal complaints, an NYPD source told the Daily News.

    Presumably, three months later, this has been resolved by now. But why should it take a formal complaint for a housing cop to know about a year-long problem in a building they patrol? Why isn’t there a cop who can say, “this is my building and I know what is going on and who is doing it”?

    Police officers need — and for the most part want to assume — geographic ownership. I was happy one night to be “Sheriff of Orangeville” (thanks for that term, D.W.). Oh, yes, there was a new sheriff in town, and Orangeville was quite that night. (The rest of 334 post was OK, too.) Mostly I had to be happy with the area around Hopkins hospital. But whichever post I policed, it was “my” post that night. I cared. And also… I didn’t want the hassle and paperwork and hospital details that come with serious crime.

    Progress and “sector policing” put the nail in the coffin of Baltimore post integrity (@ThanksBatts). Basically, instead of one cop patrolling one post you have five cops patrolling five posts. A cop can’t care or take ownership of a whole police sector of ten or twenty thousand people. But a cop can almost handle two square miles and 3,000 people. So now crime is up and there isn’t a single officer who says, “This is my corner and you drinking and selling drugs here is disrespectful to me, personally.”

    Well, back in NYC, there’s a housing bureau cop for every 200 residents in public housing. About 500,000 residents in 328 developmentsand 2,553 buildings buildings. You don’t need a NYPD mobile command post with loud generator and overly-bright lighting after somebody gets killed. If there are 2,700 police officers in the Housing Bureau, then there are more officers than buildings.

    Do you see where I’m going with this?

    Why not just assign one officer to each building? Now many of the buildings are small and don’t need anybody. So you don’t put a cop there. Queensbridge is the largest public housing project remaining in America. Six cops on visible patrol 14 hours a day, six days a week. That takes about 18 cops in total. But it’s still just cop for each 450 residents. Is that too much to ask?

    Were it up to me, I’d give each patrol officer a very small chuck of the city. Of course you’d have to patrol a larger area. But you and only you are responsible for everything that happens in that for that small chunk. Everything. We’re talking an area of roughly 500 people or 1/3 of a mile of street. Those are your people. Know them. Treat them well. And when residents have a problem, they could still call 911 and a cop will show up. But they might prefer to wait till you’re on duty to talk to you, whom they know. It’s really not that crazy. And for some reason it will never happen.

  • Let’s Rethink Patrol

    Here’s another piece of mine in CNN, also out today. I hope this gets a bit of attention because I was able to move past the headlines (thanks to my wonderful editor at CNN for her encouragement and mad editing skillz) to question the very concept police patrol. That’s the type of moderately deep-thinking that is hard to get published in op-ed form.

    But at this moment there might be a small window of opportunity to make substantive changes in policing. Why do have a system where, for instance, the first responder to a mentally ill person is a police officer? It doesn’t make sense. Not for the cops. Not for the mentally ill. So why not rethink a reactive model of undervalued and understaffed police patrol. The status quo swallows up resources and — by design — limits the discretion and problem-solving ability of police officers.

    Many people who call 911 do need help, but it’s not help that a very young police officer barely out of high school — armed and with the power of arrest — can provide. These calls for service would often be better addressed by doctors, social workers, teachers and parents.

    Over the past 40 years, with the advent of call-and-response policing, the mentality of policing changed. Consider the portrayal in the 1980s TV show “Hill Street Blues” (it’s pop culture, but it contains truth): The first sergeant, played by Michael Conrad, finished roll call with the sage advice: “Let’s be careful out there.” After his death, the new sergeant was played by Robert Prosky. His motto? “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.”

    There are benefits to old-fashioned beat policing that we need to reclaim, but we can’t as long as most police resources are controlled by civilian dispatchers, officers have too little discretion, and the war on drugs dominates urban policing by criminalizing too many people.

    For a cop bouncing from call to call constantly dealing with criminals or people who have lost control of their lives, it’s too easy to believe that nobody in the area is in control. From the window of a patrol car, every face on the corner starts looking the same. By walking on foot and engaging with the noncriminal public, police officers, especially those without any prior knowledge of the area they police, could begin to understand both how communities function and how they fail.

    Read the rest here.

  • How about telling cops what they should do rather than what they shouldn’t do?

    Here’s my piece in today’s New York Times:

    Critics of police — and there have been a lot this past year — are too focused on what we don’t want police to do: don’t make so many arrests; don’t stop, question and frisk innocent people; don’t harass people; don’t shoot so many people, and for God’s sake don’t do any of it in a racially biased way.

    Those are worthy goals all, but none of this tells police what they *should* do. Some critics of police seem to forget that the job of police and crime prevention involves dealing with actual criminals.

    It’s a perfectly fine short piece. I do want to move the discussion away from what police shouldn’t do to what police should do. But I find the whole New York Times “room for debate” concept a bit disingenuous. Because there’s no debate. As a writer, I don’t know who else is writing or what they are going to say. It really would be nice to respond to other points and flesh out the issues. Instead “room for debate” is a collection of 300-400 word op-eds. Perhaps that is what it should called: “Room for too-short opinion pieces from people willing to write for free just to get a Times byline.” Doesn’t really roll of the tongue, admittedly.

    (On principle, in solidarity with free-lance writers everywhere, I try not to write for free, especially to for-profit businesses. Writing is work. And workers should be paid. A proper 800-1,000 word op-ed published in the print edition of the Times or the Washington Post or the Daily News or with CNN.com generally pays $200 – $300. A dollar figure that has actually decreased for some publication. Now the $300 I get from CNN is not a lot of money, mind you. But it really is the principle… and the money. And yet once again I wrote for the Times for free because it’s the Times. So much for principles. Or money. But it is pretty easy for me to hammer out 300 words.)

  • Sometimes you just get wet

    Sometimes you just get wet

    From Shorpy:

  • Bratton tweak Operation Impact…

    …By putting rookie officers with more veteran officers. This should have been a no-brainer years ago. Partnering dumb with dumber — both right out of the police academy, both sometimes clueless white boys from Long Island — was never a brilliant idea (though even then it did help reduce crime). Rookie cops faced with quota pressure who could not distinguish class differences in the ghetto led to a lot of unwarranted stops, questionably legal marijuana arrests, and political backlash that hurt the NYPD. It also reinforcing the idea that foot patrol was just something to be endured before you got to become real police.

    The story in the Daily News.

  • High Crime Neighborhood + Cops on Bikes = Less Crime

    From the Chicago Tribune:

    The [Chicago] impact zones, established in February 2013 after a violent 2012, comprise just 3 percent of the city’s geographic area but account for one-fifth of its violent crime, according to the department.

    From the Sun Times:

    In March 2013, the department began assigning foot patrol offers to the high-crime areas. McCarthy said feedback from the communities has been positive, as have the results. Since Feb. 1, 2013, in the impact zones, murders are down nearly 50 percent, shootings are down 43 percent and overall crime is down 26 percent, doubling and outpacing citywide reductions, he said.

    How is the different than NYC? Hopefully, one would think, the cops in Chicago are doing something other than feeling quota pressure to write citations.

    In numbers, though, we’re not talking many cops. 360 officers in total. 140 on bike 220 on foot. That’s 18 cops per impact zone, which means about 4 or 5 on duty 16 hours a day. The zones seem rationallysized. The few I checked are about one-quarter to one-half square mile (or 30 to 55 blocks).

  • The NYPD is a-changin’

    Bratton Tells Chiefs He’ll Stop Sending Rookies to High-Crime Areas

    And, as you probably know, DeBlasio is dropping the city’s appeal to the stop and frisk lawsuit. But hoping to limit a federal monitor to 3 years. In response: “Four unions representing NYPD officers have filed appeals and motions opposing dismissal of the city’s appeal, which are pending.”

    Good times. Fun times.

  • In Praise of the Beat Cop

    In Praise of the Beat Cop

    In the current issue of New York’s Transportation Alternative’s Reclaimmagazine.

    [And dig the picture of me, from 12 years ago:]
    [photo by Amy Eckert]

  • Back to the Future

    Back in 1829 London, Robert Peel and Company said that every police officer, “should be able to see every part of his beat, at least once in ten minutes or a quarter of an hour.” That’s a pretty good “response time.” Craaazy, I thought. But is it?

    I think there are 6,000 miles of streets in New York City. I know there are about 8 million people, and 35,000 police officers. Could we not just give every police officer 1,000 feet of street and 230 people to be responsible for? For some beats this would be less than one building. Any crime that happens on your1,000 feet or to or by one of your230 people would be your responsibility.

    Sure, make it bigger or smaller for population density and crime rate and whatever else you want. And I understand that while on duty each officer would have to patrol six beats to make up for officers not on duty. But with beats that small, is it too much to ask for? Or if you prefer, just work with existing patrol officers and double the size of the beats. Still doesn’t seem like too much.

    I know it’s crazy and would never work…. but why not?

    Seriously, where have all the officers gone? And wouldn’t it better to have a police officer take responsibility for me and my block rather than have two strangers show up 20 minutes after I call 911?

  • Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment!

    Rarely to get exciting reading articles in academic journals (whether that says bad thing about me or the journals I leave to you), but this is exciting: “The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment: A Randomized Controlled Trial Of Police Patrol Effectiveness In Violent Crime Hotspots.” It’s in the current issue of Criminology (like most academic journals, unavailable to the general public).

    The Newark Foot Patrol Experiment was researched in the 1970s. And though it showed foot patrol in a more positive light than many people remember it for, it was hardly the unequivocal support for foot patrol I would have expected.

    Now I know foot patrol works, but get a bunch of academics in a room and ask a simple question like, “Does foot patrol work?” and you’ll get a lot of “we don’t know” and “no” and “more research is needed.” Even in the police world, opinion is split.

    Well finallysomebody has done a proper study of foot patrol. The bottom line? In high-crime areas, foot patrol decreased serious violent crime by 23 percent. This happened just after three months of foot patrol. No big difference was found in lower-crime areas, but then we fall back on the Newark Experiment and reduced public fear.

    I bet you’ll never hear of a study showing the crime-reduction benefits of officers remaining “in service” to answer radio calls.