New Crime Strategy Takes After NYC, LA and Chicago
When Mayor Adrian Fenty and Police Chief Cathy Lanier introduced their new strategy for tackling the District's stubborn crime problem late last week, we expressed some skepticism. After all, "new" strategies come along about as often as school superintendents, neither of which have proven to be particularly good at fixing what they have to fix.
But we might have reasons to be hopeful. Beyond today's news that the weekend's all-out deployment netted nearly 500 arrests, Lanier's new plan, which involves tracking crime more carefully and crafting responses accordingly, is similar to plans adopted in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. And that could be good news. According to an article in this week's issue of The Economist, those three cities managed to keep violent crimes down last year even as they rose throughout the country. (The District recently revised last year's stats, revealing that violent crime rose nine percent in 2006.) How? Explains the magazine:
The three police forces, though, look increasingly alike when it comes to methods of tackling crime. The new model was pioneered in New York. In the mid-1990s it began to map crimes, allocate officers accordingly (a strategy known as “putting cops on the dots”) and hold local commanders accountable for crime on their turf. Since 2002 it has flooded high-crime areas with newly qualified officers.
Sound like the District's new plan? It should. Police commanders studied trends and isolated the specific days and times during which certain crimes are most likely to happen, shaping deployments around those findings. In my neighborhood, a special police detail has focused on robberies, which have increased 300 percent in the last month as compared to the year before. The presence over the last few days was obvious and significant.
The article also reports on a demographic trend that could be contributing to a decrease in violent crime in those cities:
Another change is that poor Americans have been displaced by poor immigrants—who, as studies have repeatedly shown, are much better behaved than natives of similar means. This trend is symbolised by the disappearance of blacks. Roughly half of America's murder victims and about the same proportion of suspected murderers are black. In five years America's three biggest cities lost almost a tenth of their black residents, while elsewhere in America their numbers held steady.
We've already talked about this demographic trend being true for the District -- from 2000 to 2006, the number of African Americans in the District fell 6 percent, while the number of whites, Asians and Latinos jumped 14, 20 and 6 percent respectively. But as Ryan noted in his Sunday column on crime, a rise in income inequality also tracks with a rise in violent crime -- and the majority of the losses of African American residents have been those in the middle class, leaving the District starkly divided between a well-to-do white population and poorer African Americans.
Fenty and Lanier's new crime strategy might work, but the city's increasing polarization may also prove a stubborn adversary. Only time will tell, and the summer has just started.