Crime is on the upswing. In some cities, violent crime
has spiked. Just as important, the public has tired of
many of the late 20th Century crime reduction
strategies. Strategies and tactics such as saturation
patrol, zero tolerance policies and random check points
are only modestly effective in gaining a short-term
reduction in criminal activity and nearly always
generate public dissatisfaction. Most of the 20th
Century police tactics and strategies only displace
crime; temporarily or spatial. The bad guys either wait
or they leave the area until the police and community
tire. This is not crime reduction, this is crime
displacement.
The issues associated with crime displacement do not
mean all 20th Century policing should be
discounted. Indeed, part of the solution is a return to
a number of basic policing function along with
incorporating new ideas and technologies. The following
is a brief synopsis of potential ten crime reduction
strategies for the 21st Century.
1. Demand Adherence to the Concepts of Reasonable
Suspicion and Probable Cause
Walk through your organization and ask the first ten
sworn personnel you encounter to define Reasonable
Suspicion and Probable Cause. You will find that more
than half are either unable to define both, or confuse
the two. These are the two great pillars of American
policing, yet many officers do not understand them. If
you can get every officer in your organization to
thoroughly understand these two concepts you will: Make
better arrests; have a better filing and prosecution
rate; decrease use of force; decrease citizen
dissatisfaction; and, decrease civil actions. This is
medium to long-term strategy that will decrease crime.
2. Create a Serial Offender Task Force
Many agencies are amassing a tremendous amount of data.
Yet, whenever there is a “spike” or upward trend in
crime, they fall back on short-term displacement
strategies such as saturation patrol. Managers who do
this are only connecting crime by its spatial and
temporal factors. However, if you look closely at the
data and began to connect crime by Method of Operation,
along with the time and place factors, you will see
serial offenders. It could be gangs, robbers, burglars
or any crime. Once you determine you have a serial
offender, target that offender not the community.
Targeting specific offenders, even if unknown, is
ultimately more effective that tactics like saturation
patrols which target the community. An effective Serial
Offender Task Force would include a core team dedicated
to ferreting out serial offenders from the data and then
assembling the necessary expertise to target same.
This type of fluid task force can then select from a
number of strategies. The first strategy when targeting
serial offenders discovered through an analysis of crime
data is, however, the re-investigation of all prior
reports. Suppose you discover a serial offender who
commits street robberies. Go back and re-investigate
all of the crimes: re-interview the victims and
witnesses and search for overlooked evidence. This
first strategy ensures that all the data you have
included in your initial assessment is good and will
likely discover additional data about the offender. The
serial offender task force is then able choose the best
strategy to locate and arrest the offender.
3. Focus Resources on DUI Enforcement
This is not an endorsement of check points. Check
points target the community, not the offender. Go to
your traffic officers or whomever has the records and
look at ten random DUI arrests. How many of them have
criminal histories beyond DUI? At a minimum, DUI
drivers are irresponsible individuals who require an
intervention by the criminal justice system.
Furthermore, you will find that many of the DUI drivers
you arrest have committed other criminal offenses.
To institute this strategy, first return to the number
one recommendation in this paper. Ensure all of your
officers know what gives them a reasonable suspicion
and/or probable cause to make a traffic stop. Ensure
they all know the objective symptoms of DUI. If you
have the resources, field DUI experts with the mandate
to mentor your regular patrol staff. Make DUI arrests a
command priority by explaining to your field personnel
that it is also a crime reduction strategy because many
DUI offenders also have criminal backgrounds.
4. Focus on Domestic Violence
As with DUI, this is a reprehensible behavior and, like
DUI suspects, you will find that people arrested for
domestic violence have also committed other criminal
offenses. Train your field officers to conduct thorough
preliminary investigations, to gather good statements,
to gather evidence such as photographs and medical
treatment and to document the primary aggressor.
Develop the necessary field and detective expertise to
make these arrests stick.
5. Know Your Community Problems
Incorporate community issues in your crime data. As an
example, does your crime data include vacant lots? Or
apartment buildings in serious disrepair? Can your
crime analysis personnel overlay community issues with
crime problems and potential partners? Can you
systematically identify and then prioritize community
problems? Do you assign officers to work on these
problems? Do you hold people accountable for solving
problems? You can’t do everything, but if you had this
type of data you could make a list of the top five
community issues based on their proximity to criminal
activity and address those five problems.
6. Know Your Potential Community Partners
Do you know every non-profit, church, youth group or
government agency that works in your jurisdiction? Do
you have a comprehensive list of these organizations?
Do your personnel routinely attend meetings with these
organizations? Do your field, detective and support
personnel know this information? Can you overlay the
location of community groups and organizations with
crime data? You cannot form partnerships until you know
all your potential partners.
7. Form Partnerships
Focus on what your agency does well and form
partnerships with your community organizations to solve
the problems you do not do well. Based on
recommendations five and six, you should know who can
help and where you need help – ask for help.
8. Incorporate “What do you Think?” in Your
Organization and Leadership Style
If you have all the answers, you should be telling
fortunes. Most police officers are creative,
hardworking and intelligent human beings. You hired
them because they could do the job. If you are not
engaging them and asking for their creative
intelligence, you are losing the opportunity to employ
brain power every minute of every day. If you have
supervisors and/or managers who are not asking your line
personnel to step up and contribute their creative
intelligence, your supervisors and managers are
organizational road blocks to problem solving. This is
the simplest and most effective way of turning an
organization around. Yet, because of the historical
management and leadership styles of policing, this may
be the most difficult to adopt.
9. Talk to Everyone
Police work is about talking to people; It always has
been and always will be. It is about interviewing
victims and witnesses, developing informants and
exchanging ideas with the public. Remember: All
evidence is testimony. Someone must introduce the
fingerprints into court. Someone always testifies.
Human communication is essential to good policing.
Demand that all personnel have two casual conversations
for every official conversation. Internally, for every
work related conversation you have with a subordinate,
force yourself to talk to two people about non-work
related issues. How are their children? How was that
trip? Open the lines of communication internally by
requiring your supervisors and managers to follow your
lead. Externally, demand your field personnel do the
same. If they keep a record of their daily activities,
have them log their casual conversations, also. For
every traffic stop they make, require them to talk to
two people unofficially. Stop and ask the business
owner about business. Engage the kids in the park
playing basketball. Complain about the weather with the
homeless man. It does not matter the substance of this
informal communications. What does matter is the
ramifications. Not only will community satisfaction
with the police increase, but people will open up –
someone will tell the beat cop who complained about the
weather, who committed a homicide last week. The
community often knows, you have to get them to tell you.
10. Build a Community Network
The last six recommendations are the foundation for
developing a community network. If you accomplish those
recommendations, you will have the means to pick up the
telephone, send an email, walk across the hall, drive
downtown or attend a meeting that will prevent and solve
problems, and reduce crime in your community. People
will contact your agency with critical information. You
will know about potential bad things before the local
radio station. You will have the means to mobilize
community support and the organization’s brain power.
You will be in the 21st Century.
About the Author:
Lieutenant Raymond E. Foster, LAPD (ret.) is an
international criminal justice consultant, university
lecturer and author. He is the author of ten books
including Police Technology, A Concise History of
American Policing and Leadership: Texas Hold ‘em Style.
You can find out more about him at
www.police-lieutenant.com |