A schizophrenic article in today’s Chicago Sun-Times describes the steps New York has taken to drastically cut its crime rate and how Chicago, which is now less safe than New York, can apply the same methods, just not so harsh.
We start with a success anecdote from New York:
BROOKLYN, N.Y.–Ric Curtis used to watch from his window as dogs fought to the death in an empty lot across from his apartment.
Now the cheering gamblers and snarling pit bulls are gone and the lot has become a tiny, gated park with trees and shrubs.
The shootings, robberies and drug dealing that plagued the corner are mostly gone, too.
“When we first moved here in 1991, we put the baby to sleep on a mattress on the floor,” Curtis said. “We worried about a bullet coming through the window. Now we have two daughters and they sleep in bunk beds.”
In this gritty Brooklyn neighborhood called Brownsville, crime rates have fallen at a stunning rate in the last 10 years. In 1993, 74 people were murdered here. Last year, only 16 people were killed.
Hooray! Kids in bunk beds. But wait! Not everyone is happy:
To New Yorkers like Curtis in the city’s toughest neighborhoods, the streets seemed to get safer overnight. To others, like developer Bill Webber of the tony Upper West Side, the change was more gradual, and in some ways not as welcome.
“Of course, it’s because of Giuliani,” Webber said. “Sure, with my long view over 30 years here, I think the neighborhoods have become more secure…. In Times Square, the seamier elements have been driven away, like the peep shows. But some of us in New York do not think this is progress. I miss some of the grunge. If you take some of the friction out of urban life, it becomes less interesting.”
That’s right, people who sell property in expensive neighborhoods miss the texture of the gritty life-and-death struggles in the city. Struggles that occur in other neighborhoods, which inflate the value of his holdings in safe neighborhoods. That’s the other side.
No, wait, there’s another side:
He [a criminologist] came across “Hamp,” a 62-year-old addict. Hamp told Curtis that NYPD’s zero-tolerance policy has hit the neighborhood hard.
“They’ll bust you for the least little thing,” he said, standing in a trash-strewn parking lot. “They used to come out and say, ‘Good morning, how you doing, Hamp?’ Now they look at you like a piece of s—.”
Addicts like Hamp scrape together enough money to buy their heroin through a variety of hustles. They work as prostitutes, sell small amounts of drugs, and even sell the needles they get free from needle exchange programs.
“It’s been driven underground,” Hamp said. “The police will no longer tolerate addicts shooting up outside in parking lots and on park benches…. Right after Giuliani initiated it, they started going after open cans of beer and loitering.”
Over the past decade, Curtis said, New Yorkers have become less tolerant of criminals and more likely to call the cops.
That’s right, zero tolerance hurts criminals. It’s a pretty discriminatory practice, wot?
Don’t worry, Chicago criminals, because the Chicago city government is only wasting tax payer dollars to study New York policing methods. It won’t actually implement them:
But Cline and Crowl came to believe the New York strategy was not a perfect fit for Chicago. It would have to be customized to target street gangs–a much bigger source of crime in Chicago than in New York–and to maintain a reservoir of goodwill between Chicago police and the public.
Remember, it’s all about the feelings. Furthermore, the academics from respected Loyola University intone:
Arthur Lurigio, head of the criminology department at Loyola University in Chicago, said Chicago would be wise not to simply copy New York’s strategy.
“Chicago would have to be very selective in choosing elements of the New York model,” he said. “It does not make sense to import models of policing. Order and maintenance policing–the kind they do in New York–is effective if it is not too heavy-handed and construed as harassment.”
Lurigio said he would like to research whether complaints against New York cops have skyrocketed during the crackdown on crime.
“That’s part of the ‘New York miracle’ that does not become public,” he said. “I have a feeling there is an interesting story there.”
Whew! For a minute there, it looked as though Chicago was going to become safer, but fortunately, the Chicago city police are apparently more interested in public relations and possibly listening to nattering academics who make a living out of finding “an interesting story there” whether “there” is a Shakespeare’s The Tempest and the interesting story is “homoeroticism among heterosexual minority women” or there is “This city where children are killed in murderous crossfire” and the interesting story is “the pigs are mean.”
