Community Policing, Chicago Style. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1999 by Fred Siegel

Community policing" and "broken-windows" policing both suggest new neighborhood-based approaches to crime control. For most observers, they are so similar as to be synonymous. In fact, however, as two recent books suggest, there are, for all the similarities, crucial differences not only in approach but impact.

Community Policing, Chicago Style,(*) by Wesley Skogan and Susan Hartnett, is a carefully designed, well-researched study of police reform in which the words "broken windows" never appear. The authors show how political concerns pushed Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley, Jr., to institute the CAPS program (Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy) in a city notoriously resistant to police reform. The bulk of the book is devoted to describing how CAPS was instituted and then evaluating the outcome.

Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic(**) (written with Peter Knobler) is the professional and personal autobiography of William Bratton, the country's most successful police chief. Turnaround has been treated as a score-settling account of the dispute, between Bratton and New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, that drove the chief from office. There are, to be sure, numerous shots taken at Giuliani, who is sometimes depicted as a power-mad publicity hound. But the book offers more than gossip. The most interesting sections show how the single greatest urban public-policy success of the past 30 years, New York's broken-windows policing, emerged out of a meld of Bratton's Boston experiences and the ideas of police analyst George Kelling. Or, as Bratton put it, "I supported what he wrote because I had already lived it."

The new policing revolves around a rethinking of two intertwined concepts, "victimless crime" and "911 policing." The first suggested that the problems of order produced by drunks, drugs, and punk-ridden public spaces was, in sixties lingo, just a question of "up-tight burghers who had to learn to let go." Once that happened, the police could stop harassing drunks and druggies and get on with the important business of reducing serious crime. They would go after the "big guys" with the new technology provided by 911 telephone systems. The 911 network was designed to upgrade an older quasi-military model of policing based on motorized patrols that kept in close contact with headquarters through two-way radios. In the 1970s, this approach was enhanced by the introduction of 911 calls that enabled the central command to direct cops to trouble spots quickly.

"911," explains Bratton, "changed the face of American policing, putting a premium on 'the three R's': rapid response, random patrols, and reactive investigation. The cutting edge of policing theory in those years was all about response time and arrest clearance rates, the faster the better." The trouble was that the police made an arrest in only about 3 percent of all 911 calls involving serious crime. The net effect of focusing on rapid response, while ignoring the problem of public disorder, was that the police and public only encountered each other when crimes were committed. The result: an increasingly alienated public because of what Kelling calls "stranger policing." Cities got the worst of both worlds, deteriorating neighborhoods and rising crime rates. Between 1966 and 1990, the rate of violent crimes quadrupled.

Both community and broken-windows policing were designed to reconnect the police to the population by dealing with the local disorder that simultaneously unnerved neighborhoods and invited more serious crime. Reformers wanted to both flatten the police hierarchy and decentralize the delivery of police protection. Just as with reengineered corporations, the change meant a shift from "command and control" structures, which depend on clear-cut hierarchies and bureaucratic procedure, to a style of management based on dispersed authority and a mix of discretion and accountability. This in turn meant moving away from easily quantifiable measures of achievement, like response time and arrests, to harder-to-quantify goals like fear reduction and order maintenance - although, as always, crime reduction remained central.

In Chicago's 1994 mayoral election, Daley was faced with rising crime and the possibility of a black and Latino alliance against him. He considered raising taxes to hire more police, but that produced an uprising among tax-sensitive whites on the city council, many of whose constituents sent their kids to parochial schools and felt that they were already taxed too much. Daley viewed community policing as a way to reduce crime on the cheap, thus satisfying minorities without angering whites.

The reforms, which were first tested out in five model districts before being introduced citywide in 1994, purposely built on Chicago's tradition of strong neighborhood identity. The goal was to make the police and the neighborhood "co-producers" of safety. The 25 police districts were divided into 279 "beats." Nontraditional policing on the "beat" was linked to the delivery of other city services. Skogan and Hartnett describe, for instance, the case where a beat cop, faced with a landlord who allowed his building to be used as a crack den, alerted the building inspectors and the prosecutor's office, which eventually brought the miscreant to court.