CCTV, Boston and T.S. Eliot

Boston lockdown after terror attack last week (photo - Sacramento Bee)

If Boston proves anything it proves we need more CCTV, right? Yet police, CCTV, and the community working together caught the terrorists, not CCTV alone. We presume CCTV will cut crime and make things better. Crime might drop (which is good), but things don’t always get better.

The CPTED 3-D method (I don't teach it) states the design of a place should reinforce its designated use so that "illegitimate" users are kept at bay. Yet Jane Jacobs wrote that, if given the chance, people make spaces work in their own unique ways. That is what makes them safe.

Similar questions were posed a decade ago in Keith Hayward’s "Space, the final frontier: Criminology, the city and the spatial dynamics of exclusion."

SPACE: THE FINAL FRONTIER

Hayward threw down the gauntlet to the Criminology of Place crowd- situational crime prevention, environmental criminology and by association (not mine), CPTED.

Unfortunately Hayward wrote in the gibberish of post-structural "Foucauldian" prose, an academic fad popular among a small group of academics in the UK and Canada. Tragically it delivers little to those preventing crime except unreadable text. That's a shame because Hayward has a brilliant mind with important things to say.

He attacked theories of the then-emerging community of crime analysts and crime mappers. Today crime analysts populate every major police department. They desperately need this message.

Top down crime maps and CCTV can distract attention from what matters most

One part of that message: Spatial patterns - robbery hotspots, burglary densities, crime displacements - miss the point. More accurately, they are such a small part of the point that they distract attention away from the keys to prevention - causes behind criminal behavior.

SECOND GENERATION CPTED

Hayward's corrective is theoretical: link the individual experience of victims, offenders, and other citizens with the urban, social and cultural facts that create conditions for crime.

I think it is simpler. It’s the corrective Gerry Cleveland and I offered a decade earlier in Second Generation CPTED. Blogs on descriptive symbols and articles on Second Generation CPTED spell this out in detail.

Street life in Tijuana, Mexico - center of a narco-war?

Here are some starting places:

• Crime analysts should create a picture of crime motives in each neighborhood and link that to groups who might mitigate those motives. Otherwise they should stop calling themselves crime analysts and instead call themselves Imosprs – Incident-Mappers-of-Selected-Police-Records!

• Traditionalists tell me that community "culture" strategies in CPTED are beside the point. They say cutting the opportunity is the thing. They are wrong! Both are essential…concurrently! 

A friend of mine likes to quote T.S. Eliot: "We had the experience but missed the meaning." Let’s not miss the meaning of Boston.

New chairs at the Comstat table

The headlines proclaim victory. Are they right?

Last blog I talked about what caused dips in NY crime. There is no doubt something remarkable began in New York during the 1990s. It coincided with a wholesale reform in the New York Police Department. There is doubt whether those reforms caused the crime declines.

In NYPD Battles Crime, Eli Silverman says it was those reforms that did the job. Conversely, in The Great American Crime Decline Franklin Zimring suggests demographics and other factors probably triggered most, but not all, of New York's (and the entire country's) declines.

Most, but not all? He tantalizes us by adding that NYPD's reforms may have accounted for up to 35% of their decline. If that's the case he says, "it would be by far the biggest crime prevention achievement in the recorded history of policing."

There were many parts to those reforms, for example the broken windows theory (which I argue is less a theory and more a group of descriptive symbols). The most famous of those reforms was called Comstat (sometimes called Compstat).

Crime maps are the cornerstone of comstat

Comstat is short for comparison statistics, Comstat uses current crime statistics and maps to hold mid-level supervisors accountable for cutting crime. They do this in regular (sometimes heated) meetings at the Comstat table with the Chief as inquisitor. As my last blog suggests, senior officers often hate being hauled on the Comstat carpet for crime increases.

Today, some police executives have adopted it, such as in New Orleans, while others doubt that it works. Baltimore police suspended it at one point.

Advocates war with critics and journalists eat it up. This is especially the case in recent scandals.

I think sitting at the Comstat table did bring the neighborhood crime pulse to mid-level commanders in a new way. Accountability for crime is not a bad table to sit at even though it is a lopsided table with missing chairs. Why lopsided? Because cops can't do it all.

Police can tackle crime as it happens, catch bad guys on a crime spree, or stem a flow of drugs and gun shootings. Comstat helps them do that better. It's an overdue step forward. Sadly, as with all progress, one step forward can become two steps backwards.

HOLDING THE CENTER?

As Silverman describes, as time went on cops resorted too often on heavy use of force, alienating some of the community. Surveys showed a downturn in public confidence. About the future of Comstat and the leadership reforms Silverman asks: "Can the center hold?"

That's the wrong question. The police are not the center - the community is! Police are untrained to tackle the roots of crime, the social, economic and psychological causes. The comstat table needs chairs for those more able to tackle those roots: non-profits, business associations, faith groups, and community development organizations. Consider the importance of schools, social services, housing, cultural activities, transportation, and investors.

It won't be easy to sit at the same table. Not all crime data and discussions are appropriate in public. Neighborhoods are not always representative or properly organized. For their part police are accustomed to re-acting, not pro-acting. After all, comstat crimes are always after-the-fact (otherwise they wouldn't show up on a crime map). And the Intelligence-Led Policing folk might think of the new chairs as eyes and ears for cops rather than smarter brains for everyone.

Still, because the discussion is difficult doesn't excuse others from the table especially given what's at stake - creating opportunities to develop communities and combine the roots with the branches of the crime tree.

The incoming New Orleans police chief has taken a small step forward by inviting community representatives to observe his comstat meetings.

Geller and Belsky's new book provides a more thorough path to tread

Bill Geller and Lisa Belsky's new book Building Our Way Out of Crime shows what the next step might look like.

Ultimately, when it comes to tackling crime, holding the center is easier when it is more thoroughly and legitimately shared with resourceful hands outside the organization.

What does "good" look like? The story of Westville

There's plenty to complain about when it comes to crime neighborhoods. Not enough cops. No social help. Groups tripping over each other. Warehousing the poor into tract housing. The list goes on.

What does the "ideal" neighborhood look like?




I doubt there is an “ideal” safe neighborhood. Still, it is easier to complain about what is bad rather than imagining what good looks like. So imagine this...

Imagine a neighborhood in an old historic city, population 130,000 (300,000 in surrounding areas). Imagine over a third of the population are poor and the city has a long history of crime. There are, of course, safe places sprinkled around as there are nasty gang-ridden crime hotspots. Our neighborhood lies on the north-west corridor of the city.

This is a real neighborhood where I used to live. It is called Westville and it is in New Haven, Connecticut. It came to mind when I thought about good neighborhood development.

You can live in New Haven and never see violent crime, or you can walk in some neighborhoods and see gang shootings. In the 1990s, as elsewhere, crime declined. But murders have changed direction since 2000 and there are worries about teen violence. Youth curfews are discussed even though of 9,000 city teens only a few hundred account for most teen violence. Still, shootings and violence ripple through some neighborhoods like fear-generating tsunami.

Then there is Westville. In the north of Westville, West Rock Mountain towers over some of the poorest homes. In the south of Westville, some of the wealthiest. In the more-or-less center lies a small commercial corridor with restaurants, shops, a nearby park, and mixed housing of various incomes. To me this core area was the most vulnerable to the larger forces of change, change that might go in either direction.

Over the years a small group of residents, artists, and business owners began to turn things around. First they organized pot-lucks, art-walks, festivals, and other informal get-togethers. That got people to dialogue. Then a local activist convinced housing groups to look at Westville. Change at that point was slow.

I went to one meeting where residents told a private developer not to go away, but instead to modify the shape and scale of his multi-unit housing – some of which he did. I saw police work with neighbors at a liquor board hearing to get a bar owner to curb disorder problems at his bar. I watched shop owners fixing their storefronts with city funding and then hiring someone to sweep the street.

On their own these events are unremarkable. Coordinated together over time, they add up. They ignited community cohesion that triggered change. When a plan surfaced to widen streets and increase speeds along the main street through Westville, residents sought and won a historic district designation to stop it. If you've ever read work by famed urbanist Jane Jacobs - Westville is history repeating itself.

Today a permanent neighborhood association has formed to carry work forward. It connects Westville together. Their websites say it all.

See the Westville site
See their neighborhood organization

You could say Westville was successful because rich residents to the south anted up and got cops to tackle crime. You could, but that’s not how it happened. Police played a role. But in many instances they were asked to play a role, not do it themselves. Nowadays you can see from the Westville websites how vibrant the place is today. Take a look at the crime maps of New Haven and Westville.

Look at the crime maps

Search the map from Jan to Dec 2008. You’ll see only a tiny handful of crime reports in Westville compared to everywhere else in the city. At the beginning, when I lived there, crime was more common. I brought my university crime prevention students to Westville to study crime trends. It was a very different place then to what it has become today.

Westville is not perfect. Nowhere is. There are complaints about rowdy students in the new multi-family housing. There is a rash of graffiti. Yet people are speaking up and coordinating their actions in an organized way. Clearly, something positive is going on. We can learn from this.

I once asked what is meant by the term "healthy neighborhood". A healthy immune system lets a person recover quickly after an illness. Same in a healthy neighborhood like Westville. That is what neighborhoods should look like.

ROTO Nasties - the paralysis of analysis

The Thinker. Academic reports without action - the paralysis of analysis
- photo by Douglas O'Brien, Creative Commons

by Gregory Saville

I was thinking about what folks have said to these posts (thanks everyone for such great comments!) It brought to mind the LA Times article by J. Q. Wilson about inconclusive poverty/crime research. Yet I still can't shake one nagging question: How does our inability to precisely nail down the cause for crime excuse our inaction? I get that we don't want unintended consequences to our actions. Yes, that makes sense. It does make one wonder; What is state-of-the-art in research? So I did a bit of my own research to find out. Here's what I found.

 

Wilson incidentally is pretty pleased with LAPD's crime mapping and their aggressive policy of searching people on the streets for guns! (No surprise. He's one of the pioneers of the approach in a theory called "broken windows".)



That's not such a bad thing, really. Especially if it makes things better! But notice how aggressive policing is so easily used to explain crime reductions, whereas tackling poor neighborhoods needs more study! That sounds like a double standard to me. Is the "science" for aggressive policing and crime mapping better than the science about poverty/crime?

Not - pardon the gun-pun - by a long shot.

Read Hsieh and Pugh's 1993 article in Criminal Justice Review, "Poverty and income inequality are each associated with violent crime". Or read Kennedy's 1998 study in Social Science and Medicine. What does he conclude? "Studies have shown that poverty and income are powerful predictors of homicide and violent crime."

Are we to believe THAT research isn't good enough yet the crime mapping/zero tolerance research IS good enough?

MAKING IT COUNT 

Then I came across a book by Stan Lieberson from Harvard, Making It Count, Leiberson says that although most social research is non-experimental many researchers treat their data as though it was experimental. Why does it matter? It matters because social science data gets turned into numbers and then chopped and diced and served up as proof of this or that. It is all about counting the numbers. And that, Lieberson says, is part of the problem. Just look at J. Q. Wilson's numbers in the LA Times article.

For me, Lieberson hits a chord:

"There is a double standard used by academics in that evidence supporting an undesirable conclusion or theory is subjected to much tougher standards than evidence supporting other conclusions."

Bingo!

In other words, it seems convenient to trash the poverty/crime link because stats seem inconclusive. It seems simpler to support a get-tough, broken windows theory with zero tolerance enforcement. To be fair, I know LAPD uses other methods too. I also have seen how competent problem-oriented policing paired with updated training methods does make a big difference. Getting the guns off the streets too will help. I agree we should do more of all those things. Those things produce some good short term results.

But we mustn't stop there. Ultimately we must deal with the dysfunctional roots growing in deprived neighborhoods, neighborhoods where gang breeding and violence is cultivated in a bed of broken families and poverty. Those too are the broken windows that need fixing.

Social research is always done in a muddy social world where nothing lends itself to clean, experimental, laboratory tests. If we wait for definitive answers we'll wait forever.

NO MORE ROTO

J. Q. Wilson should be applauded for heading up a National Academy of Sciences Committee on Law and Justice to look for more answers. But pleeeeese let's not bury the obvious in yet more academic reports. Doing yet more research on the obvious won't change anything. We DO know what's going on there. Let's get going to help neighbors to change it!

True, ignoring research findings isn't wise. But so is more ROTO - Research-On-The-Obvious! ROTO has lots of nasties, like the unintended consequence of hold-backs from government funding while we wait for "conclusive" answers. Or worse; misdirection of funding onto band-aids like zero-tolerance enforcement.