Title: Measuring What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing Research
Institute Meetings (1-64).
Series: Research Report
Author: NIJ
Published: National Institute of Justice, July 1999
Subject(s):community policing, problem-oriented policing, and police
planning and management
96 pages
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U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
National Institute of Justice

Measuring What Matters
Proceedings From the Policing Research Institute Meetings

Research Report

Cosponsored by the National Institute of Justice and the Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services

COPS
Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

-------------------------------

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno
Attorney General

Raymond C. Fisher
Associate Attorney General

Laurie Robinson
Assistant Attorney General

Noel Brennan
Deputy Assistant Attorney General

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

Joseph E. Brann
Director, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

-------------------------------

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site 
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
World Wide Web Site 
http://www.usdoj.gov/cops

-------------------------------

National Institute of Justice

Measuring What Matters: Proceedings From the Policing Research
Institute Meetings

Edited by Robert H. Langworthy

Cosponsored by the
National Institute of Justice and the Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services

July 1999

NCJ 170610

-------------------------------

Jeremy Travis
Director, National Institute of Justice

Joseph E. Brann
Director, Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the official position of the U.S. Department of Justice.

-------------------------------

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the
Bureau of Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency
Prevention, and the Office for Victims of Crime.

-------------------------------

Contents

Introduction
Measuring What Matters: A Policing Research Institute
Robert H. Langworthy

Meeting One: November 28, 1995
Measuring What Matters in Policing
Alfred Blumstein

Great Expectations: How Higher Expectations for Police Departments Can
Lead to a Decrease in Crime
William J. Bratton

Measuring What Matters: A New Way of Thinking About Crime and
Public Order
George Kelling

Measuring What Matters: Crime, Disorder, and Fear
Wesley G. Skogan

Measuring What Matters
Darrel W. Stephens

The Incivilities Thesis: Theory, Measurement, and Policy
Ralph B. Taylor

Meeting Two: May 13, 1996

Constituency Building and Urban Community Policing
David E. Duffee, Reginald Fluellen, and Thomas Roscoe

Community Policing: What Is the Community and What Can It Do?
Warren Friedman and Michael Clark

Americans' Views on Crime and Law Enforcement: A Look at Recent
Survey Findings
Jean Johnson, Steve Farkas, Ali Bers, Christin Connolly, and Zarela
Maldonado

To Whom Do We Answer?
Johnnie Johnson, Robert Berry, Juanita Eaton, Robert Ford, and Dennis E.
Nowicki

The Police as an Agency of Municipal Government: Implications for 
Measuring Police Effectiveness
Mark H. Moore and Margaret Poethig

The Police, the Media, and Public Attitudes
Aric Press and Andrew Benson

Constituent Expectations of the Police and Police Expectations of
Constituents
Stuart A. Scheingold

Meeting Three: December 4, 1996

Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters
Carl B. Klockars

What Matters Routinely?
Robert H. Langworthy

Appendix: Author Biographies

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Measuring What Matters: A Policing Research Institute

Robert H. Langworthy

In 1992, a paper by George Kelling appeared in The City Journal titled
"Measuring What Matters." In this paper, Kelling raised the perennial
specter of police performance measurement, but this time with a new
twist. His discussion focused on the organizational performance
measurement demands of community-oriented policing. In essence,
Kelling's argument was that our traditional yardstick was outdated and
needed to be changed.

The National Institute of Justice (NIJ) and the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services (COPS) also recognized that our historic
measures of police organizational performance were outmoded. To
address this issue, NIJ and COPS collaborated on a first-of-its-kind
Policing Research Institute that focused on "measuring what matters." The
Policing Research Institute examined the implications of community
policing for measuring organizational performance and helped move the
industry toward a new, more relevant set of assessment criteria. To
accomplish this task, police executives, researchers, scholars, and others
interested in police performance measurement were invited to
Washington, D.C., to address a range of measurement issues.

Measuring What Matters consisted of three meetings, each focusing on a
particular set of topics. Each meeting considered a set of discussion papers
commissioned by NIJ and COPS and prepared by selected Institute
participants. The meetings produced:

o Heightened awareness within the police and research communities of
changing measurement needs associated with the shift to community
policing.

o Better informed Federal research and development grant programs on
measuring police performance (the NIJ Measuring What Matters research
solicitation, issued in May 1997, was shaped in part by these discussions).

o A series of papers, designed to reach a wide audience, chronicling the
Institute proceedings (see, Brady, 1996, for the first in this series). 

o This compilation of revised papers.

The first Institute meeting, held on November 28, 1995, focused on two
questions: How do we measure the amount of crime, disorder, and fear and
their effects on the quality of community life? and Should we expect
police activities to impact on measures of crime, disorder, and fear and
how will we know if they have? Discussion papers regarding the first 
question were prepared by Darrel Stephens, then Chief of the St.
Petersburg, Florida, Police Department; Wes Skogan, Professor at
Northwestern University; and Ralph Taylor, Professor at Temple
University. The second question was introduced by papers prepared by
William Bratton, then Commissioner of the New York City Police
Department; Al Blumstein, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University; and
George Kelling, then Professor at Northeastern University. In essence,
these discussions focused on how to measure police organizational
performance and whether we can reasonably and unambiguously attribute
changes in crime, fear, and disorder to it.

The second session, held on May 13, 1996, focused on police
constituencies' expectations and, perhaps more importantly, what police
could expect of different constituencies in a partnership. Seven discussion
papers were presented at this meeting. Jean Johnson, of Public Agenda,
addressed public attitudes toward the police. Aric Press, then of
Newsweek, and Andrew Benson, then of the Cleveland Plain Dealer,
collaborated on a discussion paper that explored the relationship between
the police and the media--particularly the print media. David Duffee,
Professor at the University at Albany, and Stuart Scheingold, Professor at
the University of Washington, independently considered alternative police
constituencies and the implications for community policing partnerships. 

Warren Friedman, of the Chicago Alliance for Neighborhood Safety, and
Michael Clark, of the Citizen Committee for New York City, collaborated
on a paper that explored the community and police partnership from the
perspective of "what's in it" for each of the partners. Mark Moore,
Professor at Harvard University, discussed police organizations as
instruments of local government with a particular focus on the nature of
interagency partnerships. Finally, Johnnie Johnson, Jr., then Chief of the
Birmingham, Alabama, Police Department; Dennis Nowicki, Chief of the
Charlotte-Mecklenburg, North Carolina, Police Department; and Robert
Ford, Chief of the Port Orange, Florida, Police Department, collaborated
on a paper that addressed their experience in identifying important
constituencies, what those constituencies expect of the police, and what
the police can expect of those groups. This session was designed to
address a salient community policing problem--police do not deal only
with one community but simultaneously with many publics, often with
competing expectations and differing capacities to be partners in a
community policing enterprise.

The title of the discussion paper prepared by Carl Klockars, Professor at
the University of Delaware, captures the focus of the final Institute
meeting, held December 4, 1996. His paper, "Some Really Cheap Ways to
Measure What Really Matters," was intended to lead into a discussion of
indexes and instruments that police agencies might consider to assess
organizational competence, skill in the use of force, and integrity. The
format of this session departed from the previous sessions by dividing the
participants into small groups to discuss economically feasible and
meaningful measures of police organizational performance. These
breakout sessions considered a discussion paper I prepared while working
with NIJ on a sabbatical from the University of Cincinnati. The five
breakout groups were each assigned a conceptual domain and asked to
focus their discussions on that topic. The domains were:

o The impact domain--how might intended police effects on the
environment be measured.

o The process domain--how might police know if they are doing their
work as they should. 

o The community assessment domain--how might public assessment of
police performance be monitored.

o Organizational health--how might police departments know if their
employees are satisfied with their work.

o Community context--how might police organizations monitor changes in
the work environment that impede or promote their ability to achieve 
organizational goals. 

The aim of this meeting was to initiate discussion of organizational
performance measurement systems that could provide information to
organizations that they can use to monitor and contextualize their 
performance.

Community policing, with its emphasis on problem solving and
community restoration, significantly expands the police domain and
demands that organizational performance be reconceptualized. It is no
longer sufficient to measure organizational crime-control prowess (which
we never did very well). Now we must address crime control plus the
expectations created under the rubric of community policing. The Policing
Research Institute improved our capacity for "measuring what matters" in
the context of this new policing paradigm. This collection of papers was
instrumental in shaping those conversations.

References

Brady, Thomas. Measuring What Matters, Part One: Measures of Crime,
Fear, and Disorder. Research in Action. Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1996, NCJ 162205.

Kelling, George. "Measuring What Matters: A New Way of Thinking
About Crime and Public Order." The City Journal (Spring 1992): 21-33.

National Institute of Justice. Measuring What Matters in Community
Policing: Fiscal Year 1997. Solicitation. Washington, DC: U.S.
Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, 1997.

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Meeting One: November 28, 1995

Measuring What Matters in Policing

Alfred Blumstein

The police and measurement of their impact

The most traditional measure of police effectiveness is typically reflected
in some measure of the aggregate crime rate or, possibly, in its
disaggregation into crime types about which the public may be most
concerned. When the crime rate is increasing, the public might demand
police accountability for the rise. Usually, however, the police are quite
effective in fending off those challenges, and thus we more often consider
the rise to be attributable to demographic shifts or changing social
conditions.

When the crime rate is declining, the situation is usually quite different. It
is common for the more aggressive police officials to seek to claim credit
for the decline, usually attributing that decline to the latest operational
innovation they have introduced. I have seen declines attributed to a new
K-9 corps, new management practices, or a special action force designed
for rapid response. Thus, we have one of the important measurement
dilemmas on the effect of policing on crime--the asymmetric nature of
police officials' claims of credit for their control over crime cycles: They
claim credit for the decline, but they avoid any blame when crime is on the
rise.

A second issue closely related to crime measurement is that of arrest, and
here we have a similar situation. Many police see their primary function
not to be as closely related to crime as to the arrest of those who violate
the law. Until recently, with the advent of community policing, arrest was
their primary interaction with the community. Since most arrests result
from onsite detection or witness or victim identification, shifts in the arrest
rate for any particular kind of crime can also be affected by police policies
or practices (e.g., setting up speed traps, cracking down on prostitution,
setting up a burglary sting) or exogenous events involving changes in the
composition of crimes (e.g., growth in the fraction of homicides involving
strangers, which are more difficult to solve than those involving
intimates). Here, again, it is important to distinguish the contribution
associated with more effective policing from that associated with shifts 
external to policing.

Closely related to crime is the issue of the fear of crime, and there is little
question that anything that can be done to reduce that fear contributes to
an improvement in the quality of life in a community, even if there is no
impact on the crime rate itself. Also, since the police are one of the few
agencies that are on the street all the time, there are many other aspects of
quality of life to which they can contribute (ranging from rescuing the
proverbial cats from trees to the settling of disputes that might escalate to
serious violence). Even though the connection of these activities to crime
may often be indirect, they clearly contribute to the community's support
of the police in their crime-related work.

In addition, there are many other community-related activities the police
engage in that may be seen as ends in themselves but that also contribute
to improved ability to prevent crimes or solve them once they occur. This
is one of the basic principles underlying problem-oriented policing and
community policing. Crimes can be prevented if the conditions leading to
them can be identified and the potential offenders dissuaded from pursuing
the crime. Also, connection to the community and its information
networks provides important opportunities to learn of the perpetrator of a
crime and enhance the likelihood of an arrest. Since arrest probabilities are
so small, this potential for enhancing the intelligence capability represents
a far more significant means of increasing general deterrent effectiveness
than any of the changes that might be considered downstream from arrest
in the criminal justice system.

Aside from these activities in which a common interest exists between the
police and the community, there is another aspect of policing that must be
considered in any measurement of police performance. Policing inherently
involves conflict between the police and at least some members of the
community who may be--or may be suspected of--violating a law.
Interacting with such suspects often involves the use of force in ways that
may be seen as excessive by the suspect, bystanders, or viewers of a
videorecording of the encounter. For a variety of reasons that could be
legitimate (e.g., greater hostility to police based on past encounters or by
oral history in the community) and illegitimate (e.g., racism by individual
police officers), these situations occur disproportionately with minority
suspects, and they represent a major problem in policing in minority
communities where strong positive connections between the police and the
community are most needed. Here, again, these problems could be
attributable to police performance (e.g., inadequate training leading to
premature invocation of excessive force) as well as outside the control of
the police (e.g., when the community rallies around a legitimate arrest
because emotions have been aroused over a previous questionable one).

Thus, in addressing the issue of measuring police performance, we have
two primary challenges: (1) identifying the variety of ways in which the
police contribute to or detract from community well-being, and (2)
partitioning both blame and credit for such changes, at least in a binary
way between police and nonpolice factors.

In this paper, we begin by addressing the issue of crime and arrest, partly
because of its traditional relationship to policing and partly because it is
one aspect that is regularly measured and reported to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI) for the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR), thereby
permitting comparison across police departments. These data, with local
augmentation, provide a base for empirical analysis that enables a police
department to identify where it is being effective or ineffective. That
information and its analysis should be used for the basic purpose of 
continuous improvement, which should be far more important to effective
management than the short-term political benefit of overblown claims of 
performance successes.

Factors in crime and arrest

Perhaps the most important indicator to the public about police
performance is its effect on the crime rate; the magnitude of that effect is
widely debated. Some argue that social and economic conditions, 
demographic shifts, and individual choices unaffected by police activity
represent the total influence on crime rates. Others--notably police
officials during crime downturns--argue that the credit fully belongs to the
police. Of course, there are many points between 0 and 100 percent, and so
a more meaningful partition somewhere in this range would generally be
desirable.

There seems to be wide agreement that a large fraction of the crime
rate--and particularly the violent crime rate--is largely immutable and
unresponsive to anything the police might do short of a massive
intensification of police presence in the community and in everyone's
lives. But there is also little doubt that more aggressive or targeted police
tactics (e.g., intensive patrol or focused stop and frisk to confiscate guns in
high-violence areas) or changes in police strategy (e.g., use of community
policing to develop community ties to identify problems before they
become crimes and obtain critical intelligence information on potential or
actual crimes) can have a sizable effect on suppressing some crimes.

It would appear to be valuable for most police departments to develop a
tight feedback measuring capability enabling them to observe the
influence of changes in tactics (typically short-term response) or strategy
(where the response is expected to take longer and will not be seen as
quickly) on crimes or arrests. The jargon for this approach has recently
emerged almost as a religion in industry under the name "total quality
management." This requires maintaining detailed and high-frequency
information on crime measures. But it also requires keeping careful logs of
police operations, particularly noting those locations and situations where
there has been a change from what was previously standard or routine.
This latter aspect is necessary to permit the linkage between operational
actions and their consequences. Attributing the changes to "better
policing," without being able to identify what aspect of "better policing" to
apply elsewhere to achieve comparable success, may have its political and
public-relations values but does not directly improve the effectiveness of
police management.

Of course, the problem is complicated by the fact that changes in the crime
rate will often be generated by factors exogenous to anything the police
might do. This could occur, for example, with the appearance of a new
gang, the initiation of a new drug market, or the outbreak of warfare
between two rival gangs. Although police efforts could well contribute to
suppressing that increase once it occurs or keeping it from escalating, it is
quite difficult to anticipate its emergence. But displaying speed and
effectiveness in responding to its emergence can also be a factor inhibiting
its appearance in the first place.

Isolating how police contribute to upward or downward shifts in crime or
arrest rates requires that information be maintained on key factors that
might explain the shift. These should include at least the following:

o Precinct or other spatial units, especially to distinguish those places
where special effort or changed tactics or strategy are applied. A
geographic information system (GIS) can be particularly helpful in
maintaining and displaying such information.

o Age, particularly because different criminal justice approaches are
applied to different age groups. Incarceration and its associated
incapacitative effects are most likely to influence older groups; younger
groups are more likely to respond to changes in socialization and family
structure patterns.

o Drug markets, since so much of crime can be linked to drugs. The mores
and practices that surround drug markets can easily contaminate the
communities in which they are located.

In addition, it is important to maintain other baseline data against which to
relate the changes, such as locations in which officers are assigned at
different times and shifts or those areas where innovative or experimental
operations are introduced. Basic demographic information by location on
socioeconomic conditions, family structure, and age and race composition
are needed to provide a basis for measuring rates. In addition, the analysis
should include intelligence information on the emergence of gangs and
their criminogenic activities and on markets for drugs and guns and other
criminogenic products.

Whatever is used as a performance indicator poses the danger that
operating officers will work at manipulating the measure itself rather than
the underlying process being measured. This is of particular concern with
respect to crime statistics, which are principally generated by the police.
Intensive emphasis on crime statistics provides an undue incentive to
distort the recording and reporting of the phenomenon being observed.
Some homicides could be classified as suicides, robberies as larcenies,
aggravated assaults as simple assaults, and auto thefts as joyriding. There
could be a greater degree of unfounding of marginal crimes. And any
police officer with sufficiently strong incentives who controls recording
and classification can make the results look more favorable merely by
changes in recording or classification practices.[1] The similar
phenomenon with arrest statistics and clearance rates has been pointed out
by Skolnick[2] in his classic work.

Measures beyond crime and arrest

Although crime is certainly a salient measure, it is clear that police
have--or should have--a responsibility for other facets of the quality of life
in a community. Some of these relate to fear of crime (which may or may
not respond to shifts in actual rates of crime or victimization); some relate
to affecting police ability to deal with crime (e.g., connections to the
community and associated access to intelligence regarding crime). In this
period of distrust and hostility between police and certain sectors of the
community, especially in minority communities, it is important to measure
the state of those relationships. These issues are addressed in this section.

Fear of crime

Fear of crime does not derive from a careful reading of UCR or National
Crime Victimization Survey statistics. Rather, it is stimulated by dramatic
incidents (the Polly Klaas murder and its impact on the passage of "three
strikes" laws is a prime example), repetition of highly visual stories about
crime on TV news programs, and reports of incidents involving
individuals one knows or hears about. Thus, the time trends in fear could
easily move in the opposite directions from crime trends. Indeed, even
though there seems to be strong evidence of a growing fear of violence in
the United States, most Americans would be surprised to learn that the
homicide rate trend in the United States has been flat for the past 20 years,
has not been increasing at all, and has been decreasing since it peaked in
1991.[3]

It would be desirable to have a regular measure of fear in any community,
particularly to see how that level of fear shifts with individual crime
events, changes in the reporting of crimes, changes in police deployment
tactics, and any of the other activities police engage in, whether intended
to deal with fear or with crime itself. That might be done through periodic
surveys of the community. But generating sample sizes of sufficient
frequency with the potential for small-area estimation would
probably make the cost of such surveys prohibitive for other than special
measurement associated with a particular experiment or innovation.

It would be much more desirable to have unobtrusive measures (see Webb
et al.)[4] of public fear. That could be reflected in the number of people
who are willing to walk in the street at night and in the use of places like
public parks that may be viewed as inherently dangerous. One interesting
such measure that has previously been reported on is the sale of the early
evening edition of the Daily News in New York City, a reflection of the
willingness of people to go out at night to buy the paper. These measures
have the advantage of reflecting behavior rather than attitudes, they can be
easily and cheaply obtained, they can be a good reflection of the state of
fear in a neighborhood or community, and they involve no distortion of the
behavior through the process of measurement. Finding such measures is an
important challenge.

Citizen cooperation with the police and use of excessive force

Citizen cooperation with the police is a critical aspect of policing. It will
be reflected in improved intelligence information for policing and a
generally supportive and prosocial attitude within the community. Various
indicators of this might be reports of citizen intelligence, surveys of the
community, improvement in crime clearance rates, and various related
measures.

One of the most important factors inhibiting citizen cooperation with
police is the tension, particularly in minority communities, between the
police and the community. Because such communities tend
disproportionately to be the locus of serious crime, it is critical that
effective management control be maintained over excessive use of force.
This requires a mixture of training, discipline, and punishment for blatant 
violations.

Measurement of the level of such violations can be very difficult. For
example, as the public comes to perceive police management as being
more responsive to these concerns, it is possible that this increased 
sensitivity could stimulate reporting of incidents that might not otherwise
have been reported and so give rise to an increase in the reporting of
incidents. Thus, some kind of calibration is necessary to assess the
threshold of incidents being reported by location and nature of the
encounter.

State of disorder

One important indicator of a sense of disorder in a community is the
"broken windows" theory highlighted by Wilson and Kelling.[5] This does
seem to be an important issue for indicating both the quality of life in the
community to its residents and the care with which policing is being done.

Research possibilities

These issues of measurement of police contribution are certainly
important. In light of the large expenditure (in the order of $50 billion)
throughout the Nation on policing, it is striking how little effort has been
devoted to measuring police performance and using such measurements
for the purpose of continuous improvement. In the military, beginning
more than 50 years ago, operations research groups were assigned to many
operating units to perform exactly that function.

It would be extremely useful for the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) to
identify a number of police departments that would value such service and
establish pilot units to carry out measurements and report on the results of
those measurements directly to top operating officials. This kind of
activity is particularly useful when there are regular repetitions of the same
kind of operations (e.g., police patrol).

In establishing such groups, it is important that they maintain scientific
integrity and their results not be oriented toward the public relations effort
for the department. If that becomes the case, then there will be strong
pressures to distort the results. The danger of these distortions could be
reduced by establishing an external audit overseeing the work of these
pilot programs.

Aside from this more general assignment of operations research groups, it
would be desirable to pick several cities that are willing to engage in
careful and detailed incident-based data collection (e.g., through the
National Incident-Based Reporting System) on crime and arrests to
perform the partitioning and attribution discussed earlier in this paper. In
the process, new methods of measurement and analysis are likely to be
developed, and those results are likely to be generalizable to other
jurisdictions, particularly to the operations research groups assigned to a
number of departments.

Approaches such as this would bring the competence that has been
extremely important in enhancing military and business performance into
the world of policing. It has the potential to significantly enhance the
professionalism and effectiveness of management, not only in the
jurisdictions where the studies are pursued but in others to which their
results might be generalized. This is clearly an important mission for NIJ
and would cost a tiny fraction of the operating cost of policing.

Notes

1. My own experience highlights some of these possibilities. I was in New
York (well before William Bratton was commissioner of the New York
Police Department) and experienced an event at 5 p.m. on a summer
Sunday afternoon in a crowded part of midtown that was a cross between a
mugging and a pickpocketing incident. I asked the police officers who
came to my aid following the incident if they wanted to take a report, and
they replied, "Nah, that kind of thing happens here all the time." In another
incident in Pittsburgh, when I tried to report an attempted larceny, I was
bounced from central headquarters to the local precinct, where they tried
to bounce me back to headquarters. When I told precinct staff I had
already spoken to someone at headquarters, they told me to come into the
police station to file the offense report--which I never did. Although this
may be fairly common police practice, intensive evaluation of a unit on the
basis of the crime reports on its beat could easily be seen to shift the
frequency with which crime reports are discouraged or rejected.

2. Skolnick, Jerome H., Justice Without Trial: Law Enforcement in a
Democratic Society, New York: John Wiley, 1966.

3. See, for example, Blumstein, Alfred, "Youth Violence, Guns, and the
Illicit-Drug Industry," Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 86 (1)
(Fall 1995): 10-36.

4. Webb, Eugene J., Donald T. Campbell, Richard D. Schwartz, and Lee
Sechrest, Unobtrusive Measures: Nonreactive Research in the Social
Sciences, Chicago: Rand McNally, 1966.

5. Wilson, James Q., and George L. Kelling, "Broken Windows: The
Police and Neighborhood Safety," Atlantic Monthly (March 1982): 29-38.

-------------------------------

Great Expectations: How Higher Expectations for Police Departments Can
Lead to a Decrease in Crime

William J. Bratton

Police management

I have been asked to write on the question: "Should we expect police
activities to impact on measures of crime, disorder, and fear, and how will
we know?" I'd like to begin by turning the question around: If we don't
expect police activities and police departments to have an impact on crime,
disorder, and fear, they almost certainly won't. By accepting the
prevailing image of police departments as slow moving and relatively
ineffectual bureaucracies, and by assuming that nothing can be done to
change them, we are, in effect, making a self-fulfilling prophecy. No
organization, whether it is a police department or a private business, is
going to achieve high-performance results in an atmosphere of such low
expectations.

I am a police manager, not a criminologist. I tend to think about crime not
as a sociological problem but as a management problem. The scholarship
about the underlying causes of crime is very interesting, but it is of limited
utility to someone charged, as I am, with public safety in a large city. The
fact that many criminologists have argued that police don't have much
impact on crime adds to my management problem. My job is to direct
police resources and motivate 38,000 police personnel. I cannot afford to
subscribe to a system of belief that tells me the police can't accomplish
our primary mission of controlling and preventing crime.

Instead, like many police managers, I've turned to modern business theory
and the study of how to make large organizations work more effectively
toward their goals. Goals, it turns out, are an extremely important part of
lifting a low-performing organization to higher levels of accomplishment
and revitalizing an organizational culture. Goals become a means not only
of measuring success but of replacing unproductive or counterproductive
behaviors with effective, goal-oriented activity. Goals can be used to
inspire an organization, long dominated by negativism and faultfinding,
toward positive cooperative efforts and, therefore, toward success. As a
police manager, I have learned how to set ambitious goals for police
departments as the first step toward achieving ambitious results.

In this paper, I will describe two police management stories: the New
York City Transit Police since the early 1990s and the New York Police
Department (NYPD) in the past 2 years. I think I can make a strong case
that management changes and goal setting in both organizations were the
primary catalysts for the steep decline in subway crime, beginning in
1991, and in citywide crime, beginning in 1994. I use the word catalyst
intentionally. In organizations as large and complex as the Transit Police
and the NYPD, no management team can claim sole or even primary
credit for success. The role of top management is to motivate and support
the organization as a whole, driving it to work to its full potential, but the
credit for ultimate success belongs to the cops, detectives, supervisors, and
precinct commanders who take our plans into the real world and make
them work.

Following the general police management discussion, the second part of
this paper will discuss what we are doing in New York in terms of the
relevant criminological theory about police departments and crime. It also
considers some of the other possible factors, besides the NYPD, that might
be causing the decline in New York City crime. In certain quarters, there
seems to be a near-absolute certainty that police did not and could not
have caused the steep drops. Scholars are ready to attribute these declines
to demographics, social causes, supposed changes in the drug market, and
unsubstantiated speculations about drug gangs making peace--in short, to
any possible cause except police work. I think most of these alternative
explanations can be easily discounted. They are simply not supported by
the facts in New York City, where the number of youths between the ages
of 15 and 19 has increased slightly rather than decreased, the economy is
relatively stable, drug-use patterns are relatively unchanged, and small
drug gangs continue to fight over turf in a number of locations throughout
the city.

I am hopeful this symposium will begin to change some of the
preconceived notions about policing and crime. Better management, better
strategies, higher expectations, and more effort on the part of police
departments can do far more than just affect crime rates at the margins.
We have in the Nation's police departments an enormous untapped
potential. If we can bring just a portion of that potential into play, we can
have a swift and decisive impact on crime. If we start to use police
resources strategically and efficiently, we can cut crime by 20, 30, or even
50 percent in the space of several years.

Consider the following story. A series of robberies is taking place in a
neighborhood and giving the local area a steeply rising crime rate. It just
so happens that this neighborhood has enough political clout to have an
elite police unit, expert at apprehending robbers, assigned to the problem.
With its special skill, the unit identifies the robbery patterns, deploys its
resources, and systematically apprehends the members of two loosely knit
robbery gangs. The robbery rate and the crime rate in the neighborhood
plummet. Did the police cause the drop in the local neighborhood crime
rate? Of course they did.

But I can hear the arguments now. A police department could never apply
that level of skill and resources to an entire city. Neighborhoods without
clout--poor and minority neighborhoods especially--would be slighted.
Crime would be displaced from the places where elite units are active to
the neighborhoods where they are not. And so on.

If I were to assert that lowering the crime rate in an entire city--even in
New York City--is simply the process of repeating the success of the elite
unit over and over again, many criminologists would be skeptical. They
would be even more skeptical if I were to say that an entire police
department--even the NYPD--could be geared to function like an elite
unit, bringing to bear the same kind of timely intelligence, rapid
deployment, effective tactics, and relentless followup that make elite units
so effective. But that is exactly what I am going to argue because that is
what the New York experience, both the Transit Police and the NYPD,
demonstrates.

The Transit Police

When I became Transit Police Chief in 1990, subway robbery rates were
rising steeply, disorder was rife in the system, and fare evasion was
skyrocketing out of control. Robberies rose 21 percent in 1988, 26 percent
in 1989, and about 25 percent in the first 2 months of 1990. Many of these
robberies were what we called "multiple perpetrator" cases, involving five
or more youths who would often attack and beat subway riders in order to
rob them.

A lot of the robberies seemed to be crimes of opportunity. The groups
doing the robberies were not real gangs but loosely organized associations
of youths who knew the subway was a good place to steal. They would
meet after school or encounter each other in the system, look for a likely
target, and strike. As more and more kids picked up the tricks of this
nefarious trade, the subway robbery rate headed off the chart.

The farebeating problem was just as severe. This is a petty crime that can
collectively amount to a colossal theft. In 1990, at the peak of the problem,
some 57 million fare evaders were costing the public about $65 million.
The turnstile areas were overrun not only with farebeaters but with token
thieves, who sometimes seized control of subway entrances and brazenly
collected tokens from commuters as they shooed them through illegally
opened exit gates. The public was appalled and frightened by the
spectacle. The criminals were emboldened by it.

In addition, we faced a huge disorder problem beyond the turnstiles. Some
5,000 homeless people--most of them drug abusers--were trying to live on
trains, platforms, and in the restricted track areas. In fact, more than 80
homeless people died in the subway in 1989. In addition, aggressive
panhandlers and illicit hawkers were everywhere, disrupting transit
operations and lending an air of chaos and disorder to the entire subway
environment.

I drew on the collective wisdom of dozens of Transit cops--many of whom
were frustrated because they had never been given a chance to try their
ideas--to develop a Transit Police patrol strategy concentrating on robbery,
fare evasion, and disorder. We all agreed there was a clear connection
between felonious crimes of opportunity, i.e., robberies and petty crimes,
and violations. Seeing an environment of apparent disorder, young
multiple perpetrators reasonably concluded that they could get away with
anything in the subway, including beatings and robbery. We had to change
their perceptions in a hurry.

We coupled a program of full enforcement of all subway rules and
regulations with a targeted attack on repeat subway felons, especially
youth gangs. Instead of closing multiple-perpetrator cases after one or two
arrests--as we had been doing--detectives were instructed to pursue all of
the participants in a robbery. Even if we failed to find them all, we
reasoned, the effort of searching, bringing witnesses into schools, and the
general ubiquity of Transit Police detectives in pursuit of subway robbers
would start to alter criminals' perceptions of the chances of success in a
subway robbery.

We also greatly intensified the pursuit of people wanted on subway
warrants. Using computers and faxes, we cut the time it takes for the
police to act on a bench warrant from 30 days to 24 hours. Our warrant
unit started work at 2 a.m. when the fugitives were still at home, and our
apprehension rate rose sharply, eventually rising to more than 60 percent.
We turned out to these locations in force, once again sending a message
that subway criminals were being relentlessly pursued.

In the fare evasion sweep, we developed a near-perfect tactic for the
subway. Previous programs to attack farebeating had usually focused on
deterrence by stationing uniformed officers in front of turnstiles. The cops
hated this work, and the uniformed presence wasn't having any impact on
the overall farebeating problem. We began intensive plainclothes fare
evasion sweeps throughout the system. The sweeps not only caught
farebeaters in the act, they also gave us an opportunity to intervene with
robbers because every arrested farebeater could be searched for weapons
and checked for warrants. Not surprisingly, most subway robbers weren't
paying the fare, and a good number of them were caught in our sweeps.
During the first 6 months of this operation, about one in seven people
arrested for fare evasion was wanted on a warrant.

The last piece of the puzzle was our attack on disorder. We mounted a
huge outreach effort to the homeless, cutting the resident homeless
population in the subway by about 80 percent over a couple of years by
steadily enforcing the rules and offering round-the-clock transportation to
shelters. We quelled disorder among school-age riders with a safe passage
program on 80 key trains and intensive truancy sweeps. We began
enforcing the rules and regulations of the subway system against
panhandling, illicit merchants, smoking, drinking, lying down in the
system, and many other antisocial acts. The message was sent by both our
uniformed patrol force and anticrime plainclothes units: The subway
system is under alert police control.

It took about 6 months to put everything in place, but subway crime then
began dropping, and it kept dropping for the next 5 years. Total subway
felonies and robberies declined every month from October 1990 through
October 1995, with the exception of March 1993, when there was a slight
increase in both categories. If anything, the trend accelerated under my 
successor, Michael O'Connor, and has continued to accelerate since the
merger of the Transit Police with the NYPD in April 1995.

The bottom line? Subway felonies in the first 10 months of 1995 have
fallen nearly 64 percent compared with the first 10 months of 1990.
Subway robberies have fallen 74 percent. There are fewer than 20 felonies
a day on a system that carries more riders daily that the population of most
American cities.

Even more surprising, given the proportions of the problem, was the
Transit Police's success against fare evasion. By the end of 1994, it was
cut more than in half. By the end of 1995, it will have dropped by 
two-thirds, for a total savings of about $40 million. It would be difficult to
identify a demographic or social cause for the decline in subway crime.
Subway ridership is poorer, younger, and more minority than the city as a
whole. Yet, in the early 1990s, subway crime dropped far more steeply
than New York City crime, of which it is a subset. Between 1990 and
1993, the drop in subway robberies was three times greater than the drop
in citywide robberies. In 1991, subway robberies accounted for nearly
two-thirds of the drop in the citywide robbery rate, even though subway
robberies never represented more than 10 percent of the citywide robbery
total. What, besides the work of the Transit Police, could possibly explain
that?

Yet, as a closed and contained system, the subway does present a special
case. By intensifying police efforts in the subway, the Transit Police may
have been driving crime to street level. It is possible to argue that subway
crime was merely displaced to the rest of the city. The Transit Police
experience in the early 1990s showed how a police department can swiftly
and effectively redirect its efforts toward solving key problems and
achieving key goals. It also showed that a redirected police department can
prevent crime by changing criminals' perceptions of their chances of
success. But it does not prove with any certainty that such a redirection
can reduce an entire city's crime rate. For that kind of evidence, we will
have to turn to the NYPD during the past 2 years.

The NYPD 

When Mayor Rudolph Guiliani appointed me New York City Police
Commissioner in 1994, we both believed the NYPD had vast untapped
potential. But like the Transit Police, the New York City Police
Department needed sharply focused strategies and a stronger direction to
achieve its potential. With its array of skilled and experienced personnel,
the department was like a race car that had never been driven more than 40
miles an hour. The mayor and I decided to experiment by putting the pedal
to the floor.

We challenged the NYPD to focus its full talents and resources on its core
missions of driving down crime and controlling disorder. We set a public
goal for the department of a 10-percent decrease in felony crimes in 1994.
While many within and outside the department were skeptical that we
could come anywhere near to achieving this goal, we ultimately exceeded
it with a 12-percent decline in 1994, and we are exceeding it again with an
expected 16- to 17-percent decline in 1995.

It took some doing to propel the organization forward. Although the public
believes that police departments spend all their time thinking about and
combating crime, the truth is that these large organizations are rather
easily distracted from their core mission by the political or social issue of
the moment. In addition, the burden of emergency response leaves police
leaders with the sense that there is always something urgent to do, and this
day-to-day emergency footing cuts into the time spent on strategic
planning. Work on crime is usually done on a case-by-case basis without
any real strategic oversight. As a result, police organizations can be
particularly subject to drift.

Traveling further down the ranks, one finds many of the problems that
plague any large bureaucracy. For years, the NYPD had been organized
around avoiding risk and failure. Although the department is decentralized
into 76 precincts, precinct commanders had been constrained on every side
by regulations and procedures issued from headquarters. Many police
operations, such as prostitution sweeps and execution of search warrants,
could only be conducted by centralized units, reflecting an abiding distrust
of precinct personnel and resources. Yet, despite the micromanagement,
the department was providing little in the way of genuine strategic
direction. It was clear what precinct commanders and personnel weren't
allowed to do, but it was much less clear what they ought to be doing to
combat crime, disorder, and fear.

Beginning in 1994, there were major changes in the management
philosophy of the NYPD. We established seven crime control strategies
dealing with guns, drugs, youth violence, domestic violence, reclamation
of public spaces, auto-related theft, and police corruption. In all these
areas, we got the entire organization thinking about how to attack crime
and disorder problems, best deploy police resources, disrupt criminal
enterprises, and use each arrest to develop information that would lead to
other criminals and arrests.

Precinct commanders were granted far more latitude in initiating their own
operations and running their own shops. Uniformed patrol cops were
encouraged to make drug arrests and assertively enforce quality-of-life
laws. At the same time, the central strategic direction of the department
became far stronger and the lines of accountability far clearer. Today,
avoiding failure is no longer a formula for success. Instead, the positive
efforts of commanders and cops at reducing crime, disorder, and fear are
being recognized and encouraged.

For the first time in its history, the NYPD is using current crime statistics
and regular meetings of key enforcement personnel to direct its
enforcement efforts. In the past, crime statistics often lagged behind events
by months, and so did the sense of whether crime control initiatives had
succeeded or failed. Now there is a daily turnaround in the "Compstat"
(computer comparison statistics) numbers, as the crime statistics are
called, and NYPD commanders watch weekly crime trends with the same
hawk-like attention private corporations pay to profit and loss. Crime
statistics have become the department's bottom line, the best indicator of
how the police are doing, precinct by precinct and citywide.

At semiweekly Compstat meetings, the department's top executives meet
in rotation with precinct and detective squad commanders from different
areas of the city. During these tough, probing sessions, they review current
crime trends, plan tactics, and allocate resources. Commanders are called
back to present their results at the Compstat meetings at least once every 6
weeks, creating a sense of immediate accountability that has energized the
NYPD's widely scattered local commands.[1]

Four steps or principles now guide the department's patrol and
investigative work: timely, accurate intelligence; rapid deployment;
effective tactics; and relentless followup and assessment. Debriefing
people taken into custody, even for minor crimes, is now standard practice,
and it has greatly increased the department's timely, on-the-ground
intelligence. Computer pin mapping and other contemporary crime
analysis techniques are functioning as the NYPD's radar system,
achieving early identification of crime patterns. The barriers that long
separated the department's Patrol Bureau, Detective Bureau, and
Organized Crime Control Bureau have been broken down, and a new spirit
of cooperation is resulting in the rapid deployment of appropriate
resources. Although overall strategic guidance flows down to the
precincts, many of the tactics that are accomplishing the strategies flow up
from precinct commanders, squad commanders, and rank-and-file police
officers and detectives.

In the 6-week Compstat cycle, the effectiveness of every new tactic or
program is rapidly assessed. Failed tactics don't last long, and successful
tactics are quickly replicated in other precincts. Gathering field
intelligence, adapting tactics to changing field conditions, and closely
reviewing field results are now continual, daily processes. The NYPD can
make fundamental changes in its tactical approach in a few weeks rather
than a few years.

The new flexibility allows much quicker response to shooting and robbery
patterns. Identified by computer pin mapping, shooting "hot spots" can be
blanketed with uniformed and plainclothes quality-of-life enforcement.
People carrying illegal guns begin to realize they risk facing gun charges
after being arrested for a minor offense. The result is fewer guns carried,
fewer guns drawn, and fewer guns used. We have seen a 40-percent drop
in handgun homicides in New York City since 1993.

The new strategic approach to crime problems has sharpened the focus on
the criminal support system: on burglary fences, auto chop shops, stolen
car exporters, and gun dealers who supply both drug dealers and armed
robbers. In many instances, we have been able to dismantle key pieces of
the criminal enterprise. Shutting down local fences, for instance, can have
a dramatic effect on neighborhood burglary rates. It may take burglars
some time to find another outlet for their stolen goods. The same is true of
auto thieves, who need an immediate outlet--e.g., a chop shop or stolen
auto exporter--because stolen cars are difficult to hide and easy to identify.
We are also focusing on people wanted on warrants who we believe are
likely committing additional crimes. Like the Transit Warrant Unit before
it, the NYPD Warrant Unit has been revitalized. It has rearrested 10,103
wanted felons in the first 10 months of 1995, compared with 6,113 in all
of 1993.

Intensive quality-of-life enforcement has become the order of the day in
the NYPD. Throughout the city, we are responding to problems such as
public drinking, "boombox cars," street prostitution, and street-level drug
dealing. Neighborhoods feel safer, and people see the police taking action
against these highly visible problems. The NYPD's success against the
"squeegee pests," who had begged for money by washing car windows at
most highway entrances in Manhattan, is a prime example of what steady
quality-of-life enforcement can accomplish. Continuing police pressure,
backed by arrests when necessary, has all but eliminated what was once a
constant urban annoyance.

The NYPD Civil Enforcement Initiative has given us a powerful tool to
combat petty crime and disorder. First developed by my predecessor,
Commissioner Ray Kelly, and by Jeremy Travis, who then was NYPD's
deputy commissioner for legal matters and now is the director of the
National Institute for Justice (NIJ), civil enforcement sends NYPD
attorneys into the field to assist precinct commanders in devising their
enforcement strategies. Together, they use civil law--especially nuisance
abatement law, police padlock law, and various forfeiture proceedings--to
augment the traditional police sanctions of summons and arrest. They
close brothels and drug and gambling locations and confiscate drug
dealers' cars and cash. We have been able to have a significant impact on
street prostitution by arresting johns and confiscating their cars, which we
are authorized to do because the car would have been used in the intended
crime. We have also had a powerful impact on boombox cars--using the
threat of a temporary confiscation of the auto to be used as evidence. We
have achieved a high level of compliance in neighborhoods that were once
continuously assaulted by these drive-by noise polluters.

All this focused, strategic police activity has translated into steep declines
in crime. The seven major felonies were down 12 percent in 1994 and,
according to preliminary data through November 12, are down 17 percent
in 1995. The preliminary numbers through November 12 show a 2-year
decline of 27.4 percent. Crime is down in every felony category, including 
2-year drops of 39.7 percent in murder, 30.7 percent in robbery, 36.1
percent in auto theft, 24.4 percent in burglary, and 23.8 percent in grand
larceny. Only the declines in felonious assault (12.9 percent) and rape (7.7
percent) have failed to reach 20 percent for the 2-year period. These
relatively lower numbers probably reflect the department's domestic
violence strategy, which is actively eliciting complaints of assault and
sexual violence from battered spouses.

In terms of human impact, the real numbers are even more impressive.
After steep declines in 1994, there have been 51,728 fewer felonies in
1995 through November 12, including 373 fewer homicides, 47 fewer
rapes, 11,949 fewer robberies, 3,103 fewer assaults, 12,520 fewer
burglaries, 7,788 fewer grand larcenies, and 19,988 fewer auto thefts. 

There have been declines in every borough and precinct in the city. All
five of the city's boroughs have registered 2-year declines of 23 percent or
more. Keep in mind that Brooklyn and Queens would be the fourth and
fifth largest cities in the country if they were independent municipalities.
In effect, we have achieved crime declines of 23 percent or more in three
of the five largest cities in the country.

One clear benefit of the strategic policing approach has been the allocation
of police resources where they are most needed and the consequent
declines in crime in some of the most crime-prone neighborhoods in the
city. As of November 12, for instance, the 75th and 77th precincts in
Brooklyn, which are among the toughest in the city, were the leaders for
real-number declines in homicides, shooting victims, and shooting
incidents. The 75th precinct, covering East New York and Brownsville,
has seen 45 fewer killings this year. The 67th precinct, another tough
neighborhood in Brooklyn, leads the city in real-number decline with 544
fewer robberies. The 107th and 109th precincts in Queens, which had been
the car-theft capitals of the world, saw real number declines of 1,186 and
1,063 auto thefts, respectively, through November 12.

If the current trend continues through the end of this year, total Uniform
Crime Report (UCR) index crimes in New York City will have fallen 26
percent between 1993 and 1995 and 38 percent since 1989. These
decreases are even more impressive when compared with the percentage
change in total UCR index crimes in other venues: Whereas crime fell 3.0
percent in the Nation as a whole and 9.0 percent in New York State during
calendar year 1994, New York City's total UCR index crime fell 11.7
percent--our largest percentage decrease since 1972. New York City's
ranking for total index crimes among the Nation's 25 largest cities moved
from 18th in 1993 down to 21st in 1994.

The reduction in New York City crime has effectively pulled the Nation's
aggregate crime level down quite significantly. Based on the Federal
Bureau of Investigation's (FBI's) preliminary 1994 UCR figures, crime
reductions in New York City accounted for approximately 33 percent of
the national homicide and robbery reductions and 70 percent of the
national decrease in motor vehicle thefts. Although preliminary 1995 FBI
UCR data are not yet available, we expect that New York City's decreases
in crime will again contribute significantly to the Nation's overall
reduction in crime.

Why are the steep declines in crime happening at this time? I believe it is
because of fundamental changes in the NYPD's management philosophy
and operating principles. We have gone from a micromanaged
organization with little strategic direction to a decentralized management
style with strong strategic guidance at the top. Our four operating
principles--timely, accurate intelligence; rapid deployment; effective 
tactics; and relentless followup and assessment--have made the NYPD a
much more responsive, flexible, and effective force in the field.

In the broadest sense, an effective police department can't keep people
from becoming criminals or control the social and demographic forces
that, according to many criminologists, engender criminal activity. But we
can keep people from becoming successful criminals. We can turn the
tables on the criminal element. Instead of reacting to them, we can create a
sense of police presence and police effectiveness that makes criminals
react to us. And then, in a narrower sense, we do keep people from
becoming criminals or at least from committing criminal acts as they
realize their chances of success are much smaller. This is certainly what
the New York City Transit Police achieved in the subway to drive robbery
rates down 74 percent. The young felons who committed most of the
subway robberies quickly learned that their chances of success had been
greatly reduced. Now the NYPD is sending the same message to New
York City as a whole, and we are seeing comparable results. 

Criminology tends to view criminals as a kind of irresistible social force.
Its prognosis for the future amounts to the cry of "Look out! Here comes a
demographic bulge in the crime-prone age cohort of 15- to 19-year-olds,
and we are all going to be swamped by it." I don't think so. Criminals are
not an irresistible force. In fact, the criminal element responsible for most
street crime is nothing but a bunch of disorganized individuals, many of
whom are not very good at what they do. The police have all the
advantages--in training, equipment, organization, and strategy. We can get
the criminals on the run, and we can keep them on the run. It is possible.
We are doing it in New York.

Theory and practice

One of the prevailing views in contemporary criminology as I understand
it is the position that police have little impact on crime--that variations in
the rate and prevalence of crime within a community are primarily or
entirely attributable to variations in population demographics, the impact
of social trends, and a number of economic factors. Criminologists, some
of whom are quite fixed in their opinions, cite innumerable studies
employing a variety of methodologies to show the relationships between
these variables and the rate of reported crime or crime victimization. 
Specifically, they point to the relative size of a community's cohort of
young males between 15 and 19 years of age as a primary determinant of
crime rates, along with the availability of guns, the supply-and-demand
economics of the illicit drug market, drug-abuse patterns in the
community, and a host of other broad social and economic variables.
These views are supported by empirical research showing statistically
significant and highly positive correlations between the rate of crime and
the various demographic, social, and economic variables over time as well
as by intuitive arguments and anecdotal evidence.

As a basic tenet of epistemology, however, we cannot conclude that a
causal relationship exists between two variables unless the intuitive
explanation for the relationship has face validity--it must make sense and
conform to our objective observations of the world around us--and unless
three necessary conditions occur: one variable must precede the other in
time, an empirically measured relationship must be demonstrated between
the variables, and the relationship must not be better explained by any
third intervening variable. Although contemporary criminology's
explanations for the crime decline in New York City meet the criteria of
the first two conditions, they don't explain it better than a third
intervening variable. That variable is assertive, strategic enforcement by
police officers in a well-managed and highly directed police agency. When
it comes into play, the causal equation is radically altered.

As a corollary to the assertion that crime is primarily pulled by the engine
of social and demographic trends, contemporary criminology maintains a
longstanding belief that police activities have little or no appreciable effect
on crime, despite the public ideology and political rhetoric periodically
mustered to justify larger police budgets and staffing increases. In support
of this belief, academicians proffer a number of empirical studies showing
that the addition of police resources, including personnel, has rarely, if
ever, had a sustained impact on crime rates. If increasing the number of
police within a given jurisdiction has no discernible impact on crime, the
reasoning goes, the institution of policing is powerless to influence crime.
This logic incorrectly assumes that all police patrol activity is undertaken
with the same intensity and that police officers in disparate agencies will
be deployed, managed, and directed in the same or similar fashion.

I do not take issue with the empirical validity of any of these studies or
with the observation that police activity has historically had little impact
on crime. I do question the basic premise that because no credible causal
relationship has ever been shown to exist between police activity and
reductions in crime, no causal relationship can exist.

One of the earliest studies of this issue was conducted in the NYPD's 25th
precinct in 1954, where the operational strength of the precinct was more
than doubled for a 4-month period. At the project's conclusion, reported
street robberies declined by an astounding 90 percent, and burglary and
auto-theft reports--crimes that are typically visible to patrolling police
officers--declined as well. Increased manpower had no impact on
homicides and minimal impact on felony assaults, however, since many or
most of these crimes took place indoors or in locations that patrolling
police could not easily scrutinize. Despite the project's brevity and several
flaws--it did not control for or measure the displacement of crime, and it
did not account for reductions that might be attributable to factors other
than manpower deployment--it was used to justify demands for an increase
in police personnel and resources (Wilson, 1985: 62-63).

In 1966, consistent results were obtained when this study was replicated
through saturation patrol in the 20th precinct. Street crimes visible to
patrol again declined in the target precinct, but no appreciable declines
were noted in crimes occurring indoors or in other private places. As
James Q. Wilson (1985) pointed out, the results of these two projects
"were sufficiently striking and consistent to warrant entertaining the belief
that very large increases in police patrols may reduce "outside" or "street"
crimes significantly, at least for a short period of time" (p. 64). Neither
study, though, used sufficient controls or measures to adequately
determine how much of the crime-reduction effect was due to deterrence
and how much was due to displacement.

The main conclusion derived from these studies--that any impact the
police may have on crime is due to a deterrent effect and is limited to the
type of street crimes easily visible to patrolling officers--prevailed in
criminology and police management circles for several decades. The
accuracy of this conclusion is called into question by our contemporary
experience in New York City, where we have achieved steep reductions in
all categories of crime, irrespective of their visibility to patrolling officers.
We have not found any significant variance in the relative proportion of
reported "indoor" versus "outdoor" crimes in any offense category.

Samuel Walker (1985) has argued that the addition of more police to an
agency has historically had no demonstrable effect on crime. Although
Walker acknowledges that police do deter crime to some unspecified and
limited extent and arrests serve a specific deterrence purpose through
incarceration of criminals, he says the impact of mere police presence as a
crime deterrent can scarcely be measured in precise terms. Walker asserts
that while police patrol since the time of Robert Peel has been designed to
prevent crime, the "police are at best a last-resort, reactive mechanism" of
social control, and he concludes quite validly that "even the most
superficial evidence suggests no relationship between the number of cops
and the crime rate" (p. 104).

Walker's characterization of police patrol as a "last-resort, reactive
mechanism" describes activities of agencies and officers cast in the
traditional mold. Walker has argued elsewhere (1984) that this reactive
model of police organization was in large part forged as the legacy of
O.W. Wilson, whose classic Police Administration became the "bible" of
an entire generation of police executives. These executives embraced
Wilson's gospel of efficiency and were profoundly influenced by his
ideology of crime suppression, which emphasized the deployment of 
resources to control "serious" crimes--the seven felonies comprising the
UCR crime index (pp. 409-410). Indeed, for decades police executives
were locked into a narrow mindset in which the UCR index was
practically the sole benchmark for police performance. When index crimes
declined, they took credit; when index crimes increased, they blamed
either improved reporting rates or broad social factors beyond their
control. The narrow mindset has its advantages.

I can hardly dispute the empirical evidence cited by Walker (1985) or the
overall validity of his argument, but I would emphasize that the state of
contemporary policing in New York City differs enormously from the
traditional reactive model on which criminologists have based their
conclusions. In New York City, we have radically altered the face of
policing by empowering the agency and its officers with policies and 
tactics that "capitalize on community crimefighting initiatives and take the
bad guys off the streets," a strategic approach that John DiIulio has so
graciously dubbed "Bratton's Law" (DiIulio, 1995: A19).

Perhaps the best-known and most frequently referenced study of the effect
of police patrol on crime is the Kansas City Experiment in 1974. This
year-long study determined that changing the level of preventive patrol
within demographically matched neighborhoods had virtually no impact
on the number of reported crimes or the level of fear experienced by
residents of the various neighborhoods. However, as James Q. Wilson
(1985) observed, the experiment "did not show that police make no
difference, and it did not show that adding more police is useless in
controlling crime. All it showed was that changes in the amount of random
preventive patrol in marked cars did not, by itself, seem to affect . . . how
much crime occurred or how safe citizens felt" (p. 67, emphasis in
original). He points out that the experiment might have yielded very
different results if important changes were made in the way police were
used, including assignment to plainclothes patrol, sustained attention to
places identified as having been frequent sites of crimes, or more extensive
followup investigation of past crimes (pp. 67-68).

After examining the body of research on the impact of police on crime,
Wilson (1985) concluded that "what the police do may be more important
than how many there are, that patrol focused on particular persons or
locations may be better than random patrol, and that speed may be less
important than information" (p. 71, emphasis in original).

There is much wisdom in Wilson's conclusions, and they certainly jibe
with our experience in New York City. What we have done in New York
is, in effect, to focus and coordinate police officers' activities, to free them
from random patrol duties by providing coherent tactical directions and
enforcement strategies to occupy their undevoted time, and to provide
them and their commanders with accurate and timely crime intelligence
necessary to make a difference. They relentlessly follow up their
enforcement activities and identified crime problems, and we provide them
with the discretion and authority to practice their considerable
crimefighting skills and experiment with new methods and tactics in
fighting crime. These policing skills were always present but usually
underused. Street cops have always said they had the ability to reduce
crime if the agency's executives would only relieve them of the
constraints imposed by an unimaginative and timid management cadre. At
the NYPD, we did remove many of these constraints without sacrificing
discipline or our command and authority over police officers' behavior. In
New York, random preventive patrol is a thing of the past because we've
given our officers better and more productive things to do with their time.
The time they once spent aimlessly driving or walking the streets is now 
devoted to tactical strategic enforcement activities.

I would be remiss to leave you with the impression that the absolute
number of officers deployed in the field is of little consequence. In fact,
the number of officers deployed is an essential ingredient in this formula,
but it is probably less important in terms of reducing crime than the
manner in which officers are deployed. Certainly, we require a sufficient
number or "critical mass" of officers to make our crime strategies effective
and workable, but we could probably do with fewer officers if we could
significantly reduce the amount of time they devote to purely reactive 
policing and increase the amount of time they spend in a proactive
enforcement mode. At the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that visible
police patrol leads to a heightened public sense of safety and security.
Making people feel safer is an important police function, and a certain
amount of police time and personnel will always be devoted to that
purpose.

In the traditionally managed, reactive agencies, police work often followed
a set of contradictory, or at least conflicting, operating principles. Officers
were deployed in reaction to crime trends and patterns that might, at best,
be several weeks or months old. And yet, as part of O.W. Wilson's legacy,
many police executives displayed a near obsession with shaving seconds
off the response time to 911 calls about crimes that had already occurred.
Although they were given a long list of rules intended to govern their
behavior, police officers in reactive agencies operated virtually
unsupervised, with little meaningful management oversight of their
specific activities. These officers were, in effect, set loose on the streets
without the benefit of coordinated and integrated tactical strategies. Police
officers and executive alike shared a rhetoric and a sensibility that "real
police work" involved fighting the "serious" crimes of robbery, burglary,
larceny, assault, rape, and murder, to the exclusion of less important
quality-of-life offenses. Yet few agencies developed strategies to deal with
these crimes in their totality as opposed to dealing with them on a
crime-by-crime and case-by-case basis. And few recognized that the
failure to enforce quality-of-life laws was sending a message of lax 
police enforcement and encouraging the commission of more serious
crimes.

As described earlier, the NYPD now has the technological capacity to
identify crime patterns almost immediately, and our response can be
virtually contemporaneous with evolving patterns. We also have
significantly tightened our management controls over police activities,
empowering officers and commanders at the local level while holding
them accountable for their crimefighting results. Officers and
com-manders are now guided by comprehensive and coordinated
strategies and tactical plans that provide enough flexibility to permit the
crafting of appropriate site-specific responses. We relentlessly follow up
on their activities to ensure that problems are solved rather than displaced.
We have also recognized and embraced the wisdom of Wilson and
Kelling's "broken windows" theory and its emphasis on the criminogenic
nature of quality-of-life offenses (1982). We have convinced officers and
commanders that serious crime as well as public fear of crime can be
reduced by tending to these "minor" offenses and annoyances of urban
life.

The NYPD circa 1995 is a very different agency than the reactive
organizations that previously characterized American policing, and it is
achieving very different results. The assumption that all police
departments can provide only a "last-resort, reactive mechanism" is in
need of thorough study and evaluation. A new kind of police department is
emerging--a flexible, responsive, focused organization that can swiftly
identify new crime patterns and just as swiftly counter them. It is time for
the discipline of criminology to recognize the change. To compare the old 
reactive agencies to the NYPD circa 1995 is to compare apples and
oranges.

I turn now to the main hypotheses, inferences, and research data that make
up the view that crime is primarily pulled by social and demographic
engines. Let's look at how these theories are challenged by empirical facts
in New York City's contemporary crime picture.

Age, demographics, and crime

The relative size of the cohort between 15 and 21 years of age historically
has been shown to have enormous influence on the rate of reported crimes.
Criminologists have clearly demonstrated that adolescents commit a
disproportionate number and percentage of total crimes, criminality peaks
between the ages of 16 and 20 for the majority of specific offenses, and
the rate of offenses attributable to a particular age cohort declines as the
cohort ages (Hirschi and Gottfredson, 1983; Wolfgang et al., 1972; Tracy
et al., 1990). These conclusions are supported over time by the UCR data
as well as by victimization studies.

It should also be noted that individual criminologists define such
important variables as "youth" and "youth crime" differently, which
complicates the comparability of their research. By slightly altering the
operational definitions used to collect data sets or altering the upper and
lower limits used to categorize an age group, for example, substantially
different results might be obtained.

Despite these caveats, official data and criminological research do reveal
that the rate at which adolescents and young adults commit crimes is three
to five times higher than their proportional representation in the general
population. They account for a disproportionate number of arrests as well.
In particular, the highly credible cohort research conducted by Marvin
Wolfgang and his colleagues ( Wolfgang et al., 1972; Tracy et al., 1990)
found that about one-third of both Philadelphia birth cohorts they studied
had been arrested by age 18 and one-half had been arrested by age 30.
These results support the general observation that the number of male
adolescents in a population will have considerable impact on levels of
crime. Between 40 and 50 percent of the increase in crime index offenses
during the 1960s, for example, is attributed to the "baby boom"
generation.

Arrest data from New York City also show the heightened criminality of
adolescents aged 15 to 19. Between 1980 and 1994, for example, the
average annual robbery arrest rate for young people between 15 and 19
(17.38 per 100,000 population) was more than five times higher than for
the population as a whole (3.29 per 100,000) and nearly double that of the
next closest age group (20 to 24, 9.20 per 100,000). In 1994, this cohort
accounted for more than 37 percent of all robbery arrests in New York
City, almost four times the percentage for the population as a whole (9.47)
and almost two-and-one-half times the percentage for the cohort aged 20
to 24 (15.7). The age 15 to 19 cohort clearly accounts for a
disproportionate number and percentage of robberies, and generally
similar relationships can be discerned by examining complaint and arrest
data for other specific offenses.

When robbery arrest trend data from 1980 through 1994 are examined,
however, a somewhat different picture emerges. Although the age 15 to 19
cohort has consistently accounted for the greatest proportion of robbery
arrests, that proportion in New York City has declined over time--from 47
percent in 1980 to 37 percent in 1994. This cohort's share of the total
robbery arrests declined steadily between 1980 (47.0 percent) and 1987
(30.8 percent), when it began to climb upward by one or two percentage
increments per year.

Criminology's conclusions about the influence of the age 15 to 19 cohort
on overall crime may have been historically accurate, but they no longer
seem to apply in New York City. The city's youthful population declined
during the two decades from 1970 to 1990 when crime rates soared in
New York City and across the Nation. The group between 15 and 19
declined by almost 22 percent in New York City during this period, but
the proportion of the cohort involved in crimes increased enormously. Per
capita arrests for youths between 15 and 19 increased almost 60 percent
between 1970 and the early 1990s. During this period of significant
decline in the city's high-risk youth population (between 1970 and 1990),
total index crimes increased by 22.8 percent--from 578,149 index crimes
in 1970 to 710,221 in 1990. Both homicide and motor vehicle theft hit
20-year peaks in 1990.

But as New York City crime started to decline in the 1990s, the decline in
youth population reversed itself. Based on its analysis of the 1990 U.S.
census, the Department of City Planning estimates that the city's
population of youths between 15 and 19 years of age has increased slightly
between 1990 and 1995. Most significant, especially for criminologists
who consider race as a variable, the number of black males between 15
and 19 is estimated to have increased by nearly 2 percent and the number
of male Hispanic youths by 5.7 percent. Asian and Pacific Islander males
between 15 and 19 also increased an estimated 2.36 percent. Pulling the
average for the entire cohort down were the white males whose numbers
decreased 8.4 percent. These data are confirmed by New York State 
Department of Education school enrollment figures for the City of New
York, which show that total public school enrollment increased 4.4
percent between the 1989-90 and 1994-95 school years. The number of
public school students in grades 9 through 12, comprising a significant 
portion of the high-risk group aged 15 to 19, increased by 12 percent.

The demographic rationales for crime and their emphasis on criminality
among the cohort of males between the ages of 15 and 19 cannot explain
the significant crime reductions in New York City over the past several
years. These rationales would, in fact, predict the opposite effect. The
demographic data provided here point to the indisputable, if theoretically
inconvenient, reality that the number of individuals who have historically
been shown to account for a disproportionate amount of crime relative to
their percentage representation in the overall population was relatively low
during the late 1980s when New York experienced a rise in crime, and that
that number has actually increased between 1990 and 1995, when New
York City began to realize a notable decrease in crime.

Drugs and crime

A great deal of recent discourse and research in contemporary criminology
has focused on the nexus between drug abuse and crime, particularly
violent crime. Hypotheses typically establish a causal link between drugs
and crime in two ways:

(1) The physiological effects of a particular drug are said to induce violent
crime through the removal of inhibitions or other pharmacological effect.

(2) The prohibitive cost of some drugs is said to cause users to commit
crimes, particularly property crimes, to generate sufficient income to
satisfy their addiction.

Of central concern to the "drugs cause crime" hypothesis is the question of
which variable comes first--do individuals become addicted and then
commit crimes, or do criminals begin to use drugs after their criminal
careers have begun? It is my understanding that this empirical question
remains unresolved despite a quantity of research. Nevertheless, positive
correlations between drug use and criminality have been demonstrated,
despite the fact that many of the studies are based on convenient samples
of prison and jail inmates and therefore present the problem of sample bias
(Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988, 1991). Another empirical issue is the
difficulty in determining what portion of overall crime is committed by
drug abusers. As Wilson and Herrnstein (1985: 366) pointed out, it is
virtually impossible to calculate how much crime heroin addicts commit
even if there are accurate data about the number of addicts and the
monetary costs of their addiction.

Criminologists seek to explain fluctuations in crime rates by pointing out
how variations in drug markets and drug-abuse patterns have historically
correlated with crime trends. Specifically, some have argued that the
precipitous increases in robbery complaints experienced nationwide during
the late 1980s were attributable to the emergence of crack cocaine, a drug
that has been intuitively and anecdotally linked to higher rates of crime.
Crack cocaine exploded onto the drug scene in New York City in 1985
and 1986, a period in which robbery complaints did in fact increase
dramatically. Based on the concurrence of these historic trends and a
general tendency to infer causation from mere correlation, many
criminologists would conclude that New York City's increase in robberies
during the late 1980s was driven by the advent of crack. Conversely, those
criminologists would tend to conclude that New York City's recent
decline in robberies signals a dramatic reduction in crack addiction and
use. Some would argue, in a similar vein, that the supposed reemergence
of heroin as the drug of choice among street criminals might translate into
an increase in burglary complaints because burglary rates have long been
associated with or attributed to the extent of heroin addiction.
Unfortunately for these criminologists, however, neither of the hypotheses
is supported by the current empirical evidence in New York City.

In 1984, just prior to the crack explosion, the first NIJ-sponsored Drug
Use Forecasting (DUF) urinalysis study at the NYPD Manhattan Central
Booking facility revealed a 42-percent positive rate for cocaine among all
arrestees sampled, irrespective of charge. By 1988--perhaps the height of
the crack epidemic--the prevalence of cocaine use among all arrestees had
nearly doubled to 83 percent, lending credibility to the hypothesized
relationship between crack cocaine and crime.

Although a decline has been recently noted in cocaine use among all
arrestees, it has been fairly modest. In February 1995, 78 percent of
arrestees tested positive for cocaine, and in May 1995 (the most recent
quarterly data available), 68 percent tested positive for cocaine. These
quarterly data fall within the typical range of variance for positive cocaine
tests. Since 1988, the proportion of arrestees testing positive for cocaine in
each quarterly sample varied from 59 percent to 83 percent, and since
1993, the proportion of positive cocaine tests varied from 63 percent to 78
percent. Cocaine use among those arrested in New York City has not
declined substantially, certainly not to the extent that declining cocaine use
could account for the enormous decline in the crime, particularly violent
crime, that cocaine supposedly engenders.

The hypothesized increase in heroin abuse has not been evident in the
quarterly DUF data either. In 1984, 21 percent of arrestees tested positive
for opiates; positive tests peaked at 27 percent in June 1988 and 25 percent
in October 1988. In the most recent DUF testing quarters, February and
May 1995, 22 percent and 20 percent of arrestees, respectively, tested
positive for opiates. 

Narcotics enforcement activity data also provide indirect evidence that
drug abuse has not diminished significantly. In 1994, total arrests for
narcotics offenses in New York City increased 28.9 percent, reaching their
highest point since 1989. Felony drug arrests rose 11.4 percent in 1994,
and misdemeanor drug arrests rose 54.2 percent. Through November 12,
1995, total NYPD narcotics arrests increased 10.14 percent over the
comparable 1994 period and 39.06 percent over the comparable 1993
period.

Although this increase is clearly due to our heightened enforcement and
the strategic approach we are taking to address the city's narcotics
problem, and although arrest data cannot be taken as conclusive evidence
of the prevalence of drug abuse, these numbers provide a rough indicator
that drug abuse remains pervasive.

Firearms use

Without engaging in the contentious and ongoing debate about gun control
and the right of citizens to possess firearms, one can intuitively grasp a
connection between the availability of guns, particularly handguns, and
violent crime. Guns are certainly more lethal than other weapons used in
the commission of crimes, and it is a reasonable assumption that gun
availability facilitates the commission of many crimes. Roughly half of the
Nation's homicides are committed with guns, and guns are used in about 
one-third of all robberies and one-third of all rapes. I won't address the
question here of whether guns cause crime in the sense of serving as a
catalyst for the escalation of violence or if they deter crime when they are
in the hands of law-abiding citizens. It is scarcely debatable, however, that
a large number of criminals have carried and used guns in the commission
of their crimes or that, in the case of New York City at least, the vast
majority of these guns are illegally possessed.

The number of firearms, especially handguns, used in criminal activity has
declined substantially in New York City during the past 2 years. The data
supporting this conclusion are derived from several sources, each of which
confirms the observation that fewer criminals are carrying and using guns.
The percentage of robberies in which firearms were used, for example, fell
from 36.3 percent in 1993, to 33.05 percent in 1994, to 28.7 percent for the
first 6 months of 1995. The total citywide number of shooting incidents
between January 1 and November 12 fell 39.67 percent between 1993 and
1995, and the number of shooting victims injured in these incidents fell
37.62 percent. The decline in firearms use can also be inferred from the
declining number of calls reporting "shots fired" to our 911 system. The
department received 23 percent fewer shots-fired calls from citizens and
dispatched 12,353 fewer radio cars for these calls in the first 9 months of
1995 than it did for the comparable 1994 period.

The declining number of shooting incidents and shooting victims reflects a
general decline in the number of firearms being carried and used by
criminals, which we attribute to the effectiveness of our strategic gun
enforcement efforts. We are hard pressed to conceive of any demographic
or social variable that might induce street criminals to refrain from
carrying or using their guns. Although the total number of gun arrests for
the year-to-date period through November 12 declined 34.8 percent from
comparable 1993 levels, we do not claim to have taken all of these guns
off the streets or away from criminals. We merely assert that criminals
have considered the wisdom of leaving their guns at home. Indeed, our
gun arrests increased fairly rapidly subsequent to the introduction of our
gun strategy and then began to decline as a function of the aggressive
enforcement. It should also be noted that implementation of our strategy
seems to have had the unanticipated consequence of promoting the use of
other, but fortunately less lethal, weapons. The number of arrests for
nonfirearm dangerous weapons increased more than 6 percent during the
1993 to 1995 year-to-date period.

The following example illustrates one creative way of approaching the
problem of illegal guns. Our research and investigations showed that
unscrupulous private gun dealers holding Federal firearms licenses (FFLs)
were a major source of illicit guns on New York City's streets. In March
1993, we began to jointly review FFL applications from New York City
residents with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Of the 238
new applications received through December 1994, 97.4 percent were
disapproved. In addition, 71 percent of the renewal applications between
August 1993 and December 1994 were abandoned, surrendered, or
disapproved in the face of increased police scrutiny. Although we cannot
quantify the extent to which this policy actually reduced the availability of
illegal firearms and handguns, we believe that it is certainly a contributing
factor.

Social and economic factors

Whether or not poverty causes crime has been one of the most
controversial and enduring issues in criminology and the political arena.
Academic research efforts have failed to provide conclusive data to
support or reject any of the common economic theories of crime causation.
Arguments over the role of poverty and other economic factors tend to
follow the lines of political ideology and are largely based on rhetoric and
intuitive reasoning. Wilson and Herrnstein (1985) pointed out that the
presumed connection between unemployment and crime is rather tenuous.
They said the empirical research in this area is inconclusive and noted
several logical faults within the competing theoretical models that seek to
link unemployment and crime.

In any case, none of the common social or economic factors that
criminologists typically cite to explain fluctuations in crime has registered
changes of sufficient magnitude in New York City to suggest they are
responsible for any appreciable decline in crime. New York City's
economic picture has improved slightly over the past several years, but
those years cannot be accurately characterized as a boom period or even as
a period of significant growth. Monthly data from the U.S. Department of
Labor show New York City's unemployment rate at 10.8 percent in
January 1994, 7.2 percent in September 1994, 9 percent in February 1995,
and 8 percent in September 1995. Throughout the 2-year period, the city
had a higher unemployment rate than the Nation. A comparison of the
New York City Human Resources Administration's July 1994 and July
1995 public assistance rolls reveals that the number of city residents
receiving public assistance benefits declined by 45,354, or fully 4 percent.
A comparison of the number of city residents receiving food stamps in
August 1994 and August 1995 reveals a very modest decrease of 0.4
percent.

Certain other indicators, however, seem to show a return of confidence in
the safety of the city. In time, we might see an improvement in the city's
economy following a decline in crime rather than the other way around.
The New York City Convention and Visitors Bureau estimates that the
city will welcome more than 25 million visitors in 1996, a 14-percent
increase over 1995 levels. This translates into 3,500,000 more visitors who
contribute to the local economy. New York City's hotel occupancy rate
rose from 71.7 percent during the first 6 months of 1994 to 74.2 percent 
during the comparable 1995 period. Overall airport arrivals rose 2 percent,
and international arrivals rose 7.4 percent. Attendance at Broadway shows
rose 14.1 percent, and the number of visitors served by the Convention
and Visitors Bureau increased by 5.1 percent.

Similarly, subway ridership has mirrored the decline in subway crime.
Daily subway ridership fell 3.5 percent between 1990 and 1991, but it
increased 0.2 percent between 1991 and 1992 when subway crime fell 15
percent. In 1992 and 1993, when subway crime fell an additional 24.3
percent, daily ridership rose 5.1 percent. In 1994, with subway crime
falling another 21.7 percent, ridership increased an additional 5.2 percent.
From these data we can infer that public fears associated with riding the
city's rapid transit system have declined and residents and commuters are
increasingly willing to travel freely throughout the city using public
transportation.

Prison and jail populations, arrests, and incapacitation

Even the best-managed, most effective, and most highly directed police
agency cannot reduce crime solely through arrest and enforcement. Other
spheres of the criminal justice system--the courts and corrections,
probation, and parole functions--take responsibility for an offender once
he or she is in custody, and each plays a salient role in reducing crime and
enhancing public safety. Corrections agencies in particular are
instrumental in reducing crime through incapacitation and perhaps to some
extent through deterrence, although the importance of the correctional role
rarely receives much attention in the public discourse on crime.

Like each of the other spheres of the criminal justice system, the view of
correctional agencies is subject to prevailing political and organizational
ideologies. During the 1960s when national crime rates tripled,
correctional policies and practices were driven to a large extent by the
rehabilitative ideal. We did not conclude until the 1970s that, in terms of
rehabilitation, "nothing works" (Lipton et al., 1974; Martinson, 1974). In
the 1980s and 1990s, the ideology of incapacitation has come to the fore.

Although it may be difficult to accurately estimate the relative
effectiveness of incapacitation strategies, the rationale for incapacitation is
fairly simple. We know that some criminals, particularly "career
criminals," commit a highly disproportionate number of criminal offenses.
Blumstein and his colleagues have noted that the most active 10 percent of
offenders each commit in excess of 100 crimes per year (Blumstein et al.,
1986: 94). The clear implication is that drastic reductions can be made in
the overall crime rate if this group of high-rate chronic offenders is
incapacitated.

As discussed above, cohort research on youth crime (Wolfgang et al.,
1972; Tracy et al., 1990) also reveals that a relatively small percentage of
young people are responsible for a vastly disproportionate share of 
offenses. Statute law and the ideology of the juvenile justice system
preclude sentencing youthful offenders with the same severity directed
toward adult criminals. But it also stands to reason that significant 
inroads can be made in the overall crime picture if we implement some
sort of realistic intervention to discourage criminals at the early stages of
an evolving criminal career. Too often in the past, police and juvenile
courts have not treated youth crime seriously enough. Both police and
courts have operated on the assumption that it is not in children's best
interest to burden them with criminal records. Many police officers have
failed to take appropriate discretionary action in cases involving young
people, possibly in the cynical belief that juvenile court authorities would,
at best, merely give the juvenile offender a "slap on the wrist." It should be
no surprise, then, that many young people who have had contact with the
juvenile justice system learn that their offenses will not be taken seriously.
For the small percentage of feral youth whose contacts with police and
courts are frequent, this perception is repeatedly reinforced. Some are
genuinely surprised when the criminal court system finally imposes a real
sentence.

An article in the Detroit News described New York City's tremendous
drop in crime and speculated whether the strategies and tactics the New
York City Police Department pursued would have a beneficial effect in
Detroit. The article also noted that criminologists were skeptical about the
role of the NYPD's strategic approach in achieving these reductions as
well as the credit police deserve for them. One criminologist was quoted
as saying that police do not control any of the things that generate crimes:
"[Cops] don't control the demand for drugs. They don't control who's on
welfare and who's not. They don't control who has a job and who doesn't.
They don't control what Republicans like to call family values'" (Tobin,
1995: A3). This is a fair and accurate assessment. The police do not
control these broad social and economic factors. But the same
criminologist went on to explain why, in his opinion, crime had declined
so precipitously in New York City: "The bad guys are in jail," he said.
"Even a small number of crooks taken off the street can make a big
difference in crime statistics." Who, if not the police, put them there?

For the year-to-date period ending November 12, 1995, the total number
of arrests for all criminal offenses in New York City--felonies and
misdemeanors--increased 26.73 percent over 1993 levels for the
comparable period. Arrest for combined index crimes--all
felonies--increased 4.27 percent. The disparity in these data demonstrates
the effectiveness of the department's shift away from limiting emphasis on
the traditionally "serious" index offenses committed by adults toward
strategic enforcement of appropriate and applicable laws, and it provides
evidence of the efficacy of the "broken windows" theory. By increasing
enforcement--as measured through arrests--for misdemeanor
quality-of-life offenses among adults and young people, we were able to
achieve enormous reductions in felonies, particularly index crimes.

Not all of those arrestees were incapacitated through incarceration.
Although a large percentage of the 3.4-percent increase in New York
State's prison population between 1993 and 1994 is attributable to arrests
from New York City, it must also be noted that both admissions to and
releases from State prisons declined in 1994. Admissions fell by 3.4
percent and releases by 1.8 percent. Fewer criminals are being
incarcerated, but they are being incapacitated for longer periods.

The increase in arrests, especially misdemeanor and juvenile arrests, did
not impose an untenable burden on our jail system. In fact, the city's
average daily jail population actually fell 1.2 percent between 1993 and
1994, after rising in both 1991 and 1992. For the first 9 months of 1995
versus the comparable 1994 period, the average daily jail population fell
by 5.9 percent, from 19,558 inmates to 18,397 inmates.

The inference to be drawn from these data is that dramatic crime
reductions can be achieved through the sustained and tactical enforcement
of quality-of-life misdemeanor offenses, coupled with vigorous
enforcement of "serious" felony crimes and the concomitant incapacitation
of "career criminals."

Summary

The magnitude and direction of change among the various socioeconomic
and demographic variables reviewed here lends little credibility to
traditional criminological conceptions about the causes of crime and crime
reduction. Indeed, given the direction and magnitude of change evident in
many of these variables, traditional criminological thought might have
predicted increases in crime in New York City rather than the significant
declines we have actually experienced. A third intervening variable--a
well-managed and highly directed police agency--provides a better
explanation for the decline in New York City crime than any of the
traditional explanations cited by criminologists.

Note

1. For a good account of Compstat meetings, see Kelling, George, "How
to Run a Police Department," City Journal, Autumn 1995.

References

Blumstein, Alfred, Jacqueline Cohen, Jeffrey A. Roth, and Christy A.
Visher, eds. Criminal Careers and "Career Criminals." Washington, DC:
National Academy Press, 1986.

Bureau of Justice Statistics. "Drug and Crime Facts, 1991." Washington,
DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1991, NCJ
134371.

DiIulio, John J. "Why Violent Crime Rates Have Dropped." The Wall
Street Journal, September 6, 1995, A19.

Hirschi, Travis, and Michael Gottfredson. "Age and the Explanation of
Crime." American Journal of Sociology 89 (November 1983): 552.

Innes, Christopher A. "Drug Use and Crime." Special Report. Washington,
DC: U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1988, NCJ
111940.

Lipton, Douglas, Robert Martinson, and Judith Wilks. The Effectiveness
of Correctional Treatment: An Empirical Assessment. New York: John
Wiley, 1974.

Martinson, Robert. "What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison
Reform." The Public Interest 35 (1974): 22-54.

Tobin, Jim. "Can Detroit Bite Into Crime Like Big Apple?" The Detroit
News, September 18, 1995, A1, A3.

Tracy, Paul E., Marvin Wolfgang, and Robert M. Figlio. Delinquency
Careers in Two Birth Cohorts. New York: Plenum, 1990.

Walker, Samuel. "Broken Windows' and Fractured History: The Use and
Misuse of History in Recent Police Patrol Analysis." Justice Quarterly 1
(1984): 57-90.

Walker, Samuel. Sense and Nonsense About Crime: A Policy Guide.
Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole, 1985.

Wilson, James Q. Thinking About Crime, revised edition. New York:
Random House, 1985.

Wilson, James Q., and Richard J. Herrnstein. Crime and Human Nature.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985.

Wilson, James Q., and George Kelling. "Broken Windows." Atlantic
Monthly (March 1982): 29-38.

Wilson, O.W. Police Administration, 2d ed. New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Company, Inc., 1963.

Wolfgang, Marvin E., Robert M. Figlio, and Thorsten Sellin. Delinquency
in a Birth Cohort. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972.

-------------------------------

Measuring What Matters: A New Way of Thinking About Crime and
Public Order

George Kelling 

[This article is reprinted with permission from City Journal.]

Here is a public policy paradox: New Yorkers are frantic over what seems
to them the increasing lawlessness of the city. Crime and fear are
consistently among the top two or three reasons cited by New Yorkers
who say they want to leave town. Yet according to professional standards
and the most common statistical measurements, the New York City police
departments are among the best in the country, especially after taking into
account their size and the problems they face.

For generations, police have tried to develop a model of policing that is
equitable, accountable, efficient, lawful, and honest. They have largely
succeeded: In the quest for equity, police are distributed across cities on
the basis of crime rates and calls for service--seemingly objective criteria.
To be unobtrusive, police have relied on responding to citizens' calls for
help, rather than initiating action on their own. To ensure lawfulness,
police have focused their resources on serious crimes--murder, rape,
assault, robbery, and burglary--acts prohibited by unambiguous laws and
about which a broad consensus exists that police should take strong action.
To ensure honesty, police have limited contacts with possible sources of
corruption, including citizens.

By these measures, New York City is excellently policed: Its departments,
especially the New York City Police Department, distribute police
equitably throughout the city, respond quickly to 911 calls (especially
considering the enormous volume here), are unobtrusive (despite rare and
highly publicized exceptions), have concentrated on serious crime, and
maintain high levels of integrity. Among professionals, the NYPD is
widely believed to be one of the "cleanest" very large departments in the
country.

Even by more widely touted measurements, New York police do relatively
well; so many people have been arrested that neither jails nor prisons can
hold them. If the number of cells was expanded, few doubt that New York
City police could fill almost any added capacity as well. Crime rates are
also encouraging, at least compared to other large cities. In 1989, eight
large American cities had higher homicide rates than New York City, 21
had higher rape rates, 17 had higher burglary rates, and eight had higher
automotive theft rates. The differences were not trivial: Washington's
murder rate was almost 2.8 times as high as New York's; Cleveland's rape
rate 3.5 times higher; Dallas's burglary rate twice as high. Only in robbery
did New York lead the nation, and not by much.

But New Yorkers are not the least bit reassured by these statistical and
relative achievements. One prominent local political leader eager to
discover his constituents' concerns recently gathered some New Yorkers
in "focus groups" to discuss major issues. When he asked them to react to
the statement "New York City is tough on crime," their response was 
incredulous laughter.

The citizens are right. These formal measures of police work have little to
do with community needs. After all, even after decades of increase,
individual serious crimes remain relatively rare. But if a typical annual
increase in the mugging rate does not materially increase the chances that
one will be mugged, neither does a similar decrease reduce the real harm
done to those who are not mugged--which is to make them afraid and
cheat them out of a little bit more of their lives. Lawlessness consists not
just in the relatively rare "index" crimes counted by the FBI, but can also
refer to an atmosphere of disorder in which it seems like these and less
serious crimes and harassments might occur at any time. Lawlessness locks
neighbors behind doors, chases storeowners off streets, shuts down
business, and spreads poverty and despair.

Still, twice a year when the official FBI crime statistics are released and
the Times announces, "New York Leads Big Cities in Robbery Rate, but
Drops in Murders," and the Post and the News chip in with their
more-colorful versions, police officials frantically counter with their own
numbers that show how well they are doing. Even now, when "community
policing" (which is supposed to deemphasize statistics) is all the fashion,
police chiefs know that every time the ritual is repeated, the political
powers-that-be will call them on the carpet and the powers-that-would-be
will call press conferences. Police strategy, tactics, and even police
mythology and esprit de corps are driven by statistical and bureaucratic
measures of performance. The result is disastrous for the community.

Ironically, the statistics police find most nettlesome, the FBI's Uniform
Crime Reports, were invented by The International Association of Chiefs
of Police in the 1920s. The original UCR index consisted of seven crimes:
murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor
vehicle theft. In 1979, arson was added to the list. The UCR also include
data on crimes cleared (someone was arrested), on the people who were
arrested, and on law enforcement personnel. Victimization surveys
supplement the UCR by providing additional information about victims
and offenders in crimes which may never have been reported.

Once chiefs had high hopes for the UCR, believing that reported crime and
clearance rates would provide "scientific" measures of the nature and
extent of serious crime and of the relative effectiveness of police
departments. And during the comparatively quiet years of the Forties and
the Fifties, police were quick to claim credit for the relatively low reported
crime rates.

In the Sixties, this honeymoon ended. Crime levels, in the statistics and in
the minds of citizens, became intolerable. As the crisis worsened and
became a bigger national story, the UCR framed the problem for the
media, the general public, and therefore for politicians and police as well.
The crime problem was reduced to the seven crimes on the index;
important crime-control activities were clearances and arrests for index
crimes. Police departments, broadsided biannually with bad news, became
obsessed not only with statistics, but also with statistical responses. They
pointed with pride to figures showing that arrests were up, response times
were faster, police were working hard, and criminals were going to jail.
And by all these quantifiable standards, their departments were indeed
going well. If crime still raged after such prodigious efforts, it could
hardly be the fault of the police. Better to blame lazy prosecutors, lenient
judges, push-over probation officers. And don't forget the liberals. Got a
problem, buddy? Tell it to Earl Warren.

If it had only been a dodge for the press and the pols, it would not have
been so bad. Unfortunately it is hard to say things too often without
coming to believe them, and in any event bureaucracies of all sorts love
numbers, which hold out the promise of order and accountability, a way of
toting up the score at the end of the game. Unfortunately crime, arrest, and
response reports not only fail to keep an accurate score, they also confuse
everybody about the object of the game.

While low levels of recorded crime may conceivably reflect low crime
rates, they can also reflect a lack of confidence in police. It is well known,
for instance, that about half of all rapes are ever reported to police. Women
fail to report rapes because of embarrassment, fear, and guilt--emotions
that depend in part on how police agencies handle rape victims and their
cases. So what does the difference between Cleveland's and New York's
rate mean? Is it true that there are more rapes in Cleveland than in New
York? Are New York police to be credited with being more efficient? Or
are women in Cleveland more confident that they will be treated
sensitively by police and other criminal justice agencies in Cleveland?

What about burglary? Does Dallas have more burglaries than New York?
Perhaps. But another explanation is that burglary victims in New York
City have simply come to expect so little from police that they often do
not report the crime.

The UCR's stiff legal categories say little about the crime problem as
citizens actually experience it. The popular conception is that serious
crimes are acts committed by ruthless predators against innocent strangers.
In 1989, however, more than 40 percent of violent crimes, including
one-third of all rapes, were committed not by strangers, but by friends,
lovers, spouses, and colleagues. Within families and relationships, abuse
can be repeated over and over with increasing ferocity and suffering.
Society has an enormous investment in the institutions in which these
victimizations occur: family, schools, the workplace, just to mention three.

For communities, the intent of crimes often is more important than the
actual crime itself. Generally, we consider vandalism a relatively minor
crime, often committed by obstreperous youth. It does not show up on the
UCR. Yet a swastika painted on the door of a Jewish home or a cross
burned in front of a black family's home often has more serious
consequences than a random robbery or burglary. Such vandalism
demoralizes communities, destabilizes neighborhoods, and terrorizes
families.

Arrest counts are no more reliable than the UCR. Consider the following:
An officer sees a dispute between a Korean merchant and a black citizen.
The officer stays at a distance observing the dispute. It flares into violence.
The officer moves in to stop the violence and proceeds to arrest both of the
citizens. Tensions increase in the neighborhood, but two arrests are
chalked up for the officer.

Is this a success? Should the officer and department be credited for this
performance? Or were the arrests really indications of failure? Would it
not have been better to intercede earlier and prevent the violence that not
only threatened the individuals' well-being, but the community's peace?

Obviously. And in such a situation most New York City police officers
almost certainly would have done the right thing. Yet it is important to
note that if the officer had stepped in to defuse the incident, perhaps
sparing the community months of anguish, his action would never have
been recorded. That suggests a serious problem, not only in providing
recognition for officers, but also in keeping the department accountable to
the community and focused on its real needs.

Likewise, consider the much-studied problem of graffiti on subway trains.
For over a decade, while police had been unable to reduce subway graffiti,
arrests for graffiti increased year by year and were touted by the Transit
Police Department whenever it was queried about the problem. Then
Transit Authority President David Gunn instituted a successful program to
eliminate graffiti--a program based not on arrests but on quickly cleaning
cars and painting over graffiti so as to frustrate the "artists" and create the
impression that the TA [Transit Authority] took the antigraffiti rules
seriously. Arrests immediately dropped and stayed at a low level
throughout the five-year effort. The earlier volume of arrests had indicated
failing policy, not success.

If the volume of arrests says little about the effectiveness of police
performance, another favorite set of police statistics, the number and speed
of responses to emergency calls, are equally uninformative. The anticrime
potential of 911 was once thought to be quite high. Research and 
experience, however, have suggested that though rapid responses to calls
for service have very limited impact on crime, they consume enormous
amounts of police time. This view is now widely shared by police and
police scholars, although less so by city policymakers and politicians, for
whom 911 has become a symbol of being "tough on crime." Former Police
Commissioner Ben Ward put the trade-offs starkly at a meeting of
community leaders, one of whom complained, "We have our
neighborhood foot patrol officer, we now want rapid response to calls for
service." Ward's response was refreshingly frank: "You can't have both."

As I have previously noted, since the 1960s, research has confirmed that
crime, as well as the fear of crime, is closely associated with disorder.
Disorder includes petty crime and inappropriate behavior such as public
drunkenness, panhandling, and loitering; its physical manifestations
include graffiti, abandoned cars, broken windows, and abandoned
buildings. For most people, New York's crime problem comes down to
the fear they endure as a consequence of disorder--the well-founded belief
that in disorderly places society has ceded control to those who are on the
margin of or outside the law, and therefore that anything might happen in
such places.

I say this belief is well-founded because both experience and substantial
formal research demonstrate that disorder left untended ultimately leads to
serious crime. Citizens' fear of disorder is entirely rational. Fighting
disorder, by solving the problems that cause it, is clearly one of the best
ways to fight serious crimes, reduce fear, and give citizens what they 
actually want from the police force. 

Yet disorder and police efforts (or lack thereof) to eliminate it have
recently been largely ignored by official police doctrine. The reasons for
that are many and complex, ranging from the belief that uncivil,
threatening, and bizarre behavior is a constitutional right, to fears created
by past police abuse of statutes prohibiting disorderly behavior. But a
significant reason disorder has been ignored is that professional criminal 
justice ideology narrowly defines the appropriate business of police and
criminal justice agencies as dealing with serious crime--that is, index
crimes. Crime, response, and arrest statistics form a pillar of that ideology.
Disorder does not appear on any FBI index; therefore, it has not been a
priority.

Community policing, which is being put into place in this city [New York]
slowly and with considerable difficulty, is supposed to take disorder
seriously. But community policing itself is hampered by the tools police
use to measure the crime problem and police performance. There is a great
gap between the current bureaucratically defined measures of productivity
and the kinds of help communities really want from their police. Levels of
fear and disorder, evidence of mounting community tension, and, most
importantly, information about the specific sources of such difficulties and
police response to such problems, go officially uncounted.

Can we develop new measures of performance, measures more in line with
what communities really need and want? Can we quantify the "soft"
indicators that really matter to communities? Or are we doomed, like the
man who lost his keys in the alley but searches for them under the street
light, to keep looking in the wrong place because it is too hard to turn our
attention where it belongs?

During the 1980s and into the 1990s, a series of independent studies tried
to define New York's real crime problem. Citizens, neighborhood groups,
business associations, and others examined community problems, at times
in collaboration with police and criminal justice officials, but often
without any official support. With remarkable consistency, the studies tell
us what citizens want government to do. Implicitly, and in at least one case
explicitly, they tell us how to measure community crime problems and
police response.

One of these studies, "Downtown Safety, Security, and Economic
Development," was published by the Citizen's Crime Commission of New
York City and the Regional Plan Association in July 1985. As Laurence
A. Alexander wrote in the preface:

Working with both city officials and with developers, it was clear that
many private and public downtown investment decisions were being killed
by underlying nagging worries over the safety and security of people and
of investments.

At the same time, I saw many studies that showed downtowns were not
necessarily high-crime areas (especially not with respect to so-called
serious crimes). But, nevertheless, shoppers, workers, bosses, and bankers
were all convinced that crime was rampant downtown.

It was very clear that this problem--to some degree real and to some
degree a matter of perception only--was a major deterrent to rational
downtown planning, development, marketing, and management.

The report went on to document fear of crime in downtown Brooklyn,
Fordham Road in the Bronx, and Jamaica Center in Queens. The results
were stark: Almost 60 percent of those surveyed believed that if they went
to these areas their car would probably be stolen or broken into; 40 percent
believed that they would be attacked, beaten, or raped; and 75 percent
believed that they would have their money, wallets, or purses stolen.

Confirming earlier research, the study found strong correlations between
levels of fear in the area and the amount of drug use and sale, public
drinking, street gangs, loitering teenagers, and graffiti. The consequences
of fear were considerable: People stayed off the streets and avoided public
transportation and "multi-purpose visits" (that is, shopping).

While "Downtown Safety" documented citizens' fears about shopping in
commercial centers, a report called "Small Business, Big Problem,"
published in May 1989 by the New York think tank Interface, focused on
the impact of the crime problem on commercial establishments. The
organization surveyed 353 small businesses--retailers, service companies,
manufacturers, and wholesalers with an average of 27 employees--in the
Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens.

Direct losses from crime, especially from break-ins, vandalism,
shoplifting, and auto thefts, were high. More than 80 percent of the firms
reported being victimized during the previous three years. Crime, and the
fear of crime, also took an indirect financial toll on those firms in the form
of increased labor costs from high employee turnover, reduced sales, and
curbed expansion plans. The neighborhood conditions most often cited as
causes of these difficulties included loitering, drug dealing, panhandling,
illegal peddling, and in manufacturing and wholesale areas, prostitution.

Thus, even in an area where indexed crimes were a serious part of the
problem, merchants specifically cited disorderly conditions as a major
difficulty and were able to point to consequences. The section of the report
devoted to solutions specifically recommended measures usually
associated with maintaining order and reducing fear--foot patrols,
community policing and neighborhood watches.

Another study, "CPOP: the Research--An Evaluative Study of the New
York City Community Patrol Officer Program," published by the Vera
Institute of Justice in 1990, offers insights into the problems of primarily
residential neighborhoods. Their analysis of a set of reports by CPOP
(community policing) officers and a survey of community leaders is
particularly interesting.

CPOP officers used "Beat Books" to record the types of problems with
which they dealt. The problems that citizens complained about most often
were drugs (29 percent), parking and traffic (16 percent), disorderly
groups (14 percent), auto larceny (10 percent), and prostitution or
gambling (6 percent). Burglary and robbery followed at 5 percent each.
Explaining "drugs" as a priority, the authors indicate: "These were
typically problems of fairly low-level street dealing, rather than large
volume trafficking."

None of the top five problems was an index crime. Yet all five contribute
to perceptions that one's neighborhood is out of control, that one's turf is
not secure. Even parking and traffic problems can add to such fears,
particularly if residents believe the source of the problem is "outsiders"
--fast drivers using residential streets as throughways; unfamiliar cars
parking on residential streets; increasing the number of strangers and
making it difficult to tell who has a good reason for being there.

Turning to the survey of neighborhood leaders, the report states: "Very
few respondents who lived in predominantly white, middle-class,
residential areas identified robbery or burglary as problems." Or as the
president of a merchants' association reported:

"Is there a crime problem now?" Yes. We have eggs splattered on our
store windows, but we don't have stick-ups. Commercial crime involves
shoplifting and pickpocketing in the larger stores. There is also residential
crime, which involves burglaries. But no, we don't have a crime problem
of any grave consequence.

Certainly neither the authors of the report nor I would want to give the
impression that these responses are typical of all of New York's
neighborhoods. Violence among youths is endemic in many areas and
should be the highest priority for community leaders, public health
officials, police and criminal justice officials, and political leaders.
Nonetheless, the experience of community organizers, confirmed by my
own research, is that disorder is as much or more of a problem in middle-
and working-class neighborhoods, even in neighborhoods that are
seriously marred by violence.

Like other purveyors of goods or services, the Metropolitan Transportation
Authority regularly conducts market research to learn about user
satisfaction, market potential, and problems in service delivery. My own
research as a consultant to the TA, using surveys, focus groups, and other
data, confirms that fear has seriously hindered the public's use of
subways.

Ninety-seven percent of passengers report taking some form of defensive
action when riding the subway: They stay away from certain types of
people, locations, cars, and exits. Forty percent of New Yorkers believe
that reducing crime is the top priority for improving the subway. Only 9
percent believe the subway is safe after 8 p.m.; 76 percent disagree with
the statement that there is very little chance you will be a crime victim if
you ride the subway after that time; and 62 percent say that fear of crime
keeps them from riding the subway at night. Overall, those questioned
estimated that about 25 percent of the city's serious crime occurred in the
subway.

These perceptions are important. But they are not accurate. In reality, only
3 percent of New York City's recorded felonies occur in the subway. By
some estimates, only one in 200,000 subway trips is marred by a
confrontation felony, which means most New Yorkers could ride the
subway regularly for hundreds of years without being part of such an
incident.

So why are people afraid? Though they rarely experience serious crime,
they are constantly exposed to disorder and left with the impression that
no one is in charge. Broken turnstiles, litter, graffiti, the homeless, and
panhandlers threaten riders and lead New Yorkers to believe that serious
crime is more frequent. Fare-beating and other turnstile scams not only
amplify this message, but also cost the system as much as $120 million
annually.

What do subway riders want? First, more police. Second, order: 84 percent
of survey respondents agree that it is important for police to stop
fare-beaters and 65 percent believe that the homeless should be removed
from the subway.

In sum, studies of commercial centers, neighborhoods, and subways all
call for increased attention to quality-of-life offenses including disorder
and drug dealing and for new partnerships between police, citizens,
neighborhoods, and businesses. They ask for community policing, often
endorsing CPOP by name, and for foot patrols. These studies are hardly
exhaustive, but they tend to confirm what common sense and experience
suggest: The professionalized, bureaucratized preoccupations of police
organizations do not reflect the concerns of most citizens. Police and
policymakers must undertake a systematic effort to discover what citizens
want from police, what problems are really undermining communities, and
how effective police are in fighting them. What these studies have done in
fragmentary and informal ways is what formal law enforcement
evaluations ought to be doing. We need a new sort of database that will
shift the attention of press and politicians alike away from the UCR and
arrest and response reports and toward citizens' real problems.

Ironically, in the late 1970s the New York City Police Department
performed an experiment called "Operation Crossroads" that nearly did
just that, although without actually meaning to. Unfortunately, the
experimental program was allowed to die and the NYPD never capitalized
on what it learned. As described in an unpublished study by the Fund for
the City of New York, one of the program's funders, the program's goal
was to clean up Times Square, which suffered from the same problems it
does today: prostitution, hustling, gambling, scams, and drug dealing.

Even then, the consequences of disorderly conditions were intuitively
understood:

Police and other enforcement officials believe that certain types of street
conditions such as the number, type, and frequency of street solicitations,
the number of individuals loitering in doorways, and storefront uses and
their hours of operations do contribute to . . . serious crime. At the very
least, offensive street conditions are perceived as dangerous and
threatening to the public . . . . They are a primary contributor to the
negative image of Times Square, part of a self-perpetuating cycle of 
decay.

Before Operation Crossroads, police in the area relied on repeated
aggressive "sweeps" as their main cleanup tactic. They would identify a
problem area, mobilize a squad of officers, and arrest all those who were
loitering. Little was accomplished. The troublemakers were often back on
the streets sooner than the officers who arrested them. Sweeps consumed
enormous amount of police time and were eventually declared
unconstitutional.

Operation Crossroads addressed three separate but linked questions. First,
could counts of disorder be useful in assigning police officers to particular
beats or neighborhoods? Second, were alternative tactics available that
were both legal and successful in reducing disorderly conditions? Third,
could the same counts of disorderly conditions be used to evaluate police
tactics for reducing disorder?

Researchers established a procedure for documenting disorder. Trained
observers counted incidents of disorderly behavior in specific areas.
Disorderly behavior was defined to include solicitation or sale of sex or
drugs, use of drugs or alcohol by loitering people, all non-food vendors,
and several categories of loiterers including vagrants, troubled persons,
three-card monte dealers, other gamblers, handbillers, and hawkers.

It developed that although the entire Times Square area was viewed as
disorderly, the problems tended to concentrate on a few blocks. And while
disorder continued throughout the day, the ratio of disorderly persons to
other street users changed as evening approached, thus making the area
seem more threatening. But perhaps most important was the discovery that
disorderly conditions could actually be quantified in this manner.

Armed with these new data on disorder, the police decided on a markedly
different approach: a high-visibility but low-arrest strategy that explicitly
rejected mass arrests in favor of direct action to interrupt and deter
disorderly behavior. Thus police would order, counsel, educate, cajole, and
use other noncoercive methods to discourage offenders, and would arrest
them only as a last resort.

The researchers hoped that the disorder counts could be used to allocate
officers. Police managers, however, continued to rely on traditional
measures to assign police--reported crimes and calls for service.

A crisis, however, made it clear that the street condition reports (as they
were called) could be useful. Parks commissioner Gordon Davis
threatened to close Bryant Park (adjacent to the main branch of the New
York Public Library). Drug dealing had reached epidemic levels. Police
could not or would not control it. Police managers responded to Davis's
threat and the publicity that followed with an aggressive effort that relied
on the low-arrest tactics of Operation Crossroads. Instead of using such
traditional means as arrest counts to evaluate their own efforts, they used
the condition reports. The results were not only interesting but of great
practical value:

o The number of people engaged in positive activities increased by 79
percent; the number of drug sellers, buyers, and users decreased by 85
percent.

o The percentage of loitering and drug-related use as a function of total
use declined from 67 percent to 49 percent.

o Drug selling was not displaced en masse to any single location outside
the park.

o While the decrease in the number of dealers was not as dramatic as
police had hoped, dealers behaved more discretely.

o The aggressiveness of the uniformed officers, not just the fact that they
were in the park, appeared to be the key factor in changing the dealers'
mode of operation.

o Supervised, directed patrol, rather than the absolute number of officers
assigned, seemed critical to affecting conditions in the park.

o Stationing a uniformed officer in front of the library during lunchtime
and early afternoon virtually eliminated the clustering of drug activity.

Nevertheless, the project was aborted. Once the crisis was over, police
simply were not interested in using the information. As time went on, key
personnel were transferred, not to frustrate the project, but as a matter of
routine police practice. Soon the funders had little choice but to drop the
project altogether.

It does not take much reading between the lines to know what was going
on: the police were not about to abandon their traditional ways of
evaluating their performance and assigning officers in favor of the
low-arrest strategy. Operation Crossroads and the Bryant Park crisis had
forced police back into a problem area--disorder--that violated the
dominant police paradigm. However police managers might phrase their
reluctance, in effect they were unwilling to shift to a system that would
measure actual results as citizens might experience them, rather than such
apparent efforts as arrests. For the police, the goal was still to demonstrate
that "we held up our end," rather than "we solved the problem."

Distinguishing between what citizens experience in their neighborhoods,
shopping centers, and subways and the official crime problem as defined
in crime, response, and arrest statistics is not an academic quibble. For
generations, public policy has been built around priorities established in
response to these data, satisfying the eternal bureaucratic yen to be
evaluated by numbers and process rather than by results. Yet whenever
citizens are queried--whether systematically, as in many of the reports
noted above, or informally--their greatest complaints always include 
disorder and an accompanying fear. Statistics which indicate that people
are hardly ever raped or murdered in their neighborhood or that help is just
a 911 call away offer little comfort. I am certain that if systematic studies
were available about the "crime problem" in schools, parks, and public
housing, the results would be similar.

Official police doctrine is changing, especially in New York City. The
Mayor, the MTA, the Transit Police Department, and the NYPD all
strongly endorse the notion that police must focus on solving the problems
that really upset New Yorkers. By controlling disorder and stemming fear,
they will keep citizens on the street and thereby discourage serious crime.
Serious programmatic reform plans are already underway, with the most
well-known being the Mayor's Safe Streets, Safe City plan.

At the level of theory, the corner has been turned. But the real change will
be much harder than is imagined by those who glibly drop phrases like
"community policing" and then stand back and wait for miracles. Despite
the city's enormous official commitment to community policing, the issue
is still very much in doubt. The dominant criminal justice model has been
in place a long time and is supported by powerful traditions and
mythologies. The task facing police forces here, and across the country, is
to turn away from several decades of accumulated, preconceived, and
self-regarding notions about their mission, and to discover instead the real
needs of the communities they seek to protect.

It is not easy to change an entire subculture. First and foremost, police
need to change their own minds about their mission, and give up the view
that police work consists of racing around in patrol cars, apprehending
criminals after the fact, and feeding them into a "criminal justice system."
That "cowboy" version of policing has considerable allure for most of the
young people who become police officers, attractions that "problem
solving" and community work (often with civilians) do not necessarily
have.

Former Chief Robert Igleburger of the Dayton Police Department, one of
the country's most innovative police chiefs during the 1960s, has likened
police departments to rubber bands. They can be stretched, pulled, and
twisted into a variety of shapes, yet whenever pressure is relieved, they
snap back into their previous shape. Many forces bridle public
organizations: traditions, habits, vested interests of groups both within and
outside the organization, political chicanery, public myths, and so forth.
As we know from the current experience of the auto industry, which had to
be brought to the brink of bankruptcy before it began to reform itself,
repositioning organizations is difficult, and keeping them repositioned is
harder.

One way to start--one way that has been overlooked so far--is for New
York's Police Department to begin a revolution in American crime
statistics. They should move American police (and the American media)
away from their unproductive preoccupation with current official data.
Taking a cue from Operation Crossroads, the city's police should build
new citywide databases that measure the problems that citizens really care
about, the ones that spread crime and fear, disrupting the trust of neighbor
and community cooperation that is essential to preventing crime. They
should develop databases that measure whether police are responding to
these problems and databases that measure whether the problems are
getting better.

Collaborating with citizens to prevent crime and disorder requires
knowing what citizens think about crime and disorder. It is useless to
demand that police respond to community needs rather than self-serving
bureaucratic standards, unless we know what those needs are. It would be
unjust and demoralizing to criticize police for not helping to maintain
order (which they have been doing to some extent, albeit fitfully, and
without commendation or encouragement throughout the 911,
UCR-dominated decades) without the data to prove the case, or to
commend them when deserved. 

Creating such databases is one thing, maintaining and updating them will
require a real commitment of resources and managerial will. For if they
are to be useful, the surveys must measure New York's many
neighborhoods separately and in detail. To assume that all communities
have the same priorities would be fatal to the effort described here.

Yet despite all the work, will, and widgets this effort would consume, it
would be very efficient even in the medium term. Such data would be
crucial in helping transform police culture and make community policing
self-sustaining. By providing police with a new way of thinking about
their jobs, they would overcome the entrenched traditions that have
impeded past reforms.

Even police who initially regard such community policing tactics as foot
patrols with distaste almost always learn to like them as soon as the
programs get underway. But liking a duty does not go very far unless it is
linked to career advancement. Currently, officers move up in the force by
leaving patrol work for a job with a specialized unit. And they are
promoted out of patrol by doing things that can be added up statistically,
like making lots of arrests, rather than by solving community problems.

In order to truly change the culture of the police department, the
department must tie career advancement to the tasks that make community
policing work, especially being a good patrol officer. The department will
not be able to do this without data. It is, after all, a bureaucracy, and a
bureaucracy it will remain until its dying day. As such, it will always want
to play by the numbers. So we must find a way to change the numbers and
show police officers that the new way to get ahead is to rack up good
numbers of a different sort.

For the same reason, the New York Police Department, and all the other
departments that follow in its wake, should make an enormous annual or
biannual public fuss about the new numbers, crowing shamelessly about
every bit of good news, and cheerfully expending the great portions of
patience and fortitude it will take to explain them to the press. For to really
ensure the future of community policing, we have to change not only the
internal culture, but also the public mythology of policing.

As one prominent New York police official has put it, "It's not just what
these guys learn on the force, most of them are cowboys or buffs' [lovers
of police tradition and lore] before they sign up." And while chiefs
battered by the UCR twice a year may no longer be cowboys, there is no
doubt that the enormous publicity that accompanies the current statistical
measures of performance affects the way police forces behave.

Powerful images sustain the "crime fighting" view of policing: the "thin
blue line" and the "wars" on crime, drugs, and violence waged by arresting
and incarcerating offenders. The statistical parallels of those images,
broadly accepted by the media as a scorecard for police performance, now
come back to haunt police. Tragic events, such as killings in schools, get
wide publicity and fuel demands that police "do something," regardless of
what it is. Tough measures must be taken against those who are violent.
But we must also take tough measures against myths that deflect press,
public, and police alike from the real problems of the community.

Not much more than a generation ago, there were other police myths that
were powerful and emotionally rewarding: myths of the cop on the beat
who knew his block, his people, and what they needed. Officer
Murphy--and his nightstick--would not be popular in most New York
neighborhoods today. But we can create new heroes of public service in
his place, citizen soldiers who know how much their fellow citizens suffer
from the grinding, day-to-day incivilities and minor street offenses that
erode the quality of urban life, make people afraid, and create the milieu
within which serious crime flourishes. Images as powerful as the war
metaphors of the 911 era can support them in their struggle. But all this
would be made far easier with, and may be impossible without, concrete
measures of achievement that redefine successful policing as policing that
actually makes people want to live here.

-------------------------------

Measuring What Matters: Crime, Disorder, and Fear

Wesley G. Skogan 

This chapter considers two issues: (1) measuring the possible effects of an
innovative policing program, and (2) doing so in a framework that could
support the inference that the program caused variations that the
measurements might reveal. Measurement involves (among other things)
the collection of data that represent--sometimes only indirectly--the
problems that programs target. These are "outcome" measures, and it is
vital that they represent the scope of a program's intentions as accurately
as possible. The framework within which these data are collected is
evaluation's research design, and it is crucial that the design account for as
many alternative explanations for what is measured as is possible under
the circumstances. Arguing that "the program made a difference" over the
past month or year involves systematically discounting the potential
influence of other factors that might account for changes in the measures
through the use of randomization, matched control groups or time series,
and other design strategies.

Measurement issues are a bit more closely related to analytic issues than
this distinction suggests. One cannot divorce what is measured from how
the measures can be linked causally to programs. What evaluators call the
"logic model" of a program--how, exactly, it is supposed to have its
desired effect--needs to be specified clearly enough that appropriate
outcomes can be identified and their measures specified. For instance, if
evaluating a crime prevention program, exactly what kinds of crimes
involving what kinds of victims during what periods of the day or night
should we examine for evidence of impact?

This essay focuses on measurement issues, but it addresses issues through
concrete examples of how measures have been used to make judgments
about the impact of programs. It examines some of the experiences the
evaluation community has had in taking the vital signs of a community by
measuring crime, disorder, and fear. This is far from a complete list of
what matters in policing, as other articles in this volume attest. However,
in Kelling's original plea for a focus on "what matters" in policing, he
concluded with a call for a renewed focus on "the grinding, day-to-day
incivilities and minor street offenses that erode the quality of urban life,
make people afraid, and create the milieu within which serious crime
flourishes" (1992: 33). In recompense for the brevity of the list of issues
considered in detail in this chapter, I conclude with an inventory of other
issues that need to be considered--and appropriately measured--in any
thoroughgoing evaluation.

Measuring crime

The development of a new research technology--survey-based measures of
victimization--has enabled evaluators to dig deeper into claims about the
effects of policing on crime. Although not without their problems (which
will be examined below), survey measures of crime bypass two enormous
sieves that strain out so many offenses that it can be difficult to interpret
official crime statistics. These sieves are citizen reporting and police
recording practices. Together, they work to the disadvantage of the poor
and residents of higher crime areas, and they can disguise the effects of
programs that might otherwise appear promising.

Citizen reporting

Interviews with victims indicate that many incidents are not reported to the
police, either by themselves or (as far as they know) anyone else. Among
crimes measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey, about 40
percent of all personal crimes and 33 percent of property offenses are
reported. Reporting is high for auto thefts (93 percent of successful thefts)
but much lower for simple assaults (43 percent), attempted rapes (33
percent) and robberies (36 percent), and pocket pickings (22 percent).
Only 52 percent of successful residential burglaries and less than 12
percent of thefts of less than $50 are reported (Bureau of Justice Statistics,
1996, table 91). Crime reporting by witnesses rather than victims is even
lower. In Britain, only about 12 percent of the instances of shoplifting, 8
percent of serious fights, and 29 percent of thefts from cars observed by
the public are reported to anyone (Skogan, 1990b).

Furthermore, the National Crime Victimization Survey reveals that
reporting differs by population group. Generally, lower income people,
younger victims, and men report victimizations at a low rate, while
homeowners report at a high rate. Incidents away from home, those with
smaller financial consequences or for which victims had no insurance, and
crimes in which victims and offenders know one another well are reported
less frequently. Black on white crimes are also more likely to be reported.
In some crime categories, fear of retaliation discourages reporting; in
others, people do not report because they plan to take action on their own.
The belief that police would not want to be bothered or that they are
ineffective or biased is responsible for about 10 to 15 percent of
nonreporting, depending on the category of crime.

In addition, programs and practices that involve people more intimately
with policing also encourage crime reporting when these people are
victimized. That is, crime prevention and other programs that ask citizens
to "be the eyes and ears" of police, hopefully do increase reporting, but the
higher crime figures could make those efforts look counterproductive even
if the actual crime rate has not changed or has decreased. It appears this
effect has only been documented once--by Anne Schneider (1976) in an
evaluation of a residential burglary prevention program in Portland--but
the threat of looking worse as a result of doing better has made almost all
evaluators aware of the difficulties of using reported crime figures to
evaluate programs.

Police recording practices

In addition to the fairly systematic bias introduced by citizen nonreporting,
official figures are further confounded by the vagaries of police recording
practices. Founded incidents are not the same thing as reported incidents,
often for good reasons, but the gap between the two can disguise deceptive
recording practices. At several levels, police may act to avoid unpleasant
or seemingly unproductive work, forestall complaints about their behavior,
or respond to pressure from their supervisors to keep the crime count
down. Bona fide reported offenses may be shifted from one category to
another, mostly to downgrade them or so they can be ignored. In
numerous well-documented cases, there have been sharp changes in crime
rates associated with reform movements, changes in political
administration, turnover among district commanders, and the like. In
Chicago, detectives were caught "killing crime" at an enormous rate by
unfounding (determining that a case is unverifiable) rape, robbery, and
assault incidents without investigation. The practice was widely
understood within the department, which kept two sets of books--one
public and one private--on reported offenses (Skogan and Gordon, 1983).

Administrators who want honest accounting have few choices. One is to
examine the ratio of recorded crimes to arrests in hope of spotting districts
where the two figures are too close together; they can also monitor the
crime clearance rates reported by their detectives. Another strategy for
encouraging honesty in bookkeeping is to conduct expensive field audits
that track the course of 911 calls, beginning with the communication
center's running tape; Chicago's department did this for a decade in
response to the "killing crime" scandal. However, changing technology is
undermining the apparent control that centralized complaint-taking and
dispatch gave downtown managers over police operations. Police and the
public are increasingly communicating with each other directly--using
beepers, cell phones, and voice mail--rather than through 911. In addition,
community policing strategies almost always involve increasing the
frequency of face-to-face meetings and informal encounters between the
police and the public for the purpose of exchanging information. The old
systems for command and control within police agencies produced a
torrent of data on crime and disorderly conditions; these data were
sometimes of dubious quality, and now they are becoming increasingly
unreliable.

Survey measures of crime

There are alternative measures of crime, however. The most well known
are victimization rates based on surveys that quiz respondents about their
recent experiences with crime. These measures bypass citizen reporting
and police recording practices and typically produce estimates of the crime
rate that are two to three times those based on official sources. In the
aggregate, they sometimes trend in the same direction as official figures.
This is particularly true at the national level when expansive categories of
crime are considered over a period of years and after adjustments are made
to account for some of the differences between the two series (Biderman
and Lynch, 1991; Mirrlees-Black et al., 1996). However, for small areas,
tight timeframes, and detailed categories of crime, it is unwise to expect
survey and official figures to point to the same conclusions.

Exhibit 1 presents a fragment of a typical victimization screening
questionnaire designed for telephone administration. The original
questionnaire (Skogan, 1995) included 18 screening questions that probed
for both personal and property victimizations. The questioning strategy
was to first elicit yes-no responses about each scenario on the list, and then
return to followup questions like those employed in this study ("Was it
reported to the police?" "Did this happen in your neighborhood?"). For the
respondent, this breaks any apparent link between giving a "yes" response
and the burden of answering additional questions, a link that suppresses
the victimization count (Biderman et al., 1967). Information about the
location of incidents is frequently required to identify those that took place
in the targeted area and those that occurred elsewhere. In personal
interviews it is possible to show respondents a map and ask them to
identify where specific incidents took place. This is particularly useful if
the area under consideration is a police district or administrative unit that
does not closely correspond to popular conceptions of local neighborhood
boundaries.

Problems with survey figures

Coverage. Not everyone will be included. Interview refusal rates can be
high, and they are growing. The problem is compounded in multiwave
studies in which respondents are reinterviewed over time. In a mobile
society, recontact rates can be low if more than a few months pass between
the waves of a survey, and that loss differs from group to group. In
particular, young people, renters, and short-term residents of the
community are difficult to reinterview, while women, family members,
and homeowners can be found again more easily. Young people (who are
at greatest risk) are hard to find at home at any time. Also, many crimes
are reported by organizations (such as schools), merchants (Shapland,
1995), and others who will be left out if only households are included in
the survey. These groups experience a considerable number of
victimizations. The last national commercial victimization survey revealed 
a burglary rate of 217 per 1,000 establishments, as contrasted to a
household rate of 89 burglaries per 1,000 dwellings (National Criminal
Justice Information and Statistics Service, 1976). Among crimes reported
to the police, one-third of burglaries involve "nonresidential" (largely
commercial) targets (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1995). However, 
it is common practice to survey only households.

There is a great deal of debate about the relative merits of telephone versus
in-person surveys. The latter cost more, but many inner-city homes have
no telephones. In Chicago, there are strong links between race, poverty,
crime, and the accessibility of people for telephone surveys. At the
census-tract level, the correlation between telephone access and the gun
crime rate is (-.44). It is (-.67) for families on public aid and (+.50) for
homeowners. Among the city's prototype community policing districts, 10
to 19 percent of households in the two poorest areas did not have a
telephone, and more than 20 percent of households in the northern end of
another district did not have a phone (Skogan, 1995).

On the other hand, survey refusal rates in big cities are lower for telephone
than in-person surveys, partly because respondents are unwilling to let
strangers into their homes. The difficulties involved in managing and
protecting the safety of interviewers in higher crime neighborhoods are
considerable because it is important to conduct interviews during evening
hours (Groves and Kahn, 1979). It is not clear what the bottom line is on
this issue, and in the end it is usually decided by cost.

Expense. Surveys typically use samples to represent the populations of
neighborhoods, districts, or cities. This introduces error in the findings; if
that error is going to be acceptably small, the surveys have to involve
fairly large numbers of respondents. The issue of how many respondents
are needed is determined by the subject. For example, documenting an
anticipated drop in the prevalence of burglary victimization from 15
percent to 10 percent of households (a 33-percent decline) requires
interviews with about 340 respondents each time (cf., Kraemer and
Thiemann, 1987).

Getting the count straight. One of the most interesting developments in
studies of victimization is the analysis of what makes high-crime
neighborhoods "high crime." Research in Great Britain suggests that the
key fact is not that more people are victimized in these areas; while that
percentage is higher in high-crime areas, what distinguishes the worst
areas is that some residents are repeatedly victimized. Repeat or multiple
victims contribute disproportionately to the overall crime count in
high-crime areas (Farrell, 1995; Trickett et al., 1992). This is both good
news and bad news.

It is good news because it gives us more leverage on the crime rate. It
suggests that programs that target first-time victims could have "more
bang for the buck" than scatter-shot prevention efforts because
once-victims are much more likely than nonvictims to be targeted. This
phenomenon presents a cheap and apparently effective way of targeting
criminal justice resources and suggests that cities that have invested in
security surveys, hardware upgrades, and other support services for
victims were on the right track (Anderson et al., 1995; see Spelman, 1995,
for another view).

It is bad news because even the best surveys are not very good at
measuring repeat victimization. The reasons victim surveys are poor at
measuring repeat victimization are complex: A combination of general
bounding, telescoping, temporal ordering, forgetting, differential recall,
series victimization, estimation, design-effect, and confidence-interval
problems pile up on this particular issue (Skogan, 1981). One way of
ignoring some of these problems has been to avoid trying to measure
victimization rates, that is, the number of crimes occurring in an area
divided by the number of residents or households. Rates are severely
affected by most of the problems listed above because rates involve
estimating the number of crimes that have occurred.

Instead, almost every published evaluation in the police field has
examined survey measures of the prevalence of victimization, or the
percentage of persons or households who have been victimized once or
more. This figure is resistant to some of the problems outlined above: We
only need to know that something happened to someone to categorize that
person as a "victim." Prevalence measures are also easier to analyze using
multivariate statistics, because whether or not a person was a victim is an
experience that easily can be related to the individual's background,
household, and lifestyle factors. Finally, prevalence measures require less
questionnaire space and interviewer time because fewer details are
required to get a yes-no answer. But we now know that this approach is
remarkably insensitive to one of the forces that drives up neighborhood
crime rates, and it is not well-suited for evaluating what appears to be a
promising crime prevention strategy.

An example

The situation is not as hopeless as the discussion above might suggest.
Because they are so difficult to assess when many issues and potential
program outcomes compete for evaluation resources, I have found
triangulation a useful strategy for analyzing multiple, flawed measures of
crime rates. Exhibit 2 illustrates the findings of a recent evaluation of
community policing in two of Chicago's police districts (Skogan et al.,
1995). It compares the findings of household surveys and an analysis of 34
months of founded crime incidents. Exhibit 2 reports (1) perceptual
measures asking "how big a problem" specific crimes were in the
community (see the next section about this); (2) officially recorded crime
counts; and (3) survey measures of the prevalence of victimization. These
two crimes were selected for close examination because they were among
the four top-rated problems in these two districts. The probability figures
presented below each of the survey-based figures indicate how likely the
changes described were to have arisen by chance. The percentage change
is presented for officially recorded crimes.

In this example, all of the measures pointed in the same direction, lending
more confidence to the conclusion that crime went down substantially in
these districts. In Morgan Park, auto theft as measured in the survey was
down significantly, as were reports that it was a "big problem" in the area.
In Austin, robbery was down in both survey measures. Both districts saw a
decline in officially recorded crimes in these categories, especially Morgan
Park. In the comparison areas matched to these districts, robbery and auto
theft also declined, but only slightly.

Measuring disorder

Important as it is, there is reason to doubt that crime reduction is the sole
"bottom line" for evaluating policing. Narrowing their traditionally wider
scope of responsibility was one of the strategies reformers used to capture
control of police organizations (Kelling and Coles, 1997), but the
profession has paid a price for the consequences. To "police" society
implies a wider mission, and expanding the police mandate is a
fundamental feature of modern problem-oriented policing. Police are the
only servants of the people who are available 24 hours a day and continue
to make house calls. They also have taken on a wider range of problems
because, when given the opportunity, their "customers" demand it. In
Chicago, observational studies of small public meetings that are an
integral part of the city's community policing program reveal that
neighborhood residents are concerned about a broad range of problems,
including traffic enforcement, illegal dumping, building abandonment, and
teenage loitering (Skogan and Hartnett, 1997).

One aspect of this new and larger police agenda is an untidy bundle of
problems that I have labeled "disorder" (Skogan, 1990a). Disorder is
apparent in widespread junk and trash in vacant lots, decaying and
boarded-up buildings, vandalism and graffiti, and stripped and abandoned
cars in the streets and alleys. It is also signaled by bands of teenagers
congregating on street corners, prostitutes and panhandlers, public
drinking, verbal harassment of women on the street, and open gambling
and drug use. For many purposes, it is useful to think of these problems as
falling into two general classes: social and physical. Social disorder is a
matter of behavior: You can see it happen or observe direct and tangible
evidence that it is a problem. Physical disorder involves visual signs of
negligence and unchecked decay: abandoned or ill-kept buildings, broken
street lights, trash-filled lots, and alleys strewn with garbage and alive with
rats. By and large, physical disorder refers to ongoing conditions, while
social disorder appears as a series of more-or-less episodic events. What
these conditions have in common is that they signal a breakdown of the
local social order. They are violations of what James Q. Wilson (1968)
called "standards of right and seemly conduct."

Of course, to be useful, a concept must also be bounded. It cannot
encompass every nuance of behavior. Disorder violates widely shared
norms about public behavior; these norms prescribe how people should
behave in relation to their neighbors or while passing through the
community. They are not a neat bundle of rules, because legislatures have
not set some of them in cold type even though they are widely agreed
upon. Some activities in the bundle are unlawful, but it has been difficult
to get police to take most of those very seriously. Because many norms
about public behavior are uncodified and others are not traditionally
defined as "serious," evaluators need to work through the untidiness of
disorder to identify its dimensions in a particular context. They usually
need to develop new measures of their prevalence because the uncodified
status of many disorders means there are few official reports or indicators
of the extent to which they plague particular neighborhoods.

The importance of disorder to policing's customers can be illustrated by
what happens during beat meetings in Chicago. These meetings are a
central aspect of the city's program, for they are the principal arena in
which joint problem identification and problem solving takes place.
Attending 146 of these meetings, we noted a total of 113 different
problems that were discussed, as well as 36 types of solutions to them. Of
the problems recorded in our observations, 21 were mentioned in at least
10 percent of all beat meetings. These are depicted in exhibit 3. About half
of these problems are related to social disorder issues; note the high rating
given to "youth problems." Complaints about police procedures made up
another quarter of these issues, including two of the top four problems.
Another fifth of the top issues involved the decay of the physical
environment, in the form of graffiti, litter, and abandoned cars and
buildings. The kinds of core problems around which reactive policing was
organized--represented here by complaints about either burglary or
robbery--ranked only 17th on the list and were brought up in only 12
percent of all meetings (Skogan et al., 1995).

There are at least three approaches to measuring the extent of disorder:
analysis of archival records, direct observation by trained observers, and
sample surveys. Each has strengths and weaknesses, and these are 
reviewed in detail by Ralph Taylor in his essay "The Incivilities Thesis:
Theory, Measurement, and Policy" in this volume. I focus here on
survey-based measures of disorder.

Survey measures of disorder

The importance of disorder in the eyes of the general public can be seen in
surveys. Boston's 1995 public safety survey asked respondents about 16
different kinds of incidents or conditions in their neighborhood, asking
them to rank "how big a problem" each was. The top rankings belonged to
auto theft and drugs, but next were noise, public drinking, and vandalism;
then, after burglaries, came kids hanging around, graffiti, and panhandling
(Boston Police Department, 1995). A survey of the most dangerous district
involved in Chicago's community policing project found that two of the
most highly rated local problems were gang violence and drug dealing, but
between them came abandoned buildings; the fourth-biggest problem was
junk and trash in the streets and sidewalks. Respondents in that survey also
thought that public drinking was a bigger problem than burglary, assault,
or rape (Skogan et al., 1995). While many surveys ask "how big a
problem" specific disorders are, other formulations of the question include
"how worried are you about . . ." (Maxfield, 1984) and "how concerned
are you about . . ." (Mayhew et al., 1989). These approaches confound the
prevalence of problems in their environment with their perceived impact
on the respondent, which are not necessarily the same issue, and I would
not recommend them.

Determining what disorders to include in an evaluation is, of course,
driven by the problems facing the communities involved and the nature of
the programs being developed. For example, some circumstances might
call for targeting alcohol-related problems. In Chicago, we asked residents
of program and comparison areas about "things that you may think are
problems in your neighborhood." They were read short lists of problem
descriptions and asked each time if they thought it was "a big problem,
some problem, or no problem in your neighborhood." The following
alcohol-related problems were addressed:

o Public drinking--27 percent thought it was some problem; 20 percent, a
big problem.

o Taverns or liquor stores selling alcohol to minors--21 percent thought it
was some problem; 15 percent, a big problem.

o Taverns or liquor stores attracting troublemakers--23 percent thought it
was some problem; 19 percent, a big problem.

In other studies, I have examined survey reports of the extent of a variety
of disorder problems: 

o loitering
o vandalism
o street harassment
o fly dumping
o massage parlors
o abandoned buildings
o noise
o abandoned cars
o junk-filled vacant lots
o truancy
o panhandling
o litter and trash
o graffiti
o public drinking
o broken windows
o public gambling
o loud parties
o school disruption
o public insults
o spray painting
o dilapidated buildings
o taverns
o topless bars
o dirty streets and sidewalks
o pornographic theaters

In each case, it was necessary to tailor the specific wording of the question
to local conditions. For example, questions about topless bars were
included in surveys in Houston because I could not help but notice beer
halls with flashing neon signs announcing "Naked Girls Dance" in several
of the targeted residential areas (Skogan, 1990a).

Are these perceptual measures valid indicators of the true extent of
disorder in a community? Unlike survey measures of victimization,
relatively little research has addressed the matter, and much of it is
reviewed in Ralph Taylor's "The Incivilities Thesis: Theory, Measurement,
and Policy" in this volume. The question is whether responses to these
kinds of survey questions can be accepted as useful reports on
neighborhood conditions and whether we can treat respondents as
informants. Responses to questions about disorderly conditions might
reflect respondents' biases or personal preferences, or they might be
random answers made up on the spot to satisfy interviewers. The middle
choice (respondent bias) implies that disorder largely rests in the eye of the
beholder and that surveys are not a very useful way of gathering
intelligence about the distribution of neighborhood problems. However,
statistical analyses suggest that the surveys are not just measuring
intolerance for all but conventional middle-class views of how people
ought to behave. Rather, there is evidence that major economic, social, and
lifestyle groups within neighborhoods are in a great deal of agreement
about the problems they face and that the surveys actually represent
neighborhood differences in conditions, not just individuals' views.

Another approach to validating survey results is to compare them with the
extent of specific disorders measured by observing the same area. This is
easiest to do for such observable neighborhood conditions as litter, graffiti,
and building abandonment. Ralph Taylor and his colleagues made
carefully controlled observations of those factors in 66 neighborhoods.
The results were correlated with perceptual measures gathered in surveys
of the same areas. The correlations were not always very high. They were
highest when the survey and observational data were combined to form
general indices and when they were compared for small areas. However, at
the single-measure, problem-specific level, the extent to which the low
correlation could be attributed to measurement errors on both the survey
and observational sides of the comparison is unclear.

Observational measures of disorder

As this hints, there are great possibilities for observational measurements
of the targets of some policing programs. This work was pioneered by
Ralph Taylor, who has conducted block-by-block physical surveys of
neighborhoods in Baltimore. His observers assessed and scored the
physical dilapidation of individual buildings as well as the deterioration of
streets, alleys, and sidewalks. They noted the presence of abandoned
buildings and storefronts, graffiti, and litter. These factors were then
correlated with resident morale and calls for police service. Other
researchers have examined the distribution of graffiti and abandoned cars
or the impact of taverns, schools, and mixed land use on crime. This
research is not easy to conduct. There must be acceptable levels of
inter-observer agreement on what they observed for us to accept the results
of their judgments; also, it is important to ensure the safety of observers.

There are limits to what can be observed and what persons living in a
neighborhood can be asked about. For example, Richard Taub (Taub et al.,
1984) found that his observers could not reliably count junk in front yards
and vacant lots that was "smaller than a toaster," so they used that
standard. Many of the phenomena we would like to observe can be
transitory in character, especially if observers are looking at social
behavior rather than physical manifestations of decay. These disorders are
events rather than conditions, so brief observations are likely to miss them.
They vary enormously by the time of day, the day of the week, and the
weather. In one study, during repeated and lengthy observations of specific
locations that had been identified as high-disorder hot spots, observers
actually saw something disorderly take place very infrequently.

A survey example

Exhibit 4 reports the results of surveys of five police districts in Chicago,
using the "how big a problem" formula described above. It identifies the 4
neighborhood problems that were the most highly ranked in each district
from a list of 22 problems that were presented to respondents in 3 different
sections of the questionnaire. Several points are illustrated. 

First, some problems were common across many or most of the districts,
including drugs and gang violence. Street drug sales were on the agenda in
every community; gang violence, in four of the five. However, the other
top problems differed from place to place, and issues that loomed large in
some areas were scarcely problems in other districts. In one dense area
with little off-street parking, vandalism to automobiles was one of the
area's top four problems; only in the wealthiest area was auto theft on the
list. Thus, one goal of community policing is to open departments up to
local input--so they can effectively discern these variations in local
concerns and tailor their operations to respond to them.

Second, not all of the problems on people's minds fell in the
"conventionally serious crime" category. A wide range of problems were
identified as vexing. Car vandalism was near the top of the list in two
areas, as was graffiti. Street crime was also highly rated in two areas. Auto
theft, burglary, disruptions around schools, abandoned buildings, and
"vacant lots filled with trash and junk" each stood near the top of the list in
one district. It is interesting to note that only in one district--Morgan Park-
-did conventionally serious crimes constitute all four of the area's most
highly ranked problems. This was the wealthiest area of the group, one
that is the home of many city workers and has strong connections with city
hall and municipal service agencies. In the other four districts, two of the
top four problems were quality-of-life concerns rather than conventionally
serious criminal offenses.

Finally, exhibit 4 illustrates that the initial levels of these "biggest
problems" varied considerably from district to district. For example, street
drug dealing was rated a big problem by more than 60 percent of residents
of Englewood, but only by about 13 percent of the residents of Morgan
Park, and by 20 percent of those we interviewed in Rogers Park, even
though it was among these areas' top-ranked issues. In Morgan Park,
burglary was a top-ranked problem, but only 10 percent gave it a high
rating. In Morgan Park in particular, there was not much room for
improvement on many dimensions, and expectations about the potential
impact of community policing on problems had to be tempered by this
fact.

What was the impact of the program on these problems? Exhibit 5
examines this question. It depicts Wave 1 and Wave 2 survey results for
one district and its matched comparison area. The biggest problems in
Englewood included drugs, gang violence, abandoned buildings, and
trash-strewn lots. The values in parentheses near the bottom of the figure
present the statistical significance of Wave 1 to Wave 2 changes within the
area. This is the likelihood that the change recorded actually reflects a
chance fluctuation in the survey. (We only want to pay attention to
changes that were probably not due to chance.) Detailed statistical
analyses of the data are not presented here, but they reinforced the patterns
that can be observed in exhibit 5.

In Englewood, all four of the biggest problems declined, while none went
down significantly in its matched comparison area. Street drug sales were
ranked a big problem by 62 percent of Englewood residents in 1993, but
by only 49 percent in 1994. Abandoned building problems dropped from
43 percent to 27 percent. Gang violence was down only modestly,
declining from 41 to 35 percent, but it increased significantly in
Englewood's comparison area. Detailed statistical analysis provided
additional evidence that these problems all declined significantly after 15
months of community policing.

Measuring fear of crime

There have been many efforts to clarify the meaning of the concept of
"fear of crime" (Ferraro and LaGrange, 1987; Maxfield, 1984). Some are
troubled that there is no clear consensus on what the concept means or
how it is best measured and that studies that measure the concept in
conceptually diverse ways find that different operationalizations of fear are
only moderately correlated with one another. However, this heterogeneity
of meaning simply reflects the fact that fear of crime is a concept of
everyday language, one suited for casual conversation. People commonly
talk about fear of crime and its social and political effects; for example,
one hears that the elderly are "prisoners of fear," traumatized by the
thought of venturing out because of the risks they would face. But the
concept needs to be refined for research purposes, and how it is best
defined depends upon the purpose of the research.

Research on fear of crime conceptualizes it in one of four ways. Three
definitions are cognitive in nature, reflecting people's concern about crime,
their assessments of personal risk of victimization, and the perceived
threat of crime in their environment. The remaining approach to defining
fear is behavioral and defines fear by the things people do in response to
crime. Dissecting these variations in how fear of crime is defined is
important because they make a great deal of difference in what researchers
have found. Different definitions of fear can lead to different substantive
research conclusions.

Concern about crime

The "concern" definition of fear focuses on people's assessments of the
extent to which crime and disorder are serious problems for their
community or society. Concern is a judgment about the frequency or
seriousness of events and conditions in one's environment.

There are a number of approaches to measuring concern. Opinion surveys
ask whether crime or disorder is increasing or decreasing and whether
respondents would place them on their list of "most important problems."
Most research adopting this definition of fear examines neighborhood
conditions. In my research I have asked about "how big a problem"
respondents think various conditions are in their immediate area. The 1995
Boston Public Safety Survey asks, "Is crime a problem in Boston?"

The British Crime Survey gives respondents a list of crimes and disorders
and asks, "how common or uncommon they are in your area?" (Maxfield,
1984). Respondents also are sometimes asked to compare crime in their
neighborhood to the city as a whole. Even in the highest crime cities, most
report that their own area is "below average." Massive surveys of 13 cities
conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau during the 1970s found that only 7
percent thought their neighborhood was more dangerous when compared
to others in the metropolitan area (Garofalo, 1977). This is likely to be true
because the distribution of crime within cities typically is very skewed,
with a few areas driving up the citywide total. Because they ask for a
report on neighborhood conditions that is independent of how respondents
perceive their own risks, measures in this category are typically unrelated
to those that tap the emotive dimensions of fear.

Risk of victimization

The second common meaning of fear is the perception that one is likely to
be victimized. Since the surveys sponsored by the President's Crime
Commission in the mid-1960s (Biderman et al., 1967), researchers have
asked people to rate their chances of being victimized. For example,
survey respondents may be asked to rate "how likely" they are to be
attacked or burglarized, on a scale ranging from "not very likely" to "very
likely." Assessments of risk are respondents' perceptions of the likelihood
of things happening to them, and these are frequently recommended as
measures of "fear." In the 1988 British Crime Survey, respondents were
asked to rate their risk of being victimized in the next year using a
six-point scale from "certainly not" to "certain to be victimized" (Mayhew
et al., 1989). Risk measures appear to factor in what respondents have
done to protect themselves from victimization. As a result groups like the
elderly--who report high levels of fear on other dimensions--do not
perceive of themselves as particularly at risk because they are much less
exposed to victimization (Skogan, 1993).

Threat of crime

Definitions of fear focusing on threat emphasize the potential for harm that
people feel crime holds for them. Threat levels are high when people
believe that something could happen to them, if they exposed themselves
to risk. The concept of threat is distinct from those of risk and concern.
People may adopt various tactics to reduce their vulnerability to
victimization; as a result, they may not rate their risk as particularly high
because they avoid exposure to risk. However, they might rate the threat of
crime as high if they were to be exposed to risk. Because many people
believe they are capable of dealing with crime, threat is also distinct from
concern about the issue. Threat is measured by questions that ask, "How
safe would you feel if you were out alone?" or, "How would you feel if
you were approached by a stranger on the street or heard footsteps in the
night?" (Taub et al., 1984). Numerous surveys have found that the threat
of crime is felt most strongly by the elderly, and in comparison to
measures of risk or concern, questions measuring threat clearly
differentiate senior citizens from the remainder of the adult population.

Fear as behavior

A final, important conceptualization of fear of crime is what people do.
This operational definition of fear focuses on the behavioral, rather than
cognitive, aspects of the attitude. From this perspective, fear is best
assessed by how it manifests itself in the frequency with which people go
out after dark, restrict their shopping to safer commercial areas, fortify
their homes against invasion, and avoid contact with strangers. The
International Crime Survey, which has been conducted in almost 30
countries, asks if respondents avoid certain areas, go out with an escort,
have a burglar alarm, leave their lights on when away from home, and ask
neighbors to watch their homes when they are away (Van Dijk and
Mayhew, 1993).

This research usually examines two general classes of reactions to crime:
those that limit risk of personal attack by avoiding potentially threatening
situations and those defensive tactics that reduce the vulnerability of
households to burglary and home invasion. This distinction was first
drawn by Furstenberg (1971), who dubbed them "avoidance" and
"mobilization." Avoidance definitions emphasize behaviors aimed at
reducing risk of personal crime, such as avoiding dangerous places and
people and walking only with an escort (rather than alone) after dark.
Mobilization includes the extent to which people fortify their homes
against crime by adopting security measures such as special outdoor lights,
door locks, window bars, and interior lights and by marking their property
with a special identification number.

Which measure to use

It makes a difference what measure is used. For example, research on the
effects of mass media coverage of crime is contingent upon the
conceptualization of fear that is used. Tyler and Cook (1984) found that
exposure to media stories about crime increased people's concern about
crime (as it is defined here, the belief that crime is a growing community
problem). However, they found that it did not affect people's perception
that their own neighborhood was unsafe or that their personal safety was at
risk. Other researchers have found that political attitudes and measures of
ideological position are correlated with concern measures, but not with
risk or threat measures. Victimization, on the other hand, has clearer
effects on both risk and threat measures. Interestingly, the elderly's
well-known fear of crime is manifested only on the threat measure; they
do not rate their own risk of being victimized as particularly high, they do
not perceive their neighborhoods as particularly disorderly, and they are
much less likely than others to be concerned about crime (Skogan, 1993).

As this summary implies, it is important that evaluators pick and choose
fear measures carefully. To evaluate the impact of visible patrol, it would
be wise to use threat measures, which assess perceived risk "outside." On
these measures, almost no one feels very unsafe during the day, so
after-dark fears--and after-dark programs--need to be assessed. Domestic
violence programs would call for tailored behavioral measures that would
assess, for example, things victims do to distance themselves from abusive
partners. The fear-of-crime measure employed by the National Opinion
Research Center, the Roper poll, and others ("Is there a place nearby"--that
is, within a mile--where you would be afraid to walk alone after dark?")
would be a useful hot spot question, especially in conjunction with a
followup open-ended question identifying the location. Specific
interventions might call for fear measures linked to specific types of
crime; for example, house burglary or robbery near automatic teller
machines. Offense-specific measures of fear are more strongly linked to
one another than are broad or heterogeneous measures (Warr, 1984).

An example

Can better policing affect fear of crime? This is an area where I think the
common research wisdom is wrong. The notion that visible policing does
not make a difference in fear and attitudes toward police stems from early
experiments conducted in Kansas City. Police there were selectively
withdrawn from some experimental precincts and their numbers beefed up
in others to gauge the effect of the extent of routine (largely motorized)
patrol on crime and fear. Researchers found no differences in the
subsequent views or victimization experiences of residents of the
experimental and comparison areas. Residents also did not notice that the
number of police assigned to their area had changed. There has been
research before and since that ran counter to these conclusions, but the
Kansas City findings (Kelling et al., 1974) became famous.

However, researchers working with survey data on the visibility of
policing and contacts between the public and the police quickly note that
associations between visibility, contacts, satisfaction, and fear are strong,
persisting even when a long list of alternative correlates are controlled for.
This can be illustrated by the findings of an ongoing evaluation of
community policing in Chicago (see Skogan and Hartnett, 1997). Unlike
Kansas City, the evidence in this case is correlational rather than
experimental. But it also involves a program that suddenly increased--this
time visibly--the level of police activity in selected areas. The apparent
consequences of police visibility in Chicago contradict the Kansas City
results. In this evaluation, respondents were questioned twice, once before
the program began and again after about 15 months. The research
examined the impact of experiences the respondents personally had
between the two waves of interviews. Fear of crime was measured each
time by responses to three questions about localized, outdoor crime
threats:

o How safe would you feel being alone outside in your neighborhood at
night? [four responses, ranging from "very safe" to "very unsafe"]

o Is there any particular place in your neighborhood where you would be
afraid to go alone, either during the day or after dark? [yes or no]

o How often does worry about crime prevention prevent you from doing
things you would like to do in your neighborhood? [four responses,
ranging from "very often" to "never at all"]

The reliability of the composite scale combining these items was 0.66.
Before the program began, levels of fear were higher among women,
low-income and less educated people, African-Americans, and renters.

Statistical analysis found that the impact of visible community-oriented
police efforts (walking on foot, talking with residents, patrolling the
alleys) on this fear measure was large and highly significant. Controlling
for many other factors, residents who subsequently observed the police
involved in a list of community-oriented activities (not just driving by) felt
safer. The most important control factors took advantage of the fact that
the respondents were interviewed twice: The analysis controlled for a
measure of how fearful they were before the program began and what they
reported seeing police in their area doing before the program began.
Controlling for past experience, residents of the target community policing
neighborhoods were less fearful and more satisfied with police
responsiveness to community concerns; they also thought police were
more effective at dealing with crime. The effect of police visibility on fear
was of about the same magnitude as the effects of age and sex, two of the
strongest determinates of fear.

To illustrate the magnitude and generality of the involved effects, exhibit 6
charts Wave 2 responses to the first fear question listed above, "How safe
would you feel being alone outside in your neighborhood at night?" It
shows the percentage of respondents who replied "unsafe" or "very
unsafe." The visibility of community-oriented policing during the period 
between the interviews is represented by a count of sightings (ranging
from zero to four) of two different kinds of foot patrol--police checking
buildings and alleys, and officers having informal conversations with
citizens. Whites were less fearful than African-Americans or Hispanics,
most notably when police visibility was very low. However, levels of fear
were lower for all groups when the police were more visible. Also, the
downward slopes of the lines for African-Americans and Hispanics were
somewhat steeper than the slope for whites. This suggests the effect of
police visibility was greater for minorities than for white respondents.

Police-related measurement issues

Having developed useful indicators of the extent of crime, disorder, and
fear, is the evaluator's task done? What we have reviewed is just the
beginning. A thoroughgoing evaluation may have to attend to many more
issues that call for systematic measurement. The list is long, and some
issues--such as those related to assessments of the quality of police
service, the visibility of policing, police-citizen contacts, and satisfaction
with encounters with police--are worthy of a conference in their own right.
The following section addresses some of the issues that evaluators have
found crucial.

Visibility of police

Since the Kansas City preventive patrol experiment, surveys have
routinely included questions about observation of various police activities.
No research has addressed the accuracy of these measures, which is
probably fairly low. Visibility should be mostly related to how frequently
people are positioned to see police, and it is typically much lower among
older people, the unemployed, and women.

In our Chicago study, we used a checklist of seven common police
activities that neighborhood residents might observe, including driving
through the area, patrolling a nearby commercial area, pulling over an auto
or searching or frisking someone, patrolling an alley or checking garages,
and having an apparently friendly chat with people from the
neighborhood. All of these were commonly observed in the dense,
not-well-off areas that we surveyed. Over time, the activities commonly
associated with community-oriented policing (conversations, foot patrols,
and alley or garage checks) were observed more frequently in the program
areas than in the comparison areas. Those activities were also linked to
reduced fear of crime (as illustrated in exhibit 6), while visible motorized
patrol seemed to have no consequences at all.

Encounters between police and the public

The survey approach screens for encounters between police and the public
within a specified recall period (e.g., "the last 6 months"), using a list of
typical contact situations. The British Crime Survey, which is conducted
in person, presents respondents with a checklist of 17 scenarios-- ranging
from reporting a crime to asking for directions--and asks if they have been
involved in them during the past 12 months. More than 50 percent of
Britons recalled such a contact during 1992. Almost 40 percent contacted
the police, while an overlapping 33 percent were stopped by police or 
were contacted in the course of an investigation (Skogan, 1994).

There are no comparable national figures for the United States. In our
Chicago surveys, we screen respondents for nine types of citizen-initiated
contacts, ranging from reporting a crime to contacting the police to ask for
information. We also ask about their involvement in motor vehicle stops
and being stopped while they are on foot. In April 1993, 61 percent of
adult Chicagoans recalled one or more of these direct contacts with police
during the past year. In addition, almost 30 percent indicated they had
received a parking ticket in the city during the previous year, but we did
not include that indirect contact in the 61 percent figure.

Assessments of the quality of police service

Remarkably little attention has been focused on developing measurements
of public assessment of police service. In Chicago, we have asked "how
good a job" respondents think the police do at a variety of tasks and under
a variety of circumstances, "how satisfied" people are with specific police
efforts, and how well the police behave "toward people in this
neighborhood." Typically, 15 to 20 percent of respondents insist that they
"don't know" about these things; analytically, they turn out to be older, to
have had no recent contact with police, to watch little or no television, and
to be uninvolved in neighborhood life.

Assessments of encounters with police

Following a contact screen like that described above, respondents recalling
an encounter can be questioned about what transpired. If they have had
multiple contacts, they should be asked about the most recent one. These
data are particularly useful because they can provide a detailed "consumer
report" of recent encounters with police. The British survey asks those
who contacted the police about response time, efforts that police made at
the scene, the interest the police seemed to show in the case, if the
respondent had any followup contacts with police about the matter, and
how politely the respondent was treated. People who were stopped by the
police are asked if they were given reasons for being stopped; if they were
questioned, searched, or breath-tested; and if they were arrested,
prosecuted, or otherwise sanctioned. In Britain, all of these factors are
closely related to how satisfied people who have had contacts are with the
quality of police service (Skogan, 1994). One complication is that many
crime victims who contact the police have also been stopped or even
arrested by them in the recent past, complicating how they judge the
quality of the service they receive (Maxfield, 1988).

References

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Biderman, Albert D., and James P. Lynch. Understanding Crime Incidence
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Farrell, Graham. "Preventing Repeat Victimization." In Building a Safer
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Ferraro, Kenneth F. Fear of Crime: Interpreting Victimization Risk.
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Furstenberg, Frank. F., Jr. "Public Reaction to Crime in the Streets."
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Garofalo, James. Public Opinion About Crime. Washington, DC: U.S.
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Groves, Robert M., and Robert L. Kahn. Surveys by Telephone: A
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Kelling, George. "Measuring What Matters: A New Way of Thinking
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Kelling, George, and Catherine Coles. Fixing Broken Windows. New
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Kelling, George, Tony Pate, Duane Dieckman, and Charles Brown. The
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Kraemer, Helena C., and Sue Thiemann. How Many Subjects? Statistical
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Mirrlees-Black, Catriona, Pat Mayhew, and Andrew Percy. The 1996
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Schneider, Anne L. "Victimization Surveys and Criminal Justice System
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Criminal Victimization, ed. Wolfgang Bilsky, Christian Pfeiffer, and Peter
Wetzels. Stuttgart, Germany: Enke, 1993: 131-140.

Skogan, Wesley G. Contacts Between Police and Public: Findings From
the 1992 British Crime Survey. London, England: Home Office Research
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Skogan, Wesley G. Resident Survey Methods Report. Program Paper No.
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Skogan, Wesley G., and Andrew C. Gordon. "A Review of Detective
Division Reporting Practices." In Crime in Illinois 1982. Springfield, IL:
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Skogan, Wesley G., and Susan M. Hartnett. Community Policing, Chicago
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-------------------------------

Measuring What Matters

Darrel W. Stephens 

In recent years, discussions of policing among practitioners and scholars
have begun to emphasize the importance of outcome and impact measures.
These discussions have pointed out that the police have developed a series
of performance measures that, for the most part, have little relationship to
results. James Q. Wilson, in "The Problem of Defining Agency Success,"
says it this way:

Most of the efforts to improve performance measures for policing have 
concentrated on finding either real measures of overall effectiveness or
plausible proxy measures. Not much has come of these efforts for reasons 
that should be obvious. There are no "real" measures of overall success;
what is measurable about the level of public order, safety, and amenity in a
given large city can only partially, if at all, be affected by police behavior.
(For example, if the murder or robbery rates go up, one cannot assume that
this is the fault of the police; if they go down, one should not necessarily
allow the police to take credit for it.) Proxy measures almost always turn
out to be process measures--response time, arrest rates, or clearance
rates--that may or may not have any relationship to crime rates or levels of
public order. (Wilson, 1993)

Many practitioners and scholars would agree with Wilson. Nevertheless,
the police continue to face the challenge of dealing with the impact of
crime, fear, and disorder in their communities and the public's belief that it
is their responsibility. The police are the first, and frequently the only,
government agency the public looks to for answers when crime rates
change, a heinous crime occurs, or citizens are afraid to go out of
their houses after dark. Like many other aspects of their job, even when
the police do not have a clear answer, there is an expectation that they say
or do something that will provide a sense that things are either under
control or will be in short order. A survey of Florida residents by the St.
Petersburg Times (November 4, 1995) indicates that 85 percent of the
respondents say the problem of greatest concern to them is crime. Over the
past 10 to 15 years, national public opinion surveys routinely indicate that
crime and drug abuse are among the highest priority concerns.

The police are truly on the front line in dealing with the crime, fear, and
disorder that have such a great impact on a community's quality of life.
Before the police can address these problems, however, they face the
significant challenge of measuring them. This challenge, along with the
impact of these problems on the quality of community life, is the subject
of this paper. The problems associated with measuring the levels of crime,
fear, and disorder in the community are discussed in separate sections
devoted to each of these areas, followed by an examination of the impact
of these problems on the quality of life in the community. The concluding
section discusses how these measures can be applied to specific
neighborhoods in a way that allows the police to gain a sense of both the
overall community problems and the efforts to deal with them.

Measuring crime

How do the police measure the level of crime in their community? For all
intents and purposes the police measure the level of crime, and any change
in crime, through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime
Reports (UCR). In many cities, monthly, quarterly, and annual reports are
released to the public to show the number of serious crimes (Part 1 or
index crimes) that citizens have reported to the police during each
timeframe. These reports often provide comparisons to the same period in
the previous year so anyone interested can see if reported crime has
increased or decreased. News media stories about these crime statistics
usually include quotes and sound bites from police representatives who
attempt to explain any significant variations from one timeframe to the
next. Occasionally, the stories include observations about the statistics
from political figures and academic experts. Political figures are most
often available to the media when crime reports are down from the
previous reporting period.

The UCR data represent the official level of crime in the community.
These reports and the news media stories about them can have a
significant impact on the community. They often serve as grist for the
political mill--local elections have been greatly influenced by crime
reports. In some cases, the careers of police chiefs and sheriffs have been
affected in either positive or negative ways by these statistics. Because of
their potential impact, UCR data have been the subject of considerable
debate, discussion, and criticism as a measure of crime in the community.

The criticism of the UCR has been focused primarily on a number of
well-known limitations of the reporting system (Silberman, 1978; Kelling,
1996). First, the UCR represents only that portion of crime that is reported
to the police. Although well known, this fact is not usually noted in either
the reports provided by the police or the news media stories about them. In
many residents' minds, these statistics represent the actual level of crime
in their communities, particularly if there are significant increases from
one year to the next. The second criticism is that only eight crimes have
been included as Part 1 offenses. Crimes that the public cares a great deal
about such as narcotic offenses are not included in the reports. Third, a
series of program rules contribute to confusion about what the reports
actually mean. For example, a bicycle or lawn mower stolen from an open
garage is classified as a burglary. If these same items are stolen from the
driveway a few feet from the open garage door, the offense is called a
larceny. Some are also critical of the "hierarchy rule," which requires that
an incident be classified as the most serious crime if multiple crimes occur
at the same time. The fourth and perhaps most significant criticism is that
crimes are reported to the police, who classify them, tabulate them, and
send them to the State or directly to the FBI. Those suspicious of the
police argue that this provides the opportunity for intentional manipulation
of the numbers or mistakes in classification.

The possibility of crime reports being manipulated by the police is not
without some basis in fact. One example is the Kansas City, Missouri,
police chief who had served with distinction for a number of years and
was indicted by a county grand jury in 1960 for manipulating the UCR.
The indictment was eventually dismissed, but he lost his job in the
process. The same problem has surfaced in other cities over the years and
continues to be one of the most significant concerns about crime reports.
After all, there are subtle differences between attempted burglary and
vandalism. A window might be broken in both, but there are different
motives for each type of crime, and the motive may not be immediately
clear. There is also a slim margin of difference between a strong-arm
robbery and a purse snatching. It is clear when the victim is knocked to the
ground in the process of taking the purse. In many cases, though, the
difference is the degree of resistance involved in hanging onto the purse.
There are similar distinctions that can be made in shoplifting cases where
the suspect is confronted and resists apprehension. These are important
issues because the seriousness of the crimes can be influenced by the
benefit of the doubt going to the less serious incident. In the case of
burglary or vandalism, if the latter classification is used, the incident drops
completely out of the Part 1 crime category.

All of the other limitations of the UCR are just that--limitations that need
to be taken into account when using the data as a measure of crime. At the
local level, intentional manipulation of the reports, however, is an entirely
different matter. Manipulation of the reports renders them virtually useless
as a measure of crime in a city. This, in turn, casts a dark shadow on the
only measure of crime that most cities have and raises serious questions
about the overall integrity of the police. Although local victimization
surveys might be helpful, their cost puts them well beyond the ability of
most police departments to conduct them with any regularity.

Given the limitations of the UCR, how useful is it to the police and
community as a measure of crime? In one sense, the question is academic:
Until someone develops a suitable replacement, the UCR is the best
available measure of reported crime--even with the flaws. A substitute for
the UCR is not likely to be available anytime soon. An alternative system
developed in the mid-1980s by the Police Executive Research Forum with
the support of the Bureau of Justice Statistics failed to attract sufficient
interest to serve as a viable replacement. No other initiatives are under way
to develop a crime reporting and measurement system to take the place of
the UCR.

Therefore, it is important to reach a consensus on how significant the
limitations of the UCR are to measuring crime in the community. If police
departments pay close attention to proper collection and classification
methods, the UCR can be a valuable and useful measure of reported crime.
In fact, so much time is spent criticizing the system, little attention is
given to the useful aspects of a reporting process that provides a good
indication of the matters the public believes is important enough to bring
to the attention of the police.

Several aspects of the UCR provide helpful information to the police. One
useful aspect is that it provides a relatively simple method of classifying
criminal incidents that are brought to the attention of the police by the
public. Even with the limitations, it provides a common language that
most people, police officers and citizens alike, can understand. Using State
statutory definitions presents some of the same problems as the UCR, and
generally State definitions are more complex. For example, in some States,
a burglary is limited to building structures; in others, a theft from a vehicle
can be a burglary. State statutes contain many overlapping definitions for
similar incidents, which can result in several criminal charges from one 
incident.

A key criticism of the UCR is that it measures only the crime that is
reported. That criticism would exist with any system unless it included
victimization surveys, which are generally not practical for police 
departments. Moreover, one might want to explore just how valuable it
would be for a police department to invest the resources to know what
citizens have failed to report. How helpful would victimization data be for
a police department? For the most part, knowing about every fight that
takes place between two juveniles on the way home from school that
might be classified as an assault is probably not particularly helpful to the
police or the community. To be sure, most citizens will report what they
believe is important for the police to know. If the police routinely 
encourage citizens to report incidents, what is reported might be a useful
measurement of the level of crime in the community that the public
believes is important for the police to know.

Given the challenges of measuring crime, the UCR has been and can
continue to be a useful way of measuring reported crime in a community.
One of the greatest difficulties with the UCR is not the system itself but
how the police and politicians use the information that comes from the
system. Criticism of the UCR is loudest when reported crime is increasing. 
In spite of the cautions against comparisons from one city to another, it is
done with great regularity, and it is naive to believe that will not continue.
In fact, police, academics, and the news media regularly engage in the
practice. The limitations of making such comparisons are rarely pointed
out, except when reported crime is increasing. During these periods of
increasing crime, it is often said that the primary reason the comparisons
are not useful is because other cities may not give the same amount of
attention to the accuracy of the reports. Although most police executives
have learned to be cautious about what they say about UCR crime
statistics when reported index offenses are declining, some are quite vocal
about police contributions to the decline and look to the most recently
implemented program as the source of the change.

An important question that begs for some professional resolution in
dealing with the issue of measuring what matters is who gets the credit--or
the blame--for fluctuations in reported crime. Are police executives
entitled to take credit for a decline in reported crime? If so, under what
circumstances? While some in policing believe the police are essentially
powerless to do much about crime, others argue that the police can make
significant contributions to reducing crime in specific neighborhoods and
circumstances.

Focused, thoughtful responses to specific crime problems at the
neighborhood level that involve those affected by the problem can
contribute to reductions in reported crime. The police also should be able
to accept some of the credit or responsibility for changes in reported
crime. At the citywide level, it may be appropriate for the police to share
in the credit for a decline in reported crime under at least two
circumstances. First, the police should share in the credit if they address a
problem in a small geographic area and changes in reported crime in the
area affect the citywide totals. A good example of this is what happened
with thefts from autos in the downtown area of Newport News, Virginia,
in the mid-1980s. As a part of the department's problem-oriented policing
effort, officers focused on the issue of thefts from vehicles parked in the
area of the shipyard that employed more than 35,000 people. A careful
analysis of the problem and the implementation of solutions tailored to the
various aspects of the thefts resulted in a 52 percent decline in theft reports
over a 12-month period (Eck and Spelman, 1987). That decline
corresponded with a significant decline in the total number of thefts from
vehicles in the city. While there are other possible explanations for this, it
seems it is appropriate for the police to say this initiative is likely to have
had some impact on the overall reduction in thefts from vehicles in the
city. Moreover, since the larceny category was a major part of overall
crime, it could be argued the subsequent decline in property index offenses
was due in part to the initiative at the shipyard. It is also important to note
in this example that the solutions implemented relied heavily on the
contributions of others--the shipyard, the city, owners of the vehicles--to
take steps to change the environment; thus, they should share in the credit
for reducing the problem.

Second, the police should share in the credit for declines in a specific
crime on a citywide basis if they have implemented a specific response to
the problem and the problem declines. Gasoline driveoffs have been
affected by pay-before-you-pump policies advocated by police in many
cities. In the mid-1970s, most urban areas enacted exact-change policies
for public buses, and the once frequent bus robberies stopped. In neither
case can other factors be ruled out because change and displacement
influence overall numbers, but it seems appropriate for the police to accept
some of the credit for the outcome.

The UCR is perhaps the best available tool to address the question of how
the police measure crime in a community. Given careful attention to the
process and how the information is used by officials, some of the concerns
can be addressed. In addition, the UCR can gain greater credibility, which
might enhance its value. The UCR, however, has taken on a role as a
measure of police impact that is well beyond what it should be--even if it
works exactly as it was designed and everyone understands its limitations.
Community measurements of crime and fear do not seem to be influenced
to a great extent by the fluctuations in Uniform Crime Reports. The
community uses other barometers.

Measuring disorder

How does the public measure crime? How much influence do official
police reports have on citizen perceptions of crime? Do police annual
rituals of providing UCR statistics to the public create a sense of relief or
contribute to concern about crime? Part of the answer to these questions
lies in how citizens define crime. Experience in working with citizens in a
number of communities suggests that citizens define crime in very
different terms than the police, and, by and large, official periodic
pronouncements of the level of crime in the community have little
influence on citizens' feelings about crime. In fact, these experiences lead
one to believe the average citizen's perspective is influenced to a much
greater extent by the amount of disorder they encounter, what they hear
from friends and family members, their personal victimizations, and news
media reports. The combination of these and other factors influence both
their sense of the significance of the crime problem and their level of fear.
Perceptions of disorder clearly seem to have an effect on citizens' views of
crime and its impact on the quality of community life. Therefore, it is
important for the police to define disorder, gain a better understanding of
its influence on citizens' perceptions, and make stronger efforts at
measurement.

In "The Impact of Community Policing on Neighborhood Residents,"
Wesley G. Skogan looked at disorder through the use of survey questions
that each of the projects included as a part of their evaluations (1995). The
amount of disorder was determined by questions on public drinking,
begging, street harassment, truancy, and gang activity. Surveying is one
good way to understand citizens' views of disorder and its impact in a
neighborhood or community. In fact, surveys of neighborhoods by the
police in cooperation with residents are both practical and useful tools that
are well within a department's capacity to conduct. There are other ways
of measuring disorder as well.

One helpful way to measure disorder is through simple observation of
neighborhood or area conditions. It would not be difficult for police
officers or motivated citizens to conduct a disorder assessment of the
neighborhood by systematically recording what they see in a drive or walk
through an area of concern. In St. Petersburg, neighborhood groups have
volunteered to conduct surveys of residents as well as record the physical
aspects of the area. If security is a concern, and it almost always is, they
routinely walk the neighborhood at night to do an inventory of street
lights, noting those that need repair as well as identifying locations where
they believe additional lighting is needed. To measure disorder in a
neighborhood, consideration might be given to the presence of graffiti,
groups of people loitering on the street, the level of noise (from boom
boxes or loud car stereo systems, for example), boarded and vacant
structures, abandoned vehicles, homeless or street people, and litter. The
presence of these elements in a neighborhood tends to contribute to a sense
that the situation is out of control and to heighten the level of fear.

The police also have an abundant source of information about disorder that
would provide a sense of both its extent and location. Police call records,
arrests, and reports are all good sources of information on public concerns
about disorder (Skogan, 1990). Police call data is little used but is one of
the best sources of information that police have about citizen concerns and
their views of what police work should be. Calls about noise disturbances,
street corner drug dealing, drinking on the street, graffiti, and gunfire are
all good indications of pubic concern about disorder. Regular analysis of
call information--frequency, type, location, and time--can give police a
strong indication of the nature of the problems and, in some cases, insight
into what might be done to improve the situation.

Perhaps the greatest challenges for police in measuring disorder are to
make it a priority and do what they can to change conditions. Wilson and
Kelling's theory of "broken windows" is well accepted, and there is
evidence that efforts to control disorder have some influence on the level
of citizen fear, satisfaction, and reported crime (Houston, Newark, New
York City, and St. Petersburg). However, it is often difficult for a street
police officer to make the same connection. It is not because they do not
have the intellectual capacity--they do. Police officers simply get caught up
in the urgency of dealing with robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, and
blatant street-level drug dealing. It is not easy for them to step back from
the fray far enough to see the relationship between rowdy youths on the
street corner, noise calls, and how those activities might contribute to the
environment that produces the "real crime" they are most concerned about
and believe is of greatest concern to the public.

Although a challenge, disorder management is becoming a higher priority
in many cities as the police make greater efforts to develop partnerships
with the community to solve problems. Interaction with residents about
neighborhood problems helps officers understand the importance of
disorder to citizens' sense of safety. As police officers explore
problems--and think about prevention and noncriminal justice
responses--they begin to see the links between neighborhood conditions,
fear, and crime. The development of a police department environment
where officers have not only the expectation but also the opportunity to
focus on problems in their areas of responsibility is critical. Police
executives, managers, and supervisors have the obligation and
responsibility to create this environment. With this environment comes the
knowledge and understanding of the importance of measuring and
responding to disorder problems.

Fear

Many would argue that the local government is as obligated to deal with
the fear of crime as it is to deal with the actual incidence; that it is
important, whatever the basis for existing fears, that citizens feel secure in
their home and on their streets. (Goldstein, 1977)

Over the past 20 years or so, it has become increasingly clear that the true
mission of the police ought not to be "to protect and serve" but to help
create a sense of safety in the community. To contribute to the production
of safe communities, the police must both acknowledge and take steps to
address citizen fear. This is a complicated task indeed, particularly because
Skogan showed that the level of fear is not directly related to the risk of
victimization (1986).

Obviously, citizen surveys are the most helpful tool in measuring citizen
fear and, like disorder, are within the capacity of the police to conduct on a
neighborhood level. In fact, neighborhood surveys can be designed and
conducted in a way that provides information on a variety of issues. The
questions in exhibit 1 were included in surveys conducted in St.
Petersburg that provided information on fear. While the information is not
sufficient to understand the reason for the change in fear, it does give the 
police and citizens a sense of the level of fear and how it has changed over
time.

Although measuring fear is a bit more complicated for the police than
measuring crime and disorder, data are available that would be helpful if
viewed in the context of this problem. Once again, police calls can be a
useful source of information about the level of fear in the community. Of
particular importance are calls related to suspicious people and vehicles.
Alarm calls might also serve as a crude measure of the level of fear in
some areas. Alarm calls, particularly false alarm calls, have increased in
most cities. While part of that increase is due to faulty systems, the rise in
the use of both building and vehicle alarms has contributed to the increase
as well. In some communities, ordinances have been enacted that require
alarms for structures to be registered with the police. New alarm permits
provide an indication of the level of fear in the community. In St.
Petersburg, alarm permits increased almost 25 percent in the second year
following the enactment of an ordinance requiring alarm systems to be
registered. Looking at these data in concert with neighborhood survey data
might identify areas where police can engage in specific activities to
address citizen fear.

While it may be difficult to capture, the investment in or presence of other
security measures might be an indication of the level of fear in the
community or neighborhood. The use of window bars, dead bolt locks,
and demands for increased lighting provide some indication of the level of
fear in a neighborhood. The police or other governmental agencies also
have information on gun permits, security guard services, and off-duty
police employment. All of these areas can provide some indication of the
level of fear in the community and offer the potential for identifying
specific areas where fear levels seem to be increasing.

Although it is very difficult to measure, the impact of the news media, the
entertainment industry, and police educational programs on citizen fear
must be considered. The media obviously has some influence on how
citizens feel about crime and violence and is, at least partially, responsible
for contributing to citizen fear. When one considers the attention given to
crime in both the print and electronic media, it is reasonable to conclude it
affects the fear level in the community. In many metropolitan areas, local
television news consumes from 4 to 6 hours of programming time. When
combined with national news coverage, as much as a third of
programming time is devoted to news. If the lead story is not devoted to
crime, at least one of the top two or three stories is likely to deal with
crime--generally the most violent or vicious of the day. In addition, a
considerable portion of tabloid television shows are devoted to crime and
violence. The steady diet of crime, murder, and mayhem reinforces daily
the notion that there is good reason to be afraid.

A significant portion of the television and movie entertainment industry is
focused on crime and violence as well. The police shows like "COPS,"
"Stories of the Highway Patrol," and "America's Most Wanted" enjoy
high ratings and add to the sense that crime and violence are completely
out of control. This, of course, is an additional contribution to fear in the
community.

The police contribute to fear as well. With the best of intentions, the police
have made the challenge of dealing with fear even more difficult. Police
efforts to convince citizens of the importance of taking precautions to
minimize their potential for victimization almost always begin with
statistics or anecdotes about crime. The idea is to motivate citizens enough
to take reasonable steps to protect themselves or their property.
Unfortunately, these efforts have also caused additional fear; a police
officer telling a citizen about the risks of crime has an extra amount of
credibility. The clear challenge for the police is to educate citizens about
their risk of criminal victimization in a way that motivates action--but does
not unnecessarily increase their fear.

The police must become more thoughtful and aggressive in providing
information to the public to mitigate the effects of all the messages that
promote fear. One tool that can be helpful is public cable television. Many
cities have developed special programming designed to inform citizens
about steps that can be taken to reduce the potential for victimization
without living in fear. Police departments have also developed a range of
methods to provide accurate information to citizens about crime in their
neighborhoods. Some use telephone call-in systems allowing residents to
access data 24 hours a day by entering the appropriate codes for their
neighborhoods. Others provide periodic reports that are included in
neighborhood newsletters. Still other departments have made crime and
workload data available over the Internet. Many public newspapers in
urban areas have returned to the practice of printing a police log that lists
calls and crime reports by neighborhoods. The St. Petersburg Times lists
crime reports and calls by community policing area in a biweekly
neighborhood section. All of these tools are important to help members of
the community be mindful of their potential for victimization but not so
fearful that they become prisoners in their own homes.

The effects of crime, disorder, and fear on the quality of community life

What are the effects of crime, disorder, and fear on the quality of
community life? Are the choices that people make on where to live, work,
shop, or recreate influenced by their assessment of the risk of being a
victim of crime? Fear is one effect of crime and disorder that clearly has
an influence on how people live their lives. A USA Today poll indicated
that 43 percent of Americans no longer shop at night because of the fear of
crime. In a recent meeting, St. Petersburg car dealers concerned about
crime indicated that citizen fear about the location of their businesses
made it more difficult to attract both employees and customers. Concerns
about safety in public schools have also had as much or more to do with
parents placing their children in private schools than the quality of
education.

The fear of crime and disorder contributes to neighborhoods declining and
dying because people are afraid to invest in them. Those who can afford it
escape to the suburbs. Those who are not able to escape watch
single-family houses turn into multiple-family dwellings that eventually
get boarded up and demolished after absentee landlords reach the point
where even minimal investments in meeting codes do not result in profits.
Local governments wrestle with the dual problem of meeting increased
service demands in these neighborhoods--fire protection, police service,
code enforcement, environmental cleanups--while the revenue to support
the services decreases. Measuring the effects of crime, disorder, and fear
on the quality of life requires more than just measuring the levels of each
of these variables.

Once again, surveys can provide an indication of how crime, fear, and
disorder affect individuals in the community. In many respects, "quality of
life" is a difficult concept to understand. While there will be agreement on
many aspects of what a good quality of life might include, individual
perspectives will differ considerably. The fear a young man has about
crime and disorder is likely to be very different from the fear of an elderly
man. A person who is financially well off will not feel the same effects of
crime and violence that a poor person will. The wealthy can simply move
away from the problem or invest a small portion of income in creating a
greater sense of security. Surveys can help sort out these various effects of
crime and disorder on the quality of life.

One can also monitor population shifts, property value changes, boarded
and vacant properties, loss of public revenue, and similar variables that
might provide some indication of the effects of fear, crime, and disorder.
Another indication might be the willingness of the public to invest
resources in public safety. The will to support get-tough policies continues
to increase as more of the public treasury is devoted to the prison industry.

A focus on neighborhoods

When one thinks about crime, violence, drug abuse, fear, and all of the
factors associated with them the problems seem overwhelming. The
endless debate about what to do about these problems and who is
responsible--individuals or society--takes place for the most part at the
State or Federal level of government where the primary responsibility for
many of the programs to address crime actually lies. And both of these
levels of government are, for all intents and purposes, inaccessible to the
general public. To effectively deal with crime and disorder and the fear
they generate, it seems that a focus on neighborhoods or small geographic
areas of the larger community offers the greatest promise of both
understanding what is happening and doing something meaningful about
these problems 

The police have been more willing in recent years to acknowledge their
limitations in dealing with crime. They have begun to talk about crime and
violence in the context of neighborhood conditions, education, the
economy, and other demographic factors in areas with the greatest
problems. Yet most police departments have not considered changes in 
these conditions as possible measures of their contributions.

Fortunately, some police departments are beginning to look at these
factors to determine the effect of initiatives aimed at neighborhood
problems. One example is the appearance of the neighborhood. Building
on the theory of "broken windows," police departments working with
neighborhood associations, other arms of government, and the private
sector have begun to consider change in the way a neighborhood looks as 
a positive impact of their collective efforts. An improvement in the way a
neighborhood appears could translate into less fear or higher property
values. Both of these variables can be measured at the neighborhood level
as can the level of reported crime and amount of disorder. The efforts in
St. Petersburg since 1992 have made an important contribution to property
values in targeted neighborhoods. Exhibit 2 provides an indication of the
change in property values from 1994 to 1996 in eight neighborhoods
where citizens and local government developed and implemented specific
plans to address problems of concern. The police played a key role in each
of these neighborhoods because of the priority that citizens placed on
security issues.

What is the value of a new or expanded business in a neighborhood from
the perspective of crime and disorder? Could new job opportunities help
transform some individuals from criminal activities to legitimate forms of
work? Can the foot and vehicular traffic associated with new business
contribute to safer streets? Can police engage in programs or adopt
policies that will enhance neighborhood improvement and investment? Is
the police contribution to reducing truancy a valid measure of police
performance, and how does that translate into reduced crime and disorder?
Does an increase in occupancy of an apartment complex where police have
worked on problems reflect a positive contribution? Obviously, the
answers to these questions depend in part on the interventions police have
initiated in cooperation with the community--but they also might provide
greater insight into the ability of the police to affect crime and disorder
and the fear they cause.

Conclusion

Measuring crime, disorder, fear, and their effects on the quality of life in
the community is important to the police. It seems, nevertheless, more
important to consider a wider range of issues to gain a true sense of the
potential impact of the police on contributing to the creation of safe
communities. It also appears that the police have the best chance of
understanding these issues and making a meaningful contribution to
dealing with them if the focus is on neighborhoods. At that level, even
difficult, persistent problems do not appear to be quite so overwhelming.
At that level, both the public and government can see visible signs of
progress or the lack of it.

Many baby boomers remember a time when their neighborhoods offered a
sense of safety and security and neighbors rallied to provide support to
each other in times of need. Many can recall a story of their youth where
someone in the neighborhood intervened in a way that enforced standards
of acceptable behavior--and then made sure that parents were aware of the
incident. These baby boomers also point out that neighborhoods are not
what they used to be.

In spite of the changes in society, progress is being made in rebuilding
neighborhoods and the sense of identity associated with them in cities
throughout the United States. That experience suggests that crime,
disorder, and fear can be influenced in a positive direction at the
neighborhood level.

We should be building on that experience. We should measure crime,
disorder, and fear at the neighborhood level and develop tailored responses
to deal with these problems. In that way, the police can make a substantial
and meaningful contribution to the creation of safe communities.

References

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