U.S. Department of Justice

Office of Justice Programs

National Institute of Justice

DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE

OFF ICE OF JUSTICE PROGRAMS

BJA NI J OJJDP BJS OVC

MEASURING

WHAT MATTERS

Office of Community

Oriented Policing Services

COPS

Proceedings From the Policing

Research Institute Meetings

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

COPS

MEASURING

WHAT MATTERS

RESEARCH REPORT
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

Noël 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 National Institute of Justice Office of Community

World Wide Web Site World Wide Web Site Oriented Policing Services

http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij World Wide Web Site

http://www.usdoj.gov/cops
National Institute of Justice

Edited by Robert H. Langworthy

Cosponsored by the

National Institute of Justice and the

Office of Community Oriented Policing Services

July 1999

NCJ 170610

Measuring What Matters:

Proceedings From the Policing

Research Institute Meetings
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.

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.

COPS

Jeremy Travis

Director, National Institute of Justice

Joseph E. Brann

Director, Office of Community

Oriented Policing Services
iii

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Contents

Introduction

Measuring What Matters: A Policing Research Institute

Robert H. Langworthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Meeting One: November 28, 1995

Measuring What Matters in Policing

Alfred Blumstein . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Great Expectations: How Higher Expectations for Police Departments Can Lead to

a Decrease in Crime

William J. Bratton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

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

George Kelling . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

Measuring What Matters: Crime, Disorder, and Fear

Wesley G. Skogan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37

Measuring What Matters

Darrel W. Stephens . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55

The Incivilities Thesis: Theory, Measurement, and Policy

Ralph B. Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65

Meeting Two: May 13, 1996

Constituency Building and Urban Community Policing

David E. Duffee, Reginald Fluellen, and Thomas Roscoe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91

Community Policing: What Is the Community and What Can It Do?

Warren Friedman and Michael Clark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121

Americans’ Views on Crime and Law Enforcement: A Look at Recent Survey Findings

Jean Johnson, Steve Farkas, Ali Bers, Christin Connolly, and Zarela Maldonado . . . . . . . . . . . . 133

To Whom Do We Answer?

Johnnie Johnson, Robert Berry, Juanita Eaton, Robert Ford, and Dennis E. Nowicki . . . . . . . . . . 141

The Police as an Agency of Municipal Government: Implications for

Measuring Police Effectiveness

Mark H. Moore and Margaret Poethig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151

The Police, the Media, and Public Attitudes

Aric Press and Andrew Benson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169

Constituent Expectations of the Police and Police Expectations of Constituents

Stuart A. Scheingold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183
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Meeting Three: December 4, 1996

Some Really Cheap Ways of Measuring What Really Matters

Carl B. Klockars . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195

What Matters Routinely?

Robert H. Langworthy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215

Appendix: Author Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227
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● A series of papers, designed to reach a wide

audience, chronicling the Institute proceedings

(see, Brady, 1996, for the first in this series).

● 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.

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 communityoriented 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:

● Heightened awareness within the police and

research communities of changing measurement needs associated with the shift to

community policing.

● 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).

Measuring What Matters: A Policing

Research Institute
Measuring What Matters: A Policing Research Institute

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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:

● The impact domain—how might intended police

effects on the environment be measured.

● The process domain—how might police know if

they are doing their work as they should.

● The community assessment domain—how might

public assessment of police performance be

monitored.

● Organizational health—how might police departments know if their employees are satisfied with

their work.

● 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 crimecontrol 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.
Meeting One:

November 28, 1995
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Measuring What Matters in Policing

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

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
Measuring What Matters in Policing

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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 shortterm 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
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Alfred Blumstein

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:

● 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.

● 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.

● 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 Skolnick2

 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
Measuring What Matters in Policing

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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,
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Alfred Blumstein

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.
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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 unproducGreat Expectations: How Higher

Expectations for Police Departments

Can Lead to a Decrease in Crime

tive 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
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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
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William J. Bratton

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-theclock 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
Great Expectations

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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 qualityof-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
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William J. Bratton

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 qualityof-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
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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,
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William J. Bratton

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 supplyand-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
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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 “lastresort, 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
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William J. Bratton

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
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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 commanders 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
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William J. Bratton

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,
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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.
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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.
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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
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William J. Bratton

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.
Great Expectations

26

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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.
27

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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.

George Kelling

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. This article is reprinted with permission from City Journal.

Measuring What Matters: A New

Way of Thinking About Crime and

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

28

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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 crimecontrol 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, pushover 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.
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George Kelling

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

30

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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
31

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George Kelling

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

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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. Farebeating 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
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George Kelling

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 highvisibility 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:

● The number of people engaged in positive activities increased by 79 percent; the number of drug

sellers, buyers, and users decreased by 85 percent.

● The percentage of loitering and drug-related use as

a function of total use declined from 67 percent to

49 percent.

● Drug selling was not displaced en masse to any

single location outside the park.

● While the decrease in the number of dealers was

not as dramatic as police had hoped, dealers

behaved more discretely.

● 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.

● Supervised, directed patrol, rather than the absolute

number of officers assigned, seemed critical to

affecting conditions in the park.

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

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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.
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George Kelling

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.