Paul Bass Photo
Police Commissioner Cathy Graves, Chief Esserman, Mayor DeStefano, and Assistant Chiefs Luiz Casanova and Archie Generoso at Wednesday’s press conference.
New Haven didn’t celebrate its year-end drop in crime Wednesday.
Instead, officials called the dramatic year-end numbers for 2012 — a 50 percent drop in homicides and a 30 percent drop in non-fatal shootings from 2011 — a signal that the city was smart to return to community policing.
“It’s a beginning,” Police Chief Dean Esserman said a City Hall press conference. “We have a ways to go.”
“We’re not where we need to be. We all want to do better,” said Mayor John DeStefano. “There’s a vibrancy I haven’t seen in a while [with] community partnerships. … We’re headed in the right direction.”
Still, there was no mistaking the undercurrent of Wednesday’s press event, covered by all area TV outlets: After a couple of years of brutal carnage on the city’s streets and repeated grim-faced press release, New Haven had progress to report.
The number of homicides rose from 13 in 2009 to 24 in 2010, to 34 in 2011. In 2012 the city had 17 homicides, a 50 percent drop.
The city recorded 133 non-fatal shootings in 2011. It had 92 in 2012, roughly a 30 percent drop.
(Robberies did rise from 622 to 645.)
The mayor noted that the city was demanding change, a return to community policing, in 2011. He brought in Esserman with a mission to reconnect the cops with the community and get violence under control.
Toward that end, the department sent cops back to dedicated walking beats in all 10 police districts. It invited a wide range of community members to weekly “Compstat” crime-data-and-strategy sessions. It formed a shootings task force in conjunction with state and community agencies, resulting in arrests in older unsolved shootings as well as current ones that might have fallen below the radar in the past. At year’s end it began “Project Longevity,” an attack on gang violence launched in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice, the Connecticut State’s Attorney’s Office, and local ministers and grassroots groups. (Read about that here.)
DeStefano also noted that “Operation Bloodline,” the largest drug sweep in state history, took many alleged gangbangers off the streets. New Haven detectives in 2012 also made arrests in 19 homicides, 10 of them 2011 homicides.
Police union President Louis Cavaliere Jr. credited the “hard work” of street cops and an increased level of help and trust from the community for helping to drive down violent crime this past year. He also mentioned the Compstat meetings, where district managers know they have to account for how they’re dealing with each individual major crime in their neighborhoods. “If it helps drop crime, what’s wrong with that?” he said.
To bring the crime numbers down further in 2013, the department, which has been short-staffed, plans to send all 40 newly minted officers into additional new neighborhood walking beats. It plans to train another 67 cops by year’s end. It plans to roll out Project Longevity to all the city’s gangs. It is also launching a new “Command College” to train supervisors better.
Signal versus noise. I hope as much as anyone that there are fewer shootings than the year before, and agree that a single homicide avoided is one enough to celebrate.
But let's be honest with ourselves about the numbers, rather than sycophants to City Hall.
The death count has bounced between 10-15 and 25-30 killings every year but has essentially averaged 20 homicides per year every year for a decade. 17 is still a higher number than many recent past years.
Any crime analyst not on the City Payroll will tell you that numbers this small (3 killings below the average) do not constitute a significant drop.
Bottom line, 17 killings is still way too many and does not represent a significantly lower number than previous years.