Neighborhood activists who remember the prime of community policing issued a plea — and a call to citizen action — to bring it back.
The plea came during a press conference Monday at the corner of Norton Street and Whalley Avenue, the crossroads of three neighborhoods struggling with increased shootings and youth crime: Whalley, Edgewood, and Beaver Hills (aka “WEB”).
Two members of the WEB management team joined an organizer of a new armed Edgewood citizens patrol to issue the plea. It was perhaps the most concise and detailed public expression to date of the brand of community policing that made New Haven a national model in the 1990s and that many frustrated people citywide feel has disappeared: neighborhood-based walking and bike cops; top cops who can negotiate gang truces and find other methods beyond arrests of defusing tensions; innovative new programs and problem-solving that enable the city to buck national crime trends.
“We once had a gem,” said WEB activist Francine Caplan. “It’s lost.”
During the press conference, city Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts (pictured) listened politely, then made himself available to the press to respond. “We do have community policing,” and New Haven remains on the cutting edge, he argued.
The two presentations illustrated the stark contrast between two points of view in New Haven: The DeStefano administration’s argument that community policing is thriving and continuing to make the city safer than ever; and a growing community sentiment that it died over the past three years.
“No One” Feels Safe
As cops coincidentally investigated a robbery that occurred just prior to the press conference at the Citizens Bank catty-corner at the Norton-Whalley intersection, the neighborhood activists decried what they called out-of-control crime.
“No one—no one—in this WEB district feels they are safe,” declared WEB’s Peaches Quinn (pictured). She spoke of rampant “fear, terror, a feeling of helplessness, hopelessness… Families need a sense of peace and order. Everybody has a story of an incident or a series of incidents that have changed their lives forever.”
To that end, Quinn called on neighbors to fill the Whalley-Norton substation Tuesday night at 7 for a WEB meeting with Police Chief Cisco Ortiz. She also called for a return to New Haven’s brand of community policing. “New Haven was a role model in the early 1990s for community-based policing,” she said. Officers left their cars for walking and bicycle beats, she said. The police chief met with gang leaders to help reduce violence; top cops were in contact with all sides of the street. “Police were the street workers.”
Quinn noted that the force has as many officers, between 380 and 390, as it did in the early 1990s, but far fewer are deployed in those walking and bike beats.
“The excuse that there is no community-based policing because of the lack of officers does not give credit to the rank and file officers. It is a philosophical decision made up on high,” echoed Eliezer Greer, organizer of the armed Edgewood patrol.
The fact that he and the WEB organizers appeared together at the conference was significant: Initially there were tensions between the two groups over the patrol’s decision to carry guns. After a mediated discussion, the groups found common cause on the larger shared conviction that they must push the city to reinstate community policing.
The police department last year started a program called ID-Net that represented the antithesis of central tenets of the 1990s community-policing program. It sent swarms of cops into one neighborhood at a time for arrest sweeps for low-level crimes and stop and frisks, to offer short-term relief to crime-plagued areas. A similar military-style program in the 1980s was called CAPACT. It failed to address crime long-term, as arrested people immediately returned to the streets; meanwhile it failed to develop crucial relationships between neighbors and regular beat cops. The alternative programs in 1990s New Haven — resisted fiercely at first by both the police union (under the same leadership as today) and the New Haven Register—including dismantling neighborhood-intimidation police teams (like the so-called “Beat-Down Posse’), treating even criminals with respects, and disciplining violent cops. An intensive focus was put on intelligence-gathering. New Haven’s crime rate plunged to its lowest level since the early ‘60s; nationally recognized innovative programs were launched like the Yale Child Study Center partnership that links beat cops with child shrinks to counsel kids who witness violence. Police critics were invited to meet with officials — in at least one case, recruited to the force.
By contrast, when a new problem emerged two years ago — a spike in youth violence, the emergence of groups of kids committing crimes, a loss of confidence in community policing — the city and police brass at first denied the existence of a problem, then waited close to a year to start playing catchup. At the time top city staffers were helping the mayor run for governor, with the help of the police union. (The city scrapped ID-Net after the gubernatorial election.) The FBI had to come to town to arrest allegedly crooked cops in the narcotics unit; City Hall responded by spending money on a task force monitored by a citizen oversight board consisting of not a single police critic; City Hall officials (but not the chief) boycotted an overflow community meeting at the time filled with critics.
While shootings have risen 50 percent this year, City Hall has emphasized that crime continues to fall overall. However, the bulk of the falling numbers can be attributed to one factor: a new state law placing motor-vehicle registration stickers inside of windshields rather than on license plates, from which there were widespread thefts.
Meanwhile, nationally recognized creative innovations — and the plunges in urban crime rates in the face of national countertrends — have emerged in communities like High Point, North Carolina.
(Click here to read an op-ed by David R. Cameron published in Sunday’s Register that suggests what the city could learn from Boston in using community policing to combat gun violence.)
“Police departments from San Francisco, New York, all over the world came to New Haven in the ‘90s,” said WEB’s Francine Caplan Monday. “[Then-Chief] Nick Pastore may have had opponents. But he got [officers] out of cars. He talked to people. He made sure people were on bicycles” and walking beats.
The philosophy and strategy must “come from the top,” the mayor and police chief, Caplan said. “They need to hear us. They need to do something. We know these are good people. We know they can do something.”
The Upbeat View
They are, insisted Chief Administrative Officer Rob Smuts, who oversees the police department.
“We do make national headlines” for innovative community-policing program, he said.“That’s what this” — he pointed to a button he was wearing [pictured] — “is about. It’s about problem-solving”
The button referred to the city’s plan to issue ID cards for people in town, including undocumented immigrants. That’s part of a larger strategy the city has pioneered to make immigrants feel safer here; it includes ordering cops not to inquire into immigrants’ legal status. The idea is to make immigrants feel more comfortable reporting crimes.
Smuts also noted that the city has put a dozen cops in schools. “We do deployment to solve problems.” Other cops are accompanying Yale child shrinks to the homes of the 170 teens identified as causing the most trouble in town. That’s intensive, innovative community policing, he said.
The city had 60 to 70 more officers at the height of community policing, according to Smuts. It is now actively recruiting new classes of trainees, which should allow for the return of walking and bike beats.
The city is also forming a new “street outreach workers” program linking people with credibility on the streets with cops to reach troubled youth. The program is modeled on successful efforts in Providence and Boston.
Smuts defended ID-Net for getting guns off the street. Such “interdiction” strategies must be part of an effective overall strategy, he argued.
“Yeah, we had a 50 percent [rise] in shootings. That is a real problem. That makes people feel less safe in this community,” Smuts observed. “It goes to trends that go beyond New Haven.”
Time for Ortiz to go, folks?