The police department is changing the slogan on its patrol cars — and its approach to tackling crime.
The new slogan will only be added to new vehicles. It was one change Police Chief James Lewis (pictured) and Mayor John DeStefano rolled out as they unveiled a new policing strategy a Thursday press conference at police headquarters.
The new “targeted activity policing” approach will employ tactical units, including a new “metro street crime unit” that will move around, targeting specific behaviors such as prostitution and street robberies.
In 2008, the city reported having the second lowest violent crime rate in the past 15 years. The violent crime rate remains about 2 1/2 times the national average per capita, however.
Lewis told the crowd of reporters and police brass Thursday that he was there not just to roll out a new tactic or task force, but a new approach to solving crimes. He introduced a new departmental mission statement that gets rid of the words “community-based policing.” Instead, it talks about “targeting quality of life issues … through aggressive enforcement of the law.”
After the press conference, Lewis explained that when he took the helm of the police department in June, he discovered that the city’s cops didn’t have a clear picture of what “community policing” meant.
“The term ‘community policing’ has evolved to mean a million different things,” he said. To some, it’s walking beats. To others, it’s “soft-policing,” not making arrests. Cops felt they were being asked to be everything to everyone, he said.
“It wasn’t clear what the community wanted,” Lewis explained. “We’re trying to give them a clearer focus.”
The new focus is to improve neighborhoods by targeting behavior, Lewis said.
That includes a new traffic enforcement squad, which has contributed to a 48 percent increase in motor-vehicle violations from 2007 to 2008. It includes targeted prostitution stings. A new narcotics squad.
And a new “metro street crime unit.” The new unit will be comprised of two teams of seven, each with one sergeant, two detectives and four officers. The teams will be deployed seven days a week. They won’t respond directly to 911 calls. Instead, they’ll be tasked with targeting specific behavior, such as a streak of street robberies on Dixwell Avenue, or an emergence of prostitution in Fair Haven.
DeStefano (pictured) said the new squad won’t be like the defunct ID-Net, a roving, data-driven police squad that saturated neighborhoods for short periods of time, racking up arrests for everything from not wearing a seat-belt to having a gun.
“ID-Net flooded neighborhoods,” DeStefano said. The approach was criticized for the way it changed the relationship between residents and police, and took officers away from the regular walking and bike patrols that were the mainstay of community policing. It was disbanded in 2006.
Unlike ID-Net, the new street crime unit will be in plain clothes and unmarked cars. Officers will work based not only by looking at crime data, but by working with other types of intelligence, officials said.
The intent is to zero in on specific behaviors, Lewis said.
“It’s not a focus on making a lot of arrests,” he said. “It’s a focus on making the right arrests.”
A New Philosophy
To brand the new approach, the police department will be changing the slogans on police cruisers.
Right now, the cruisers say “Committed To Community Policing.” Some also say “Pride and Progress,” or “Policing Through Partnerships.”
The old slogans won’t be wiped off of the old cars, Lewis said, because that would be too costly. But any new department vehicle will now be decorated with these words: “Dedicated to Protecting Our Community.”
DeStefano vowed that the basics of community policing — building relationships and partnering with the community — won’t disappear with the elimination of those words.
“We’re not walking away from management teams,” he said. “We’re not walking away from having the same cops in the same neighborhoods.”
He said to tackle crime, he had the choice between using a lot of overtime hours, or adding more bodies to the force. He chose the latter in the belief it would keep the same faces in the same parts of town.
Relationship-building and enforcement can coexist, the mayor argued. He said Lewis has been able to accomplish both by having each beat cop dedicate 1.5 hours per shift to targeting a problem traffic corner. The result is a steady face in the neighborhood, as well as targeting “unacceptable behavior.”
The new approach, however, will mean a shift away from walking beats.
“A walking beat has a value,” said DeStefano, but “it’s a passive” form of policing. Walking beats are only helpful to a neighbor for the few seconds that the officer passes by his or her door, he said.
When drug gangs dominated the city in 1989, he argued, it was enforcement, not walking beats, that solved the problem.
“What drove crime down in the 1990s was the robust investigative effort” into the gangs, he argued. “We arrested thousands of people.”
At that time, then-Police Chief Nick Pastore declared arrests a last resort and “a sign of failure.” The argument was that locking up, say, low-level drug offenders or prostitutes at best delays dealing with the roots of crime, at worst causes new problems by flooding jails and courts with people who belong elsewhere. The department focused on different strategy: Steering people to social services. Deemphasizing guns and police dogs. Gathering intelligence on drug-gang leaders. Having walking-beat cops get to know neighborhoods. And working alongside non-police agencies to pioneer nationally replicated programs like a needle exchange and a cop-shrink team-up with the Yale Child Study Center to help young kids who witness violence.
Move over thar, pardner...there's a new sheriff in town. Goodbye to the touchy-feely garbage that's rewarded criminal behavior and marginalized law-abiding citizens. Chief Lewis for mayor.