Alan Helfman, Jay Wall, and William A Wolff have followed a March 2007 op-ed on crime with another op-ed on crime in today’s Chronicle.
In this one, they advocate greater use of statistics and New York City’s broken-windows approach to fighting crime.
Here is their conclusion:
When [former NYC police commissioner William] Bratton arrived in L.A., he found a shrinking department, crime rates that had been climbing for three years and a demoralized organization. During his four-year tenure as LAPD’s chief, morale within the department has skyrocketed, relations with the minority community have improved and crime has fallen 25 percent. The LAPD was manpower-challenged, too, with 2.25 officers per 1,000 population and a 468-square mile territory to police. The “won’t work here” argument won’t hold water.
Houston Mayor Bill White has shown little or no interest in implementing CompStat for HPD. We believed that a mayor elected based on his promise to bring “best practices” to city government would have instituted a version of CompStat a long time ago.
CompStat can and will bring accountability to HPD. It would empower HPD’s middle management and allow the cream of both its managerial and front line forces to rise to the top.
Energizing the stodgy command at HPD, forcing city departments to work together and ultimately altering public behavior will take hard work and guts. We hope our city leaders will step up and meet the challenge. It’s about time.
The city needs the philosophy that William Bratton brought to NYC (and LA) policing as much as it needs the statistical tools he employed.
Unfortunately, neither Mayor White nor his absentee police chief seem that interested in Bratton’s approach to crime.
