Word: bratton
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Some experts doubt that Bratton is responsible for any of New York's crime drop. "It's like trying to take credit for an eclipse," says former New York City Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. Others are watching Bratton with mouths agape. "I've never seen anything like it," says University of Maryland criminologist Lawrence Sherman, who has studied 30 police departments in the past 25 years. "Police chiefs routinely say, 'Don't expect us to bring down crime, because we don't control its causes. But Bratton says just the opposite. It's the most focused crime-reduction effort...
There's more to the Giuliani-Bratton strategy, of course, than terrorizing captains at early-morning meetings. Though their predecessors, Mayor David Dinkins and Kelly, deserve real credit for putting more cops on the beat, Giuliani instructed Bratton to do something Dinkins would never have allowed: use those cops to crack down on minor offenders, public drunks, potheads, those who urinate on the street, aggressive panhandlers, graffiti scribblers and "squeegee pests," who converged on cars at stoplights to clean windshields for spare change...
This quality of life campaign tested a principle that Giuliani and Bratton had believed for years: the "Broken Windows" theory, first put forth in 1982 by criminologists James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling. Wilson and Kelling argued that minor violations create a disorderly environment that encourages more serious crime. "I chose Bill Bratton," says Giuliani, "because he agreed with the Broken Windows theory." Sure enough, as arrests for small offenses rocketed, New York's streets became notably more civil. Then Maple, who has been Bratton's aide-de-camp and crime strategist since Bratton was slashing subway crime...
...says Maple. "Now I can radio the precinct for outstanding warrants or parole violations. Maybe I bump against that bulge in your belt; with probable cause, I can frisk you." Civil libertarians have been screaming, but shootings, gun murders and other signs of firearms use are down--proof, Bratton says, that thugs are leaving the guns at home...
This is a significant departure from the service-oriented "community policing'' introduced during the Dinkins administration, when beat cops were encouraged to be problem solvers for a neighborhood. (Now the patrolmen funnel these issues to their precinct commanders.) The Bratton version of community policing is to devise strategies that target specific criminal behavior. Special squads are dispatched to hit high-crime hot spots, while others track down illegal guns. Precinct detectives now interrogate suspects not just about the crimes they may have committed but also about other gun and drug dealers they know. Eventually, Bratton believes, all the policies begin...