 Funding for this program is provided by the National Institute of Justice. Hello, I'm James Wilson. The fear of crime is often far greater than the actual risk of being victimized. And that fear harms everyone. People avoid the streets, become suspicious of their neighbors, and spend less time in community activities. People have always, the police have always come to the aid of victims of crime. Now they are beginning to help people who fear crime. Many believe that reducing the fear of crime may even help reduce crime itself. Houston is a large, sprawling city. Two million people spread over more than 500 square miles. There's no way police can patrol it on foot. But if they patrol only in cars, they're likely to meet only criminals and victims. The Houston Police Department has been conducting experiments to see if more direct police-citizen contact can help police solve crimes and citizens reduce their fear of crime. What we'd like to do is get the information from you so that we can keep in touch and develop a means of communication with the people in the neighborhood. In one experiment, police went door to door, introducing themselves, distributing newsletters with neighborhood crime information, and leaving business cards with their phone numbers. At first some people were surprised, sometimes even nervous, seeing a police officer at their door. But they soon welcomed the police presence and began talking about neighborhood problems. We're finding out that while all the citizens are very fearful of victimization, of being direct victims of crime, and the big crimes of robbery and burglary and aggravated assault, they're just as fearful of traffic problems in their area, of rowdy juveniles in the corner, of the abandoned car or cars that seem to stay week after week on their street. The result of this direct contact with citizens, fewer people victimized by crime, fewer people saying their neighborhood was disorderly, more people satisfied with the police, and an overall reduction in the fear of crime. In another experiment, police set up a storefront office in a residential neighborhood, inviting people to drop by, discuss problems in the community, and receive assistance. And that was all that was stolen? Four hubcats? Four hubcats, yes. The police also used the office as a base, from which to organize the neighborhood. What we're searching for here is to get the citizens who live in that neighborhood to visit the community station, utilize the services provided there, and know that at any time in the morning or evening hours, they can feel free to come in and find that information about a case that they may be involved in, or just talked to an officer about what's going on in the neighborhood. Why these changes? Will they last? Here to discuss this is Lawrence Sherman, professor at the University of Maryland, and Officer Robin Kirk of the Houston Police Department, a member of the Experimental Unit. Officer Kirk, you helped run this storefront in Houston. What did you actually do there? We set out originally to organize the community and break down the barriers that existed between the police officers and the citizens in our community. And by being in the storefront and putting it in the geographical area that we had defined and putting it in there and trying to organize and get out and get actively, socially, actively involved in the community, we felt like that we could break down that barrier. Did the neighborhood ask you to come in, or was this something where the police took the initiative? No, we selected this area because it had a triathletic mix of people and we wanted to be able to relate with different types of people. I see. Now, when you went in there and established the storefront, did it change the neighborhood? Did it change how people thought, how they acted? Well, originally, I think some people didn't really realize that we were there, so we set out to more or less market our program. And we had to use different ways of marketing the program. We used the grocery stores. We put out leaflets in the grocery stores where people come through with stuffing in their bags. And to answer your question, yes, over the long haul now, we've been there a year, there has been a different attitude of the people. How is it different? They feel a lot better about the police. At one of our recent community meetings we had, I guess, more or less a testimonial. People got up and were saying that now, since they know us on a first name basis and stuff, when they see us, one lady got up and said, well, I no longer, when I see a police car behind me, try to get away from that part, try to get away from the offshore. I see if it's one of you guys that are working out in the community, so we really feel good about the police. Some people might say that that's good community relations, good public relations, but does it have anything to do with the fear of crime or the actual rate of crime? I think so because the people feel better about the police and the police are concerned about them. So in turn, they feel better about their crime. Their fear of crime is different. Do they give you leads and information that you might not otherwise get? Oh, sure, sure. There's no doubt about it. We've been able to conquer a lot of criminals in our area just simply because of the relationship we have with our citizens. Think about yourself for a moment. You were in regular patrol in Houston before you became connected with this storefront. How did you change as a result of this experience? I have a lot better attitude towards the people because I've got a chance to meet the good people in the community on a different basis, rather in a proactive way, rather than a reactive way. So it's changed me in a lot of ways. I look at people a lot different now than I used to. How did you used to look at people? Well, in my opinion, I was getting to the point that I felt like everybody was bad no matter whether they were a good citizen or a bad citizen. When I got a call, I didn't look at them as a different individual. I just felt like there was all one, all bad. And now you're meeting some of the good guys, some of the victims. Exactly. Not necessarily victims, Jim. I'm getting a chance to meet them even if nothing's happened to them. I've met them before. How do other officers in Houston feel about this? Do they think you're doing just public relations or do they think you're really doing police work? To be honest with you, Jim, when we first started it was a big hoopla that, you know, it's just another thing that the politicians are trying to do to get votes. But I think now the police officers are really seeing the benefits of this program. It is really, the officers have a positive, the ones that are directly involved and ones that are just kind of on the outside and beginning to peek in or realizing that it has benefits and they do have a positive attitude towards the citizens now. Let's discuss those benefits and let me ask Larry Sherman the following question. The police foundation went in at the invitation of the Houston Police Department to evaluate this experiment. What did they find? We found a really remarkable thing. I think far exceeding our expectations. This storefront operation that Officer Kirk directed took a neighborhood in a rapidly growing city where people had no roots, where they'd come from all over the country, a neighborhood that had no identity and they gave it an identity. In fact, they even gave it a name as a result of the focus the storefront provided and the effect of doing all that, of the kind of outreach the police were involved in was to substantially reduce the fear of crime in that neighborhood as it was measured in extensive public surveys before and nine months after the storefront went into operation. It didn't reduce the rate of crime itself but it greatly enhanced the quality of life because people felt safer, they felt better about their neighborhood, they felt better about their police department and there's every indication that this kind of police approach helps to integrate it, creates a community where there was none before. If they feel better about the community and they have less fear of crime but crime hasn't actually gone down, are they really better off? Well, I think they are psychically in the sense of how people feel about their city, how likely they are to stay there rather than move out to the suburbs which has very major implications for the tax bases of our cities. And the question of actual victimization is of course another goal the police have and in another program in Houston was something that the police were able to address, the program we'd seen about knocking on the door. Tell me about that. When they were knocking on the doors as opposed to the storefront operation did this produce any reduction in crime or reduction in victimization? The program of assigning one group of officers to one area and to have them contact up to one-third of the households throughout the study period which is what they reached that produced as far as we can tell a whopping decrease in victimization a 50% reduction in the percentage of the households victimized. A percentage of the households victimized after a year or so was a 50% less than it had been before. Why did this happen? How can such a strategy have such a dramatic effect? Well, when we're cynical we say maybe they caught the one burglar in the neighborhood who was doing all the bad crime but even doing that in itself may be an achievement. The other alternative is that simply having that kind of visibility having the sense that the police are there that the police are paying attention to this neighborhood may have created a kind of community awareness that in turn had payoffs in keeping criminals out of the area. Another way to deal with neighborhood safety is to organize the community so that it can help protect itself. Community organizing is going on in hundreds of cities. One of them is Minneapolis. I'm getting ready to go. She said that they're going to leave on Saturday and wanted us to walk to the house. Oh yeah. So keep an eye on it and let the other walkers know about it. The Batemans live in this residential section of North Minneapolis. The neighborhood used to have a crime problem until residents got together to combat the problem. These days citizens take turns patrolling the two and a half block area twice each night. Since the neighborhood patrol began three years ago there's only been one house burglary. When we patrol we want to be very visible. We have our flashlights on and we walk down the alley down the street. We zigzag through the area. It's about the whole course is about one mile. And we shine our flashlights in between the houses and even into the windows of the homes. And a lot of times people like I say will come and come to the window and wave to us and they feel good about it. They feel secure. Neighbors meet regularly with block leaders and the Minneapolis Community Crime Prevention Agency to share information, hand out flyers and discuss ways to prevent crime. If you put your garbage cans in a wooden container, a restraining container, that makes it look owned and taken care of and that's done throughout the alleys we've noticed there's crime drops. We never had this kind of cooperation before. It's really neat to know your neighbors. Our neighbors are just super and I think this Community Crime Prevention has brought us all closer because we all have one goal in mind and it's to reduce the crime area and make it a safer place to live. This is Whittier, an inner city community in South Minneapolis. It's a high crime area with a mixture of small businesses, rental housing and single family homes. The neighborhood organized against crime and residents point with pride to their first major victory. Working with police, the community got rid of a long-standing prostitution problem. All of a sudden there was this big push to really crack down on street prostitution the Johns in the neighborhood and there was some initial resistance to that just because a lot of people have a lot of vested interest and that that continued. There's this little section of town where everybody can go and pick up prostitutes, you know, and just that's the way it's been for 50 years around here and that, you know, in the spring we started to seriously attack that problem from all angles. People have noticed a difference since the prostitutes took their trade and the associated crimes elsewhere. Our evening business gets better and better and better and better all the time. Our morning business was always good. As soon as it got dark out, the place would be empty. We were just like, there was nobody here anymore and that's not the case anymore. Our evening business is equal to our morning business and the only thing I could attribute that to is the fact that people feel safe walking down the street. A community crime prevention group called the Whittier Alliance helped organize the neighborhood. I don't look at it so much that the organization comes in and does for the community. We are of the community. All our volunteers, all in which over the years is in the hundreds are people of the community. It's helped impact that feeling of isolation and that we're just sort of on the edge of downtown where nothing more than an area that the bus goes through where the cabs go through. That we are in fact a neighborhood. Committees within the Alliance concentrate on various community groups. Business owners, senior citizens and youth. I sort of see this group as really getting involved in something for these kids that's more meaningful than just a football game or just a dance. Some police officers, however, say that community crime prevention efforts have a limited impact on crime. Citizens can patrol but only increased arrests by the police will make a real difference. If the police don't respond by attempting to use their job to make arrests on the street I don't think you're going to get anywhere. You can get a lot of lip service, maybe police attend various meetings but eventually the police have to fulfill their part by going out and making effective arrests. Neighborhood organizers admit it's sometimes difficult to sustain interest and enthusiasm for community crime prevention when the sense of urgency is no longer there or people move away. But for many residents, crime prevention efforts have paid off. The community realized it is a community and that in this day and age perhaps is the best thing of all that could have happened. Here to discuss this is Lucy Geralt, director of the Minneapolis Crime Prevention Agency here in Sherman. Lucy Geralt, how in Minneapolis do you get people to organize, especially when the winters are so cold and the Bateman's did not look like they were having a good time out there? Well, this is winter, not summer. We organize people on the block level with volunteer block leaders with the assistance of the crime prevention staff. If they're interested in other programs we will work with volunteer leaders to develop the kind of program and the need that is there. Can you keep their interest up over the long term? It's extremely difficult in some areas. We aren't sure yet what the key is. Some neighborhoods, some programs have gone on and on and it seems to make a difference who the leader is and the kind of interest that individual has in sustaining the effort. In others, once the initial urgency is gone the impact seems to wane. But the network, the group of people is still there to call on some problem comes up and we need to begin to use that network again. Is it better for the neighborhood out of a sense of crisis to organize itself and then for the city to help out? Or is it easier if the city or your agency comes in first and tries something in order to get the neighborhood organized? In my experience it works much better if the community comes to us and says we have a problem, we're ready to work with you rather than us going to them and saying you've got a crime problem, can we do something? If they're not interested it is just to develop that interest. Now we saw foot patrol by citizens. Is that the best strategy to combat crime on the part of citizens or do you have to have different strategies for different kinds of neighborhoods? You must have different strategies for different neighborhoods. The most commonly used one across the country and in Minneapolis is the neighborhood watch concept of organized blocks. That doesn't work in all neighborhoods. Some neighborhoods need foot patrols. Some need maybe the McGrath safe houses and apartment clubs where there's a high density area. Another time maybe the problem is really a lack of cohesiveness in the neighborhood and a mediation project might resolve some disputes that could bring the community together. So another issue is maybe the actual physical security of a home and a hardware program that improves the physical security is needed. So depending on the issue, the program needs to be developed around that problem rather than just saying there's only one way to do it. The police officer from Minneapolis that we saw a moment ago expressed, if not criticism, perhaps a reservation. He said that the bottom line is the police still have to make a rest. Is that your judgment as well? The effort certainly is cooperative. We can't do it without the police. The police have their role, but there's also a role for the police that is involved with the community. There's a block where officers go out and work with the community, attend meetings, do some door-knocking. The officers have a much better feeling about the community and also they get information and are more likely to get some information that they need to make those arrests. So there is a role for the police other than just enforcement but working with the community. What we've seen so far, older people, adults, middle-aged people were involved in these community organizations and they were primarily a problem created by young people. Are you able to reach young people and make them part of this process? Currently I'd say the youth are most involved in programs through schools and we are working with a juvenile mediation project where we're mediating juvenile disputes and we're also trying to develop something right now for youth because I think it's imperative that they're involved early so that they take some responsibility realizing that they need to do that. Let's go back to Larry Sherman for a moment. Larry, what have we learned from the Minneapolis experience? The basic question about whether this kind of community organizing reduces crime is still unanswered, we're still collecting data and that's down the road to peace. What we've learned so far is some things about how hard it is to do this kind of thing. Lucy and her people had always in the past gone into areas that were not that in being organized and that's been the way neighborhood watch has been done around the country. One of the effects of that is that middle class areas which tend to have lower crime rates tend to have more block watch organizing against crime. The areas that have the higher crime rate the lower economic areas do not have this kind of program and they need it the most. The bold step that Lucy took was to go into areas where they hadn't been invited to try to assess in the face of that problem. But we know how hard it is to do it now even better than before. We also know that the police can make this or break this from the standpoint of making the arrests that Officer Otterson was talking about. Police only make arrests when the citizen gives them the information about who committed the crime or who the likely suspect is. And if they don't bother to get that information from the public other than in the 911 emergency call context or to make the arrest, if they cooperate, if they take the block they've been assigned to work with and cultivate that block, get the information then they're going to be doing a lot more than social work, they're going to be making those arrests. But if they resist the idea of getting out of their cars talking to people and informally putting together an information network then it won't be as successful as it could be. So what we perhaps need is some combination of the Houston effort to get the police out into the community who organized it. So if the two can be brought together that may offer the best chance for success. Let me ask you this, people all over the country form neighborhood watch organizations and yet you said that we really don't know whether these neighborhood watch organizations are having an effect on crime. Is that the case? I think that's right. It's something that has not been tested in a rigorous experimental fashion before. What happens is somebody says here's some money you create a neighborhood watch program, you do it in one area and you compare it and it looks good. And on the basis of that we've put a lot of effort into this process around the country. It's faith rather than fact and maybe the faith is right. But Lucy again was bold enough to test it and indeed if we find out that it doesn't have a strong crime reduction effect then she may have some explaining to do. Let's hope she doesn't have to explain too quickly. Officer Kirk, a lot of police officers around the country are very skeptical of citizens going out of patrol by themselves. In many cities they've actively opposed it. How do you feel about it? Well, as long as the people have an understanding that when they go out they're supposed to be looking and not taking any action. As long as they're schooled on that matter, I'd like to say something in reference to Larry. What Larry just said, the officers have got to realize that without the cooperation of these watch programs we can't function on a level other than just getting the calls for service to our dispatcher. So it is very important in my opinion that we get the community organized. The problem you have with the watch programs throughout the nation, I feel like is the police department go in and help form these watch programs. But then they don't do any maintenance on them. They go in they help form them, they say here gang y'all got it, now we're gone. Y'all do it. And the problem is you have to do maintenance on those programs. You have to keep an officer involved in that program once it is developed. You can't pull the officer out of it. He's got to stay with it and do maintenance on it and it'll be successful. If the officer stays with the program the officer is going to be doing something very different from what he or she has been doing in the past. I mean a lot of time in front rooms and in store fronts and talking to people rather than answering calls for service. Won't some police officers think well this is not real police work. I'm not catching any crooks I'm just talking to nice people. I think so because once they get out there they're going to realize that through those watch programs the people are going to build a trust in them and even then they're going to start making, they're going to have more rest, big time of rest. They're not in burglaries and things like that that they really like to do. And once they get involved with that community it all works hand in hand. And that's what our project in Houston, we first everybody thought we were a community service project. Well we are. But that's 50% of it. We organize some people with us. They're the eyes and the ears and then we do the enforcing. And that's the way we're set up in our community. Let me ask Lucy and Larry something you've observed this process in two cities Houston and Minneapolis. Both of them are racially divided cities. Does it make a difference what kind of neighborhood you try to organize in or what kind of neighborhood the police try to organize in? Are they more successful with some groups than with others? Success varies yes but I don't think it's racial, racial lines I think it's economics and trangency. Neighborhoods that have lower economic levels and which may be more transient because of high density tend to be more difficult because they're not stabilized or they have other pressing issues that they need to deal with. And in dealing with those issues or the trangency issue you don't have that community cohesion which seems to be a real key to the success. Larry what about the reaction in terms of reduction in victimization and reduction in fear of crime and improved citizen attitude toward crime does that break out along class or racial lines at all? Well we haven't really tested enough areas to know but I think that the evidence suggests so far middle class areas respond much more to this kind of overture from the police. Many areas even middle class areas are suspicious and in fact one program in Brooklyn where the police were knocking on doors generated lots of calls to the police to complain about somebody impersonating a police officer. We know the police would never come introduce themselves at our doorstep. There's got to be a revolution of expectations. People have to redefine the police role and indeed if they expect the police to do more of this thing perhaps the police will be more comfortable doing it. It may have to come both ways. I think that the danger is that when we go into poor neighborhoods and when we go into the transient neighborhoods that the people are going to slam the door in the face of the police that happened to Minneapolis already and that in turn turns the police off and it tends to put up those barriers that Robin was talking about. We've got to keep trying to overcome that and understand the origins of the hostility against the police or indeed anybody who's trying to get the neighborhood together to fight crime. How have you cut through this hostility or have you encountered it? Has the door been slammed in your face? Have you had to do things that required you really to hang in there for a long period? Have you experienced that problem there as much as people throw in the door in our face? You've got to remember in Houston we have a bad reputation because of some incidents that occurred back in the 70s early 70s with some people doing some officers being involved in some different types of crime related things where they Well be specific the police were accused of having killed Yeah they were accused of killing some citizens while they were in custody so in turn the people in Houston didn't have a real good attitude towards the police and we were real fortunate they were more or less scared, they got to the point that they were scared of the police so that's what we were trying to do and to answer your question no we haven't really encountered that. I think we have a surprise element where they're surprised, they're very surprised and once they know us we have so many people now that actually know us personally or whatever it's Robin, Mike Charlie or whatever and that's what we want that's what we set out to do they still respect us as a police officer but they know us personally. Lucy very briefly you think there's any incentives we could offer people especially in low income neighborhoods to organize suppose the merchants were to say we're so concerned about public safety if people will join a certain organization or do a citizen patrol we'll give them a discount in our store has that ever been tried? we have tried to do discounts on locks and that kind of thing that doesn't seem to work we are currently doing I'm sorry we can't hear more about that but we have to cut away. Thank you for joining us for Crime File. I'm James Wilson