Metro Can Learn From New York Style Policing
Sunday, April 19, 2009 03:45 AM
by Justice Wallace Craig ( retired)
Since 1991, the United States has experienced a remarkable and consistent decline in crime.
In 2007, University of California Professor Franklin Zimring published The Great American Crime Decline, a sweeping analysis of all current explanations for the phenomenon, including an entire chapter on a mirror-image crime decline in Canada.
Zimring raises interesting questions concerning our commonality with the United States.
“What is there in the two contiguous nations that produces the tendency for concurrent crime cycles? Canada and the United States share a long and open border, and there were also common demographic trends during the 1980s and 1990s. But the two economies, while interconnected, did not have strongly parallel trends in the 1990s. And the substantive reasons for an underlying similarity in crime trends are by no means obvious.
Why do theft and homicide trend down together in 1990s Canada? Why do the United States and Canada trend down together for both sets of offences in the 1990s? This is a compound mystery as of 2008, an issue that invites a great deal more statistical and theoretical inquiry. It is also a question that has suddenly become an important part of sorting out the causes of the crime decline in the United States.”
Zimring concluded that at least half of Canada’s crime decline cannot be explained by old or new theories of crime causation. He postulates that presently inexplicable cyclical forces must get credit for a large share of our drop in crime and, therefore, that the U.S. decline must also become a candidate for cyclical explanation.
“Just as the two nations shared an unexplained crime increase in the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, much of the shared good news of recent history seems to elude easy explanations.”
After analysing our Canadian experience Zimring turned his attention to the singular success of New York City, which he said was “by far the greatest and most consistent decline in all crime among all U.S. cities; (that) any crime drop for the rest of the U.S. is doubled in New York City; (and that) a review of the rest of the large city records provides reasons to doubt that New York was helped in its exceptional record by strong regional trends.”
Zimring noted that only New York City has continued its crime decline into the twenty-first century, recording declines for seven traditional index offences from 2000 to 2004. He concludes that the enormous changes in crime and violence in New York City over the 1990s were achieved without any fundamental change in its citizenry and economy.
Zimring maintains that beyond any cyclical pattern, the remarkable and consistent decline in crime in New York City may be attributed to the “quantity of police in the city and the way police were deployed, evaluated, and managed,” and he points out that beyond the significant increase in police there was a tactical emphasis on proactive street policing including stop, frisk and field interrogation, and a shift in management objectives and techniques including COMPSTAT (computer statistics) information processing.
Zimring infers that “the impact of this kitchen sink full of policing changes on New York crime levels is … powerful circumstantial evidence that compound major changes in the quantity of police and the tactics of policing had a major impact on crime.”
In considering Zimring’s analyses it is important to factor in the leadership of Rudolph Giuliani, first elected mayor of New York City in 1993, and that of Michael Bloomberg, who succeeded him in 2001. Having campaigned on a promise of increasing public safety, Giuliani forced the merger of two smaller independent forces – the Transit Police and Housing Police – with the NYPD. In his 2002 memoir, Leadership, Giuliani said “It was an unwieldy bureaucracy, each with its own unions and contracts. More important, it wasn’t the right way to protect the city.”
Then Giuliani worked closely with Police Commissioner Bill Bratton and First Deputy Commissioner Jack Maples in retooling the NYPD, and under their nerves-of-steel leadership it quickly became the worlds most effective and accountable police force.
While New York City was becoming pre-eminent in its ability to reduce crime, our burgeoning metropolis of Greater Vancouver rose to prominence as Canada’s crime capital. That we are a crime capital is evidenced by the horrific serial killing of 65 Skid Road prostitutes and, more recently, by internecine street gang killings.
Compare the structure of policing in Greater Vancouver with one-force policing in New York City.
We have a nonsensical patchwork of five civilian police departments and at least eight RCMP paramilitary detachments; each with its own white-shirted command structure. The civilian forces are accountable under our Police Act to the provincial solicitor general in Victoria. The RCMP detachments are accountable to the Deputy Commissioner of E Division who, in turn, is accountable to the Commissioner of the RCMP in Ottawa.
Conceived in 1952 in a moment of political expediency, today this odd mixture of civilian policing with paramilitary contract policing is incapable of stamping out rampant crime in Greater Vancouver.
In my next commentary I will explain why we must have a Metropolitan Vancouver Police Force by 2012, and how that will impact on the RCMP and bring it back to its proper role as a federal police force.
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Posted by: opinionated on April 19 2009 9:37 AM