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The Dead of Night
By Gregory Gilderman
IT'S HARD TO THINK of a time when the Philadelphia police department hasn't had an uneasy relationship with the city. During the Rizzo years, the police were famous for brutality and racism. Under Wilson Goode, they bombed and burned down a city block. Under Ed Rendell, there was the massive 39th District scandal in which officers stole cash from suspected drug dealers and manufactured evidence against defendants. A mayor and a police commissioner aware of that history no doubt have many priorities in managing the police force, but finding ways to make its officers more aggressive at crime hot spots probably isn't one of them.
In fact, if you wanted to play it as safe as possible, you'd model your police department on Philadelphia's. You'd keep officers in their cars. You'd control and monitor their movements by tying them to the never-ending queue of 911 calls. You'd initiate a program for which there is virtually no supporting evidence, like Operation Safe Streets, in which officers do little more than stand on corners. (From a recent study in the scholarly journal Justice Quarterly: "Operation Safe Streets failed to have a significant citywide impact on homicides, violent crime or drug crimes.") You'd have COMPSTAT meetings, but you'd excise their most important element: accountability. In New York, COMPSTAT meetings are renowned for the rough give-and-take between the top brass and precinct commanders. The prospect of being dressed down in front of your peers was one of the ways former commissioner William Bratton ensured that local commanders would take ownership of their precincts' successes and failures. John Timoney brought COMPSTAT to Philadelphia, but officers tell me the current version is a far cry from New York's. "Here, we have COMPSTAT lite," a former Philadelphia officer told me. "We just go through the motions."
"Every police chief is just one headline away from losing his job," Commissioner Johnson told this magazine in 2004. He's correct, but the history of big-city policing in America offers a caveat: A chief may lose his job if there's a corruption or brutality scandal, he may get fired if he commits a personal indiscretion, but if the homicide rate jumps up, he is actually pretty safe. The recent history of Philadelphia proves that.
Commissioner Johnson recently announced the formation of the 46-member (since raised to 56) Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement Unit to help hunt for guns, but a police official told me that these teams usually assist in handling the 911 backlog. They aren't hitting the streets with the focus of, say, New York's Street Crime or Special Narcotics and Guns units.
There's another element to this story. A big-city police department is to some extent an extension of the political philosophy of its citizens and its mayor. Giuliani was a law-and-order conservative, and in New York in the mid-1990s, that's exactly what that city's voters wanted. White liberals and African-Americans were never won over by the man or his ideas, but they were outnumbered by the vast, politically moderate middle class of Queens and Staten Island. Philadelphia is different. There's a moderate middle class in the region, but it's largely in the suburbs. The political base of the city itself is African-Americans, and given the history of police brutality here, it's difficult to imagine an idea that could inspire more suspicion than increased frisking in high-crime areas.
"Aggressive policing is a euphemism for brutality and the infringement of civil rights," Jerry Mondesire, the president of the Philadelphia NAACP, said to me in a telephone interview. "If you want to fight crime, you need a better economic environment. There needs to be jobs and counseling."
I brought up Sherman's studies, and the idea of deterring gun-carrying.
"It can't last," Mondesire said. And then, possibly echoing the thought of every police commander in the city, "You're just going to get sued by the NAACP, the ACLU, and private citizens. In the long run, it's not going to solve it."
In fact, if you wanted to play it as safe as possible, you'd model your police department on Philadelphia's. You'd keep officers in their cars. You'd control and monitor their movements by tying them to the never-ending queue of 911 calls. You'd initiate a program for which there is virtually no supporting evidence, like Operation Safe Streets, in which officers do little more than stand on corners. (From a recent study in the scholarly journal Justice Quarterly: "Operation Safe Streets failed to have a significant citywide impact on homicides, violent crime or drug crimes.") You'd have COMPSTAT meetings, but you'd excise their most important element: accountability. In New York, COMPSTAT meetings are renowned for the rough give-and-take between the top brass and precinct commanders. The prospect of being dressed down in front of your peers was one of the ways former commissioner William Bratton ensured that local commanders would take ownership of their precincts' successes and failures. John Timoney brought COMPSTAT to Philadelphia, but officers tell me the current version is a far cry from New York's. "Here, we have COMPSTAT lite," a former Philadelphia officer told me. "We just go through the motions."
"Every police chief is just one headline away from losing his job," Commissioner Johnson told this magazine in 2004. He's correct, but the history of big-city policing in America offers a caveat: A chief may lose his job if there's a corruption or brutality scandal, he may get fired if he commits a personal indiscretion, but if the homicide rate jumps up, he is actually pretty safe. The recent history of Philadelphia proves that.
Commissioner Johnson recently announced the formation of the 46-member (since raised to 56) Strategic Intervention Tactical Enforcement Unit to help hunt for guns, but a police official told me that these teams usually assist in handling the 911 backlog. They aren't hitting the streets with the focus of, say, New York's Street Crime or Special Narcotics and Guns units.
There's another element to this story. A big-city police department is to some extent an extension of the political philosophy of its citizens and its mayor. Giuliani was a law-and-order conservative, and in New York in the mid-1990s, that's exactly what that city's voters wanted. White liberals and African-Americans were never won over by the man or his ideas, but they were outnumbered by the vast, politically moderate middle class of Queens and Staten Island. Philadelphia is different. There's a moderate middle class in the region, but it's largely in the suburbs. The political base of the city itself is African-Americans, and given the history of police brutality here, it's difficult to imagine an idea that could inspire more suspicion than increased frisking in high-crime areas.
"Aggressive policing is a euphemism for brutality and the infringement of civil rights," Jerry Mondesire, the president of the Philadelphia NAACP, said to me in a telephone interview. "If you want to fight crime, you need a better economic environment. There needs to be jobs and counseling."
I brought up Sherman's studies, and the idea of deterring gun-carrying.
"It can't last," Mondesire said. And then, possibly echoing the thought of every police commander in the city, "You're just going to get sued by the NAACP, the ACLU, and private citizens. In the long run, it's not going to solve it."
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