A quick glance at the headlines today reveals the sadly typical:
“19-Year-Old Dead After Being Shot In Chest”
“One Killed In Wynnefield Shooting”
“Police Investigating Juniata Triple Shooting”

Last weekend I happened upon someone else’s Philadelphia Magazine. You’ve probably seen it, the one with the gun on the cover. The corresponding feature article, “The Dead of Night,” is great in that it not only illustrated the problems with our current system, it also proposed a solution modeled on what has worked in other cities. Author Gregory Gilderman covers some of the more striking realities early on, including 911 calls. “There are only 12 to 20 officers on patrol on a given shift, which means that depending on the priority of the call, the delay can be as long as three or four hours.” He also addresses the futility of the idea of community policing “…perhaps they picture a friendly officer walking through a neighborhood like this one, saying hi to good citizens and busting bad ones, maybe taking a moment to set straight a kid who’s on the fence between joining a gang or going to college. The reality of North Philadelphia at night is that crime and people are dots on a barren landscape. A cop walking through this neighborhood would spend most of his or her shift in a wasteland.”

The proposed solution is based on an experimental program researched and designed by Lawrence Sherman, current Director of the Jerry Lee Criminology Center at Penn. First, he maps out “hotspots” or “… relatively small group of repeat locations in cities where there’s a disproportionate amount of gun violence.” Then, these areas are given extra uniformed officers with the specific mission of looking for guns. “The officers looked for behaviors that might indicate the presence of a gun — walking down the street on a summer day with a heavy coat on, for example — but also paid attention to minor offenses, such as running red lights or public drinking, that gave them a chance to see whether a person was behaving suspiciously enough to justify a frisk.”

The program was extraordinarily successful. “…at the end of the six-month experiment, gun seizures…increased by 65 percent. More importantly, gun crime had decreased by 49 percent.” Amazing, so, why not do it here? The article covers a few different reasons, leadership, ineffective policies but the main one seems to be fear. Not of violence, of lawsuits. The same fear that handicaps those who work specifically to improve our communities - from the music teacher who is supposed to teach violin without ever touching a child to the cop who can’t search an individual with a very suspicious bulge in their winter coat in the middle of July.

Related posts:

1. John’s Fed Up With Crime
2. Street Cameras
3. Nutter for Mayor?
4. So much for good samaritans.
5. Street Plea and Parolees