By Ruth Steinhardt
Washington, D.C., is one of a number of large U.S. cities experiencing a spike in homicides this year, with the number of slayings through early September surpassing that number for all of 2014. In response, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) announced last Wednesday that she would ask the D.C. Council to approve a package of yet-to-be-written legislation that would add officers to the police department, toughen punishments for some violent repeat offenders, repeal some laws and change policies that she says create mistrust between police and residents. Her proposal also would allow police to search and detain violent offenders on probation. The announcement comes at a time when law enforcement officers are under increased scrutiny after a string of incidents bringing into question officers’ relationship with the public.
GW Today spoke to Donald Braman, associate professor of law at the George Washington University Law School and the author of Doing Time on the Outside: Incarceration and Family Life in Urban America, about how Mayor Bowser’s proposals could affect the nation’s capital.
Q: Stop and frisk—the practice by which police officers are permitted to initiate stops of individuals on the street based on reasonable suspicion of criminal activity—has come under fire from civil rights activists, who argue that such stops are often unconstitutional, and that the policy increases distrust of law enforcement without reducing crime rates. Mayor Bowser made a point of saying that Washington, D.C., is “not a stop-and-frisk city” and will not become one. Does her proposed initiative avoid the problems associated with the stop-and-frisk policy used by law enforcement in New York City?
A: In large part, D.C. has managed to avoid the perils of the overly aggressive stop-and-frisk policy that plagued New York City because the Metropolitan Police Department is deeply committed to building community trust. I may not agree with every MPD policy, but if I compare the approach of former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who is most famously associated with stop and frisk, with that of Chief Cathy Lanier, it’s night and day. Mr. Kelly implemented a quota-driven system that emphasized arrests and citations for minor offenses, and backed it up by supporting the use of aggressive, often unconstitutional searches. Ms. Lanier’s approach, by contrast, has focused on building community trust as a crucial part of MPD’s crime prevention and law enforcement strategy. I am extremely critical of Ray Kelly’s approach to policing; I think it’s counterproductive and there’s no evidence that it works. There might be something of that going on here, but I’ve never seen her advocate on behalf of that.
The new measures would borrow the “swift, certain and brief” approach advocated by leading criminal justice reform advocates and adopted by the very successful HOPE Probation Program in Hawaii. [HOPE, a Hawaii initiative structured around swift and proportional consequences for probation violations, has resulted in participants being significantly less likely to be arrested for a new crime, to use drugs or to have their probation revoked, according to a 2010 study conducted by Pepperdine University and UCLA and summarized by the Pew Charitable Trust. –Editor.]
Of course, expanded police powers could be used to move in the direction of the now discredited Ray Kelly style of stop and frisk. But they could also be used to adopt a far more productive direction. Based on her record thus far, I’m optimistic that Chief Lanier is leaning in the right direction, but it’s important to be vigilant and pay attention to what the implementation looks like.
Q: Commentators say one of the major problems with stop and frisk is that it breeds mistrust of law enforcement. Wouldn’t that still, inevitably, be an issue here? How would officers be able to distinguish between people who are on parole or probation and those who aren’t?
A: The probation officer, presumably, would be involved, and they would know the person. But we don't know enough about the program yet. My guess is that there will be a lot more detail soon, once the rubber hits the road.
Q: Historically, does increased police presence in a community decrease violence?
A: There are many ways to reduce crime, and increasing a police presence is certainly one of them. There is now a great deal of evidence that increased police presence, coupled with problem-oriented policing, can reduce violence. The challenge for MPD is that they are facing a significant retirement bubble, so increasing the number of officers will be difficult.
The most effective deployment of police officers is to focus them at high crime locations at high crime times to actively seek to address neighborhood issues in a “problem-oriented” [as opposed to zero-tolerance] manner, along with direct patrolling to reduce illicit gun carrying and related crime.
Q: Are there other policies or strategies that have worked to decrease violent crime?
A: Policing is an important part of the puzzle, but there are a host of measures that are evidence-based and can reduce crime in the long run. Many of these are non-punitive. Supervising high- and medium-risk individuals on probation and parole, as HOPE does, with a regime with clear and enforceable conditions and swift yet proportional penalties has been shown to reduce recidivism, criminal behavior and drug use. Focused deterrence messages and community interventions also have been shown to significantly reduce firearm possession and firearm-involved criminal conduct. These are just a few examples.
But perhaps unsurprisingly to anyone working in the area of human services, studies of interventions showing the largest reductions in criminal justice involvement come from outside of the criminal justice system. There are a lot of promising programs out there that have been rigorously evaluated and found to work.
Some of the largest replicated efforts for crime reduction come from early interventions aimed at low-income, at-risk children and parents. The Nurse Family Partnership, which introduces vulnerable first-time parents to maternal and child health nurses, is one of the most famously effective interventions. It provided positive results in a number of related domains, including maternal health, child health, reduced abuse and neglect, and substantially reduced criminal justice involvement. D.C. committed an additional $2 million to a similar program last cycle. There are also well-known and effective preschool initiatives like Head Start. Mentoring and tutoring programs aimed at older students like BAM (Becoming A Man: Sports Edition) and Match Tutoring have been shown to decrease criminal justice involvement as well.
Other broader initiatives that are promising include summer youth employment, alcohol consumption reduction, the presence of surveillance cameras, blight reduction—like turning a trash-filled lot into a community garden—and meditation.
Q. What would be the psychological effect on the community of these measures—for instance, allowing parole, probation and pretrial authorities access to the homes of those under their supervision?
A. This will depend entirely on the manner in which the policy is implemented and the results it has on those under supervision.