Breaking Rank (71 page)

During those three years I made numerous visits to the ID, taking lunch or dinner in one of the many tasty Chinese, Japanese, Thai, and Vietnamese restaurants, walking long stretches of the district, attending and/or speaking at community meetings. The “cosmetic” changes I'd noted on my first tour with Doran? I watched them become irreversible and, in the process, inspire other improvements. Storefront by storefront, block by block. But the biggest change of all was to the Jungle.

Tommy Doran and his CSI allies (Belsky, Geller, and from the community Michael Yi and Aileen Balahadia, and from the local Community Development Corporation, Tom Lattimore, et al) spearheaded a movement to put a permanent end to the dangerous, unhygienic jungle. They started by enlisting as partners homeless agencies, other city departments, private enterprise, and, yes, the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Phuong Le, a reporter for
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, joined several of us on a tour in November 1999. Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government had just published a case study on our project. Here is part of what Le wrote:

            
To see how a partnership between police and community can change a neighborhood, hit the streets of the International District. . . . Start at Hing Hay Park, where the aromas of roasted duck and steamed dumplings have replaced the pungent odors of urine and booze that once dominated . . . . Seattle police and community members got merchants to voluntarily stop selling high alcohol wine and fortified beer. They put in tree lights, a restroom and game tables in the park and reduced public boozing, brawls and urination. These days, the park is a place where children come to skate, where the elderly play Chinese chess and residents practice tai chi . . . . The tour . . . started at Hing Hay Park and moved to the Phnom Penh restaurant where [the project] helped owner Kim Ung negotiate to buy the property about three years ago. Under previous owners the restaurant had been a trouble spot where drive-by shootings and gang activities were so common that gang unit officers were there on most weekends.

Doran then led the tour up to where the Jungle used to be. The concrete columns under the freeway had been clad in bright red with yellow Chinese characters. The parking lot was lit up to make the darkest days and nights bright and cheery (was that a smile on that Nissan?). Across the street and up the bank? The Jungle had been graded, making the bank even steeper. And it was paved over, in a not unattractive sandstone color. Its former occupants had been linked up to homeless agencies (where some
of them would actually take advantage of the proffered assistance). And immediately to the east, where the Jungle had begun to encroach, construction was under way on the Pacific Rim Center, a multistory combination of affordable housing and small commercial businesses.

As Le wrote, “In the International District, community policing isn't a buzzword. It's a creative way of doing business.” To end the article, she quoted Doran: “I love the energy, this is a great community. So many things have happened so gradually that all of a sudden you see [the neighborhood] has changed.”

Like each of the eleven agencies that made up Seattle's CSI project, Nancy McPherson grasped the true meaning of community policing. Along with her mentors, John Eck at the University of Cincinnati and University of Wisconsin professor Herman Goldstein (the “Father of Problem Oriented Policing” and the author of the 1977 classic,
Policing a Free Society),
McPherson recognized that three conditions must be present in order for an agency to proclaim itself a genuinely community-oriented PD: (1) a
problem solving
orientation (Eck's “SARA” model—
s
canning,
a
nalysis,
r
esponse,
a
ssessment—provided the most widely accepted approach to the discipline of problem solving); (2) an authentic
partnership
with the community; and (3) a demonstrable commitment to
organizational transformation.

That last one is crucial because without such a commitment it's simply not possible to conceive of community policing taking root in any city. The structure and culture of policing must change, fundamentally, for that to happen. All bureaus, divisions, sections, units—all
members
of the department must be on board. A handful of specialized patrol officers, a pontificating police chief, an idealistic lieutenant running some demonstration project—that's not community policing, no matter what the propaganda claims.

In San Diego and Tallahassee, in Milwaukee and Brooklyn, in Seattle and Santa Monica, neighborhood “justice centers” have opened in recent years.
Created, among other reasons, to help disputants resolve differences not with fists or guns out in the street but in a safe environment, these geographically dispersed centers are involved in conflict resolution, mediation, and sometimes arbitration. Some of the centers embrace a “restorative justice” concept, which means that the suspect in a crime is often brought face-to-face with his or her victims. Stolen articles are returned or replaced. The feeling of having been “violated” is addressed, apologies rendered, restitution ordered. Sometimes the wrongdoers are forgiven, sometimes they're not. But the driving force behind restorative justice is just that: the restoration of fairness, of safety, and of that which has been lost to crime—tangibly or psychologically.

Staffed variously by attorneys, trained mediators, magistrates, and volunteers, justice centers operate
in the community.
The centers don't replace the centralized courthouse or jails or prisons—those components of the criminal justice system must remain available for cases that can't or ought not to be handled within the community. Major crimes, including sex offenses, domestic violence, and other violent and/or repeat offenses are best handled by the more formal system.

San Diego has pioneered a remarkable “one-stop shop” for dealing with the entire range of family issues, from DV safety planning to nutrition to pregnancy services to counseling.

Often community-driven, these initiatives, along with their public-private partnerships, are extremely promising. But there's a big problem looming—and too many jurisdictions are ignoring it.

Just about everyone convicted of a crime and serving time in prison today (short of a capital or aggravated murder case or a “third strike” offense) will be “de-incarcerated” soon enough. Six hundred thousand of the two million people in jail or prison at this moment will be returning to the streets over the next year.

According to an October 2004 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (citing reports of the National Recidivism Reporting Program and the Survey of Inmates in State Correctional Facilities), the average number of ex-offenders who will be rearrested within three years of their release is
69.1 percent. On this basis alone, not to mention the moral duty, our police and other social institutions have a major stake in helping ex-offenders successfully reenter the community. If over two thirds of all ex-offenders return to the habits that put them in jail in the first place they will do serious damage to the best-laid plans of community policing.

Jeremy Travis, formerly of the Urban Institute, the Department of Justice, and now president of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, offers a novel proposal: require that the sentencing judge preside over the community reentry process, convening all stakeholders—community and family members, police, parole officers, et al. The judge, familiar with the case, would lay down the law to the ex-offender and at the same time see to it that all appropriate resources are marshaled to help the ex-offender's reentry.

Dennis Maloney, president of Community Justice Associates, and former director of Deschutes County (Oregon) Community Justice (note that it's “community” not
criminal
justice), writes and speaks compellingly on the need for “earned redemption.” In his capacity as director of both adult and juvenile correctional facilities, Maloney developed some of the most innovative programs in “balanced and restorative” justice. Graduates of his program, who are required to
work
their way back to freedom—and responsibility—recidivate at dramatically reduced levels.
*
Maloney's graduation ceremonies, in which a key, symbolizing the community reconstruction work of his ex-offenders, is passed from one graduate to the next. The moment is dramatic, the audience often reduced to tears. Among those in attendance at most graduations? The cops who'd busted the offenders, and many of the victims of those offenders.

Community policing is not for everyone. Just ask Daryl Gates. As the two of us debated the concept in Seattle, the ex-LAPD chief stunned the audience
with one of his frequent outrageous remarks. “Community policing, my friends,” he said to the roomful of wealthy businessmen and businesswomen of the Young Presidents Organization, “is a sham, a hoax. You have absolutely no obligation to your neighbors. Your duty is to yourself, and no one else.” His rationale? You pay taxes for police service, so let the cops do it all. “Your responsibility for public safety ends at the sidewalk in front of your house. Take care of yourself, your family, and your home, and leave the rest of it to us—the police.”

I don't know, maybe Gates was playing to the audience, those wealthy, youthful presidents of corporations, CEOs, chairs of corporate boards, managing partners, publishers. Gates may have
thought
he was preaching to the choir, but he couldn't have gotten it more wrong—and the audience let him know.

But Gates is far from alone in the belief that policing should be left to the police.