‘What would a safe community look like?’

For
starters, here’s what a safe community wouldn’t look like: a 12-year-old gunned down walking home from a friend’s house; a
2-year-old hospitalized after an illegal handgun went off unexpectedly in her
home; a troubled 13-year-old nearly killed by a police officer she charged with
a kitchen knife. But this summer, these have been the headlines.

So
it’s no wonder citizens’ concerns about crime and violence are near the top of
the list of issues the mayoral campaigns are talking about. Here’s the problem:
What can a candidate say about crime that’s substantive, not merely smooth
political rhetoric?

RIT
criminologist John Klofas puts it much more bluntly: “Public safety is almost
always a throwaway issue in any campaign,” he says. “All you gotta do is take the obvious position.” (Full disclosure:
Klofas has provided advice for each of the three major Democratic campaigns.)

After
all, any politician in their right mind is going to denounce violence and
pledge to doing something about it. And all the mayoral candidates in the
Democratic primary have made that commitment and then some. They’ve all pledged
to make fighting the many root causes of violent crime — poverty, bad
education, unemployment, a pervasive drug culture —
a priority.

But
does that even matter? On the one hand, voters have this luxury: All of the
Democratic candidates recognize that criminal activity is more than just the
sum of the bad guys divided by the number of police officers on the streets.
But that alone doesn’t distinguish any one of the pack from his competitors.

And
it may obscure a more important question: What can a mayor really do about
crime, short-term, long-term, or any-term?

The obvious
place to start to answer that question is the police department. Since the
mayor hires the police chief, that’s the first place he can influence public
safety in the city. It’s also one of the many places that individual
candidates’ approaches to the issue may begin to diverge.

One
important question, says Klofas, is: “How much do people expect their mayor to
run the police department?” Should he micromanage? Or hire the best person and
give him or her plenty of latitude? Klofas says the latter best describes how
Mayor Bill Johnson treated the department.

“That’s
probably a very reasonable approach,” he adds.

Contrary
to campaign rhetoric, “more police” may not necessarily be all that simple an
answer. Divide 50 new police officers by three shifts a day and spread them out
to cover weekends, vacations and holidays and that might translate into 10 more
officers on the street at any given time, says Klofas.

“To
really change the distribution of police on the street, you have to make
massive hires,” he says. “The more important question is: How are you going to
use what you’ve got?”

Group
14621 Executive Director Joan Roby-Davison has similar doubts about the
effectiveness of simply throwing more officers at a problem.

“If
they all end up chasing 911 calls, I don’t know if we’re further ahead,” she
says.

But while few people think Rochester can simply
police its way out of our problem with crime and violence, more can be done,
argues Klofas.

“There’s
still room for the criminal justice system to affect the level of crime,” he
says. That’s especially true when it comes to one important factor, he says:
Influencing people’s decision to carry a gun.

Klofas
isn’t just theorizing here. As a professor, some of his research into local
crime comes from extensive interviews with inmates. Contrary to popular belief,
he says, turf wars between drug dealers or drug-related gangs isn’t the cause
of most violence. Demand for the substances is so high that competing dealers
can set up shop next to each other and still do a brisk trade.

“There
was more demand for drugs than they could ever supply,” Klofas says inmates
told him. One street-level source concurred, describing some corners as
veritable drug “food courts,” with multiple vendors selling specific drugs side
by side.

Violence
usually enters the scene not for economic reasons but for personal ones: What
starts as a petty argument between acquaintances escalates to trading insults.
All too often, someone has a gun on them or stashed nearby.

“Those
arguments made up over half of our homicides” in a recent study, says Klofas.
The crucial moment in stopping these murders isn’t at the point when arguments
begin to heat up, but hours earlier, when a young man makes the decision about
whether to pack a gun that night or not.

In
other words, the norm in Rochester is not the Crips vs. the Bloods vs. the Latin Kings; it’s DeMario Moore — who lost his life for being smiled at by
the wrong guy’s girl.

One
of the ways law-enforcement officials can make a difference on the street
—both in the number of illegal guns and in crime in general — is through
targeted enforcement and special crime-fighting programs, says Klofas. Word
about these plans gets out on the street and can make a difference. One recent
example is the Project Ceasefire, which uses technology that helps police
detect the source of gunshots.

Drives
like Project Ceasefire suffer the drawback of having a short shelf life,
though, Klofas says.

“When
you change operations, people [take the change seriously] for a while but it
slowly wears away,” he says. That’s because criminals who don’t get caught in
that particular effort grow emboldened over time, even while police energy is
ebbing.

“It’s
easier to do something than to sustain something,” he explains.

That is also
true when it
comes to the many other complicated factors that affect the level of crime in Rochester.

What
would a safe community look like? What creates safety? Police? Other factors?
These are all questions for which candidates must be seeking answers, says
Klofas.

“If
you had a real public safety plan, it would involve a lot more that just
police, I would think,” he adds.

As
evidence, he points to the loosely defined part of town known infamously as the
Crescent. With just 30 percent of Rochester’s population,
it accounts for 80 percent of homicides. But Klofas doesn’t even like using the
term “crescent.”

“If
you’re going to use it as an organizing principle, then that’s fine,” he says,
but that’s not really happening.”

“There’s
no deliberate organization” of social services headed to the Crescent, says
Klofas. That will have to change if progress against crime is to be made, he
says, and he’s not alone.

“Most
of the solid strategies are long term,” says Roby-Davison. She points with
optimism to the RochesterSchool
District’s Children’s Zone program that’s
getting started in her neighborhood.

“Unless
we make significant changes, we’re not going to make any significant headway,”
she says. “I’m talking about the concentration of poverty; I’m talking about
kids not getting out of high school, or if they do, there’s no jobs.”

She
cites a study that traced Monroe County Jail inmates’ backgrounds and found a
correlation between growing up in homes with lead-based paint and violent
crimes later in life. Or the lack of enough officers trained to handle
mental-health disturbances, like the incident that sent 13-year-old Lashedica Mason to the hospital.

“Where
was the mental health intervention?” she asks. “Our social programs have been
gutted.”

Of
course, the mayor has almost no control over the delivery of social services,
which is primarily the county’s responsibility, and to a lesser extent, that of
the state. But in Roby-Davison’s mind that doesn’t let him off the hook.

“Part
of his role is to be an advocate for the people who live in this city,” she
says. “If that means you have to challenge the county executive or the state,
that’s your job.”

Of course,
none of the Democratic candidates would dispute most of this. In fact,
they’d probably lay claim much of it as part of their platforms. The tough part
is discerning who will be able to bridge the gap between rhetoric and reality.
That raises a tougher series of questions that candidates have yet to grapple
with. Klofas tossed out this partial list:

“What
is the police role versus what are others’ roles? What resources are directed
at it? Is there going to be an administrative office that reflects that? To
what lengths do you go to have order in certain parts of the city?”

A
meaningful political debate on crime and violence will have to tackle questions
like those head on and provide specific answers, rather than simply playing to
poll results.

“Crime
is far more complicated than just how many cops are in the street,” observes
Roby Davison. “If it were that simple, we would have done it already.”

This article appears in Jul 27 – Aug 2, 2005.