Pubdate: Sun, 17 Aug 2003
Source: Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA)
Copyright: 2003 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc
Contact:  http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/340
Authors: Craig R. McCoy, and Mark Fazlollah

VIOLENT CRIMES RISE AS ARRESTS FALL IN CITY

As overall crime continues to diminish in Philadelphia, violent crime -
including homicide and gunpoint robberies - is on the increase.

At the same time, police are arresting fewer people and solving fewer
crimes. Those are the highlights gleaned from the latest crime statistics
released by the police department.

The trend appears to present the biggest challenge yet for Police
Commissioner Sylvester Johnson, who has pursued a far different policing
strategy than his predecessor, John F. Timoney, since taking over in early
2002. That strategy relies less on arrests and more on police presence in
high-crime areas.

The latest figures show that gunpoint robberies are up 15 percent so far
this year. Homicide is up 22 percent and the number of people shot has risen
15 percent. In total, violent crime is up 4 percent.

As for arrests overall, the department has reported making 38,845, or about
10 percent fewer, than last year by this time. That puts it on track to end
the year with about 50,000 arrests. Under Timoney in 2000, there were
82,000. And with fewer arrests, fewer crimes are being solved.

For instance, police have made arrests in 77 percent of the 197 homicides
this year, down from 93 percent at this point last year, police figures
show.

In cases of gun robberies, police made arrests 31 percent of the time last
year. This year, their arrest rate has fallen to 26 percent.

Johnson, in an interview last week, defended his department's performance,
blaming any increase in violent crime on the poor economy.

"The trend is really nationwide," Johnson said. "I know New York is starting
to really go violent. Washington is really out of hand. New Orleans is worse
than all of us."

As for the drop in arrests, he said: "Traditional policing is not working.

Traditional policing is just locking people up. We will never arrest our way
out of this problem."

That is an attitude that runs counter to the philosophy Timoney brought to
the department.

Timoney inherited a force whose number of arrests had been falling for
years. He reversed that. He made arrests himself as police commissioner. He
pressed his officers to do the same.

Timoney mixed an old-school call for arrests with a high-tech use of
computerized crime mapping to target high-crime areas. Captains are still
questioned about crime in their districts using the map at weekly CompStat
sessions, a shorthand term for computerized statistics.

Johnson, by contrast, is a fervent advocate of police "partnerships" with
community groups, religious leaders and others. Through his Safe Streets
program, which he started in spring 2002, he has sought to virtually end
open-air drug markets in the city's poorest neighborhoods by flooding those
areas with police.

In many ways, Johnson's strategy appears to have paid off. In the first year
of Safe Streets, violent crime fell dramatically in many of the city's
police districts, rough areas that previously went underserved by police.

Crime fell overall throughout the city as well.

But the latest figures, made public by Johnson this month, suggest that Safe
Streets may be running out of gas.

So far this year, overall crime is down 3 percent, much less than the 11
percent it fell last year. Overall crime is down, despite a rise in violent
crime, because thefts and burglaries - two of the crimes committed most
frequently - continue to fall sharply.

Unlike Timoney's emphasis on precision policing, Johnson's Safe Streets
program relies on a massive police presence to check criminals.

Under Safe Streets, the department has stationed officers at each of the
city's 300 most notorious drug corners to scare off dealers and addicts.

It has cost a bundle - $35 million a year in overtime - but police have been
out on the street in greater numbers for more hours.

A fall in arrests citywide has directly coincided with Safe Streets. In the
year before the program, total arrests increased 6 percent. Under Safe
Streets, they declined 12 percent, an Inquirer analysis of police data
shows.

One senior police official said that some officers have been discouraged
from making arrests as they stand on Safe Streets-targeted drug corners. The
official said the concern was that the arresting officer would be lost from
the detail for hours handling paperwork associated with the arrest.

Johnson said his emphasis was on the quality of arrests, not the quantity.
Even as narcotics arrests have declined this year, he pointed out, seizures
of drugs, guns, cars and illicit cash have continued to grow.

He noted that his force now sought to steer drug abusers into treatment.
"When we went to Safe Streets, we went to a different mode," the
commissioner said in an interview last week. "We didn't go an arrest mode.
We went to a mode of disrupting the drug traffic." Are the falling arrests
paving the way for more crime?

Sam Walker, a criminologist with the University of Nebraska, recently wrote
a report for the National Academy of Sciences concluding that more police
"activity" was not necessarily a key to cutting crime.

"No one has established a direct link between activity and crime," Walker
said. But Jack Greene, a criminologist at Boston's Northeastern University,
said that a long period of fewer arrests might set the stage for a crime
flare-up.

"The arrest issue has got to have some lag to it," said Greene, who formerly
served as a consultant to Philadelphia police while teaching at Temple
University.

"There are two trends here," Greene said. "We've got arrests going down and
crimes going up. How come?"

As Philadelphia police commanders have spotted the troubling trends, they
have struggled to get a handle on them.

At a CompStat meeting Aug. 7, First Deputy Commissioner Robert J. Mitchell
pressed a West Philadelphia captain on the very issue. "Your arrests are
down in the some of the areas where serious crime are up," Mitchell pointed
out.

Last month, Deputy Commissioner Patricia Giorgio Fox called a special
meeting of CompStat solely to focus on the robbery surge.

And in June, the department created task forces to tackle violence in the
river wards, Southwest Philadelphia and North Philadelphia.

Johnson said the surge in violent crime worried and puzzled him and other
police chiefs from across the country. Indeed, violent crimes have surged in
many large cities this year, including New York, Dallas and Chicago.

National unemployment has been rising. The same is true in Philadelphia,
where the number of jobless is now 40 percent higher than three years ago,
according to federal statistics.

"In my opinion, it has a lot to do with economics," he said.
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