Philadelphia Weekly

Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey is getting credit for a drop in Philadelphia homicides. Should he?

Photo by Vincent J. Brown, via Flickr.

Two years ago, the city was convulsing with violence. Each week brought a new round of killings, more stories of blasé murder. From case to case, the storyline rarely changed: shots had been fired; a young man had died; nobody had seen anything. The repetition was numbing. By the end of 2007, the homicide rate had risen to an alarming level. The problem was declared deep-seated and intractable, the city dragged toward some bleak new era.

But in 2008, things began to turn. The homicide rate dropped a few percentage points—and while it was nothing to celebrate, the trend offered a measure of optimism. In 2009, the bar graph shortened again: as the year wound down, the rate wound down with it, dropping one quarter from two years before. Emboldened, the mayor and police chief trumpeted the success.

That city was Boston.

Just as in Philadelphia—which has seen a 24 percent drop in murders since 2007—the city stanched bleeding that had once seemed jugular. How had it happened? In both places, officials offered a simple answer: targeted policing had brought about order. “We’ve deployed… officers into those locations that for thirty years have been a problem,” Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis told a reporter in November. “It makes a difference. It prevents crime.” His words were echoed by Mayor Nutter, who, in a December 6 Inquirer op-ed piece, wrote that before the neighborhood-targeting Operation Pressure Point, “Philadelphia was reeling under the weight of violent crime… Today, we’re a noticeably safer city.”

Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C. have also calmed; each has seen its murder rate drop in 2009. So have San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis. In Charlotte, homicides are down 31 percent. Just as in Philadelphia and Boston, these cities’ officials are hailing targeted enforcement. “Police Superintendent Jody Weis says the decrease… is due to bringing back units that target gang crime,” said Chicago Public Radio. “One example is the mobile strike force which floods crime hotspots.” The Los Angeles Times wrote that success had come from the “[identification of] specific areas of the city that require more policing.” And Charlotte’s improvement, according to Sgt. Brad Koch, was due to a “large police presence in areas that traditionally have seen a large number of crimes. In turn, we’re seeing fewer and fewer crimes being reported.”

So all that was needed, from Roxbury to Lawndale to Compton, was a greater share of officers. It’s such a prosaic, commonsense solution that it seems shameful that so much murder—thirty years’ worth, by Davis’ count—had been abetted by a simple misplacement of attention. Why hadn’t such an approach been tried before?

Of course, it had been. Before Operation Pressure Point, there was Operation Safe Streets, then Operation Safer Streets. New York has had Operation Impact; Chicago has had Operation Closed Market. In any city with newsmaking violence, one of the best ways to allay worry—and bend the conversation—is to announce an anticrime initiative with a catchy name. When crime rates don’t respond, officials blame “external factors” and say, as Sylvester Johnson did upon his 2007 surrender, that “policing isn’t working.” When the numbers cooperate, officials bask in the praise. “Everybody wants to beat us up when [the murder rate] goes up,” D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier told the Washington Post in July, “So we'll take credit for it when it goes down.” Next, they vow to keep at it; as our own commissioner, Charles Ramsey, told the Inquirer a few weeks ago, “We’re very pleased, but we’re never satisfied.”

By all accounts, Ramsey has done a fine job in his first two years here, bringing a sense of accountability and organization to a department that had been lacking in both. There’s no evidence that he hasn’t done all in his money-constrained power to improve Philadelphia’s safety. But amidst a nationwide drop in homicides, taking full credit for a single city’s success carries a distinct Being There quality. While Ramsey and Nutter—and any other official in any other city—are free to connect the numbers to their programs, those whose careers don’t hinge on public opinion sound far more uncertain.

In an August piece entitled “The Real Murder Mystery? It’s the Low Crime Rate”, the New York Times wrote that “experts are largely at a loss to explain what makes the crime rate go up or down.” Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, said that if he could predict fluctuations in crime, “I’d start working as a stock broker.” In the recently-published American Homicide, Ohio State criminologist Randolph Roth connects murder rates to public faith in government. Or perhaps homicide is caused by lead poisoning: a Virginia economist has found a link between drops in violent crime and the phasing-out of lead in paint and gasoline. Or maybe, as was argued in 2005’s Freakonomics, it’s abortion policy. Or it could be rainy summers: in July, the Times found that “when it rains substantially in the summertime, there are fewer homicides.” Or, by the same logic, it’s the economy: people can’t afford to go out as much, and wind up staying inside, where it’s safe. Or it’s the cheapness of street drugs. Or the confiscation of firearms. Or reasons not yet postulated. The more the problem is studied, the more diffuse it becomes.

One thing that has not been offered as a cause of the current decline, here or anywhere else, is the “Broken Windows” theory. As mayor of New York from 1994 until 2001, Rudy Giuliani famously believed that cracking down on minor crimes—littering, prostitution, squeegeeing—would prevent more serious offenses. What resulted was called “The New York miracle,” with homicides falling an astounding 67 percent during Giuliani’s term. Yet in the years since—and as New York’s murder rate has risen and fallen again—evidence has mounted that Broken Windows had no effect on public safety. As Stephen Metcalf wrote in Slate:

Perhaps when the murder rate fluctuates—in New York or Philadelphia or Charlotte—something is at work that isn’t particularly reassuring, and of little use to mayors and police commissioners. Speaking to the Boston Globe in 2006, University of Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt described his “Newton’s Law of Crime: what goes up, must come down (and what goes up the most, tends to come down the most).” Put another way, things like Broken Windows and targeted policing can do incredible things. That is, until they don’t.