The retaking of New York - blame it on the police

NEW YORK City, which only three years ago had a reputation as "crime capital of the world" is now one of the safest cities in the world. How lid this quick turnaround happen? Blame it on the police.

The New York Police Department is principally responsible for the dramatic and continuing crime decline ever the past three years, the crime rate has dropped 37 per cent. Homicides have plummeted by over half.

The cover of Time magazine, calling the city "the Rotten Apple", characterised the frustration in 1990. When I first arrived from Boston in 1990, as the new chief of the city's Transit Police Department, I remember driving from LaGuardia Airport into Manhattan. Graffiti, burned out cars and trash seemed to be everywhere; it was like something out of a pessimistic futuristic movie.

As you entered Manhattan, you met the city's unofficial greeter - the squeegee pest. Welcome to New York City. This guy had a dirty rag or squeegee and would wash your window with dirty liquid and ask for or demand money.

Proceed down Fifth Avenue, between designer stores and famous buildings - with unlicensed street pedlars and beggars everywhere.

Then down into the subway where, every day, over 200,000 fare evaders jumped turnstiles as shakedown artists vandalised them and demanded paying passengers to hand over their fare tokens. Beggars were on every train. Every platform had a cardboard city where the homeless lived.

The city had stopped caring about itself. There was a sense of a society that allowed things that would not have been permitted before. The city had lost control and was the epitome of what Senator Daniel Moynihan had described as "defining social deviancy down" explaining away bad behaviour instead of correcting it.

In 1990, Mayor David Dinkins and the city council realised something, had to be done and hired 7,000 more police. It was a start.

When I became Police Commissioner in January 1994, I was aware of this deficiency and reengineered the NYPD so it significantly contributed to the crime reduction and quality of life improvement that continues.

Like many private organisations, the NYPD wasn't living up to its potential. Re engineering needs the setting of clear cut goals, restructuring of the organisation to meet those goals, and the maximum involvement of department personnel and of outside expertise.

We created 12 re engineering teams in training, equipment and technology. We cut through the centralised, hierarchical bureaucracy and returned the focus of crime prevention and disorder reduction to police in the precincts. We decentralised policing, pushing responsibility and accountability down not to the inexperienced beat cop, but to precinct commander level. We really had 76 miniature police departments. They had to apply themselves to the quality of life and signs of crime as well as serious crime.

Over two years, the police developed control strategies for drugs, guns, youth crime, vehicle theft, corruption, traffic, domestic violence and quality of life crime. We created a system of computer statistics to measure the success of our goals, and examined it twice weekly in the department war room.

Since precinct commanders could decide how best to use beat officers, they developed their own strategies for local problems. I also made sure commanding officers were in charge of their personnel and assignments, giving them the authority to put together a plan to attack crime in their precinct.

There were other reforms. We encouraged officers to seek out drug arrests - previously officers were thought too much at risk of corruption because of the cash involved. I trusted detectives to use computer systems previously denied them for fear they would jeopardise other investigations.

During my tenure, violent crime fell by 38 per cent and murders by 51 per cent. But even today there are sceptics. Some are criminal justice - researchers, others political pundits. They cite theories about the fall in crime rates, but don't mention the most significant change - better, smarter, and more assertive policing in partnership with the criminal justice system and the community community policing.

The decline may have been affected by more jailings, but the drop has been so precipitous so quickly the traditional causes of crime, or what we believe to have been the main causes of crime increases or reductions, don't apply.

We are results focused decentralised and co ordinated. We have enough cops and we are using them more effectively. We have shown that the police can change and control behaviour and most important, can prevent crime by their actions independently of other factors. We have repoliced city streets.

In response to criticisms that this new policing is too assertive and that many more citizens are being abused, I am comfortable in saying there is no sustainable evidence to back that. We had 166,737 fewer victims of violent crime in 1994-96 after we emphasised prevention, rather than reaction, and public order maintenance as a way of changing behaviour to reduce crime.

Did complaints against police in crease? Yes. But some 38,000 police officers make over 300,000 arrests and issue millions of summonses annually 9,000 citizens filed complaints in 1996.

MEW YORKERS say they are feeling safer. Residential and commercial property markets are booming and the New York economy has stabilised. Tourism is sky rocketing. The city is slowly revitalising itself. There are still serious crime problems needing extra strategies and resources. But you can see by the initial success of the new geographically based, rather than functionally based drug reduction strategies in Brooklyn North and upper Manhattan, the police can have an impact on even long standing crime problems.

The good news is if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere.