Designate Patrol Officers to Go After Illegal Guns. With our existing police force, we will designate specially trained patrol officers in each Police District to go after illegal guns and the criminals who are most likely to use them. This targeted enforcement has been proven to be effective in other cities. A 1992-93 study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Lawrence Sherman showed that targeted patrols in an area of Kansas City, Missouri with a murder rate six times higher than the city as a whole showed a 49% drop in gun crimes and a 65% increase in gun seizures. A 1997 study in Indianapolis showed that targeted patrols in one high crime district reduced gun crimes by 29%.

I believe those "targeted patrols in an area of Kansas City," and those in Indianapolis involved stop and frisk tactics. It would seem to me that he was indeed advocating stop and frisk patrols in Philadelphia and I think that was reported when he announced his "Gun Safe Philadelphia" plan. Not sure when he apparently changed his mind.

I support Michael Nutter for Mayor

but...

Yes, the Sherman study and the discussion of targeted enforcement zones involves stop and frisk (the study is deployed to show that stop and frisk is effective in reducing crime).

Both Nutter and Fattah cited the same study in their crime plans, which had overlapping elements.

The big difference between the two men's plans--and why my earlier writing on this gravitated towards emphasis on Nutter--is that Nutter situated his support for stop and frisk within a plan to declare a crime-based state of emergency in violence-plagued Philadelphia areas. In the debates, the two get conflated: discussion and criticism of stop and frisk is really discussion and criticism of the state of emergency thing.

Why this is has to do with the weird double-bind Nutter has put himself in (evident in his defense of stop and frisk last night): to not freak people out, he has to emphasis constitutionality and "probable cause" (which isn't the legal standard, which is actually lower, but whatever). But now he is just saying, under me we will do what we already can--and to a certain extent are--doing. When Nutter described the circumstances under which police could stop people to search for illegal weapons (he went into detail about the specific suspicious qualities that would support a search), he was talking about circumstances where police are already going to stop and search.

I think he is (somewhat irresponsibly) grasping onto rhetoric that he thinks differentiates himself as tough on crime, but I don't think he has the stomach to actually be that tough. I am heartened by the fact that all the other candidates think that it is a problem to rely more heavily on police discretion.

One of the problems with Nutter's plan and why Evans is right to talk about the risk of racial profiling is that I think Nutter departs too far from Sherman's study when he describes the "targeted enforcement zones" where a state of emergency would be declared. Nutter references whole neighborhoods like Strawberry Mansion. Sherman's study is based on the fact that we have specific data about past violent crime, and have the ability to pinpoint pretty narrowly where it is likely to recur. That's block-by-block data. Following it, you would declare a state of emergency on corner X.

If you do it across a whole neighborhood, everyone who lives there or has to pass through (as opposed to choosing to remain on corner X) is subject to lowered privacy rights. Nutter's plan as written referenced the mayor's ability under the state of emergency to outlaw movement (walking, driving) through the area. Anyone then who has to walk or drive through can be stopped.

Fattah doesn't say any of this, so he gets less heat.

I will do some more research, but I also think it is unfortunate that the conversation on crime prevention devolved fighting over stop and frisk and the number of new officers (500? 1000?) after the initial plans were promising. The mayoral candidates must determine what has been demonstrably effective elsewhere in reducing violent crime. Nutter claims that stop and frisk was effective in New York; Evans points out the recent studies that show the rise in racial profiling and minority complaints against the police in that period. People aren't talking about the shift in institutional culture in the NYC police also during that time.

What we should be replicating is the COMPSTAT system, which uses real-time data on crime to aggressively hold precinct-level police chiefs accountable for the crime rates in their areas:

The effort was also highly focused, based on restructuring and assisted by the intelligent use of immediately available information. Authority was decentralised to precinct commanders. The role of the centre was to exert scrutiny over those with day-to-day responsibility. In twice weekly "Compstat" (computer statistics) meetings, local precinct commanders gathered to review real time crime statistics and be cross-examined on their performance.

The New York police were therefore clearly accountable for their performance. Precinct commanders were accountable to the commissioner. The commissioner was accountable to the Mayor, who was in turn accountable to the electorate.

This is the sort of reform of how we police that is absent when we focus on the number of new police officers.

Jennifer

But I still think that the key is there: up-to-the-minute crime data, used to identify and analyze where crime is happening, coupled with aggressive accountability throughout the police force up to the mayor.

This links up with the aspect of the Sherman study that is valuable as well: I think its lesson has to do with use of information for targeted enforcement, rather than broad-based stop and frisk policies.

Jennifer