IF YOU WANT SAFER STREETS, DO WHAT NEW YORK DID AND ADD MORE COPS

There are as many different visions of public safety as there are
people, but there is no denying Vancouver residents want more. Whether
they're for drugs or against, for police presence or against, they
expect to be well cared for on city streets.

Police officers tend to point to budgets, though safety dollars here
are rarely compared to those elsewhere, and we simply assume we're a
little hard done by.

My mouth is still agape, following a phone call east. These days in
New York, crime is down in every precinct, to levels not seen in
decades. Murders are down over 39 per cent. Last year, 36 per cent
fewer cars were stolen, with 31 per cent fewer people robbed, and 400
fewer toes-up in New York City morgues.

It's no secret the Apple hosts seven million people a day. They're
chaperoned by 28,000 patrol officers, and between administration and
supervision, the NYPD has over 40,000 members.

I'd invite you to do the math, but I couldn't resist. With our daily
1.2 million, Vancouver would need over 6,800 police officers to
duplicate New York efforts. Yet the Vancouver roster hovers at just
over 1,000, meaning the VPD runs at less than one-sixth the strength
of the NYPD.

In announcing his revitalisation plan, New York Police Commissioner
William Bratton declared, "We will fight for every house, we will
fight for every block, we will fight for every neighbourhood, and we
will win!"

Rhetoric plays well on crime-weary ears, but it was more than talk.
New York fielded an extra 6,000 officers, and took back their streets.
NYPD members started from the sidewalk up, focusing on "quality of
life" issues like public intoxication, aggressive panhandling,
graffiti tagging and drug dealing.

A firming of political will made the deployment financially possible,
and the sidewalk work had a surprising effect on ne'er-do-wells. It
turned out the lower level offenders were committing more serious
crimes. Once squeegee-kids and the like began being fingerprinted,
charges relating to robberies and murders were laid.

Locally, applause was more or less universal. NYPD morale soared with
that of its citizenry, for much the same reason.

As Bratton insists, "You show success, rather than the abject failure
of drug dealers on every corner. It reinforces in the public mind that
the police are doing something, and it reinforces in the officers'
minds that you can succeed."

Passing the same crowd of drug dealers a couple of hundred times
really does soften an officer's motivation. Yet, while nothing breeds
success like success, the New York equation had officers tackling a
problem we don't have in Vancouver.

The arrival of their "Compstat" system, with its profiles and computer
pin maps, created quite a stir. They were without accurate
intelligence regarding crime trends, which Vancouver is not.

Once they solved that, the NYPD achieved something truly novel. They
targeted problem areas with extra personnel and never let up.

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, always in need of safety improvements,
has been subjected to extra patrols more than once. The catch is, with
a 1,000-member department, extra officers have to be called out on
overtime. Whatever financial quarter OT money is borrowed from is soon
depleted, and the streets revert.

I was there for the last round, and felt gratification, seeing skid
row streets made safe to stroll, even temporarily. Residents thanked
us profusely. Of course, the drug dealers we ran off chanted recurring
themes, like "OK, no dope this week. See you next week."

The New York phenomenon is based on James Wilson's "Broken Windows"
theory, which maintains that cities should be reclaimed from the
ground up, and that if you let the little things go, bigger problems
follow.

Self-proclaimed experts berate police successes and point to the
failure of Broken Windows programs in other cities. Yet each
documented failure starts with initial success, and falls apart due to
lack of followup.

There are cliches available, ie: paying for bronze and crying for
gold, but the gap between funding and expectation defies aphorism.
Perhaps the most intriguing puzzle is that the majority of VPD members
love their jobs.

Once we figure that one out, let's ask how safe we'd like to feel, and
how much we're willing to pay for the feeling. Anyone who knows this
city knows it doesn't have to be an illusion.