NY REVIEW OF BOOKS NOVEMBER 19, 1998

A Review Of:

Turnaround: How America's Top Cop Reversed the Crime Epidemic by William
Bratton and Peter Knobler 329 pages, $25.00 (hardcover) published by Random
House

Getting Away With Murder: How Politics Is Destroying the Criminal Justice
System by Susan Estrich 161 pages, $19.95 (hardcover) published by Harvard
University Press

Politics, Punishment, and Populism by Lord Windlesham 278 pages,
$35.00 (hardcover) published by Oxford University Press

The continuing decline in the nation's crime rate--in 1997, it fell
for the sixth consecutive year--has helped to draw attention to a
small group of police chiefs and crime experts who are widely believed
to have brought it about. They include William Bratton, New York's
former police commissioner; Jack Maple, who served as Bratton's deputy
and who is now advising the New Orleans police department; the
political scientist James Q. Wilson; George L. Kelling, coauthor of
the recent book Fixing Broken Windows,[1] and Herman Goldstein, a
professor at the University of Wisconsin and the author of
Problem-Oriented Policing.

Over the last decade, these crime experts have helped to
revolutionize the practice of policing in America. In doing so, they
have affected the way we think about crime. In police circles, they
have routed advocates of the old school, with its emphasis on cops
riding around in squad cars, responding to reports of crime. Among
criminologists, they have silenced those who argue that the police can
do little about crime as long as its root causes--poverty,
unemployment, racism--go unaddressed. These police officers and
writers have changed the very vocabulary of law enforcement,
introducing such terms as "broken windows," "quality-of-life
enforcement," "preventive policing," and "community policing." They
have been the subject of profiles in The New Yorker and New York, have
appeared on the cover of Time, and been featured on 60 Minutes. Most
recently, in August, The New York Times ran a glowing article claiming
that "James Q. Wilson has insights, like those on cutting crime, that
tend to prove out."

Are such notices deserved? Can changes in police theory and practice
rightly take credit for the drop in crime occurring nationwide?

1.

Taking credit is one thing William Bratton is not shy about. In fact, he's
not shy about much of anything. In Turnaround: How America's Top Cop
Reversed the Crime Epidemic, he describes his rapid rise from rookie cop in
Boston to chief of police in New York, and the tone is triumphalist
throughout. In recounting his promotions, Bratton often sounds like a
twelve-year-old telling his parents of his achievements at school. "When my
name was announced as executive superintendent, jaws dropped," he writes of
one promotion. By his own description, Bratton is eager for publicity ("I
admit it, I don't mind see-ing my name in the papers") and intensely
ambitious ("My whole career had been about making it to the top"). In
Turnaround, he writes of his "leadership style" and compares himself to Lee
Iacocca (for his turnaround of Chrysler), Frank Perdue (for promoting his
company by promoting himself), and even Babe Ruth. Recalling his bold
predictions of success upon taking over the NYPD, Bratton writes,

Like Babe Ruth pointing his bat to the bleachers indicating where his
next home run would land, I was confidently predicting the future. I
was a leader who had spent my whole professional life seeking out and
turning around low-performing, dysfunctional police departments. Now I
had been given the challenge of a lifetime--the NYPD.

Bratton's Ruthian ego would ultimately prove his downfall, bringing
him into conflict with the no-less-credit-hungry Rudolph Giuliani. Yet
it must be said that Bratton delivered. On taking over the NYPD, he
promised to reduce serious crime in the city in his first year by 10
percent; it fell by 12 percent. For the second year, he predicted a 15
percent decline; instead, crime fell by 17 percent. From these
statistics, Bratton draws sweeping conclusions:

We had developed a method to reduce crime and disorder that would
work in any city in America--indeed, in any city in the world.... The
turnaround of the NYPD was the catalyst for the turnaround of New York
City itself and offers a potential blueprint for the turnaround of the
crime situation in the entire country.

Bratton expresses his irritation with criminologists who question how
much the NYPD itself was responsible for the drop in crime. "I made a
conscious decision to take on the academics, to challenge conventional
wisdom about crime in America and prove that effective policing can
make a substantial impact on social change...," he writes. "We lined
up their alternate reasons like ducks in a row and shot them all
down." Bratton is curtly dismissive, for instance, of the argument
that the improvement in New York simply reflected national trends.
"According to FBI figures," he writes, "in the first six months of
1995, serious crime throughout the country went down by 1 percent, or
about 67,000 crimes. In New York in that same period, there were
41,000 fewer crimes, a 16 percent drop. We were two-thirds of the
national decline in reported crime."

As anyone who works with crime statistics knows, it's often possible
to prove a point by picking the right period. Here, Bratton has
limited himself to one six-month period in 1995. The picture changes
if we consider a broader period, extending from 1992, when crime
nationwide first began to drop, to 1997. Table 1 compares New York's
performance with that of several other large cities. It shows the
change both in the overall number of serious crimes (as tallied by the
FBI's Uniform Crime Reports) as well as in the most serious crime,
murder.

Clearly, most of these large cities had substantial declines in both
overall crime and murders. And while the police in some of the cities
adopted reforms similar to those introduced in New York, others did
not. In Washington, for instance, the police department has long been
regarded as a sinkhole of corruption and mismanagement, yet the number
of murders in the city in 1997 fell to 300 from 397 the year before.
In short, the drop in crime seems to reflect trends in the nation at
large.

One possible factor at work has been the booming economy. With
national unemployment at its lowest level since 1973, would-be
hoodlumshave had more opportunities to earn money through legitimate
means. In New York City, the jobless rate remains high at 7.5 percent,
but even this represents a drop from 11.6 percent six years ago. While
the research on the link between economic growth and crime is sparse,
it's hard to believe that an economic upturn of this size would not
have put some downward pressure on crime rates.

The effects of economic growth have been magnified by the ebbing of
the crack epidemic. In the early 1980s, before the introduction of
crack, the rate of serious crime in the United States was falling. In
1985, however, the rate began to rise dramatically, and it continued
to climb until 1991; violent crime rose especially sharply, increasing
by 40 percent in seven years. (See Figure 1 on page 34.) This increase
was caused by wars among crack dealers as they battled for turf, as
well as by violence among users as they sought to feed their habit.
Then, in the early 1990s, crack use began to decline. While many
inner-city adults continued to use the drug, their children and
younger brothers and sisters--seeing the damage crack caused--began to
shun it. In many large cities, the percentage of young arrestees
testing positive for cocaine dropped sharply--a sign of crack's
growing unpopularity among those most prone to commit crimes.[2]

The result has been a significant fall-off in crack-related crime in
the nation's largest cities. Conversely, some smaller cities, hit
later by crack, have experienced an upsurge in violence; in
Indianapolis, for instance, the number of murders rose from 88 in 1992
to 146 in 1997. Earlier this year, U.S. News & World Report, in a
cover story analyzing the possible causes of the national crime drop,
cited the receding of the crack epidemic as the "prime
suspect."[3]

In the light of all this, William Bratton's one-paragraph brushoff of
national trends seems misleading. Still, the New York experience is in
many ways unique. As Table 1 shows, the declines there have
outstripped those in every other major city; what's more, crime in New
York has dropped to levels well below those prevailing before crack's
arrival. One has to go back to 1967 to find a year in which fewer
murders were recorded in the city than the 770 of last year. (See
Figure 2 on page 34.)

Such figures lend weight to Bratton's claims about the importance of
his reforms in New York. Certainly most New Yorkers are grateful for
the new sense of peace on their streets. To them, the "police
revolution" seems real enough.

Like most revolutions, however, this one has had some unintended
consequences. What's more, the nature of the revolution has been
misrepresented, giving rise to public misconceptions that have
obscured its long-term costs.

2.

In January 1996, William Bratton appeared on the cover of Time.
"Finally, We're Winning the War Against Crime," the headline said.
"Here's Why." Bratton, pictured in trench coat and tie, was identified
as "New York Commissioner William Bratton, a leading advocate of
community policing." Inside, Time described the "potential new synergy
between cops and residents." To illustrate the point, the article
featured a photograph of two cops playing basketball with a group of
black children outside a New Orleans housing project, and another of a
cop smiling at a baby in a crib in Brooklyn. Such images sum up the
popular view of community policing--amiable cops on the beat
befriending local youths, dropping in on store owners, working with
neighborhood leaders to address local problems. It is policing with a
human face.

William Bratton's book itself is full of anodyne prose about the
importance of cooperation between the cops and the community. Of his
early days in Boston, he writes, "The beat cop was coming back through
neighborhood policing. We could bring down crime by developing a
partnership between the population and the police." Describing his
arrival in New York, he writes, "With its emphasis on treating people
respectfully and as partners, on interacting with responsible
community and religious leaders, and on understanding that even in the
toughest neighborhoods most citizens are good and law-abiding,
community policing offered the best hope for the department and for
the city."

The idea of cooperation between the police and local communities is
undeniably appealing, but it doesn't remotely describe what happened
in New York under Bratton, or what is now happening under his
successor, Howard Safir. While Bratton transferred officers from squad
cars to the street, he did not encourage officers to establish close
relations with local leaders or residents.

Bratton's inspiration was not the concept of community policing but
that of "broken windows," which he first encountered in the late
1980s, when he was attending an executive seminar on policing at
Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.[4] Among the speakers was
George Kelling, who had, in 1982, teamed up with James Q. Wilson to
write a highly influential article for The Atlantic Monthly titled
"Broken Windows." The police, Kelling and Wilson argued, had become so
concentrated on solving major offenses like homicides and robberies
that they were overlooking smaller ones like panhandling,
prostitution, and public drunkenness. Such offenses, in their view,
created a climate of disorder in which more serious crimes could
flourish. If a window in a building is broken and left unrepaired,
Wilson and Kelling wrote, others would soon follow; similarly, if the
police ignored small-time violators, more serious offenses would result.

Listening to Kelling describe these ideas at the Kennedy School,
Bratton found his own experience confirmed. While working his way up
the ladder in Boston, he had himself become convinced of the
importance of disorderly and destructive behavior in the streets as a
source of crime; now, for the first time, he heard someone putting his
impressions into At the time, New York's subways seemed in a state of
disintegration, with crime soaring, graffiti spreading, panhandlers
proliferating, and more and more riders abandoning the system.
Particularly troublesome was the problem of fare-beating, which had
become brazen. (Bratton describes how, on one of his initial visits
into the system, he saw a man with his mouth over a turnstile slot,
"sucking out the jammed coins and leaving his slobber.") For
old-school transit officers, fare-beating was too trivial an offense
to worry about. But the Transit Authority was losing a lot of money
from it and wanted the practice stopped.

Overcoming resistance from his own men, Bratton assigned squads of
officers to patrol turnstiles and arrest those jumping them. In the
past, such offenders would have simply received "desk-appearance
tickets," known as DATs--summonses to police stations that hardly
anyone obeyed--and then would have been released immediately; now,
officers were instructed to see if their names appeared on the lists
of outstanding warrants for arrest. As it turned out, one in every
seven did, and they were immediately taken to police headquarters to
be booked.

Eventually, Bratton introduced a Bust Bus--a city bus retrofitted
into an arrest-processing center--which, traveling to stations,
allowed officers to book people on the spot. Subway riders, seeing the
arrests, would applaud the police, helping to boost their morale. As
word of the sweeps spread, troublemakers began staying out of the
subways altogether, and crime began to drop. As Bratton writes,

We had reduced fare evasion, motivated the cops, streamlined the
arrest process, and increased police productivity; we had involved the
public, increased their attention, and won their approval; we had
controlled disorder and achieved a decrease in crime. All from
arresting people for a buck-fifteen crime. We were proving the Broken
Windows theory.

Bratton introduced many other changes as transit chief. He ordered
police officers to crack down on panhandlers in the subway. He saw to
it that defaced cars were immediately taken out of the system and
cleaned. He upgraded his officers' equipment and dressed them in
spiffy new uniforms. (In Turnaround, Bratton--convinced that cops who
look better perform better--spends much time discussing the finer
points of police fashion.) Overall, under Bratton, felony crime in the
subway dropped 22 percent; fare-beating was cut in half, and the
number of riders increased.

In 1992, Bratton--always eager for the next promotion--abruptly left
his job in New York to take a top position with the Boston police
department. He was there less than two years when Rudolph Giuliani
gotin touch with him. In a meeting with the newly elected mayor,
Bratton described the Broken Windows approach. It fit nicely with
Giuliani's concern about the declining quality of life in New York,
and Bratton promptly got the job he'd wanted since he was a boy: New
York police commissioner. As he quickly discovered, however, the NYPD,
while renowned as the world's greatest crime-fighting machine, was in
fact "dysfunctional." While very good at responding to crime, New York
cops "weren't very good at preventing it," Bratton writes. "They
weren't even trying to prevent it. They were cleaning up around it."
The problem lay in part with the community-policing model introduced
by his predecessors, Lee Brown and Ray Kelly. Community policing,
Bratton writes in Turnaround, "focused on the beat cop.... 'Officer
Friendly' would respectfully resume contact with the community,
courteously listen to people's problems, and immediately find
appropriate solutions." While fine in theory, such an approach "was
not going to work because there was no focus on crime. The connection
between having more cops on the street and the crime rate falling was
implicit. There was no plan to deploy these officers in specifically
hard-hit areas...and there were no concrete means by which they were
supposed to address crime when they got there."

In particular, community policing as practiced in New York had no
strategy for dealing with the squeegee men, beggars, prostitutes, drug
dealers, and graffiti writers who were creating a sense of disorder on
the street. Bratton was determined to go after them. "Previous police
administrations had been handcuffed by restrictions," he writes.

We took the handcuffs off.... We stepped up enforcement of the laws
against public drunkenness and public urination and arrested repeat
violators, including those who threw empty bottles in the street or
were involved in even relatively minor damage to property. No more
DATs. If you peed in the street, you were going to jail. We were going
to fix the broken windows and prevent anyone from breaking them again.

As in the subways, cracking down on small fry produced broader
benefits. If the police saw someone with an open beer can on the
street, for instance, they would pat his clothes; if they found a gun
or knife, they would book him for carrying a weapon. This not only
prevented a possible incident involving that particular weapon but
also sent a message to others to leave their weapons at home. This, in
turn, helped reduce the level of violence in the city.

Introducing Broken Windows tactics was part of a broader effort by
Bratton to "reengineer" the culture of the NYPD. As at Transit, he
modernized equipment and redesigned uniforms. He introduced a
videoconferencing system that allowed arresting officers to provide
information to prosecutors without having to waste hours at the
courthouse. Most important, he informed precinct commanders that
henceforth they would be held accountable for their performance. Once
a month, each commander had to appear at One Police Plaza to be
grilled by the brass about crime trends in his precinct and how he was
responding to them. These were the famous "Compstat" sessions that
eventually drew police officials from around the world.

None of these changes required the police to work with the community.
Indeed, the police under Bratton were determined not to work with the
community, as I learned in an interview with John Timoney, one of
Bratton's top deputies. (Earlier this year, he was named police chief
in Philadelphia.) A ruddy, excitable, outspoken Irishman, Timoney
contemptuously dismissed the idea that the police should enlist
neighborhood residents in fighting crime. "I don't want to help the
sanitation people pick up the garbage," he said. "It's the cops' job
to fight crime. Community policing said the cops can't do it alone.
Our answer was, 'Yes, they can.'" Under the Broken Windows strategy,
the police were to become more aggressive--the opposite of the
restrained approach usually counseled by community policing. And, to
judge by crime statistics, the Broken Windows approach seems to have
been a far more effective strategy than community policing, at least
as it had been understood in New York.

At the same time, the new assertiveness inherent in the Broken
Windows model has had some unfortunate byproducts. One is the strain
in relations between the police and minorities in New York. Mayor
Giuliani and his allies have frequently argued that inner-city
residents--stuck in high-crime districts--have benefited as much as
anyone from the police crackdown in the city. And so they have.
Nonetheless, many blacks are upset by the rough treatment they've
received from the police. Far from playing basketball with black
youths, the police have harassed many of them. In one recent incident,
a black sixteen-year-old carrying a water pistol shaped like an
assault rifle was shot seven times by two cops; not only did the
police not apologize, but Mayor Giuliani chided the boy's parents for
letting him be out late at night. Not exactly an example of
community-police partnership. An even more serious problem with the
Broken Windows approach is the large number of arrests it entails.
Cracking down on petty offenders means busting many of them, with all
the attendant strain on the criminal justice system. The problem is
especially acute where drugs are concerned. In the Broken Windows
model, street-level drug dealers are prime offenders, breeding
disorder wherever they appear. In Turnaround, Bratton describes his
determination to rid the city of drug dealers once and for all. With
the help of his aide Jack Maple, he developed Operation Juggernaut, a
plan to send hundreds of plainclothes police into drug-ridden
neighborhoods to conduct buy-and-bust operations, padlock drug-dealing
bodegas, and raid apartments. In describing the operation, Bratton
sounds as if he has taken General George S. Patton as his model:

Prior to Juggernaut, the city's war on drugs had been our Vietnam; we
were fighting a hit-and-run enemy and had gone in and made a lot of
contact when we could, but we'd never held the ground. We didn't have
the tactics or the will to win. Juggernaut was the Normandy invasion.
We were going to overwhelm our opponents, take the ground and never
leave, and systematically take them out.... We would systematically
take out the low-level street dealer, the midlevel operator, and
high-level kingpin. We would attack them consistently on all fronts at
all times. If you were a drug dealer, you were a marked man.

Juggernaut was launched in April 1996, with 1,000 police sent into
northern Brooklyn. Soon after, the campaign was extended to several
other drug-ridden parts of the city. And it had some success. By
disrupting drug gangs, the police were able to bring down murder and
robbery rates in the neighborhoods they entered. In doing so, however,
they made huge numbers of arrests. In 1997 (by which time Bratton had
been replaced by Howard Safir), the number of drug arrests in the city
hit a record 101,000--more, even, than at the height of the crack epidemic.

Curious about the effect this was having on the criminal justice
system, I talked to Michael Jacobson before he resigned as New York's
commissioner of correction at the end of 1997. In view of Jacobson's
position, and the fact that he was a Giuliani appointee, I fully
expected him to applaud the city's anti-drug crackdown. Instead, he
was outspokenly critical. "Prison expenses are going through the
roof," he said. In 1980, he noted, his department spent about $150
million to house 6,000 to 7,000 inmates; in 1997, it was spending $800
million to house 18,000 to 21,000, of whom more than one third were
drug offenders. A former city budget official, Jacobson noted that all
of this was part of a "zero-sum game. The money for corrections is
coming out of other places, like health care and education." Because
of all the drug arrests being made in the city, Jacobson said, "kids
in New York schools have to attend classes with ninety other kids."

The city's drug offensive was proving expensive for New York State,
as well, for it was the state that had to house all those drug
offenders after they were convicted. Many had to serve long terms,
thanks to the draconian drug laws imposed under Nelson Rockefeller.
According to them, even the lowliest sellers of crack and heroin were
commonly sent away for one, two, or more years, depending on their
previous record. Owing largely to the increase in drug offenders, the
state's prison population has shot up from 21,621 in 1980 to nearly
70,000 today. By the early 1990s, the system had become so jammed with
low-level drug offenders that violent felons were being let out early
to make room for them.

Seeing the madness in this system, Governor George Pataki has quietly
begun arranging for the early release of low-level offenders so as to
free up space for truly dangerous felons. In 1997, for the first time
in fifteen years, the number of drug offenders behind bars went
down.[5] This is just a stopgap measure, however. As long as New York
City keeps rounding up street-level drug dealers and prosecuting them
under the Rockefeller laws, the pressure on the state system will continue.

3.

As in New York, so in the rest of the country. In 1997, the nation's
prison population grew by 5.2 percent--this despite a 4 percent drop
in crime. The number of Americans behind bars rose from 1.1 million in
1990 to 1.7 million last year.[6] Of course, a drop in crime need not
automatically result in a decrease in the number of inmates. On the
contrary, the growth in the prison population has probably helped
reduce crime by removing so many troublemakers from the street. The
problem is, there seems no end in sight to the explosion in inmates.
What's more, we increasingly seem to be locking up the wrong people.

This last point is convincingly made by Susan Estrich in her short but
lucid book Getting Away With Murder: How Politics Is Destroying the
Criminal Justice System. A professor of law and political science at the
University of Southern California, Estrich is a Democrat but, as she is
eager to show, a hard-headed one. Seeking to distance herself from the
civil liberties wing of the party, she writes of her humble origins (she
went to law school on a scholarship), her ability to get ahead without
special help (she managed to become a professor "because I was smart"), and
her own personal brush with crime (she was raped when she was twenty-one).
As an adviser to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, Estrich
had to deal with the problem posed by the case of Willie Horton, the center
of the most ferocious get-tough-on-crime ad campaign ever.

In her book, Estrich asks how society should deal with a man like
Horton, a first-degree murderer who, while on a weekend furlough from
a Massachusetts penal institution, brutally raped a Maryland woman in
her house. Her answer is simple: "Lock him up." She is openly
disdainful of Dukakis, noting how, as governor, he doggedly defended
the policy of furloughing first-degree murderers even after Horton's
crime. After such tough-sounding remarks, however, Estrich goes on to
mount a scathing criticism of the criminal justice system, especially
its reliance on mandatory minimum sentences. Virtually every state in
the country now has such sentences, and while their main goal is to
punish people like Willie Horton and isolate them from society, they
are, Estrich argues, having the exact opposite effect.

As an example, she cites California's three-strikes-and-you're-out
law. The occasion for this measure was the kidnapping and murder of
twelve-year-old Polly Klaas by Richard Alan Davis, who, at the time of
the crime, was on parole for a third offense. For that third
offense--also a kidnapping--Davis had received a sixteen-year
sentence, the maximum. Because of a shortage of prison space, however,
the California legislature had passed a law requiring all inmates to
serve one half of their mandatory terms, "effectively cutting
[sentences] across the board," Estrich notes. Davis was released
automatically in exactly eight years. He then kidnapped Polly.

In his grief and outrage, Polly's father, Marc Klaas, led a campaign
to enact a ballot proposition that would put three-time offenders like
Davis away for good. Politicians across the state took up his cause,
and the proposition was progressively made more severe. In its final
version, the measure did not require the third felony to be violent,
and it barred judges from assessing the dangerousness of the person
committing the crime--provisions so excessive that Marc Klaas himself
came out against the proposition. Nonetheless, it carried by a wide
margin. And, in its first two years on the books, about 70 percent of
the cases tried under it involved three strikes that were nonviolent,
with drug use the most common offense. This not only resulted in the
waste of millions of taxpayers' dollars, Estrich writes, but also
crowded the state's prisons, making it more likely that truly violent
criminals would be released. "The result of mandatory laws and
punishment by slogan," she observes, "is that we spend more and more
money locking up less and less violent people."

Such irrationality, Lord Windlesham argues in Politics, Punishment,
and Populism, is to be found throughout America's criminal justice
system. The principal of Brasenose College at Oxford and the former
chairman of the Parole Board for England and Wales, Lord Windlesham
coolly analyzes the American system of criminal justice and finds it
dismaying. He concentrates on the Violent Crime Control and Law
Enforcement Act of 1994, which, authorizing the expenditure of $30.2
billion over six years, was the most expensive, and extensive, piece
of crime legislation in American history. At times, Politics,
Punishment, and Populism gets bogged down in the details of
congressional maneuvering, but the book shows with admirable clarity
how public opinion, populist rhetoric, and the demands of legislative
compromise combined to produce a law that defies the findings of
research, not to mention common sense.

Well before the crime bill was taken up, in the fall of 1993,
Windlesham observes, the surge in violent crime in the United States
had begun receding. Nonetheless, as his research shows, TV news
programs were featuring a record number of crime stories that year,
helping to create public alarm, and that in turn drove legislators to
vote ever harsher sanctions, and ever larger appropriations to carry
them out. Of the 1994 act's final price tag, $13.8 billion was
earmarked for law enforcement--mostly to put 100,000 new police
officers on the street--and $9.8 billion to expand a prison system
whose incarceration rate already outstripped that of every
industrialized nation save Russia. Between 1980 and 1993, Lord
Windlesham notes with some astonishment, the number of people in
custody for drug offenses grew from about 24,000 to nearly 240,000,
with most of them sentenced under laws requiring mandatory minimum
terms in prison. To this Conservative peer the application of such
severe penalties to such petty offenders seems the most damnable
feature of a highly irrational system.

Last year, the RAND Corporation published a study assessing the
cost-effectiveness of mandatory-minimum sentences for drug
offenses.[7] Using a variety of statistical techniques, RAND attempted
to estimate how much US cocaine consumption would be reduced by
investing an additional million dollars in longer sentences for drug
dealers, as compared with investing that money in conventional law
enforcement--arrest, prosecution, and incarceration--or drug
treatment. Spending a million dollars on longer prison sentences, RAND
estimated, would reduce cocaine consumption by about 13 kilograms
(about 28 pounds). Investing it in law enforcement would reduce it by
27 kilograms. Putting the same amount of money into treatment
programs, by contrast, would reduce consumption by more than 100
kilograms. As for reducing cocaine-related crime, every dollar
invested in drug treatment was found to be ten times more effective
than law enforcement and fifteen times more effective than mandatory
minimums. The reason, RAND concluded, is that when a supplier is
jailed, he is usually replaced by another supplier, whereas treatment
directly reduces the market for drugs and, by extension, the negative
consequences associated with them. All in all, RAND concluded,
"mandatory minimums produce the smallest bang for the buck by far."

Drug treatment gets little attention from the leaders of the "police
revolution." For them, druggies are just another breed of malefactor
adding to the sense of disorder in the street. Yet they are in many
ways different from other offenders. Arrest a fare-beater or a subway
graffiti-writer often enough and he will eventually get the message
and desist. Drug addicts, however, have a compulsive need to use drugs
and so are not subject to the normal rules of deterrence. And so the
police must keep arresting them--a Normandy invasion without end. The
Broken Windows model has had undeniable successes, but dealing with
the drug problem has not been one of them.

Perhaps more than any other factor, trends in drug use account for
changes in US crime rates. The rise of crack was largely responsible
for the sharp upsurge in crime of the late 1980s. And, while the crack
epidemic has waned, the nation's drug market remains vast, with an
estimated 3.6 million Americans addicted to heroin, cocaine, and
crack. So far our main strategy for dealing with them has been arrest,
prosecution, and incarceration. It is time to try a new approach, one
that would seek to reduce the demand for drugs by providing addicts
the help they need.

Footnotes

1 George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Colis, Fixing Broken
Windows: Restoring Order and Reducing Crime in Our Communities (Martin
Kessler Books/ Free Press, 1996). See James Lardner's review, The New York
Review, August 14, 1997, pp. 54-58. (back)

2 See my article "Crime and Drugs: The New Myths," The New York Review,
February 1, 1996, pp. 16-20. (back)

3 Gordon Witkin, "The Crime Bust," May 25, 1998. (back)

4 In fact Fixing Broken Windows has a section on "keeping the
community involved" which argues that residents and community
organizers "will need to work with criminal justice officials and take
to the streets with them." But that was not the point Bratton
extracted from Kelling's work when he took it as a guide to the
policies he would follow. (back)

5 Raymond Hernandez, "Pataki Eases Parole for Many, But Tightens It
for the Violent," The New York Times, August 3, 1998, p. B1. (back)

6 Fox Butterfield, "Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate
Drops," The New York Times, August 9, 1998, p. 18. (back)

7 Jonathan P. Caulkins, C. Peter Rydell, William L. Schwabe, and James
Chiesa, Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences: Throwing Away the Key or the
Taxpayers' Money? (RAND Corporation, 1997). (back)

Checked-by: Patrick Henry