Too Tough? Tactics In Suburban Policing: First of Three Parts

SUBURBAN COPS, TOUGH TACTICS

In Area Towns, Nuisance Laws Result In A Disproportionate Number Of
Arrests Of African Americans, Often By Nearly All-White Police Forces.

The Rev. Reggie Brooks, pastor of a storefront church in the toughest
part of Pottstown, once counted himself as a strong supporter of a
police crackdown on the pushers and hoodlums who tormented his neighborhood.

That ended on the day his 14-year-old nephew and a friend were hauled
out of a neighborhood barbershop last year as suspected drug dealers.

After ordering the teenagers to put their hands in the air and spread
their legs, the police found no drugs. They left without an apology.

"There was a time when there was a relationship between the police
and the people," said Brooks, who is African American. "Now, I don't
think the cops respect the community."

As Philadelphia debates a tougher style of neighborhood policing,
public officials and community leaders need look no farther than some
of the city's older suburbs to see what happens when police make
thousands of nuisance arrests to fight drugs and violence.

Pottstown, Coatesville and Darby, blue-collar towns where jobs have
fled and crime has risen, have in recent years consistently recorded
some of the highest arrest rates in America for minor offenses, an
Inquirer investigation shows.

Norristown, Bristol Township and Colwyn also rely on these
high-arrest strategies. Last year alone they dramatically increased
arrests for disorderly conduct and other minor crimes.

Year after year, these municipalities and others across the state
aggressively enforce noise, nuisance, loitering, disorderly conduct
and jaywalking statutes, focusing mainly on high-crime neighborhoods
that are home to large numbers of minorities.

Many police chiefs across the suburbs say nuisance laws are an
indispensable tool in their quest to rid the streets of serious
criminals; they say many of those arrested have long records for drug
dealing or violence. They insist that they do not target offenders by race.

But these aggressive tactics, employed in largely minority
neighborhoods, mean that African Americans are arrested for nuisance
offenses far more frequently than whites - at rates dramatically out
of proportion to their numbers in the population.

Marine Sgt. Kareem Cox, a veteran of two tours in Iraq, said he was
standing beside his sister's car in Darby in July when an officer
yelled at him to move. When he answered, "You don't have to yell,"
she put him in handcuffs and charged him with disorderly conduct, an
offense later dismissed.

"This will follow me for life," he said.

Inquirer analysis

The Inquirer spent more than a year analyzing arrest data, studying
court records, observing police, and conducting scores of interviews
in cities and towns in Southeastern Pennsylvania and across the state.

Among the findings:

Many of the laws used to make these arrests are so vague and poorly
drafted that experts say they violate the Constitution. More than
4,000 people in Pennsylvania have been arrested since 2000 under
local loitering statutes, including some that outlaw standing in
public or "hanging out."

Despite a national trend toward more diverse police forces, the
suburban departments embracing these high-arrest tactics are nearly
all white and, in some cases, getting whiter - a gulf that increases
tensions and creates mistrust between police and communities.

Some police departments and Pennsylvania county jails routinely
strip-search all defendants, including those arrested on minor
nuisance laws - though federal courts have consistently ruled that
such blanket strip-search policies are unconstitutional.

Although these policies can help curb serious crime, at least
temporarily, their long-term record is mixed at best. In Darby,
Pottstown and Coatesville, serious crime has gone up since 2000,
statistics show.

These high-arrest policies now in vogue in many cities across
Pennsylvania and the nation also come with a cost.

The tactics can - and often do - go awry, resulting in the arrest of
many innocent people, and creating resentment and racial strains in
community after community, The Inquirer's review shows.

Bucks County NAACP president John Jordan said Bristol Township police
clear street corners with loitering arrests that enable them to
search suspected drug dealers - and anyone else picked up in the sweeps.

"It's like every kid who is black is supposed to have a gun," he
said. "I think there's a lot of it that is profiling."

Some officials here and around the country, including Mayor-elect
Michael Nutter, believe that police can reduce violence by a
relentless focus on enforcing small crimes, an approach made famous
in New York City under Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

"I think it was Giuliani in New York who [identified] the
broken-window syndrome," said Bristol Township Chief James McAndrew.
"And he's 110 percent right."

That theory - put forth in the 1980s by the criminologists James Q.
Wilson of Pepperdine University and George L. Kelling of Rutgers
University - says one broken window in a building, if left
unrepaired, encourages more window-breaking and a sense of lawlessness.

With a crackdown on petty offenders, they argued, order can be
restored and law-abiding citizens can again feel they are in control of a city.

As New York's police arrested more petty offenders, they found more
people who had guns or drugs, or who informed on bigger criminals.

But, in an interview, Kelling said he never advocated a permanent
street-clearing operation in African American neighborhoods, a
strategy he said is guaranteed to create anger and fray relations
between police and citizens.

It's especially troubling, he said, when the forces making those
arrests are nearly all-white.

"You can," Kelling said, "have racial profiling in pedestrian stops."

Searching two teens

Reggie Brooks' Victory Christian Life Center, on Washington Street in
downtown Pottstown, is just a few blocks from the barbershop where
police grabbed his nephew, Lamar Nesbitt, and a friend, JiHad Tanner,
also 14, last year.

"It was 'Put your hands on your head and spread your legs,' "
recalled Nesbitt, an honor student who helps out at his uncle's
church. "They didn't tell us why or nothing. They just searched us."

The police found nothing and told the youths to return to the shop
and finish their haircuts.

When Brooks and other relatives asked for an explanation, police said
the youths matched the description of two cocaine dealers. Brooks
later learned that police were seeking "two black men with hooded
shirts," not 14-year-old boys.

"It doesn't matter whether you're a good kid or a bad kid, you get
thrown in the pot," Brooks said. "Lamar was upset that night. I could
tell. He was hurt."

The aggressive tactics Pottstown police demonstrated that day show up
dramatically in the town's arrest rates, some of the highest in America.

For years, it has stood out for exceptionally high patterns of
disorderly conduct arrests - in 2005, it ranked 15th highest among
more than 4,000 U.S. cities with populations above 10,000, according
to FBI data. The year before, it ranked eighth.

Since 2000, Pottstown has charged people with disorderly conduct at
eight times the per-capita rate of Pittsburgh and nine times that of
Philadelphia.

Pottstown Chief Mark Flanders said he has priorities that are
different from those in the state's major cities. For his town, he
said, stopping minor "quality-of-life" offenses is a big part of the
department's mission.

Typically, disorderly conduct laws lump together infractions such as
loitering and being a nuisance.

While police always try to make an arrest in serious felonies such as
murders and robberies, criminologists say enforcement of petty
offenses is usually discretionary - and can be a barometer of how
different departments approach their jobs.

Pottstown, Darby and Coatesville have used that law far more
aggressively than nearly all other American cities, according to The
Inquirer's analysis. In 2005, Coatesville ranked sixth in the nation
in its rate of disorderly conduct arrests; Darby ranked seventh.

Last year, Darby's disorderly conduct arrests jumped 76 percent.
Meanwhile, Coatesville's arrests fell dramatically after African
Americans took control of City Council and began to debate
allegations of racial profiling.

Police officers in these cities say the tough tactics are necessary.

In Pottstown, which has lost its industrial base and hundreds of
factory jobs, Flanders said the crackdown on minor crimes during the
last few years has helped the town "get ourselves back on our feet."

Though poorer than most towns in Montgomery County, Pottstown has
succeeded in attracting new businesses and townhouses.

"There are a lot of new businesses coming in, a lot of new homes
actually being built in the community," Flanders said. "Our part in
that - in order to help that process along, we needed to start
identifying more quality-of-life issues and attacking them."

Much the same high-pressure approach is used in some small towns.

In Delaware County's Colwyn, sandwiched between Darby and Southwest
Philadelphia, Chief Bryan Hills uses nuisance laws as a border guard
might. "We're keeping the line. What I say is that we hold our
borders," Hills said. "Darby's activity stops in Darby, and Philly's
stops in Philly."

Officers in Colwyn, a town of 2,500 with relatively little serious
crime, use minor arrests as a way to clear street corners and to pat
down people they consider suspicious.

"Certain things we have zero tolerance for," Hills said, explaining
that he does not allow youths to congregate on corners. "If we have
to tell you twice, you're going to get locked up."

Hills, a part-time Darby officer before he was hired as Colwyn's
chief, is proud of his town's reputation for no-tolerance policing.

Men from Philadelphia are often reluctant to even enter his town, he
observed. When going out with women from Colwyn, they will drop their
dates off - even at 2 a.m. - at the Cobbs Creek border with the city.
Women walking home late are also stopped and questioned, Hills said.

"They say, 'My boyfriend won't come into Colwyn,' " Hills said.
"Probably a good policy."

'Stop-and-frisk'

Nutter and others are pushing for an approach called
"stop-and-frisk," in which police step up street searches, looking for guns.

Some police departments use nuisance laws in much the same way: Once
someone is under arrest, police can search the person for drugs or weapons.

"If you can arrest them for disorderly conduct, cursing or fighting
or whatever, that's another way to get your hands into their pocket,"
said Police Chief Robert Grice of Lumberton, N.C. - which had the
highest rate of disorderly conduct arrests in the nation in 2004 and
2005, the latest national data available.

In Coatesville, police for years made more curfew stops, per capita,
than all but two or three other cities in the country, using the
stops to systematically search teenagers for guns and drugs.

But do these crackdowns work over the long haul? The statistical
evidence is far from clear.

Major crimes in Pottstown - such as murder, robbery, burglary and
serious assaults - have gone up by more than a third since 2000, FBI
data show. In Darby, they increased by 16 percent over that time.

Coatesville ended its high-arrest policies more than a year ago, but
there, too, the effect on crime is difficult to measure. With fewer
people being arrested and searched, drug cases plummeted. This year,
murders, rapes and robberies fell, while the rate of serious assaults climbed.

Nationally, these tactics also have produced mixed results in some
large cities. In Baltimore, three police commissioners for years
pursued high-arrest, zero-tolerance strategies. Supporters of the
tactics say they helped curb serious crime, including homicides.

But the tactics also clogged Baltimore's jails, jammed courts with
petty charges, angered many citizens, and finally led to lawsuits by
the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP, alleging illegal
arrests and strip searches. This year, homicides jumped, and the city
hired a new commissioner who has disavowed the high-arrest tactics.

Baltimore police spokesman Sterling Clifford said the department now
tries to target "only the bad guys." The clear-the-street-corners
approach can trigger a community backlash, he said.

"We need to make sure every arrest directly addresses the violent
crime issue in those neighborhoods," Clifford said.

A racial disparity

Pottstown's Flanders, Colwyn's Hills, and the other suburban police
chiefs insist that these tactics have nothing to do with race.

"We have the most drug-dealing going on . . . where the residents are
of a lower socioeconomic status," Flanders said. "That area is also
predominantly African American."

But the aggressive strategies consistently produce arrest rates for
blacks that are strikingly out of line with their percentage in the
overall population.

In Pottstown, half the people arrested for disorderly conduct are
black - in a town with a population about 15 percent African American.

In Darby, black arrests for disorderly conduct soared last year, up
92 percent. White arrests for the crime dropped by 17 percent.

More than eight of 10 people arrested in Darby for disorderly conduct
are black; African Americans make up about 60 percent of the town's
population. The pattern is not isolated to a handful of towns in
Southeastern Pennsylvania. Statewide, the number of blacks arrested
for disorderly conduct was up nearly 30 percent between 2000 and 2006
- - although there was only a slight increase in the state's black
population, and a slight dip in black arrests for violent crime.

During the same period, white disorderly conduct arrests dropped by 6 percent.

Tough balancing act

These tangled issues of crime and race are a difficult balancing act
for police - and perhaps an even tougher one for African Americans.

People in black neighborhoods, often besieged by crime, clamor for a
visible police presence and effective enforcement, said Kareem
Johnson, an African American councilman in Coatesville.

"If I'm surrounded on a corner by 30 or 40 teenagers, I'm going to
want police," he said.

But Johnson said supercharged arrest tactics won't work if people
feel they are being abused because of their race - a problem he said
he frequently heard from his constituents under the old police administration.

"If they act that way," he asked, "do you think I'm going to help them?"

These conflicted feelings in the African American community - demands
to crack down on criminals, and resentment when police go too far -
can be found within the same families.

In Bucks County's Bristol Township, Marcus Sargeant was arrested by
police for loitering just a week before he went off to play football
at Lackawanna College.

A police cruiser pulled up outside the home of a high school
teammate, and an officer called both youths over to the car. He put
handcuffs on them as he wrote out citations.

"I felt like, 'Why me? I'm trying to go to college,' " Sargeant said.

As far as Sargeant and his friend could tell, their only offense was
being outside in Bloomsdale-Fleetwing, one of the poorest
neighborhoods in Bucks County and one of the town's most popular
outdoor drug markets. A judge dismissed the charge.

But Sargeant's grandmother Mary Sargeant was less worried about
mistakes by police - even though they grabbed her grandson - than the
need to stop the drugs and violence on her street.

She bought her own small rancher 40 years ago on Winder Drive, one of
the few areas in Lower Bucks County that welcomed African Americans
then. That was long before crack dealers plied their trade there,
long before gunfire echoed at night, long before her 19-year-old
neighbor was killed on her street in September.

"Whatever they're doing, I wish they'd do more of it," she said.

Chief McAndrew said loitering laws were a valuable tool for his
officers to search known troublemakers. "They know the people who are
rumored to carry weapons and those who are not rumored to carry
weapons," the chief said. But Sargeant, now a defensive back for the
Reading Express indoor football team, said police can, and do, make mistakes.

"They're right 75 percent of the time," Sargeant said. "The other 25
percent of the time, they've got to be careful."

Constitutional questions

That's the problem, national civil-rights experts say: Laws such as
the one used to arrest Sargeant allow police to arrest and search
anyone, whether the person is trying to sell drugs or just standing
outside a friend's house.

In short, they say, they violate the Constitution.

Lawyers from across the ideological spectrum - from the ACLU to the
conservative Judicial Watch - reviewed dozens of loitering statutes
and other local ordinances for The Inquirer. The experts said they
were amazed that some were still in use.

For example, the Bristol Township law that police used to arrest
Sargeant made it illegal to "gather for an unlawful or malicious
purpose," along with criminalizing a host of other activities,
including sleeping in public.

"How can you tell if a person is gathering for an unlawful or
malicious purpose?" asked Paul J. Orfanedes, Judicial Watch
litigation director. "It's just very silly."

In Colwyn, a nuisance ordinance prohibits anything that can "injure,
annoy, inconvenience, disturb or otherwise adversely affect life" -
not to mention "any offense to the sense of hearing, smell or sight."
About 100 people have been charged with breaking the law since 2000.

University of Pennsylvania law professor David Rudovsky said the law
makes a crime of "almost every human activity."

"It would be hard to write a broader or vaguer ordinance," Rudovsky said.

Loitering laws have typically been viewed skeptically by federal
courts. In 1999, the U.S. Supreme Court drew a clear standard when it
struck down a Chicago loitering law aimed at street gangs.

The law allowed police to break up any gathering of two or more
people who were "in any one place with no apparent purpose." More
then 40,000 people had been charged, the vast majority black or Latino.

Justice John Paul Stevens, a Chicago native and lifelong Cubs fan,
wrote that police could use the law to make arrests outside Wrigley
Field - no matter if a person was out "to rob an unsuspecting fan or
just to get a glimpse of Sammy Sosa leaving the ballpark."

In spite of the constitutional concerns, at least 83 Pennsylvania
towns still have their own loitering laws on the books - some nearly
identical to ones that were successfully challenged as
unconstitutional in civil-rights suits.

In the last six years, court records show, these laws have been used
to make about 4,000 arrests.

Black citizens, white police

Beyond their aggressive tactics, police departments in municipalities
such as Bristol, Darby and Colwyn stand out for another reason: They
are overwhelmingly white, even as the towns they patrol become home
to more minorities.

Upper Darby, with a black population of 21 percent and growing, is
another example. Of 127 officers, just one is black, making it one of
the whitest police departments of its size in the region.

"Everybody realizes that it's time to get in with the rest of the
country," Chief Michael Chitwood said.

But after two years as chief, Chitwood still hasn't hired any new
black officers and has no prospect of doing so any time soon. He said
it's tough to find qualified applicants.

It's the same story in other towns. In Bristol Township, where the
population is about 8 percent African American, civil-rights groups
have been fighting for about 30 years to integrate the police
department. The result: There are 69 officers - none of them black.

In Pottstown, there are two black officers and 42 white ones in a
town 15 percent black.

"You can't have an opposing force of all white officers arresting
African Americans and Hispanics," said Camden Police Capt. Joseph
Richardson, whose force is two-thirds back and Latino. "No matter
what you do, it doesn't cut it."

What's worse is that the numbers of black officers in many
Pennsylvania towns are actually declining.

Allentown's department went from 85 percent white in 1990 to 94
percent in 2006. "We're doing as much as we can. We went to colleges,
we went all over," Chief Roger MacLean said.

It is the same story in Erie, Harrisburg, York - even with the
Pennsylvania State Police. All have fewer minorities now than they
had a decade ago, an analysis shows.

Pennsylvania's state police ranks, with only 5 percent black
officers, are now far less diverse than in states such as Alabama and
Mississippi. In this failure to hire minorities, Pennsylvania's
cities are lagging far behind the rest of the nation. Across America,
nearly 24 percent of police were minorities by 2003, up from 15
percent in 1987, according to federal studies.

This woeful record startles state officials.

"Wow!" said Walter M. Phillips Jr., Pennsylvania Crime Commission
chairman, after hearing a roll call of departments with few or no
minority officers.

Phillips said the commission, which hands out millions of dollars in
grants annually, should begin to consider racial diversity when it
makes the awards.

"Historically, it's been very difficult for white officers to go into
the minority community and command the respect," he said.

State Rep. Harold James (D., Phila.), a former city police officer
who once headed the city's association of African American officers,
said federal authorities should investigate whether there were
"intentional discriminatory policies" in towns that are not hiring
black officers.

"It seems to be by design," said James, a board member with the state
agency overseeing police training. "We need to call on the Justice Department."

In explaining the lack of blacks in their ranks, police chiefs say
they have few openings and even fewer African American applicants;
when blacks do apply, the chiefs say, they don't score well enough on
civil-service tests.

Yet many of these obstacles appear to melt away when blacks obtain
political power.

In 1998, Jacqueline B. Mosley became the first African American mayor
of Yeadon, a town with an 80-percent-black population. Yeadon then
had two black officers on a force of 15.

A retired Philadelphia public school teacher, Mosley threw herself
into the hiring process, interviewing police candidates.

"I spoke to the chief. He used to do all the screening. I said it
can't be that way," Mosley said.

Now the department has six blacks and seven whites.

"People have to be concerned about it," she said. "And for years,
they haven't been."

Standing on the corner

Two officers on bicycles, both white, approached Jonah T. Wamah and
Alfred Bedell, both black, on the sidewalk in Darby and told them to
move along. The encounter took place minutes after the two childhood
friends, both Liberian immigrants, bumped into each other on Main
Street in September 2004.

Wamah and Bedell hardly looked liked drug dealers or thugs.

Wamah, 53, a photographer for a Philadelphia public-relations firm,
was dressed in slacks and dress shirt. He was headed for an
appointment with a physical therapist. Bedell, 46, is a home
remodeler with real estate in Philadelphia and Delaware County.

But that didn't count for much when police ordered them to leave.

When Bedell protested that they had done nothing wrong, both men were
arrested, searched, and charged with disorderly conduct, Wamah said.
Neither man has had any other arrests.

Wamah, a U.S. citizen for the last 16 years, said one of the officers
gave him a chilling piece of advice: "If you don't like it, go back
to where you came from."

After a judge dismissed the charges against both men, Wamah filed a
federal civil-rights lawsuit, charging that he was unlawfully
searched, then roughed up on the street during his arrest. The town
has denied wrongdoing.

Wamah sees his experience as a cautionary tale in an increasingly
black town with a nearly all-white police force determined to take a
hard line, even if it meant arresting two middle-class, middle-aged
black men chatting on Main Street. And it's been hard to put behind him.

"When I see the cops in Darby," Wamah said, "I'm very paranoid."