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In fact, for all the conservative paeans to New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the data show that police forces that win the respect of high-crime communities reduce crime at least as much as those that simply bust heads. Look at San Diego. During the 1990s San Diego police divided the city into small residential units. (According a local captain, "We basically threw out the original beat boundaries. We went to the community and said, 'Where do you think your neighborhood boundaries really begin and end?'") They assigned officers to those specific beats, engaged community leaders in an ongoing dialogue about how to solve various problems, and developed a corps of 1,200 citizen volunteers who became eyes and ears for the police.
Compare this to Giuliani's New York, which (particularly after the departure of Commissioner William Bratton, architect of the city's original police reform program) pursued an ultra-hard-line policy of "
zero tolerance." That policy, as practiced by the city's now-notorious Street Crimes Unit, quickly became an invitation to hyperaggressive abuse. The Street Crimes Unit adopted "We Own the Night" as its motto, and some of its officers wore t-shirts emblazoned with the Hemingway quote: certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for anything else thereafter. It was a deliberately antagonistic posture, one that contributed to the attack on Abner Louima and to the killings of Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond. And it has left many black New Yorkers profoundly alienated from the police officers who are meant to protect and serve them. In a 1998 Justice Department survey of citizen satisfaction with police in twelve American cities, San Diego's was the second-highest-rated force; New York's finished third to last.
But the important point for conservatives is that, for all the ill will they sowed, the New York police were no better at stopping crime than their San Diego counterparts. In fact, they were slightly worse. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, University of Toledo Law Professor David Harris said that "while homicide in New York fell 70.6 percent between 1991 and 1998... San Diego's results were even more impressive ... a fall of 76.4 percent, the best in the country." Statistics were similar for robbery: It fell 60 percent in New York but 63 percent in San Diego. And because they enjoyed more help from average citizens, says Harris, the San Diego police got those results with a much smaller force: The city has just 1.7 officers per 1,000 residents, while New York has 5. In other words, smaller government--something else conservatives care about quite a bit .
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Re: Произвол или "так им и надо"?
Originally Posted by crazy-mike
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