This Works: Preventing and Reducing Crime

Introduction

The most impressive achievement of city governance during the urban renewal of the 1990’s was the enormous decline in crime. Over the last decade, police departments across the country adopted innovative new crime prevention strategies and realized unprecedented results. Despite those successes, however, much work remains to be done in reducing crime and increasing public safety. While some cities across the nation have made great strides, driving down the national crime rate to levels unseen since the 1960’s, there were many that missed out on the national trend, reducing crime only marginally, if at all. Moreover, in the last year, with several notable exceptions, crime rates have plateaued, and in some cities have even begun to track upward once again. If the success of urban America is to continue, it is essential that police departments and civic leaders not rest on their laurels, but rather continue to improve and refine their crime prevention strategies, adopting the most effective methods displayed in recent years.

Two principal goals must guide the creation of strategies to replicate the most impressive crime prevention successes of the 90’s: Order Maintenance and the creation of law enforcement structures to support it. The guiding vision for law enforcement must be to maintain order within each city, not to catch criminals. Creating an environment that is not conducive to illegality, rather than seeking to punish illegal conduct after the fact, is the key to preventing crime. Having adopted this vision, implementing it on the streets requires that local police units have the resources to do their job properly and the freedom to use them innovatively, and that they be held strictly accountable for the results, whatever they may be. This naturally requires careful tracking of crime patterns and close communication within police departments in order to target resources appropriately and to place responsibility accurately. It also requires the integration of other law enforcement and public sector agencies, as well as the local communities, into an order maintenance framework. By adopting the combination of an order maintenance philosophy and a flexible, accountability-driven law enforcement structure, cities that have made little progress to date can achieve reductions on par with the most dramatic declines in urban crime during the last decade, while those cities that have already experienced such successes can continue to force crime down to ever lower levels.

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