NYC: Crime Keeps Falling;/ If Carriage Horses Are Outlawed, Who Gains?; Hint: Not the Horses. / Helping Mentally Ill Stay Out of Jail

Mayor Bill de Blasio at a news conference in Brooklyn on Tuesday with Police Commissioner William J. Bratton and Public Advocate Letitia James. Credit Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times        

N.Y. Times

Mayor Bill de Blasio declared that New York, which his opponents once said would grow more dangerous under his watch, had in fact become even safer.

Robberies, considered the most telling indicator of street crime, are down 14 percent across New York City from last year. Grand larcenies — including the thefts of Apple devices that officials said drove an overall crime increase two years ago — are also down, by roughly 3 percent.

And after a record-low 335 homicides in 2013, the city has seen 290 killings in the first 11 months of this year, a number unheard-of two decades ago.

 

Even shootings, which had increased by more than 10 percent earlier this year, have receded amid a push by the Police Department to stamp out troublesome pockets of gun violence. There were just over 1,000 shootings in the first 11 months of this year, about a 4 percent increase over last year.

 

For Mr. de Blasio and his police commissioner, William J. Bratton, the numbers provided a kind of cushion for the criminal justice and policing reforms that both men are putting into place.

Officers will this week begin a pilot program of wearing body cameras in three police commands, Mr. Bratton said on Tuesday, and a wholesale retraining of the department’s patrol force is also starting. A new marijuana policy aimed at reducing low-level arrests, which was announced in November, has already resulted in a 61.2 percent decline in arrests in its first two full weeks.

 

Indeed, Mr. de Blasio pointed to 20 years of “momentum” that he inherited, referring to an “arc of continuous progress across different mayors, different commissioners.” He expressed pride in the performance of the Police Department over the first 11 months of this year, and declined to describe the continued decline as vindication of his reform-minded policies.Others were more ready to do so.

 

“Bravo!” wrote Joseph J. Lhota on Twitter, who as the Republican candidate for mayor last year ran ads predicting a return to the crime-plagued streets of the early 1990s if Mr. de Blasio were elected.

With a month still to go before the end of the year, the favorable crime numbers appeared to render a verdict on at least one question: Would a vast decline in the number of recorded stop-and-frisk encounters create an opening for violence to return? So far, Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Bratton said, the answer has been no.

Mr. Bratton said that by the end of the year there would be fewer than 50,000 such stops, down from a high of over 685,000 in 2011.

 

With fewer crimes, detectives have found themselves with more time to devote to investigations, said Robert K. Boyce, the chief of detectives. The rate at which homicide cases are closed — usually with an arrest — reached 77 percent this year.

“It’s the highest I’ve seen,” said Chief Boyce, who joined the department in 1983.

 

=============================================

 

Another Look At De Blasio's  Plans For Carriage Horses

 

A horse waiting for a customer at Grand Army Plaza, near Central Park. Legislation to be introduced in the City Council would ban carriage horses in the city. Credit Kirsten Luce for The New York Times        

 

 

Jim Dwyer, N.Y.Times

 

Mayor Bill de Blasio declared this week that he will carry out a promise made during the mayoral campaign: to rid the city of the carriage horse.

Legislation will be introduced in the City Council any minute now, the mayor said, but many details remain to be aired out.

That makes the moment pregnant with questions.

Such as:

Is the still-unseen de Blasio plan good for horses or for people interested in developing the Midtown West real estate where they live?

Once the horses are banished, what will become of their stables and the 64,000 square feet of lots that they sit on, their value swelling by the day?

 

And what of the 220 or so carriage horses that now live in sprinkler-equipped homes and enjoy regular veterinary examinations and five weeks in the country annually? The group leading the campaign to ban the carriage horse, New Yorkers for Clean, Livable and Safe Streets, said it and other groups, like the Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, would ensure the well-being of the steeds.

“We’d be happy to provide lifetime care for all these animals,” Allie Feldman, the NYClass executive director, said. This is an offer that sets off fireworks at Burgundy Brook Farm in Palmer, Mass., a sanctuary and rescue farm for work horses where a number of carriage horses have retired.

“The horses in New York City are some of the healthiest and best taken care of I’ve ever seen,” said Pamela Rickenbach, the executive director of Blue Star Equiculture, which runs the farm.

Offering them new homes is like giving away ice in the winter.

“Those horses are not going to have any problem with finding a home,” she said. “They are so well adjusted to begin with. They are selected for their intelligence and their temperament.”

Horses with jobs, like pulling carriages, have pretty good homes already, Ms. Rickenbach and others said. But, they said, there is a national crisis of homeless horses — beautiful creatures who are expensive to provide for.

“We are completely over-full and overwhelmed,” Ms. Rickenbach said. “It seems impossible to address the problems of the homeless horse. Every day I could send them horses that need homes.”

Many horses that either land at the rescue farm, or in the rural community she lives in, are “in need of medical attention, or they’re underfed, starving.”

New York City and the animals that live here are not immune to the laws of supply and demand, and the mayor and council members who support the carriage horse ban ought to look at an earlier example of good intentions with horses that went awry.

The United States effectively banned slaughter of horses at the end of 2006, according to a 2011 report by the Government Accountability Office, but the story took some bad turns.

“Horse welfare in the United States has generally declined since 2007,” the report found, citing increased abandonment and reports of neglect. “Abandoned, abused and neglected horses present challenges for state and local governments, tribes and animal welfare organizations.”

 

==========================================

 

NYC Aims to Divert Mentally Ill From Jail’s Revolving Door

 

N.Y. Times

It is hard to walk the halls of the Criminal Courts Building in Manhattan without encountering stories of crimes committed by people with mental illnesses. On Monday, two separate murder cases were being tried against men who had presented evidence they were psychotic when they stabbed their victims to death.

In a third courtroom, a homeless man with a history of mental illness, who had been jailed several times before for minor crimes, was scheduled to be arraigned on attempted murder charges after being accused of stabbing a street vendor in the chest with a pair of scissors.

Those are the nightmare cases, defense lawyers and prosecutors say, horrific situations in which people who never received effective treatment for mental illnesses ended up committing violent crimes.

 

Those are the nightmare cases, defense lawyers and prosecutors say, horrific situations in which people who never received effective treatment for mental illnesses ended up committing violent crimes.

 

But every day, dozens of people with fragile psyches are arraigned in Manhattan for minor crimes. Many cannot make bail and are remanded to Rikers Island, where they seldom receive the medical care they need, criminal justice experts said. These defendants often leave jail with a weaker hold on sanity than when they entered. A few go on to commit worse offenses.

            

“What we have been doing to try to keep mentally ill offenders from cycling in and out of the system has not worked well enough,” the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced an ambitious $130 million plan to break that pattern, to screen out nonviolent defendants with mental illnesses before arraignment and divert many more of them to supervised release programs or to treatment programs, rather than holding them in jail.

Many parts of Mr. de Blasio’s plan have yet to be fully developed or put into effect, and will take shape over the next year, possibly in the form of pilot projects. Some of his proposals will build on existing diversion programs and a supervised release system.

More than a decade ago, the judiciary established mental health courts to handle cases in which both sides agree treatment is a better outcome than incarceration. Those courts have dealt with 2,900 defendants in the city since 2002.

 

Mr. Vance said one important provision in the plan was the training of police officers to spot signs of mental illness, which his office is underwriting with $15 million in forfeiture funds. The officers will then have the option, without booking them, to take people accused of minor crimes to newly established community drop-off centers, where they can receive treatment and counseling, rather than putting them through the court system .

 

Another important plank of the plan is the expansion of a supervised release program to 3,400 slots, from 1,100, Mr. Vance said. Under that program, defendants can avoid jail if social workers stay in close touch with them while a case is pending and they agree to go to mental health services and drug treatment. The additional 2,300 slots will be made available to mentally troubled people.

 

The city also plans in January to begin systematic screening in Manhattan by sending health care workers into the central booking office at 100 Centre Street, armed with diagnostic questionnaires for defendants before they are arraigned.

 

At present, medics from the Fire Department do a brief health screening of defendants during the booking process. But it is generally left to public defenders and social workers in the arraignment courts to identify people who might be candidates for diversion to mental health treatment, and to make a proposal to a judge.

 

 

Seymour W. James Jr., attorney in chief of the Legal Aid Society, said the current efforts to identify mentally ill people before arraignment were spotty at best. People with undisclosed mental problems often appear risky to judges and have bails imposed upon them that they cannot pay, he said.

“To have someone screening individuals early can make a world of difference,” he said. “They deteriorate in Rikers Island.”

 

The mayor’s plan also aims to persuade judges to reduce the use of bail. New York judges can consider only the risk of flight in setting bail. As a result, bail is often imposed on mentally ill defendants, who often have vague work histories, little money and a record of minor arrests, defense lawyers said.

But the mayor’s plan calls for the development of some scientific guidelines over the next year to help judges weigh defendants’ risk of flight if they enter a supervised release program. That approach has worked in Washington, and in some jurisdictions in Kentucky, officials said.

 

NYC: Prison Population Shrinks When Police Crowd Streets

NY TIMES     JOHN TIERNEY

Now that the United States has the world’s highest reported rate of incarceration, many criminologists are contemplating another strategy. What if America reverted to the penal policies of the 1980s? What if the prison population shrank drastically? What if money now spent guarding cellblocks was instead used for policing the streets?

In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?

As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country.

Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals.

 

..."In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?

As the American prison population has doubled in the past two decades, the city has been a remarkable exception to the trend: the number of its residents in prison has shrunk. Its incarceration rate, once high by national standards, has plunged well below the United States average and has hit another new low, as Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced recently. And crime in the city has fallen by more than 75 percent, almost twice as much as in the rest of the country." ...the 50,000-foot story from New York is that you can drive down crime while decreasing your jail and prison population — and save a huge amount of money in the process.”       

Whatever has made New York the safest big city in America, that feat has certainly not been accomplished by locking up more criminals. In short, what would happen if the rest of the country followed New York City’s example?

 

 

 

  Before the era of mass incarceration began in the 1980s, local policing accounted for more than 40 percent of spending for criminal justice, while 25 percent went to prisons and parole programs. But since 1990, nearly 35 percent has gone to the prison system, while the portion of criminal justice spending for local policing has fallen to slightly more than 30 percent.

New York, while now an exception to the mass-incarceration trend, also happens to be the place that inspired it. When New York State four decades ago commissioned an evaluation of programs to rehabilitate criminals, the conclusions were so discouraging that the researchers were initially forbidden to publish them.

Eventually one of the criminologists, Robert Martinson, summarized the results in 1974 in the journal Public Interest. His article, “What Works? Questions and Answers About Prison Reform,” was soon known as the “nothing works” thesis. Dr. Martinson concluded that rehabilitation strategies “cannot overcome, or even appreciably reduce, the powerful tendencies of offenders to continue in criminal behavior.” 

 

 

 

 An outgrowth of the study was a consensus to eliminate parole for many offenders and to mandate long sentences determined by formulas rather than rely on the discretion of judges and parole boards.

Dr. Martinson wrote an article in 1979 recanting his “nothing works” conclusion, but by then it was too late. The trend toward tougher sentences continued, causing prison populations to grow rapidly in the 1980s throughout the country, including in New York. When crime kept rising anyway, sentences often were further lengthened.

But New York diverged from the national trend in the early 1990s, when it began expanding its police force and introduced a computerized system to track crimes and complaints. Officers also aggressively enforced laws against guns, illegal drugs and petty crimes like turnstile jumping in the subways. Arrests for misdemeanors increased sharply. 

 

Yet serious crime went down. So though more people were being locked up for brief periods — including many who were unable to make bail and were awaiting trial — the local jail population was shrinking and fewer city residents were serving time in state prisons.

“Even with more people coming into the system, the overall bed count was declining because people weren’t staying as long,” Dr. Jacobson, who was correction commissioner from 1995 to 1998, recalled. 

 

  By not expanding the jail and prison populations, he calculates in his 2011 book, “The City That Became Safe,” the city and the state have been saving $1.5 billion a year, more than twice as much as it cost to finance the additional police officers in the 1990s. 

 

Policing, of course, is not the only possible explanation for the safer streets. A shift in demographics, the arrival of new immigrants, the waning of the crack epidemic, and other economic and social changes had an impact on neighborhoods in New York — and in the rest of the country, where crime also declined in the 1990s.

But the drop was much steeper and more prolonged in New York than elsewhere. And while researchers attributed about a quarter of the decline in the rest of America to the stricter penal policies, that explanation did not apply to a city that was locking up fewer people.

 

 

 

...  studies have shown that crime drops when more police officers are hired, so it is not surprising that the expansion of New York’s police force in the 1990s by more than a third was accompanied by a drop in crime. But during the past decade, the force has shrunk by 15 percent, and yet crime has mostly continued falling.

When Dr. Zimring and other criminologists look at this trend, and compare it with the fluctuating crime rates in other cities, they conclude that the retreat in crime in New York is not just a matter of the number of police officers. Those officers must be doing something right, but what exactly?

The most likely answer is a shift in strategy called hot-spot policing.

In the 1970s, research had shown that a small percentage of criminals committed a large share of crimes, so it had seemed logical to concentrate on catching repeat offenders and locking them up.

 

But after computerized crime mapping was introduced, it turned out that crime was even more concentrated by place than by person.

In city after city, researchers found that half of crimes occur within about 5 percent of an urban area — a few buildings, intersections and blocks, often near transit stops and businesses like convenience stores, bars and nightclubs.

The criminal population keeps changing as men in their 30s drop out and are replaced by teenagers, but crimes keep occurring at the same places.

 

Researchers suggested: Perhaps the authorities should pay less attention to individual criminals and more attention to the hot spots where they operate.

Dr. Sherman, Dr. Weisburd and colleagues have tested the idea in randomized experiments in Jersey City; Houston; Kansas City, Mo.; Minneapolis; Philadelphia; Sacramento; and cities in Britain and Australia.

Typically, a list of hot spots was identified, and then half were randomly chosen to receive extra police attention, like more frequent patrols. Other strategies were also used, like improving street lighting, fencing vacant lots or arresting people for minor violations.

As hoped, there were fewer crimes and complaints at the hot spots chosen for extra attention than at those that were not. And once police officers started to show up often and at unpredictable intervals, they did not need to stay more than 15 minutes to have a lasting impact.

-----

"We assumed that if we hit one area hard, the crime would just move somewhere else,” said Frank Gajewski, a former police chief of Jersey City, who worked with Dr. Weisburd on the experiments there. But Dr. Weisburd won over Mr. Gajewski and other skeptics — and also won the 2010 Stockholm Prize, criminology’s version of the Nobel — by showing that crime was not simply being displaced. Moreover, he and his colleagues reported a “spatial diffusion of crime prevention benefits” because crime also declined in adjoining areas, as the police in Jersey City had observed.

“Crime doesn’t move as easily we thought it did,” Mr. Gajewski said. “If I’m a robber, I want to be in a familiar, easily accessible place with certain characteristics. I need targets to rob, but I don’t want people in the neighborhood watching me or challenging me. Maybe I work near a bus stop where there are vacant buildings or empty lots. If the police start focusing there, I can’t just move to the next block and find the same conditions.”

 

Many experts also see it as the best explanation for the crime drop in New York...a program called Operation Impact, which was started in 2003 by Raymond W. Kelly, then and now the police commissioner.

Commissioner Kelly gives the strategy credit for the continued decline of crime despite the reduced police force.

There is supporting evidence from Dennis C. Smith, a political scientist at New York University who led an analysis of trends in the dozens of precincts where the city’s police focus on “impact zones,” as the hot spots are called. Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it.

 

 

 

 

One part of the hot-spot strategy in New York has been highly controversial: the stopping and frisking of hundreds of thousands of people each year, ostensibly to search for weapons or other contraband.

Some critics say that the tactic has been used so often and so brusquely in New York that it has undermined policing by arousing disrespect for the law, especially among young black and Latino men, who are disproportionately stopped and searched. Research shows that people who feel treated unfairly by the police can become more likely to commit crimes in the future.

Defenders of stop-and-frisk, including Mayor Bloomberg, argue that when it is done properly and politely, the practice prevents crimes that disproportionately hurt the city’s minorities.