New Yorkers voted for a special tax to raise about US 1 billion to fight crime and another 7,000 officers were added to the force. The responsibility for ways of fighting crime devolved from a centralised bureaucracy to precinct commanders, and police used computers to track and target crime trends more easily.
This resulted in a much harder attitude against all crime, "zero tolerance" being the policy of not allowing or tolerating even the smallest crimes. These included begging, minor drug dealing, taggers, turnstile jumpers in the subways and all forms of anti-social behaviour on the streets. Timoney uses turnstile jumpers as an illustration of the broken windows theory at work. Police found that 22 percent of turnstile jumpers were wanted for other crimes or were able for arrest because they carried guns. "We arrested one man simply for jumping a turnstile and found that he was a drug dealer carrying cocaine and 50,000 in his pockets," says Timoney.^ New York’s transformation attracted global attention and cost Bratton and Timoney their jobs. They were both sacked by Giuliani, who felt they were stealing his glory. Timoney has since acted as a consultant to police throughout the world, preaching the benefits of zero-tolerance policing. Ironically, Bratton, the former Boston beat cop who rose to head Now York’s finest, evidently doesn’t like the term zero-tolerance because he thinks it implies a lack of tolerance for any deviation from social norms. Critics of New York policing say that intolerance is exactly what zero-tolerance policing encourages. They point out that urban crime has fallen right across the United States in the past five years not just in New York, and even in states where zero-tolerance policing is not practised, while the country’s jail population has dramatically increased. Shifts in the nature of America’s population ages and character have reduced the number of young men (aged 18-24) most likely to best involved in crime. Crime is also reduced when many more criminals are in jail.
Criminologist Greg Newbold says that crime rates spiral up and down in unexplained cycles and they are no easy solutions to reducing crime. Together sentences and more police mean an increasing drain on tax-payers and there is no certainty that they will continue to lower crime levels. Criminals will learn to live with those methods and find ways around them.
Charles Pollard, the chief constable of Thames Valley in Britain, calls zero-tolerance policing a short-term care that works well in urban areas with large amounts of petty crime. Once petty crime is brought under control, he told the Economist, sharp drops in crime will diminish. Observers say the drop in New York crime had to come with the introduction of almost any new tough police policy, because the crime rate was so high.
WPolice Association president Greg O’Connor agrees. "You can talk all the theories you like but, at the end of the day, what will stop criminals from committing crime is the belief that they will be caught. With only 18 percent of burglaries are being solved, and most of them don’t believe they will be caught, burglary becomes something of a risk-free occupation。 |
