Crime
Issue discussion
There is no one simple solution to the high rates of violence in Philadelphia. We need to combine short-term, medium-term, and long-term solutions to the problem of crime. In the short term, we need to adopt much more aggressive crime-fighting strategies. In the medium term, we need to provide more support for young people, especially young people at risk. And, in the long term, we need to reduce poverty and create new jobs.
None of these crime fighting strategies will work by themselves. But combined they can get us out of the tragic mess that we face today.
In the short term, we need much smarter policing to reduce crime and to remove guns from the streets. Such policies have reduced the murder rate in New York by 75%. There is no reason why they will not work in Philadelphia.
Gun violence is an epidemic that spirals out of control. People who live in dangerous neighborhoods or who take part in illegal activities arm themselves because they know that the people they deal with are armed. If we aggressively target all crime, and reduce people's access to illegal guns, we can reverse the spiral and dramatically reduce gun violence.
The problem in our city is that a very small percentage of citizens are committing the vast numbers of crime. We mostly know who they are, and could know who all of them are if, by means of community policing, relationships between the police department and the community were improved. More effective policing would also encourage people to testify against criminals.
Smarter policing will not be possible if we don’t fix the broken politics of our city. We need more police officers. But, even more, we need to reduce the political interference with police department. Experts in the field, not politicians, should determine where our police are deployed. Right now leaders in our police force will say privately that too many police officers are filling out forms and too few are on the streets. Too many police officers are on special details, and too few are walking a beat or patrolling neighborhoods. Political interference also undermines innovative public police like the Compstat system of tracking crime with computer technology. In New York, Compstat spurs innovative policing and encourages cooperation between the police and other agencies. In Philadelphia Compstat has been used to punish the Captains of our police district. And the other agencies that can and should play a role in reducing crimes—such the schools and DHS—are not involved in Compstat.
The medium-term solution is to provide additional support for our young people outside of school. We must convince young men and women that they have a future if they stay in school and avoid drugs and criminal behavior. We need to expand after school, mentoring, and tutoring as well as midnight basketball and other recreational programs. We need to expand the intensive Youth Violence Reduction Program for the young people who are most at risk.
Finally, the long-term solution is to address the underlying issues that create crime: poverty and economic displacement. To do this, we must implement the community-based economic development programs, improve our schools, and restructure our business taxes.
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My Blog We need all three solutions to succeed. Poverty produces crime. And crime, in turn, discourages investment in poor neighborhoods, exacerbating poverty. Aggressive policing and providing support to young people will reduce crime in the city. If we do that, then other economic development strategies will revive the economy in Philadelphia’s poorest neighborhoods. That in turn will further reduce crime.
