Crime keeps falling, Police Chief James Lewis reported Monday. He offered some clues why — and some suggestions for tackling a “perfect storm” on the horizon.
New Haven had 10 percent fewer serious crimes in September than in the same month a year before, Lewis said at a police headquarter press conference. Eleven of the last 12 months have shown a drop from the year before.
Crime is down 12 percent overall since the start of the year, according to Lewis (pictured). He said statistics for October and November, currently undergoing final auditing, show 9 – 10 percent drops.
(The crimes included in the tally: Murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft.)
The department is also well on its way to meeting its goal of having 1,000 fewer crime victims in 2009; through September the total number from the year before had dropped 913. So Lewis has upped the goal: Now he wants New Haven to have fewer than 9,000 crime victims in 2009, which would represent the smallest number since 1990, at which point the city was having 15,000 and 16,000 crime victims per year.
Through November, murders have dropped 48 percent, from 23 to 12, in 2009; the number of shooting victims, 11 percent.
Click here to view the PowerPoint presentation Lewis made Monday.
“The numbers are still too high in every category. Still too many shootings, too many robberies. There’s still a lot of work to do,” Lewis observed. “We really need to have four or five years of such numbers.”
The department will probably be pursuing those goals without Lewis at the helm over most of that time. He came to New Haven in mid-2008 to serve an 18-month stint overseeing a reorganization of the department. An announcement is expected later this week about how much longer Lewis plans to stay here past the Jan. 31 expiration of his contract, while the city seeks a replacement.
Old Faces, New Tactics
What’s the department doing right?
Lewis ticked off a number of new approaches.
One: stopping a lot of cars and cyclists for traffic violations. Besides making streets safer, those stops are producing loads of drugs and stolen guns, he said. (Click here to read about that.) The department seized 252 firearms through November, a 20 percent annual increase. It has nearly doubled the number of traffic citations written: 19,415 so far in 2009, compared to 10,615 in 2008. Cops also issued 1,752 cell phone tickets through September.
Just as important, police have started hearing a lot more from citizens, even in neighborhoods where people fear retaliation, Lewis said. A number of recent gun arrests have followed anonymous phone calls about people — described on specific corners, wearing specific clothing — carrying weapons.
Meanwhile, the department has initiated “Targeted Area Policing.” District managers, street cops, and others gather each Thursday to examine major crimes to examine “underlying factors,” Lewis said. For instance, a murder may have stemmed from increased drug sales on a block. The team then targets that block to eliminate the larger problem leading to the crime.
And under Lewis, the department disbanded, then reconstituted the once-troubled narcotics unit, with a new mission. The unit has started 507 investigations, made 283 arrests, and seized $217,106 worth of crack, $35,888 worth of heroin, and $1.56 million worth of marijuana.
The narcotics unit has also rung up a big zero this year — zero citizens complaints of police misconduct. Lewis called that the unit’s “most important” statistic. “Usually an aggressive unit tends to get some complaints,” whether or not the complaints turn out to be valid, he said.
Lewis noted that the same cops who worked in the department before have been responsible for turning it around, through new approaches. That started as soon as he got here: Last August, noticing a spike in scrap metal theft, cops arranged a sting. They brought two “stolen” manhole covers to a junkyard, which paid for them instead of requesting documentation as required by law to ascertain that the goods weren’t stolen. (Read about that here.) Then the department brought together the area’s scrap metal dealers, revealed the sting, then appealed to them to start following the law. The dealers have cooperated since then, according to Lewis.
Contrary to popular belief, crime doesn’t necessarily rise in hard economic times, thefts of copper pipes aside, Lewis said. That’s been true since the days of the Depression. More unemployment can mean more people at home, so burglars find fewer empty houses. The recession has even meant lower metal prices — eventually making the theft of those copper pipes less lucrative.
“Perfect Storm”?
To keep crime down, the city needs to confront two looming challenges, Lewis said.
One involves “lost” young people, the “too many kids who are not completing school,” he said: truants and drop-outs. “They don’t talk about their IRAs going up or down. They have a 25-year” lifespan in mind. And they get in a lot of trouble.
So do people returning to New Haven from jail.
Lewis estimated that “half” the returning ex-cons choose to resume the “lifestyle” that sent them behind bars. But half want to change — and they face a “perfect storm” of “10 percent unemployment” and an “exodus” of prisoners reentering the city. So they have to compete for not just jobs, but slots in training programs, with skilled people who have been successful in the workplace but lost work in the recession.
The cops can help. For instance the department used seized drug money to keep a weekend youth program in business at the YMCA. But, Lewis noted, it’ll take people other than cops to do the heavy lifting in improving schools, training people for jobs, helping them find work — and keeping New Haven’s crime heading downward.