13-Week Experiment Tests ​“Hot Spot” Policing

The corner of Dixwell and Bassett was hot as Officers Jason Jackson and Mike Pepe strolled by — ​“muggy” hot, not ​“mugger” hot.

Crossing guard Wilbert Sutton (at right in photo), waving kids across the busy intersection, was sweating in his vest. Pepe (at left) and Jackson stopped to schmooze with him, and to explain their mission: They and other cops from different neighborhoods will walk the Newhallville neighborhood’s four ​“hot spots” on extra-duty shifts for 13 weeks. Over and over again.

Newhallville already has regular walking-beat cops permanently assigned to the neighborhood. The extra cops will spend the 13 weeks walking special beats focused on corners with the most reported crime, aka ​“hot spots.”

They’ll do so thanks to a $75,000 ​“smart policing” grant from the federal Department of Justice. The grant will test a hot new theory in American policing: That, contrary to intuition and long-held belief, putting cops right at the highest-crime spots won’t simply move most of that criminal activity elsewhere. The theory is a variant of ​“cops on the dots.”

Recent studies in cities like Seattle and Jersey City found that ​“hot spot” policing cut crime overall.

There are different ways of policing a corner, of course: sitting in a car or walking a beat, for instance. New Haven for the past two years has refocused on putting walking cops on the street. So with the new grant, top Newhallville cop Lt. Ken Blanchard first crunched the latest data to identify Newhallville’s four ​“hottest” corners: Dixwell and Bassett; Dixwell and Division; Winchester and Lilac; and the Newhall/Read/Shelton area. Instead of parking one cop there for four hours at a time, he devised four-hour truncated walking shifts that have patrol duos passing those corners hourly, to coincide with peak periods of criminal activity.

For Jackson, usually a Hill neighborhood patrolman, and Pepe, a Dwight/Kensington assignee, that has meant hitting two of those corners while walking up and down Dixwell Avenue from Division to Elizabeth from noon to 4.

The friendly pair clearly enjoyed themselves as they popped in on storeowners and schmoozing with neighbors on the stoop the other day. They didn’t encounter any criminal activity during their promenade. They did learn about some of the characters who spend their days on the avenue.

At First Calvary Baptist, old-schooler Curley Smith, a retired Seamless Rubber factory worker and Sears Roebuck custodian who now helps clean up the church, regaled Jackson with stories about a legendary African-American New Haven cop of yore, Otha Buffalo.

“Let me tell you something,” Smith told him. ​“Down on Dixwell Avenue they had a pool hall. Someone would look out. ​‘Here comes Buffalo!’ It was a stampede.

“Buffalo was a nice guy. He didn’t take no static.”

Smith’s point: For the past two years he has begun to see familiar faces in blue in Newhallville again. He believes it makes a difference.

Officer Pepe, meanwhile, informed church secretary Helen Adams that in addition to the regular neighborhood walking cops she’ll ​“probably see 26 different officers over the next 13 weeks.”

“It’s appreciated, too,” Adams responded. ​“People see you in the neighborhood. They’ve have to be more careful what they do.”

Eve Best, the clerk at Reliable Liquors, offered a similar note of appreciation while Pepe joked with two women sheepishly passing him to order a 1 p.m. fifth. ​“It’s all right,” Pepe reassured them. ​“Might be a little early, though …”

“You gonna come back?” Best asked.

“Yes,” Pepe responded. ​“You’ve got air-conditioning!”

“I wanna see you!”

At the corner of Bassett, the officers listened patiently as mayoral candidate Sundiata Keitazulu, a plumber in the neighborhood, crashed their conversation with crossing-guard Sutton. Keitazulu spoke at length about the need for more vo-tech schools in New Haven so more people have jobs. ​“If people have jobs, crime will go down,” the candidate proclaimed. ​“Absolutely,” echoed Pepe.

Pepe joked with a mom and her small kids as they navigated the intersection on foot. ​“That’s the best part — little kids,” said Pepe, who’s been known to buy rounds of ice cream from the truck for nearby kids when he works extra-duty road jobs.

Inside the aromatic King David House of Essence, the officers heard a tale of woe from David May, the proprietor of the eight-year-old shop.

Holding a well-thumbed holy Bible, standing in front of jars marked ​“Island Beach” ​“Guilty M” and ​“Egyptian Musk,” May pointed to a cracked window. ​“They break it twice,” he said. ​“They take 15 grand worth of stuff — incense, everything.”

David had enough money to replace only the front door, not the window. ​“We need some money here to improve our business,” he said. But he can’t seem to qualify for government small-business renovation grants, he said. He seems to attract more thieves than customers these days, he said. ​“They call this store a voodoo store.”

Pepe sought to accentuate the positive. Gesturing to the burning incense stick lodged in the screen entry door, he remarked, ​“If somebody smelled this place, they’d come in.”

He took a closer look at May. ​“Don’t I recognize you from the flea market?” he asked him. Yup, he works the flea market, David said. ​“You must sell” a lot of products there, Pepe suggested.

Then it was on to the equally aromatic Palm Tree Restaurant, where the officers introduced themselves with much praise about the smell of the curried goat and jerk chicken.

“Just saying hello to everybody,” Pepe told Frankie (pictured) and Patricia Moore, who had the front door to their street-front apartment to let in air amid the heat. They came outside with their children, telling the officers about the drug dealers who keep coming into their backyard. A fence didn’t stop them. They even used the house’s outdoor outlets to ​“charge their phones and computers,” Frankie said. One of them stole her son’s bike, Patricia said.

Then a call came on the radio: Some kids were trespassing at the Presidential Gardens complex several blocks back toward Division Street. Pepe and Jackson bid the Moores good-bye and headed over. They couldn’t zip there as quickly as if they had a car. But several cruisers were already on scene. The officers checked in with Lt. Blanchard, got the scoop — and mentally filed another piece of information to have handy as they walk their temporary new extra-duty beat.