As tension simmers between cops and citizens nationwide, the Wall Street Journal reported that it has found a way out: New Haven-style community policing.
The Journal Friday published an extensive front-page feature on how the return to walking-beat policing in New Haven has coincided with steady, higher-than-average drops in violent crime — as well as an absence of the fatal tensions found in communities like Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, N.Y.
Click here to read the article, which is entitled: “Putting Police Officers Back on the Beat — In New Haven, Conn., and across the nation, cities give community policing another try as tensions rise.”
Journal reporters Gary Fields and John R. Emshwiller spent weeks researching the story, looking at how community policing has evolved in recent decades and how it fits into America’s current crisis.
“In New Haven, the number of homicides, robberies, motor-vehicle thefts and other types of serious crime has fallen about 30% since the city, best known as the home of Yale University, put a big chunk of its officers on foot-patrol duty in 2012. More than one-third of officers in the typical evening shift walk a beat, as do all new police-academy graduates for at least a year,” the article states. It follows several beat cops on the job, includes a visit to the weekly Compstat data-sharing session, and features interviews with top New Haven officials, along with national experts. One of them, Jim Bueermann, president of the Police Foundation, a police research group, is quoted as saying: “Cars and radios were helpful in policing, but it began isolating people from the people they serve. The thing we forget a lot in policing is it is a people business.”