Last month city leaders announced a new \u201croadmap to Downtown recovery\u201d that they said will attempt to address mounting concerns about homelessness, crime, and public safety in the area.<\/p>\n
The announcement came just hours after a press conference<\/a> held outside the Long Beach Superior Court where a victim woman who\u2019d been assaulted while walking on a Downtown sidewalk spoke out demanding \u201cmore cops.\u201d<\/p>\n To combat crime like that, Councilmember Mary Zendejas, Deputy Police Chief Gerardo Prieto and Mayor Rex Richardson outlined several steps that include an increased police presence, adding more winter shelter beds and filling public spaces with more community activities.<\/p>\n And while he couldn\u2019t provide specific details, Deputy Chief Prieto said the department was deploying additional officers to the downtown area, and Mayor Richardson noted the police introduced a 16-member neighborhood safety bike team earlier this year that can be sent to crime hot spots as needed.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d like to get that number up to 32,\u201d Richardson told the Long Beach Business Journal in a recent interview<\/a>.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s one key step the city hasn\u2019t highlighted that could have a significant impact both on crime rates and the public\u2019s perception of safety, which informs their decisions to go Downtown.<\/p>\n Police departments in other cities across the country have found success with implementing more officer foot patrols, particularly in areas with lots of crime.<\/p>\n The city of Buena Park<\/a> has officers routinely conduct foot patrols to \u201cget out and meet members of the community and business owners, creating personal connections.\u201d<\/p>\n Oakland police<\/a> this year also expanded their strategy of deploying foot patrols in commercial areas, telling KTVU Fox\u2019s Amber Lee that, \u201cmaking connections with merchants and the people who work in the area help prevent and solve crimes.\u201d<\/p>\n And at the recent press conference, Mayor Richardson noted that the Downtown Long Beach Alliance has its own version of foot patrols that fill the apparent gap in visible police presence.<\/p>\n The \u201csafety ambassadors<\/a>\u201d that walk and bike around the area, though they\u2019re not officers or affiliated with police, are \u201c…ready to offer a helping hand,\u201d and \u201caddress safety issues on the streets before they escalate and require a police presence.\u201d<\/p>\n And while it\u2019s clear they haven\u2019t solved the problem, the safety ambassadors make thousands of contacts and provide hundreds of \u201cfriendly safety escorts\u201d every year in the Downtown area.<\/p>\n Providing that sense of security can improve the public’s perception of safety and make them more likely to populate the streets, which in turn creates a friendlier environment; safety in numbers is still true, and getting people out around Downtown only helps improve safety even more.<\/p>\n Here in Long Beach, police told me that, \u201cWhile we are unable to measure crime that has been prevented, we have found that proactive patrols, the presence of our bike team, and community engagement have been instrumental in our efforts to enhance safety.\u201d<\/p>\n As it turns out, research supports this idea; in 2009 the Philadelphia Police Department did an experiment<\/a>. They reached out to Jerry Ratcliffe, a professor of criminal justice at Temple University and former British police officer, to help design it.<\/p>\n Previous research from Lawrence Sherman, a professor of criminology at the University of Cambridge, \u201cdiscovered that 3% of the addresses had over half the crime,\u201d creating the opportunity for targeted patrols.<\/p>\n And in Minneapolis, using this information, police were able to reduce crime substantially<\/a> by doubling the amount of time spent in high-crime areas, or \u2018hot spots.\u2019<\/p>\n So Ratcliffe, working with Deputy Commissioner Kevin Bethel in Philadelphia, combined \u2018hot spot\u2019 policing with foot patrols, with astounding success.<\/p>\n \u201cWe knew that crime was heavily concentrated in street corners in Philadelphia,\u201d Ratcliffe told NPR<\/a>. \u201cWe could say that around 5% of corners in the city of Philadelphia had over 30 or 40% of the violent crime in the homicides and the robberies.\u201d<\/p>\n The experiment used crime data to identify 120 different \u2018hot spots\u2019 across the city, and then randomly chose 60 to receive foot patrols. The other 60 served as a control, with normal service but no walking patrols.<\/p>\n Through the experiment, Ratcliffe found a 23% reduction in violent crime in areas with foot patrols versus those without. Since then, foot patrols have become a permanent part of policing throughout the city.<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to note, however, that not all on-the-ground policing is the same. Two of the original proponents of increased foot patrols were Harvard political scientist James Q. Wilson and the Rutgers criminologist George Kelling, who in 1982 published the infamous \u201cBroken Windows<\/a>\u201d article that argued that criminals perceive broken windows and other forms of disorder as signs of weak social control, and assume their crimes will go unpunished.<\/p>\n According to Eric Klinenberg in The New Yorker<\/i><\/a>, the conclusions drawn from that article led police to implement \u201c\u2018zero tolerance\u2019 policing, wherein officers monitor petty crimes, such as graffiti, loitering, public intoxication, and even panhandling, and courts severely punish those convicted of committing them.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIn practice, this meant stopping, frisking, and arresting more people, particularly those who live in high-crime areas,\u201d Klinenberg wrote in 2018.<\/p>\n We all know how \u2018stop and frisk\u2019 worked out. In New York, a federal judge found that stop-and-frisk<\/a> policies disproportionately targeted Black and Latino communities. In 2011, out of an astounding 685,724 police stops, 574,483 of those stopped were Black or Latino, and only 61,804 were white (83% vs only 9%). Long Beach has its own questionable record on this front. An analysis in 2020<\/a> showed they stopped and searched Black motorists at a disproportionately high rate even though those searches rarely turned up any contraband.<\/p>\n But that doesn\u2019t mean officers shouldn\u2019t walk the beat.<\/p>\n In an essay<\/a> for the Violence Reduction Project, Professor Ratcliffe and Dr. Evan Sorg, an assistant professor in the Department of Law and Justice Studies at Rowan University, said they\u2019re \u201cnot necessarily advocating for beefed-up enforcement efforts through arrests or pedestrian stops.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, officers should focus on community relations, they wrote, and strike a balance between law enforcement and efforts to engage the community.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes, a consistent presence of an officer can be a strong deterrent, so increases in aggressive enforcement are unnecessary. This is especially true if community relations are to be prioritized alongside crime prevention.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cOfficer[s] must be active enough to know who the local people are, who should (and should not) be in the area, and be able to engage \u2014 positively \u2014 with everyone on their beat,\u201d they wrote.<\/p>\n Like a classic neighborhood constable<\/a>. Before the proliferation of cars in the 1950s, most officers walked beats<\/a>.<\/p>\n