Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing: Descriptions of Programs in Eight Cities. Series: NIJ Report Published: June 1995 99 pages 222,155 bytes Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing: Descriptions of Programs in Eight Cities Volume 1 of a Report Submitted to the National Institute of Justice by Susan Sadd and Randolph M. Grime "There is risk in refusing to act till the facts are all in; but is there not greater risk in abandoning the conditions of all rational inquiry?" Learned Hand--American Jurist TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction TEMPE I. The Tempe INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in Tempe C. The Target Area: Beat 16 II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention B. Law Enforcement Activities III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training B. Community and Agency Partnerships C. Outreach and Advertising D. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) E. Local Evaluation F. BJA Funds IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects B. Departmental Effects NORFOLK I. The Norfolk INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in Norfolk II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention B. Enforcement III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training B. Community and Interagency Partnerships C. Community Outreach and Advertisements D. Associated Technology IV. Expected Impacts NEW YORK I. The New York INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in New York C. INOP Target Areas II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention Activities B. Law Enforcement Activities III. Other Program Components A. Volunteers B. Interagency Partnerships C. Community Outreach and Advertisements D. Program Evaluation E. BJA Funds IV. Expected Impacts HAYWARD I. The Hayward INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in Hayward C. The INOP Target Area D. Project Goals and Objectives II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention B. Law Enforcement Activities III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training B. Interagency Partnerships C. Community Outreach and Advertisements D. Program Evaluation E. BJA Funds IV. Expected Impacts PORTLAND I. The Portland INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in Portland C. The Target Area: The Iris Court Housing Complex II. "Community Partnerships": The Iris Court Community Policing Demonstration Project A. Goals, Objectives and Strategy: Drug Demand Reduction B. Enforcement and the Neighborhood Response Team C. The Project Coordinator D. Community Health Nurse E. Human Service Partnerships F. Community Contact Office G. Landlord Training III. Other Program Components A. Crime Prevention through Environmental Design B. Evaluation C. Associated Technology PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY I. The Prince George's County INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Community Policing in PG County C. The Target Area II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention and Treatment B. Law Enforcement Activities III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training B. Community and Agency Partnerships C. Outreach and Advertising D. Volunteers E. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) F. Local Evaluation G. BJA Funds IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects B. Departmental Effects HOUSTON I. The Houston INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Neighborhood-Oriented Policing (NOP) in Houston C. The Target Areas: Frenchtown and the Near -Northside BOND Area II. "Operation Siege": The Houston INOP Project A. Goals, Objectives and Strategy: Drug Demand Reduction B. Enforcement: Zero Tolerance, Cantina Squad, TACT Team andthe Warrant Squad C. Target Hardening/Senior Citizen Home Repair D. Community Partnerships III. Other Program Components A. C.B. Patrols B. Neighborhood Clean-Ups C. Evaluations LOUISVILLE I. The Louisville INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction B. Neighborhood-Oriented Policing in Louisville C. The Target Area II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention B. Law Enforcement Activities III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training B. Community and Agency Partnerships C. Outreach and Advertising D. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) E. Local Evaluation F. BJA Funds IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects B. Departmental Effects References -------------------------------------- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This is an exciting time for the study of policing in the United States. Major changes are taking place as both large and small police departments across the country make transitions to community policing. The Innovative Neighborhood-Oriented Policing projects have provided the Vera Institute with a unique opportunity to study these sweeping changes. We would like to thank the many people who made the research possible. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the National Institute of Justice and to Charles B. DeWitt who directed its program during much of the study and made federal funds available to complete the research. We would also like to thank George Shollenberger, Craig Uchida, David Hayeslip, and Winnie Reed of NIJ, who served as grant managers for the research and who provided us with guidance regarding NIJ's interests in the area. Thank you, too, to Maggie Heisler, Program Manager of the INOP program, Bureau of Justice Assistance, for including us in the INOP Cluster Meetings; they gave us additional opportunities to talk to INOP staff and learn about the programs. BJA provided access to the sites and explained our role to the jurisdictions. This research is certainly not our work alone; there were many people at Vera, some of whom are still here and others who have moved on to other endeavors, without whom we could not have completed this work. Vera's then Director of Research, Sally Hillsman, guided us through the early days of the project; her vast research experience was indispensable in the design the project. Since Sally left Vera to exercise her considerable talents at the National Center for State Courts, we have missed her expertise and counsel more than she may know. Michele Sviridoff, formerly a Senior Research Associate at Vera, was an integral part of the research team for most of the data collection phase of the project and was instrumental in writing the Interim Report on the project (which formed the basis of Volume I of this report). Alexander Wright came to Vera as a Research Assistant four years ago and worked at a level far beyond that normally expected of research assistants. We appreciate all his work on the INOP project and wish him well at Harvard, where he is attending the Kennedy School. Researchers always rely heavily on their support staff to help them manage projects and produce reports. Scott Sparks has been involved with this project from start to finish: he produced the proposal at the beginning, the Interim Report in the middle and both volumes of this report at the end. We also want to thank Scott for his tireless work arranging our many trips on this project-- four people traveling to seven out-of-town sites on three different occasions, on different airlines, from different airports, is enough to drive most assistants mad. But Scott patiently worked with the travel agent and made certain all the airline reservations were made and the tickets delivered in time. We would also like to thank Stella Deacon, who worked with Scott on the hotel and other travel arrangements and who, along with Scott, transcribed a seemingly endless stream of taped interviews. None of the research could have been done without the cooperation of the many people who helped us in the INOP sites. From the first days of the project, we relied on the INOP project directors in the eight police departments to construct itineraries for our visits, provide transportation, and introduce us to members of their departments, the community, and to members of participating agencies. We also thank those police officers who are making courageous efforts to implement community policing where it counts the most--on the streets of their cities. We hope this report will be shared with them. Finally, and most importantly, we are forever indebted to the hundreds of community residents in Tempe, Norfolk, New York, Hayward, Portland, Prince George's County, Houston and Louisville who, being unnamed, must necessarily miss their fair share of credit. In each site they graciously opened their homes to us, fed us, and made us feel welcome. Their words and candor were more important than they may know in making this research possible. We will not soon forget their generosity. We hope that the INOP police departments will make this document available to the communities they serve, for we have written it as much for them as for the police. We also hope that this exploratory study will add to their knowlege of community policing and guide their effors in involving the community. Our thanks to all. ----------------------------------------- INTRODUCTION This is Volume I of a two-volume report on the Vera Institute of Justice's evaluation of the eight INOP projects. Volume II, entitled Issues in Community Policing: Problems in the Implementation of Eight Innovative Neighborhood Oriented Policing Programs, contains the results of the analysis of data on implementation issues and program outcomes for the INOP projects. This volume contains detailed descriptions of the eight programs. In late 1990, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) awarded funds to eight jurisdictions to participate in a demonstration program entitled the "Innovative Neighborhood Oriented Policing" (INOP) program. This program was designed to support the development of community policing strategies and tactics at the neighborhood level with the goal of reducing the demand for drugs, including drug prevention, deterrence and control, through community involvement and interagency cooperation. Each of these eight jurisdictions developed their own approach to the problem, and although they have a number of characteristics in common, the programs are widely varied with regard to the context in which they operate; the nature and scope of their neighborhood focus; the approach to demand reduction; the nature of the interagency planning teams; approach to community outreach; and the variety of other services provided. Because of this variation, the chapters that follow contain individual descriptions of each of the eight programs. The eight INOP sites are Tempe, AZ; Norfolk, VA; New York, NY; Hayward, CA; Portland, OR; Prince George's County, MD; Houston, TX; and Louisville, KY. The descriptions presented here are based on data collected by the Vera Institute of Justice as part of an NIJ-funded research project and reflect the INOP projects as they were operating between June 1991 and August 1992. Most of these programs are on-going and may have changed since the end of the data collection period. Furthermore, some of the programs added target areas (as part of their second-year funds) during the research period, but too late to be included in the detailed descriptions and analysis. These instances are noted in the individual program descriptions. TEMPE I. The Tempe INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Tempe, Arizona is a city of approximately 145,000 residents. At the time of the research, the Tempe Police Department employed 234 sworn officers and approximately 90 civilians. At the time of the first Vera site visit in June 1991, the Tempe INOP project had completed the recruitment and community policing and problem- solving training of patrol officers participating in the initiative; completed analysis of a survey of residents and business owners in the target area; established partnerships with various groups representing city government, service agencies, business associations and community groups within the target area; and, after a period of delay caused by the need to review and comply with various city regulations and specifications (e.g., zoning, Dept. of Buildings), was ready to open a mini-station in a modular unit located at the center of the designated target beat. By the second Vera site visit, in January 1992, the mini-station was completely functional. B. Community Policing in Tempe When the Tempe Police Department was chosen as one of the eight INOP sites, the concept of community policing had not yet been introduced in the city. Although the Police Department had been discussing the development of a community policing program since the appointment of the current Chief of Police three years before, the Department's selection as an INOP site proved central to the implementation effort. According to Department officials, before the BJA opportunity opened, no clear model of community policing had been defined and no detailed plans for implementation had been developed. In designing the INOP project, the Department selected a single beat, characterized by a high volume of calls for service and a long-standing heroin trafficking condition, as the site for a pilot community policing project (officially designated as "Beat 16"). Under the pilot program, one squad (consisting of a sergeant and six patrol officers, under the direction of the lieutenant for that patrol quadrant) was assigned responsibility for the beat. The assignment of a squad to a single beat represented a departure from Tempe's normal assignment system, which is temporal rather than geographic -- that is, squads are typically assigned to shifts rather than beats. Members of the Beat 16 squad, in contrast, work overlapping shifts (e.g., beginning at 7 a.m., 11 a.m., 3 p.m., etc.) within the beat. Officers in the squad continue to be responsible for calls for service within the beat itself. They differ from the rest of the patrol force in that they are not responsible for calls for service outside their beat; at times, officers who are not assigned to Beat 16 are called in to assist with calls that can not be handled by the squad. In addition, Beat 16 officers, unlike the rest of the patrol force, have the right to set priorities and delay their response to calls for service. Yet, in many respects, patrol operations for officers assigned to Beat 16 did not differ radi- cally from routine patrol operations. In part, the operational similarities between Beat 16 and the rest of the patrol force resulted from the decision, expressed by Department managers, to implement community policing "philosophically rather than programmatically." Officers in Beat 16 were not freed from responsibility for calls for service and continue to patrol in radio cars for most of their shift. Apart from their long-term assignment to a single area, the primary difference between Beat 16 officers and other patrol units is that they received intensive training in the philosophy of community policing and the strategies of problem-solving policing, which is considered an integral part of the community policing approach. They were encouraged to develop extensive knowledge of the target area and, particularly, the troubled locations or "hot spots" within the area; to interact frequently with the community; to attend meetings of community associations; and to become familiar with the characteristics and habits of known drug offenders within the neighborhood. To aid in problem-solving, shortly after training was completed, Beat 16 officers conducted formal surveys of businesses and residents within the beat. These surveys had multiple purposes: they facilitated the development of a "Beat Profile"; they helped define the problems that were most important to the community itself; they helped introduce the officers and the concept of Beat 16 to members of the community; they helped squad members establish contacts for future information-gathering within the community; and they provided baseline data for future assessments of the effect of the program on order maintenance, fear of crime and the community's perceptions of quality of life within the beat. Another central component of Beat 16 is the mini-station located in a modular unit in a park at the center of the beat. The mini-station is staffed by the squad's administrative assistant during the day. It serves as the site of a drug information hotline. It also provides a community-based setting for officers to complete paperwork during the course of their patrol shift. As one officer put it, the mini-station was designed to "bring the community to us and us to the community." The project's Coordinating Committee, which included representatives of community groups, local business leaders, service providers and city officials, was an integral feature of the Beat 16 project. According to Department officials, the Coordinating Committee, not the Department, was "in charge of" the project. The committee was expected to play an active role in defining the problems within the neighborhood and in identifying resources within the neighborhood, city government and private agencies which might be used to develop solutions to these problems. By the time of the final Vera site visit in July, 1992, however, the Coordinating Committee had been dissolved due, according to respondents, to a lack of interest among community residents. C. The Target Area: Beat 16 In contrast to the rest of Tempe, Beat 16 is a relatively troubled area. Beat 16 houses a higher proportion of low income residents, of tenants in Section 8 housing and of minority residents than the other beats in the city. It is also the city's primary site of street-level drug trafficking. The size of the target area in which community policing activities were concentrated was reduced during the training period from the entire beat (approximately one square mile, roughly 13,000 in population) to a subsection of the beat (somewhat more than half of the original beat) in which calls for service and local drug trafficking operations were concentrated. Although Beat 16 officers respond to calls for service in the beat as a whole, the focus of their problem-solving activities is a sub-area within the beat that includes three distinct neighborhoods (Escalante Park, Victory Acres and Don Carlos). The reduced target area includes a substantial business strip, featuring motels, bars and ware- house-sized commercial outlets; a centrally-located park (the site of the Beat 16 mini-station), which is adjacent to the local elementary school and includes a recreation center, pool and senior center; older privately owned, single-family homes, many of which were rebuilt over the past 15 years with Housing and Urban Development (HUD) block-grant funds; newer multi-family rental units; and small retail establishments (e.g., convenience stores). It is divided by a recently constructed highway which has cut off established routes to the school and park for some families (a source of concern within the neighborhood). The population of the area is also mixed. A substantial number of families of Mexican descent have lived in the area for generations; many own their homes. Yet the beat as a whole is predominantly white (71%; Latino, 23%). Most residents are classified as being in the low-to-moderate income range. The surveys conducted by Beat 16 officers revealed that the primary quality-of-life concerns of residents within the area involved burglary, drugs, juvenile crime (a local youth gang) and graffiti. Prostitution was also cited as a primary concern of business leaders (the prostitution problem in the area is concentrated along the com- mercial strip that houses motels and bars). Meetings with community groups also helped identify neighborhood concerns about specific bars and motels which had been the locus of problems within the area and a desire for streetlights and sidewalks to improve safety and quality of life within residential areas. According to respondents, the neighborhood is unique in terms of the residential stability of families in the older houses. Several respondents echoed the belief that, "People know everybody. They've lived there a long time." One Beat 16 officer remarked that local trouble-makers were generally easy to find because they always come back to the neighborhood. The local drug problem involved a pattern of heroin trafficking and use that has "been going on for generations" and is at least partly responsible for the reputation of the area as "one of the primary trouble spots in the city." Respondents within the Department explained that for the past 20 years a series of user-dealers, often from the same families, controlled local drug markets, developed extensive rap sheets and took each others' places during periods of incarceration. Although heroin trafficking in Tempe is largely concentrated within the commer- cial and residential streets of the target area, purchasers are reportedly drawn from neighboring communities throughout the region. II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention The drug demand reduction component of the Tempe program drew primarily upon drug education and prevention programs. Although a few respondents expressed interest in referring arrested drug purchasers to treatment facilities and in identifying criminal justice alternatives for them, even these respondents shared the general hard-line "lock 'em up" approach to local drug traffickers. The project also established ties with several prevention programs for local youth. One member of the functioning Coordinating Committee, under the auspices of Chicanos por la Causa (CPLC), runs a prevention program for elementary school youth who are identified as being at "high risk" for future drug involvement. The program features home visits, a daily presence on the school campus, after school activities designed to enhance self-esteem, and special community events (e.g., a Cinco de Mayo festival which allowed Beat 16 officers to meet with the community). B. Law Enforcement Activities The primary drug enforcement effort was "Sweep 16"--a sustained undercover buy-and-bust operation, carried out by the Department's Selective Enforcement Unit (SEU) in early May, 1991. Sweep 16 led to the arrest of 18 local user-dealers--a substantial proportion of known drug traffickers in the small target area. Respondents within the Department reported that SEU personnel were initially reluctant to conduct the sweep ("Why waste our time on small fries?") but ultimately agreed to the task, defined as "tactical enforcement," designed to change the reputation of the area as a place where outsiders could buy heroin safely. The Beat 16 squad also worked closely with a detective in the Criminal Investigation Division who was assigned to the area to locate and identify known offenders and to apprehend individuals in the neighborhood for whom warrants had been issued. III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training The Beat 16 squad was recruited directly from the Department's patrol division. In announcing the formation of the community policing component, the Department indicated that applicants should expect to work a substantial amount of overtime on the project. Of the original 12 applicants, six officers were selected. There were several components to training. The Tempe Police Department contracted with the Institute of Law and Justice (ILJ) to conduct a week of training in Tempe. The ILJ training covered the identification of city resources, crime prevention techniques, the philosophy of community policing, drug recognition, addiction and cycles of violence, problem-solving techniques and community empowerment. Training also featured a presentation on the nature and purpose of crime analysis, the supervision of problem-solving policing and extensive readings on community policing and problem-solving. Representatives of the Police Departments in Aurora, Colorado and San Diego, California were brought in to conduct seminars on community policing and problem-solving strategies. In addition, the Beat 16 squad went to San Diego for field training in problem-solving techniques. Six members of the Project's Coordinating Committee also received training at the Depart- ment's Citizen Police Academy. The Academy, which is independent of the Beat 16 project, conducts a six-week course (one evening per week) for citizens of Tempe who want to receive crime and drug prevention training and learn more about the structure and operations of the Department. B. Community and Agency Partnerships The awarding of BJA INOP funds to the Tempe project was announced shortly after the first few meetings of the developing Escalante Neighborhood Association. According to a member of Beat 16's Coordinating Committee, at first the Neighborhood Association was characterized by "anger, suspicion, disenfranchisement, and fear of retribution from the drug dealers. . . . [It was so bad that] people had been slashing city employees' tires." According to several respondents, this distrust was evident at the first meeting of the Asso- ciation that Beat 16 officers attended. One squad member characterized that meeting as "a vigilante group against the cops." He reported that neighborhood residents felt that they had largely been abandoned by the Department and were skeptical about the squad's willingness to work closely with the community. Another respondent, who works closely with neighborhood groups throughout the city, saw the timing of the project as fortuitous. She reported that, following the announcement of the initiation of the Beat 16 project, at the next association meeting "information poured out to the police [and] residents surrounded the cops. . . ." She characterized the neighborhood association as actively involved in "reclaiming the neighborhood" from the drug dealers and defined the Beat 16 initiative as an integral piece of the reclamation process. In fact, the involvement of Beat 16 with the developing Neighborhood Association proved instrumental in linking it with other organizations that had the capacity to address the problems identified as central to community residents who attend association meetings. The Beat 16 Coordinating Committee brought together representatives of community groups (the Escalante Neighborhood Association, the local businessman's association, a local priest) with representatives of city government (the liaison to the City Council, assigned to work closely with neighborhood associations and to provide direct feedback to the Council about them; a representative of the Public Works Department; representatives of the city's Community Development Agency) and local service providers (the elementary school principal, the on-site director of the city's recreation program in Escalante Park, the Director of the CPLC prevention program). In addition to groups actively represented on the Coordinating Committee, each member of the Beat 16 squad attended meetings of a specific homeowner's association or other neighborhood association within the beat. C. Outreach and Advertising Outreach efforts made by the developing Escalante Neighborhood Association in concert with the Beat 16 project were extensive. With the assistance of the City Council's liaison to neighborhood groups, the Association distributed 600 newsletters, based on issues raised at Association meetings, to families within the target area. D. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) The Beat 16 project drew extensively on the Department's Management Information System in a number of ways--it was used to enter and analyze data from the surveys of residents and business owners; to develop an information system based on Field Investigation Reports developed for the project; to provide periodic reports on "hot spots" within the beat; and to analyze changes in criminal activity within the beat, using the Department's new geo-mapping system. E. Local Evaluation ILJ was responsible for describing the process of implementing the Beat 16 project and assessing its impacts. Findings from the baseline survey of residents and businesses were compared to outcomes from subsequent surveys and provided a means of assessing effects on quality of life and attitudes toward the police within the beat. In addition, ILJ compared departmental data on crime complaints and calls for service within the beat and the rest of the city for 12 months before the initiative and 12 months after the initiative began. ILJ reviewed problem-solving assignment logs; gathered qualitative data on observable dif- ferences in street drug activity; and explored the attitudes of team members about community polic- ing, the intervention itself and its effects. F. BJA Funds In Tempe, BJA funds (a total of $200,000) were allocated to cover the cost of the project's administrative assistant; rent for the modular unit now installed in Escalante Park; officer overtime expenditures; MIS purchases; the evaluation component; training and travel; and a Clean-up Fund, established to support community-based, problem-solving activities. IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects According to Department personnel and members of the Planning Committee, a number of short- and long-term objectives were held for the project. Several respondents reported that Sweep 16 would have visible short-term effects on local drug and prostitution activities. Although project supervisors repeatedly emphasized their belief that "enforcement can't do it all," squad members pointed to the value of demonstrating to the community that "these guys (the drug dealers) aren't invincible." They also expected that the enforcement component of the project would ultimately change the reputation of the area from that of a place where outsiders can come in to purchase drugs. A number of respondents also expected that the project, in concert with the developing Escalante Neighborhood Association, would have the capacity to address specific quality-of-life issues of concern to the community--streetlights, sidewalks, graffiti, traffic problems. By so doing, it was hoped that the Project would influence the quality of life in the area; address specific problems associated with disorderly conditions; build substantial ties to community residents in an effort to expand the sources of information within the community; and, ultimately, empower the community in its effort to maximize its share of city resources. B. Departmental Effects One issue raised by respondents concerns the extent to which officers would "buy into" the community policing philosophy and problem-solving approach. Project directors voiced some concern that some squad members might remain unduly committed to a "lock 'em up" style of policing and may not have fully integrated their training in problem-solving methods. Although a few squad members acknowledged that they are more comfortable with a stronger enforcement orientation than is commonly associated with community-oriented policing, they reported that the project's intensive focus on a single beat had enhanced their ability to control drug conditions in the area. Ultimately, Department officials expected that the pilot project would have a substantial influence on the Department's efforts to increase involvement in neighborhood-oriented policing. On-going deliberations about ways to divide the city into quadrants, rather than sectors, might have some bearing on the way in which styles of neighborhood-oriented policing, beyond the Beat 16 target area, are introduced in the city as a whole. Although Department officials expected to expand neighborhood- oriented policing beyond Beat 16 in the near future, they were somewhat skeptical about whether such an approach would prove valuable in the wealthier, less problem-ridden beats in Tempe. NORFOLK I. The Norfolk INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Norfolk is a city of 261,229 people, with a population density of 4,856 per square mile (1990 Census, as reported in The Virginian-Pilot and The Ledger-Star, 6/24/91). Its police force has 684 sworn officers and 176 civilian employees. B. Community Policing in Norfolk Norfolk's community policing effort is part of an overall city government initiative entitled Police Assisted Community Enforcement (PACE). PACE is a city-wide program whose stated goals are "to reduce criminal activity and calls for service in targeted areas" through a three-stage process: (1) Sweeps, (2) Increased Patrols, and (3) Community Partnerships. The program is "city-wide" in that it formally involves every city agency, from the top down, but its activities are focused in particular areas, generally in and around public housing complexes. Like the other INOP programs, PACE incorporates community policing to address crime and quality-of-life problems, especially those related to drug trafficking and drug abuse. The PACE project was funded through revenue raised from a $.03 increase in real estate taxes (which generated $1.8 million), effective July 1, 1990. The revenue obtained from the increased real estate tax was used to provide the Norfolk Police Department with 60 new personnel, 38 sworn officers and 22 civilians. The hiring of these civilians allowed the release of 22 officers, who were performing non-enforcement roles within the Department, to patrol functions. Additional vehicles and communications equipment were also purchased as part of the PACE initiative. The three phases of PACE are described by police department staff as follows: (1) Sweeps -- intelligence gathering, undercover operations, saturation patrol; (2) Increased Patrols -- police, along with other city agencies, address quality-of-life problems, educate citizens regarding available programs; (3) Community Partnerships -- community policing itself, assisted by the police department. PACE target areas are selected by high-ranking police personnel from the Special Enforcement Division, Vice-Narcotics Division, with input from others, based on the level of street drug activity. Information on street drug activity comes from citizens, arrest statistics, and observation. The number of officers assigned to a target area varies depending on both the Phase and the part of the Phase (see Section II below for a more detailed description of the Law Enforcement Activities). During the covert operations stage of Phase 1, which lasts for two to three months, 16 officers (two undercover, four control officers, eight investigators and two corporals) and one Assistant Commonwealth Attorney are needed. When the operation moves into the "reversals/search warrants" stage (which lasts about 10 days), the personnel requirements increase to 40 officers: 18 investigators from Vice and Narcotics, 16 officers from Metro Tact, and six officers from patrol. Then, on "Indictment Day," the staff increases to 77 officers: 55 supervisors and investigators from Vice and Narcotics, 16 officers from Metro Tact, and six officers from patrol. Phase 2, Increased Patrols, involves personnel from all divisions of the police department; three marked units from the Special Enforcement Division are assigned to each target area from 11:00 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. and from 7:00 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., and one marked unit from each of the (two) patrol divisions are assigned to the area during the day shift. Officers from K-9, Traffic, Crime Prevention and Investigative Divisions assist as needed on both vehicle and foot patrols. During Phase 3, two marked units from each Patrol Division are assigned seven days a week, between the hours of 11:00 a.m. and 3:30 a.m., and Sector Lieutenants and supervisors are actively involved with the community in problem-solving efforts. Personnel from the Special Enforcement Division and Crime Prevention Division continue to work in the area. The first two PACE target areas (Grandy Village and East Oceanview) began Phase 1 on January 25, 1991, Phase 2 on January 28, and were in Phase 3 (Community Partnerships) by March 4 of that year. The second group of target areas, Calvert Square, Diggs Town, Huntersville, and Oakleaf Forest (four housing projects in close proximity to one another), which entered Phase 1 on April 4, 1991, were in Phase 2 at the time of the first Vera site visit. By the time of the final research site visit, PACE had been implemented in ten target areas and was scheduled to expand into two more areas. The PACE Support Services Committee serves to coordinate services from the police and other city agencies involved in the initiative. The committee has representatives from the Police Department, Department of Human Services, Public Health Department, Department of Parks and Recreation, Department of Planning and Codes Administration, Juvenile Court Services Unit, Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority (NRHA), and Community Services Board. The Support Services Committee meets at least monthly, and formal minutes are kept. Interagency coordination in Norfolk is extensive; the FAST team (which is a subcommittee of the Support Services Committee) is made up of representatives from NRHA, Public Health Department, Social Services, Community Services, Norfolk Police Department, Norfolk Juvenile Court, Department of Parks and Recreation, and the school system. The FAST team is designed to provide a neighborhood-focused approach to family assessment and services whose purpose is "to enhance family and individual functioning and self-sufficiency through team assessment of service needs, action planning and follow-up" (PACE Support Services notebook). The FAST team provides interagency staffing for multi-problem families and adults; information, referral and advocacy; and community involvement, needs identification, and problem-solving. Identified service needs are reported back to the Support Services Committee. The purpose of the NEAT team (also a subcommittee of the Support Services Committee) is to address environmental problems in the neighborhood such as, abandoned vehicles, vacant lots, houses in disrepair, improper storage of trash, etc. The NEAT team has members from the Police Department, Bureau of Environmental Health, Department of Public Works, Division of Existing Structures, Parks and Forestry, and NRHA. Community partnerships are a central part of the PACE program and are initiated during Phase III with the "Community Service Days." Community Service Days are held in the PACE target area, in either a Recreation Center or Community Center. Each city agency (e.g., Code Enforcement, Human Services, Health Department, Parks and Recreation, NRHA, the Police Department) sets up booths, "like a job fair," according to one agency staff member. Residents are encouraged to attend to "present your concerns and express your community needs . . . Give members of these agencies an opportunity to address your individual concerns and assist you with solutions" (Community Service Days Flyer). PACE representatives also attend civic league meetings and are present at virtually every community function. NRHA publishes a newsletter that is distributed in all the housing projects (the location of most PACE areas). II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention The major prevention component of PACE is its PACE Athletic League. The PACE Athletic League provides Nighthawk basketball, baseball, and flag football. It was reported that during the summer, 60-65 youths show up for each game, and the program also provides outings (e.g., to baseball games of the local AAA team, the Tidewater Tides). DARE is also a part of PACE. Norfolk was the first jurisdiction in Virginia to have the DARE program in elementary schools as well as junior high and high schools. The Second Patrol Division has a trailer, located in East Ocean View (which was one of the first PACE target areas). In this trailer, residents can find literature on the DARE program; a calendar of activities at the East Ocean View Community Center; information on local civic leagues; a newsletter and other information from the Ocean View Services Project Team (composed of representatives from Community Improvement, the Fire Department, the Health Department, Human Services, NRHA, Parks and Recreation, the Police Department, Public Works, Utilities, and Existing Structures). Information is also available on AIDS, drug use prevention, and drug and alcohol treatment programs. There are forms in the trailer that citizens can use to report abandoned vehicles and other nuisances. One approach to drug prevention used extensively in East Ocean View was demolition of abandoned buildings known to be used for drug dealing. Attempts were made to evict drug dealers from apartments, and in East Ocean View (and other areas with rental housing), rental housing owners are encouraged to screen prospective tenants carefully. Efforts were then made to inform other developments of evictions so that these developments would not rent to the drug dealers. B. Enforcement The PACE program is defined as having three phases: Sweeps, Increased Patrol, and Community Partnerships. The first phase is the most concentrated assault on street drug activity. Once a target area is selected, it is infiltrated by an undercover officer and two investigators from the street enforcement unit of the Vice and Narcotics Division of the police department. The undercovers are selected either from the recruit school or from the patrol division other than that in which the target area is located. The undercovers are trained and then, under the direction of the control officers, make buys from those who are selling within the target area. In addition to making buys, members of this Division do surveillance and gather information on the nature of the drug market. This first step, called "pre- sweeps," lasts for about two months. For the last week or two of Phase 1, using the information gathered during the two months, about 40 officers from Special Enforcement and the two Patrol Divisions target both dealers and users in "sweeps." Buyers are targeted through "reversals," in which the police: . . . take the place of the dealers on the corners, and we sell placebo drugs to the users and then we arrest them. We do that, alternating between the buyers and the sellers for a period of a week, either a buy/bust where we make buys and then go in and arrest, or through reversals. We just keep a concentrated effort on that area for a week or two and then on the grand jury date we go in with the indictments and arrest those that are still on the street. Enhanced prosecution is a central feature of PACE drug enforcement activities. The pre-sweeps step ends on the "Grand Jury Day," when indictments are handed down. (Unlike the practice in many other cities, in Norfolk defendants may be indicted before arrests are made.) Prior to this time, the case is developed, and the control officers prepare files. About two weeks prior to the indictment day (which is selected through the City Attorney's office and the court), the police take the case folders in for the Attorney's review in preparation for the grand jury. On "Grand Jury Day" one of the control officers goes through the folders in front of the grand jury. Indictments are handed down, and within an hour or two are in the Vice and Narcotics Division office: . . . we package them in our arrest folders; we have the teams there for the purpose of going out and making the arrests -- and doing much like we do with reversals, except we have a command post. We're bringing them straight in because there's no need to get notes together. Now we go out into the target area with however many "arrestings" it takes, depending on the number of people that have been indicted. Approximately four or five hours later, there is a news conference announcing that the target area is now a PACE area, and the narcotics officers pull out. This marks the start of the sweeps step of Phase 1. At the time of the press release, statistics have been compiled regarding the number of arrests made, including type and severity, firearms recovered, and search warrants executed. These statistics are broken down by target area. The next 72 hours are known as the "sweeps," which, for especially the first 24 hours, entail "zero tolerance." People who are drinking in public are warned or receive a summons. Police stop crap games, "hanging out," loud music, etc. Abandoned vehicles are towed. During the sweeps a mobile command post is set up in a trailer within a half mile from the target area. Arrest teams pick up sellers and buyers and take them to the command post, where evidence is gathered and labeled and documentation is prepared. During this time, the traffic division is in the area doing highway safety stops on major arteries leading into and out of targeted areas. The canine unit's drug dog is used in conjunction with these stops: . . . assisting the Vice and Narcotics unit in trying to identify these people who have not been picked up at this point on the indictments. We are out there basically to soften up the area. The worst of the bad guys are gone. They've either been arrested, or they're in hiding somewhere, or they're on the run. So they [Vice and Narcotics] do us quite a service because these guys are gone. The major dealers know something's going on, even if they haven't been picked up. So once we come in, the area's been softened up somewhat by Vice and Narcotics, then we further do that job, in an effort to get people out of their homes, to emerge out. We want them to know we're there. That's the first big impact in the sweeps, the impact on the residents. Safety stops are usually done from the time the sweeps start (around 5:00 p.m.) until midnight, when there is no longer enough traffic to continue. During the sweeps period, the police are there not only to arrest violators, but to identify problems such as defective traffic lights or signs. They make "defect reports" to the appropriate agency, through the Support Services Committee. They also go door to door (to every home in the target area), handing out flyers that describe the PACE program to the residents. Residents are given phone numbers to call with any information they might have about criminal activity in the area. During these first three days of the PACE program, cars are towed; the appropriate agencies are notified regarding broken street lights, sidewalks, eyesores, hazardous areas, etc. Phase 2, Increased Patrols then begins. Officers from Special Enforcement, Patrol and Crime Prevention talk to residents and distribute information on PACE, door-to-door in the target areas. In addition, Crime Prevention officers meet with community leaders to organize civic leagues, Neighborhood Watch, Operation Identification, or other community organizations, and also conduct security surveys. Also during this Phase, Public Support Rallies and Community Service Days are held; these include City officials, police and community leaders in open forums with area residents. An effort to clean-up target areas is initiated during this phase; this process involves a team of police, city agencies, and others (the NEAT team) who work to remove abandoned vehicles, improve trash and garbage pick-up, improve access lighting, make street repairs, code enforcement, etc. The FAST team also assesses the needs of the community to provide assistance in education, health care, recreation and referrals. During Phase 3 the community is expected to begin to reduce the burden on the police department, and enter into a partnership with the police. At the time of the final research site visit (July, 1992), this Phase remained a problem. Because of lack of community organization, according to the police, they had been unable to withdraw from any of the PACE target areas. This had the effect of stretching police resources too thin. (See Volume II for further discussion of this problem.) III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training According to personnel interviewed during the implementation site visit and subsequent visits, "all officers are PACE officers." Therefore, recruitment per se is not an issue for this program. However, one of the training officers indicated that, . . . we have officers that do PACE every day; that's their one assignment . . . [and others who are] assisting with the PACE program as far as the enforcement aspect is concerned, but . . . we're starting off slow and we eventually want to cover the entire city and get everyone involved in the PACE program. The officers who are assigned to work in PACE areas are asked to make a commitment to stay in that assignment for a certain minimum length of time. If, however, their performance is not satis- factory or they "burn-out," they will be reassigned. As indicated above, the PACE program was implemented on January 25, 1991; prior to that time, all Norfolk Police Department personnel received PACE training, from the Chief of Police down to patrol officers. Training began in August of 1990 when four members of the force were sent to Michigan State University for a three-day seminar on community policing with Robert Trojanowicz. The officers from Norfolk felt that, because this seminar was specifically designed for police from the state of Michigan, the classes were not particularly relevant to their needs. However, they felt that they did gain insight from informal discussions and with Trojanowicz himself. Subsequently, all police department staff with ranks of lieutenant and above attended a two-day seminar conducted by Trojanowicz, held at the Norfolk airport. Later, the training officers from Norfolk conducted eight-hour introductory seminars, first for all the sergeants and then for the corporals. Part of this seminar was a presentation by the Assistant City Manager for Public Safety regarding how the city officials saw the PACE program and stressing the city's support of the program and the importance of interagency cooperation. They also had video presentations from department heads in all city agencies. This was followed by roll-call training for the officers, providing an introduction to the PACE program. After all members of the Department had received the introductory training, the cycle began again with sergeants and corporals (separately) receiving another eight hours on the specifics of community policing and PACE. An integral part of each of these sessions was a request for recommendations and comments. An additional eight hours of training was also provided to the uniformed officers (including patrol officers, investigators, all staff positions, in groups of 20-25). These sessions included two hours on community policing; one hour on PACE; one hour on sensitivity training; and two hours on drug arrests and tactics that narcotics officers use on the street. Also included was time for questions and answers and feedback from the officers. One of the outcomes of this feedback was the development of "Quality Watch Forms," which provide the patrol officers with a mechanism for receiving feedback on problems they report to other agencies. In addition to the police officers, staff from other city agencies participated in the training sessions (on community policing and PACE, but not on narcotics arrests). By the end of January 1991, all members of the Norfolk Police Department had received the training described above. Since that time, one of the training officers has provided regular in-service training on the PACE approach. In addition, two of the training officers provide a four-hour training session on community policing and PACE to the police academy class. B. Community and Interagency Partnerships Interagency cooperation is extensive in Norfolk. Every city agency is involved and has representatives on the FAST or NEAT teams and/or participates in the Support Services Committee. The Support Services Committee represents all city departments that are involved in PACE. Initially, this was limited to human services and the police, plus a few other departments (e.g., Code Enforcements, Existing Structures). As the program (PACE) matured, however, its scope became broader and other agencies (e.g., Utilities) were drawn into the program. Phase 3 of PACE is called "Community Partnerships." An important part of Community Partnerships is making city services more accessible to the communities, and this is accom- plished through the Support Services Committee. According to one human services professional, shrinking resources at all levels of government and service delivery systems has resulted in human services becoming very specialized functions and less accessible to consumers. He believes, however, that it is possible to change this direction: . . . there's no reason we can't invent that . . . it's just like the police are reinventing community presence; there's no reason we can't reinvent a community presence, and that's what PACE is all about. And there's a social strategy for government; that's what PACE is all about. . . . I don't know the exact years in Norfolk, probably 10 or 15 years, never assigned caseloads for ADC, food stamps, or any other payment program on the basis of geographic area in the sense of neighborhoods. . . . And we tried to start to try reinventing that. Shift caseloads of an eligibil- ity worker, a food stamp worker, an ADC worker, all have the caseloads from a set geographic area, or a number of workers depending on the size of the geographic area. Like the law enforcement side of PACE, the human services shifts to neighborhoods are being done gradually, starting with the communities identified as PACE target areas. Thus, the PACE police officer has a social worker and an eligibility worker he/she can work with. Within PACE this coordination is carried out by the Support Services Committee, through its two subcommittees (NEAT and FAST). The NEAT team focuses on environmental concerns, while the FAST team deals with: . . . those multiple problem families that none of us can crack individually, that maybe by working together we can have an impact on those families and the dysfunction that may exist in them . . . see that referral processes are developed and flow, services central clearing houses, receiving cases, assigning cases, coordinates meetings . . . Each PACE area has its own FAST team, which is manpower-intensive, but the line-level staff appear (according to their supervisors) to be happy with the arrangement. While the original PACE design called for separate NEAT teams for each area, this was later revised so that there is just one city-wide NEAT team. The interagency cooperation exists at all levels, from line worker through administrative staff. The first decision of the Support Services Committee was that every department would treat a PACE referral as the priority referral of the department. So, the extra time that is devoted to attending meetings is recovered by increased efficiency: There's no chasing anymore. It comes in as a PACE problem, as a PACE referral, it's dealt with. And because you know the people working in that community, there's usually no loss of referrals and information in the referral process in the bureaucracies of the various departments. C. Community Outreach and Advertisements Community outreach begins during Phase 2 (Increased Patrols) of PACE. At this time the police go door-to-door distributing flyers describing the PACE program and announcing Community Service Days. Community Service Days provide residents of a PACE target area with the opportunity to talk to representatives of city agencies. Public support rallies are held, and there is an Open Forum with Norfolk city officials, the NRHA, the police, and community leaders. With regard to advertising, the PACE logo appears on all police vehicles and those of many other agencies (e.g., utilities, trash collection, etc.). Lapel pins of the logo have been produced and are worn by city employees and others. The Norfolk Police Department has a sophisticated video production unit which has produced tapes describing the PACE program. D. Associated Technology As part of the civilianization of Police Department jobs associated with PACE, the 911 dispatchers were replaced by civilian "telecommunicators." In addition, a call diversion program was instituted through which the telecommunicator determines which of the calls coming into the 911 lines can be handled over the telephone (i.e., without sending a car), which can be diverted to another agency, and which are simply inappropriate for police response. The telecommunicators are part of the Police Emergency Services Liaison Unit (PESLU), which is also staffed by a lieutenant, a sergeant, two corporals and three police officers, and functions from the Emergency Operations Center (EOC). IV. Expected Impacts The hopes of the City of Norfolk are that PACE, through the combination of enforcement efforts, interagency cooperation and community involvement, will allow the residents of neighborhoods with drug problems to reclaim their community. The enforcement efforts are expected to stabilize the neighborhood, and the residents are part of the effort through the Neighborhood Watch Program and civic leagues. Calls for service are expected to go down as a result of decreased criminal activities. As a direct result of the personal relationship developed (through PACE) between the police and the community, police officers and supervisors attend community meetings and get to know the residents. The goal of PACE is to: . . . sell to the community that it's a common interest among the police department and the city and the citizens that we all unite. That no community that's ever united and been strong has had a problem with continuing crime. It just doesn't stay where it can't operate. Without the community we're just never going to provide the kind of environment that is going to make crime [go away]. NEW YORK I. The New York INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction New York is a city of approximately eight million people, living in five counties (known as boroughs) that cover 319 square miles, with a population density of over 25,000 people per square mile (65,000 in Manhattan). In fiscal year 1990, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) had 25,869 sworn officers and 7,091 civilian employees. Community policing began as a pilot program in a single precinct in Brooklyn in 1984. Through a gradual process, community policing was expanded until, by 1988, it was implemented in all 75 precincts of the NYPD. The evolution of community policing in New York City is not over yet; the NYPD has recently presented a revised strategy for policing New York City in the '90s: "The dominant philosophy and strategy for policing the city will be community policing. The Department will return to block-by-block policing throughout the city" (Brown, Policing New York City in the 1990s, 1991). B. Community Policing in New York The goals of the NYPD involve changes in both community policing and the philosophy of the NYPD as a whole. However, at the time of the first Vera site visit, the Community Patrol Officer Program (CPOP) covered part or all of every precinct in New York City. The basic structure had been to divide a precinct (or the part of it covered by CPOP) into beats, usually 10 per precinct. Each CPOP beat was assigned a walking Community Patrol Officer (CPO) for one shift; the hours worked by CPOs are flexible, determined by the CPO and his or her supervisor in response to the problems on that beat. The CPOP sergeant is responsible for supervising the 10 to 14 CPOs in his or her precinct. Training for CPOs is provided in the Police Academy. Primary responsibility for responding to calls for service (CFS) remains with the radio motor patrol (RMP) units, but the CPO is also expected to take some calls (depending on his or her location relative to the call). C. INOP Target Areas The INOP project in New York has three target areas. The success of the project was contingent upon the purchase and receipt of a large van for each site and upon the recruitment of civilian volunteers to staff the van. Therefore, the approach used in the New York City INOP project was to recruit and train volunteers for one target site prior to receipt of the vans, and to wait until the vans were ready before recruiting volunteers in the other two sites. The INOP project had one targeted area in the 23rd precinct in East Harlem, one area in the 44th precinct in the Bronx, and one area in the 72nd precinct in Brooklyn. Each of these three precincts was chosen as an INOP site for a different reason: The 23rd precinct was chosen in conjunction with the Department of Health, which already had an interest in the area; the 44th precinct was chosen because it had a "Katzenbach school; and the 72nd precinct was chosen because it was New York City's original community policing precinct." The INOP target sites, where the vans are parked, are each outside of an elementary school or junior high school. The particular sites were chosen because they were schools within areas of active street-level narcotics dealing. The two blocks surrounding the schools were designated drug-free zones. At the time of the first Vera site visit, the only target site that was active was the 23rd precinct site. The NYPD intended to have the vans ready (i.e., painted, treated with anti-graffiti chemicals, equipped with telephones, etc.) by August 15, 1991, and at that time, begin the volunteer recruitment and training process in the 44th and 72nd precincts. While the research did not examine the INOP project in the 72nd precinct, during the second and third research site visits, data were collected on the 44th precinct. With the exception of participation of some local agencies, the program was the same in both precincts. Each of the precincts in which the vans were located has a substantial, well-documented drug problem; a high proportion of very poor families (incomes under $10,000: 23rd, 57%; 44th, 59%; 72nd, 47%); and a high proportion of minority residents (black or Latino: 23rd, 88%; 44th, 92%; 72nd, 49%). In the 23rd precinct, the van was initially parked in front of a Junior High School (JHS 117) and across the street from an elementary school (PS 83). These schools are located at 109th Street and Third Avenue, in Spanish Harlem, in an area described by the CPOs as "a supermarket for drugs." The major drugs being sold are heroin and crack, primarily heroin. The four-block area immediately surrounding the school where the van was parked contains a substantial playground area (the site of local drug trafficking); a stretch of public housing projects; and two well-developed commercial strips containing bodegas, mom-and-pop stores, and repair shops along Second and Third Avenues. In the 44th precinct, the van is located opposite an elementary school (PS 11) which also houses a comprehensive community center, MOSAIC (Maximizing Opportunity, Service and Action in the Community). The 44th precinct is located in the Melrose/Highbridge section of the Bronx, about a quarter of a mile north of Yankee Stadium. II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities The INOP project in New York involved several city and private agencies (in addition to the NYPD): the Board of Education, the Victim Services Agency (VSA), the Department of Health, the Department of Youth Services, and the Citizens Committee for New York City, Inc. In the 23rd precinct, the Board of Education provided the school building (to be used for rest rooms and recreational activities) and provided some volunteers to staff the van. In the 44th precinct, these services were provided by MOSAIC, which also served as a back-up site at those times that the van was out of service due to mechanical problems. Victim Services Agency provided a staff member from its Domestic Violence Prevention Program (DVPP) who worked in the van at least one day per week and served as "a liaison to resources." The Department of Health provided an injury prevention component for the 23rd precinct (prevention of accidents and violence); a safe corridor program, using "Safe Streets" funds; and other drug and crime prevention initiatives (e.g., McGruff). The Department of Youth Services, using money from the "Safe Streets, Safe Cities" program provided a youth counselor who (along with the precinct Youth Officer) conducted home visits three days each week and worked in the van two days per week. A drug counselor was available to make referrals to treatment (either from the van or a site in the community), and a youth outreach worker worked from the van, with the assistance of the CPO to identify kids with problems. The Citizens Committee provided training for volunteers, CPOs, and anyone else who staffed the van. In each of the seven patrol boroughs of New York City, the NYPD operates its Tactical Narcotics Teams (TNTs); TNT is a buy-and-bust street level narcotics enforcement program. TNT operates in areas identified as having a high degree of street- level narcotics dealing. Because TNT was designed to be a first step in reclaiming for the residents an area of drug dealing, TNT usually stays in a target area for 60 to 90 days and then returns to do periodic maintenance. According to a press release issued by the Mayor's Office (9/10/91), "To ensure the safety of volunteers and students in the area, . . . TNT will conduct drug sweeps before the resource centers are set up." Since this release was issued to announce the arrival of vans, TNT was not in the area prior to the start of the NRC. Rather, TNT operated in these areas around the time the INOP program began. A. Drug Prevention Activities Both the vans and the adjacent schools are patrolled by CPOs, who did not work inside the vans, but are available to provide drug prevention activities and referrals to treatment. There is also crime prevention and drug prevention literature inside the van. The Van. NYPD staff who designed the INOP project intended to park the van (in each precinct) in front of the school for 16 hours each day (although at the beginning of the project, it was there for just eight hours per day). During that time it was staffed by volunteers and the personnel provided by VSA, the Department of Health and the Department of Youth Services. At the end of each day, a designated police officer would disconnect the telephone and electrical services and drive the van back to the police parking lot. In addition to the services being provided inside the vans and in the school, the two-block radius around the van and school was designated a drug-free zone. The hope of project staff was that people in the community would see the vans as community resources, and not police resources. As a result, although the vans were painted the blue and white colors used by the NYPD and have the NYPD logo on them, they intentionally do not have "police" in the project name (Neighborhood Resource Center) painted on it, and police officers were not expected to staff them. However, because of problems obtaining volunteers, the NYPD assigned a police officer in each precinct to be the "coordinator" of the project. This officer delivers the van to the site each day and spends varying amounts of time, along with the volunteers, in the van. In a further effort to disassociate the van from the Police Department, police reports are not taken in the vans; rather, citizens are instructed to call the precinct or see the CPO outside. The Citizens Committee was interested in using the vans to identify residents who wanted to organize buildings and blocks to resist local drug dealers. To that end, the Citizens Committee was prepared to provide drug prevention training and services to community groups in the target areas, and has a history of helping groups work with the CPOs against specific drug locations. B. Law Enforcement Activities Unlike some of the other INOP programs, there was not a big law enforcement component to the New York INOP project. TNT had been in the 23rd precinct for some months prior to the start of the INOP project there, to reduce street-level drug dealing (however, it is possible that TNT would be in that area even in the absence of the INOP project). Once the van was in place, the CPOs patrolled the area around the van during the hours of its operation; although CPOs in New York City have fixed beats, responsibility for patrolling the area around the van were rotated among the CPOs in the unit. The expectation was that the CPOs would ensure the safety of citizens using the services in the van and volunteers staffing the van. They would also be available to take information about narcotics locations and conditions in the neighborhood. In addition, the telephone inside the van would enable volunteers and other staff to call the precinct to report crimes or for citizens to provide information they might have about criminal activity. III. Other Program Components A. Volunteers The volunteers were initially recruited through the schools, with the cooperation of the Board of Education. About 10 or 15 volunteers attended the initial training session (conducted by staff from the Citizens Committee) in June 1991. By the time the second session was held, however, the schools had closed for summer vacation and none of the original volunteers attended that session. Instead, there was a new group of volunteers (approximately 10) from the community. These volunteers expressed concerns about security within the van and about scheduling the hours that might be required to staff the van. The first training session was held in the 23rd precinct station house on June 18, 1991. The session was led by the Citizens Committee, and the agenda included an overview of the project, a discussion of the role of the volunteers, confidentiality, practice, and training and follow-up. The role of the volunteer was described as providing information and referrals. The importance of confidentiality was stressed. Volunteers who attended the June 18th meeting were told they would receive training in intake, developing community resources, maintaining confidentiality, entitlements, and interpersonal skills. Initial training was to begin on July 2 and involve five two-hour sessions. Also present at the initial session were staff from VSA, the Manhattan DA's office, the Department of Health, and command level police staff. The agenda for the July 2 training session included a five-minute overview of the project and a five-minute review of the previous session, followed by training on intake and paperwork and on developing community resources. Project forms were reviewed and volunteers were instructed on how to fill them out. Volunteers were also provided with a skeletal list of community resources (containing the telephone number of Community Boards and listing "elected officials, churches, multi-service centers, New York State Department of Substance Abuse Services, phone book, other service providers and community organizations, and word of mouth"). There was some concern expressed by CPOs and higher ranking officers from the NYPD that residents would be afraid to volunteer to serve in the van. According to the CPOs, local drug dealers have threatened residents that they would "kill them if they snitch," and some citizens are afraid that if they were seen going in the van, dealers would think it was to provide the police with information. If, in fact, the number of volunteers was insufficient, NYPD staff intended to use either Police Cadets or Auxiliary Police officers to staff the van. Neither the cadets nor the Auxiliary Police wear the uniforms of the NYPD; it was, therefore, hoped that they would not be seen as police officers. B. Interagency Partnerships The interagency partnerships included the NYPD, VSA, the Manhattan District Attorney's Office, the Department of Health, the Board of Education, MOSAIC (in the 44th precinct), and the Citizen's Committee. The police provided the vans and CPOs to patrol the area around the vans and to make referrals to the vans for services. Victim Services Agency provided referrals to its Domestic Violence Prevention Program (in the 23rd precinct only) and to other programs (e.g., shelters for battered women, legal services, etc.). The Manhattan DA's office educated volunteers regarding the criminal justice system so that they can provide this information to members of the community. The DA's office also runs a Domestic Violence Center, located in the New York State Office Building in Harlem. C. Community Outreach and Advertisements At the time of the Vera site visits, community outreach was limited to the volunteer recruitment efforts of the Board of Education and the Parent Teachers Association (PTA) in the schools. During July 1991, CPOs in the 23rd precinct distributed 7,000 copies of a letter (in English and Spanish), signed by the Commanding Officer of the 23rd precinct, describing the Neighborhood Police Services Project and inviting residents to serve as volunteers and/or to use the services provided in the van. (No date for project start-up was given in the letter.) Similar letters were distributed in the 44th precinct, signed by the Commanding Officer there. In addition, project staff expected local newspapers to donate advertising space (particularly in the local Spanish-language paper) and hoped that local churches would print information about the project in their bulletins. In the 44th precinct, information about the NRC also appeared in The Highbridge News (a newsletter published by MOSAIC). D. Local Evaluation NYPD staff had planned to conduct the local evaluation. They planned to use pre/post data provided by the NYPD (on crime complaints, arrests, drug-related activity, drug-related homicides, etc.); the Department of Health (on injuries in the target area, drug-related hospital admissions, children born addicted to drugs, etc.); the Board of Education (on school attendance and truancy rates), and from a community survey (administered by Police Cadets or college interns to 50 residents in each precinct within the target area and 50 residents outside the area). The community survey would measure residents' perceptions of quality-of-life changes, drug-related activity, police presence, and use of the van. In addition, NIJ operates its Drug Use Forecasting (DUF) in Manhattan (the borough in which the 23rd precinct is located) and those data would be available for the evaluation. The New York City Department of Youth Services would provide data on the number of youth contacts and referrals, youth involvement in INOP project-related recreational and educational activities and number of referrals to drug treatment programs. At the time of the last Vera site visit (in July, 1992), however, no work had been done on the evaluation. E. BJA Funds The bulk of BJA funds on the New York INOP grant was used to purchase the three vans. In addition, site preparation (e.g., telephone hook-up) and equipment for the vans (e.g., telephones, telephone usage, typewriters, etc.) was paid for out of grant funds. Jackets with a project patch were provided for the volunteers through BJA funds. There were also contracts with VSA to staff the van and with the Citizens Committee to provide training. IV. Expected Impacts The goals of the New York INOP project were to reduce crime, violence, and drug usage; increase school attendance; develop a network of services; increase resident involvement in their community; increase youth involvement in activities; increase community knowledge of resources and create a "Resource Directory"; and increase interagency cooperation. Reductions in crime, violence and drug usage would be produced first by the enforcement activities of TNT prior to the vans being in place, and then maintained by the activities of the INOP project (e.g., developing rapport with the community which might increase the likelihood of citizens providing the police with information on narcotics activity). According to one of the program planners, the mere presence of the van should have an impact on school attendance: ". . . And that's one of the logical things we can expect. The police station is going to be in front of their school. There's a good chance that more parents will encourage their children to go to school." The involvement of the youth officer and youth counselor was expected to increase youth involvement in recreational activities. This involvement in recreational activities and the referrals to drug treatment programs were expected to reduce drug usage among youth. In contrast to the expectations expressed by project planners, the CPOs from the 23rd precinct were less optimistic. While they indicated that they hoped the project would be successful, they were skeptical about its chances because of its reliance on the van and volunteers. The CPOs believed that many area residents would be afraid to volunteer to work in the van because of the threats of drug dealers and the fear of traveling home from the van at night. They expressed the belief that people in the neighborhood who might be willing to volunteer had neither the knowledge nor the skills to do the job, and would require extensive training. In addition, they felt that the people being tapped to be volunteers were those who already work for other programs and therefore would be unavailable to volunteer for the INOP project. The CPOs' recommendation was that auxiliary police officers (in plainclothes) be used to staff the van. In addition, the CPOs expressed their concern that, even if volunteers could be found, people in the area would be unlikely to use the services offered in the van. The reason, again, was fear. They said that, with the exception of a few "buffs," people who like cops and would like to be cops, people will not want to be seen going into the van. This, in turn, the CPOs feared would be a disincentive to the volunteers -- "if there are three or four volunteers in the van and only two or three people come in during the day to use its services, why should they stay?" The CPOs expressed the belief that the project could not possibly succeed in its efforts at drug demand reduction, that a drug-free zone in that area would be impossible unless "you have 50 cops around it, 24 hours a day." According to CPOs, they couldn't even keep the local branch of the Public Library drug- free. The dealers in the area will adjust their hours to avoid the police, but they will not leave. "These guys have no morals -- they deal right in front of the community center where old people go for meals." The local housing projects posed additional problems for drug demand reduction because (according to the CPOs) it was difficult to get cooperation from the Housing Police Department. HAYWARD I. The Hayward INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Hayward is a city of approximately 120,000 people that covers 39 square miles. The Hayward Police Department (HPD) employs 156 sworn officers. The target area for the Hayward INOP project was the entire city, although one area (Tennyson-Harder), with a pervasive drug problem, receives more attention than other areas of the city. The cornerstone of the INOP project was a large van, intended to be used as a mobile office and meeting space for community groups; however, at the time of the first Vera site visit (during the summer of 1991), this van had not yet been purchased. Community oriented policing is also new to Hayward. The City of Hayward Police Department unveiled its Community Oriented Policing and Problem Solving (COPPS) Implementation Plan in March, 1991, and the implementation process which is expected to take five years began on July 1, 1991 (just two weeks before the first Vera site visit). B. Community Policing in Hayward The introduction of community policing to Hayward can be attributed directly to the appointment of a new Chief of Police in January, 1990. In his former position in Santa Ana, California, the Chief was actively involved in the development and implementation of community policing, and he came to Hayward firmly convinced that community policing was a philosophy of policing that could more effectively address community concerns than could traditional policing strategies. Planning the COPPS program began in August 1990 and resulted in the COPPS Implementation Plan, dated March 1, 1991. The organizational structure of the police department was changed to accommodate community policing; the patrol function for the city was divided into three area commands, each managed by a lieutenant who functions as the "Chief of Police" for that area. The patrol staff are assigned to these areas and report to Watch Commanders for their particular shifts. All officers are expected to be community police officers and to meet the citizens on their beats. C. The INOP Target Area The target area for the Hayward INOP grant was the entire city, with BJA funds paying the salaries of one police officer and one Community Service Officer, and paying for the purchase of the van. Nearly half (approximately 45%) of the housing in Hayward is renter occupied, substantially higher than in the rest of the Bay Area. (The Tennyson-Harder area has the highest proportion of rental and Section 8 housing in the Bay Area.) Although nearly two-thirds of the residents of Hayward are white (65%), racial composition does not accurately describe the city's population. Hayward is characterized by tremendous ethnic diversity -- some 40 languages are spoken in the City, including Spanish, Korean, Farci, and Russian. According to INOP project planners, Hayward neighborhoods are not ethnically divided; that is, people from these diverse cultures live side-by-side throughout Hayward. Many people are poor (39% of the households were classified as lower income in 1980), and the city lags behind the rest of Alameda county in education (71% of the adults in Hayward have high school diplomas as compared to 77% in the county as a whole). The major problem in the area, identified by community leaders, is drugs. D. Project Goals and Objectives Three major goals for the INOP project were articulated in Hayward's proposal to BJA: 1. Increase community participation and responsibility for neighborhood problem solving; 2. Increase the public's safety in neighborhoods by reducing the level of drug abuse and trafficking through exposure to law enforcement and community programs; and 3. Facilitate and support the efforts of community-based service organizations in their neighborhood drug reduction and problem solving efforts. To attain each of these goals, several more specific objectives were enumerated and associated activities were described. Some of these are dependent upon acquisition of the van which had not been ready for use until the final Vera site visit in 1992. Even at that time, the van had been on the street for only one day. Other activities began prior to the official start of the COPPS program (7/1/91). II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention Activities The Van. The van, or Neighborhood Access Vehicle, is the cornerstone of the INOP project in Hayward. According to HPD staff, the van is to be a "moving storefront," containing brochures and other information about available services, serving as a consolidated source of referral information. It also contains meeting space that is available to community-based organizations and treatment programs to use for referral counseling. The van also is expected to enhance the relationship between the community and the police by making the police more accessible to the community. This would enable citizens to make crime complaints and requests for service without having to visit the HPD. At the same time, the van could be used to provide high visibility and a police presence in problem areas. Increase Community Participation. One of the approaches to increasing community participation in problem solving was to form (25) new Neighborhood Alert groups. According to INOP project planners, Neighborhood Alert has been ongoing in Hayward since the early 1970s, and there are some 132 listed Block Captains, 66 of whom are active (although there may be only 20 groups that meet regularly). While the files kept by the officer contain log sheets indicating that 22 Neighborhood Alert meetings had been held between November 1990 (the start of the BJA grant) and the time of the implementation site visit in July, 1991, it was not possible to tell which of these (if any) were new groups. On average, 14 people attended each meeting (six to 64 people had signed each log). Neighborhood Alert groups were encouraged by the Community Service Officer to purchase (for $20 each) and have the city erect "No Drugs Allowed" signs in their neighborhoods. At the time of the Vera site visit, eight requests for these signs had been received since March 1991. Some members of the HPD indicated that the police found it somewhat difficult to interact with the Afghan community. This was attributed only partially to the language barrier; although none of the officers speak Farci, they felt that other cultural barriers posed a bigger problem. Both the police and an Afghan community leader cited cultural differences in the definition of spouse or child abuse. In Afghanistan, for example, wife-beating is an accepted practice. Similarly, it is common "back home" to settle disputes with neighbors without involving the police, through acts of retribution. The first order of business with the Afghan community, therefore, was introducing them to the police and explaining how to deal with domestic disputes and problems in the neighborhood. According to a leader from the community, a police officer contacted her in an effort to involve the Afghan community. Beat Health Abatement. Even prior to the COPPS program, Hayward had a Beat Health Team consisting of representatives from the Fire Department, Buildings Department, Community Preservation, City Attorney's Office, Police Department, Vector Control (deals with rodents), Pacific Gas and Electric Loss Prevention and the Department of Public Works. There are no established meeting dates and a police sergeant coordinates the team. Although this team had been in existence since 1989, according to one of the project planners, the INOP project helped mobilize it and solidify relationships among the agencies involved. Juvenile Diversion. Juveniles arrested for certain first- time drug offenses are eligible for diversion to Project Eden and project planners envisioned diverting 50 percent of those eligible. According to project files, between September 26, 1990 and March 27, 1991, eight such diversions were made. B. Law Enforcement Activities The project planners intend to staff the Neighborhood Access Vehicle with the police officer and Community Service Officer for 1500 hours per year, and use it to provide a highly visible police presence in various neighborhoods. The procurement of this van took a long time; therefore, as of the final Vera site visit to Hayward in June, 1992, the van had made only one appearance on the street. Another stated objective of the INOP project was to have the administrative/supervisory staff of the Youth and Family Services Bureau (YFSB) of the HPD meet with the principals of all 10 high schools and intermediate schools in the district annually to discuss and plan for appropriate on-campus drug enforcement activities. Project files contained a list of participants from the August 1990 (prior to the start of the project) "School Kick Off" luncheon and memoranda describing the purpose of the luncheon. There were approximately 120 representatives of the Hayward Unified School District, HPD, Project Eden (a drug education and counseling program), the Alameda County Juvenile Court, the Alameda County Juvenile Probation Department, and Moreau High School in attendance. According to materials in the files, the purpose of the luncheon was to "introduce and facilitate communication between the administrative staff of the School District, the School Resource Officers, the DARE instructors, Probation Officers, Project Eden, the Probation Department and the Juvenile Court." Until the COPPS plan was implemented in July, 1991, the HPD had a Tactical Narcotics Team (TNT) which was responsible for "breaking the drug dealer to drug buyer relationship." TNT accomplished this by arresting drug users (for possession and being under the influence) and by arresting drug dealers through buy-and-bust operations. Between the time the INOP grant was funded (November 1990) and the time the TNT unit was disbanded (7/1/91), monthly statistics of the number of TNT school sweeps, drug influence arrests, and buy-and-bust arrests were maintained. After July 1, 1991, the TNT activities continued, but rather than being "permanently" staffed by narcotics officers, any police officer who was available on a given night might be drafted for a "TNT" detail. III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training During March and April of 1991, COPPS training sessions were held for police supervisors and officers. Every Police Department employee received 40 hours of community policing training, taught by police personnel who had been involved in the COPPS planning. In addition to police department training on community policing, the Building Inspection Department, Community Preservation Department, City Attorney's Office, Department of Public Works and Planning Department each presented modules designed "to increase our officers' understanding of the usefulness of citywide resources and how city departments can work with each other to solve community problems." During late May, 1991, a one hour introductory training session was provided to Block Captains (of Neighborhood Alert groups), followed in late June with an hour on civil abatement procedures. Subsequently, four additional hour-long training sessions were held to deal with problem-solving strategies, an overview of symptoms of drug use, a display of drugs and drug paraphernalia, and drugs and youth. Using a curriculum developed in San Jose, the HPD planned to work with the Eden Council for Hope and Opportunity (ECHO Housing) to provide training to rental unit managers. The purpose of this training was to teach managers how to identify drug trafficking and abuse and to inform them of their rights and responsibilities. Using the Landlord Training manual developed for the city of Portland (by John Campbell Resources) as a guide, the INOP officer and the City Attorney's Office drafted a Landlord Training program for Hayward. Adaptation of the program for Hayward required amendments to fit the rental laws of that city. B. Interagency Partnerships Another task for the INOP officer was to develop a comprehensive information and referral resource document to facilitate citizen referrals. A Resource Guide was produced by the HPD, dated April 1991, which lists federal, state and county agencies; city offices; courts; hospitals; human services; public safety/investigative agencies and schools. The INOP officer was responsible for dissemination of this Guide. An additional guide to alcoholism, drug abuse and family support resources is now available for police officers to use when making referrals. A graffiti hotline (29-ERASE) was set up and went on-line on July 9, 1991. The purpose of this hotline was to allow citizens to report the presence of graffiti for rapid removal by City paint crews. The existence of this hotline was advertised in the July 1991 Neighborhood Alert bulletin (as well as in subsequent issues). C. Community Outreach and Advertisements Neighborhood Alert Block Captains have the greatest degree of interaction with the police. In addition to their local Neighborhood Alert meetings, the Block Captains attend monthly meetings held at the Hayward Police Department. According to interviewed Block Captains, the meetings at the HPD were attended regularly by 10 to 20 people. D. Local Evaluation An evaluation of the COPPS program as a whole is being conducted by the HPD, coordinated by a sergeant. This evaluation includes performance evaluation of HPD personnel and a community survey to be conducted annually for five years. At the time of the Vera implementation site visit, the development of parameters for performance evaluation was in its infancy. But data collection for the first community survey was well underway. The survey was constructed, in consultation with the Chief of Police, by an outside contractor associated with the University of California, Hayward, who also selected a random sample of all Hayward residents. The original plan was to use volunteers to do the door-to-door administration of the survey. Thirty volunteers were recruited, but their interest soon waned when they discovered how difficult it is to get respondents to cooperate. As a result, police personnel administered the survey. A total of 833 interviews were completed. Data collection began in late June 1991 and was completed in July; the contractor who designed the survey analyzed the data and produced a report on the results. E. BJA Funds The official start of the INOP grant, i.e., the time the funds were released by BJA, was November 1, 1990; however, the Hayward INOP project did not begin until January 1, 1991. BJA funds were used to buy the van and pay the salaries of one police officer and one Community Service Officer. In addition, these funds allowed the Department to leverage other resources: community partnerships with COMPRE, the South Hayward Parish, the Apartment Owners Association, the school district and an enhanced relationship with Project Eden. According to project planners, the BJA grant focused efforts at the community level sooner than would otherwise have occurred. IV. Expected Impacts According to the proposal submitted by Hayward to BJA, the most immediate impact of the project would be that of the van, which is expected to increase the visibility, accessibility and the dissemination of information. Aggressive street-level enforcement in neighborhoods plagued by drug trafficking is expected to lead to an increased number of narcotics arrests; the ability of officers to make such arrests is expected to be enhanced by improved relationships with the people of the community. Over the longer term, drug arrests are expected to decrease as a result of prevention efforts initiated under the project. The Beat Health programs, modeled after Oakland's Beat Health Program are expected to improve the appearance of these neighborhoods, and Neighborhood Alert groups are expected to play a active role in improving lighting, reporting graffiti (using the hotline established as part of the project), and other environmental issues. The availability of referral and counseling for drug problems (through the Neighborhood Access Vehicle) is expected to reduce the demand for drugs in the area. PORTLAND I. The Portland INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Portland, Oregon is a city of 145 square miles and approximately 418,000 people. The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) currently employs 1,100 people -- 850 of them are sworn officers. At the time of the Vera Institute's first site visit to Portland in July, 1991, the Portland Police Bureau's "Iris Court" INOP demonstration project had opened the "Iris Court Community Policing Contact Office"; assigned two police officers to the Iris Court "Neighborhood Response Team"; completed the recruitment and training of a civilian project coordinator and community health nurse; completed a survey of Iris Court residents and police officers in the North Precinct; established a residents' council and tenant association to aid in problem identification and problem-solving; and established partnerships with a number of city, county, state and private non-profit agencies in an effort to coordinate the delivery of social services to the residents of Iris Court. B. Community Policing In Portland By the time it had received its INOP grant, the Portland Police Bureau had completed its first year of a five-year community policing transition plan. The transition to community policing began in May-June, 1989, when a series of five community meetings were held to introduce the concept of community policing to the residents of Portland and involve them in the problem-solving process. These meetings resulted in the creation of the Portland Police Bureau Community Policing Transition Plan which was later adopted by the Portland City Council in January, 1990. Year one of the transi- tion focused on building community-police partnerships; increasing community involvement in the problem-identification/solving process ("empowerment"); training officers in problem-solving strategies; and developing an overall management process for the transition to community policing. The first year of the transition also included implementing one community policing demonstration project in each of the city's three precincts. One of these initiatives is the INOP-funded Iris Court Community Policing Demonstration Project in Portland's Northeast precinct. The Police Bureau selected the Iris Court housing project as its INOP target area primarily because of its high levels of open air drug-dealing (especially crack cocaine), calls for service, and gang-related violence. Iris Court also appeared to be a good location for the demonstration project because it is a small community in which the police believed they could foster active resident participation in the project and reduce drug trafficking and drug-related crime with the resources available through the grant. The Iris Court project was based almost entirely on a four-year-old community policing effort at Columbia Villa (Portland's largest public housing development--1,600 residents at full occupancy) conducted by the Housing Authority of Portland (HAP) and the Multnomah County Sheriff. The Columbia Villa program was a response to high levels of drug trafficking, gang activity, and Portland's first drive-by drug-related shooting that left one dead and two wounded at the development. HAP utilized HUD Comprehensive Improvement Assistance Program funds to create a "Safety Action Team" for Columbia Villa. The Safety Action Team consisted of one Lieutenant, three Sheriff's deputies and two civilian community service officers (who do everything deputies do except carry firearms and make arrests). The Team is permanently assigned to the Villa; team members make their work hours coincide with the needs of the residents. Office space for the Team and for a number of social service providers (e.g., the State Employment Division and Adult and Family Services) was provided by HAP in the housing complex. The sheriff's deputies did not replace the Portland Police Bureau's normal patrol activity at the Villa, however. Rather, the city police continued to handle priority calls while the sheriff's team focused on problem-solving policing in an effort to keep problems (both crime and quality-of-life problems) from recurring. C. The Target Area: The Iris Court Housing Complex Iris Court is an entirely residential public housing project, owned and managed by the Housing Authority of Portland. Although the Portland Police Bureau refers to their INOP project as the "Iris Court Community Policing Demonstration Project," the target site includes the Iris Court development, Royal Rose development, Royal Rose Annex and Sumner Court developments. The two-story brick apartments are clustered around small courtyards with each block of apartments having its own play area for children. At the time of the research, the complex consisted of 108 units (54 family units at Iris Court and 54 family units at the Royal Rose, Royal Rose Annex, and Sumner Court developments), 85% of which were occupied by lower-income minority women with young children. The housing development as a whole was home to 159 people with 61 of the residents being children (all but seven of whom were younger than 13). About 85% of all adult residents were single women. The most recent figures supplied by the Police Bureau showed that 39 of the 43 occupied units in the Iris Court development are "single parent head of household" units. Twenty-nine (67%) of the units were occupied by minority residents. Twenty-three of the head of household residents (53%) had incomes of less than $5,000 per year and 16 (37%) had incomes between $5,000 and $9,999. Only five residents had wages as their source of income. Eighty-one percent of the residents relied on Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) as their major source of income. The Royal Rose, Royal Rose Annex, and Sumner Court developments also contain 54 housing units (49 occupied at the time of the research), reserved primarily for the elderly (only 9 units are occupied by persons under 50 years of age) and disabled (16 units). The residents of these housing developments had incomes that were generally lower than those residing at Iris Court. Thirty-five of the 49 resident heads of household (86%), for example, had incomes of less than $5,000 per year. Only 12 residents had incomes falling between $5,000 and $9,999. Sixty- one percent of the residents had social security as their primary source of income. The percentage of minority residents is somewhat lower in these developments than at Iris Court (60% vs. 67%). A Community Policing Problem Identification Survey conducted by the Housing Authority of Portland prior to the INOP grant project found that Iris Court residents included "the chronic poor; the undereducated; at-risk youth; young, single women with children; and people with special needs. A large number are drug dependent -- possibly as many as 50 percent." The survey also found that a majority of residents were "somewhat or very afraid" of criminal activity occurring in the housing development. The most frequently cited problems, according to respondents interviewed by Vera researchers during the first site visit, were open-air drug markets and gang-related violence. Respondents also complained of unauthorized visitors, often gang members, illegally living in the apartments of girlfriends who were residents of the housing development. It is within this context that the Portland Police Bureau has chosen to implement one of its first community policing demonstration projects. II. "Community Partnerships": The Iris Court Community Policing Demonstration Project A. Goals, Objectives and Strategy: Drug Demand Reduction The goals of the Iris Court project are to: (1) improve the quality of life and health of the 159 residents of Iris Court; (2) reduce the fear of crime; and (3) reduce the incidence of actual crime in the development. The Police Bureau believes that for any drug demand reduction strategy to be effective in the long term it must coordinate the delivery of law enforcement and social services into "a single service delivery network." The reasoning behind this strategy is that law enforcement alone cannot respond effectively to the drug problem. It is more effective, argue those involved in the planning and implementation of the project, if the police aid in facilitating the delivery of necessary social services to those who are most at-risk for drug abuse or those whose communities are plagued by drug trafficking. The PPB thus intended to achieve their project goals through: (1) Problem Solving Policing--interfering with those activities that make drug trafficking or use easy or attractive; (2) Empowerment--soliciting active citizen participation in the problem solving process; and (3) Creating Partnerships between proactive social service providers, the residents of Iris Court and the PPB. The Iris Court project consists of several interrelated components which focus on increasing public safety and the social, economic, educational, and physical/mental health of Iris Court residents: (1) a street enforcement/high-visibility patrol component; (2) a "Neighborhood Response Team" consisting of two uniformed patrol officers; (3) a civilian project coordinator; (4 ) a community health nurse; (5) a community policing contact office located in Iris Court; (6) community partnerships established with the residents of Iris Court and various social service providers from the city, county, state, and private organizations; (7) the use of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED); and (8) resident organizing and empowerment. The project was originally directed by the Metro Life Enhancement Team (MET) which was closely modeled after the "Safety Action Team" created for the Columbia Villa project (created by HAP and the Multnomah County sheriff) several years ago. The function of MET (coordinated by the PPB) was to form an interdisciplinary service delivery network which would work closely with the residents of Iris Court, local government agencies, businesses and schools to have a positive impact on drug use and other quality-of-life issues affecting the residents of the development. According to one key organizer of the MET group, "Their [MET's] function was to try to sit down and identify all of the various people and groups who might have a role in implementing the various action plans for the project." Unfortunately, according to key participants in the project, the structure and functioning of the MET team did not develop as expected. In particular, the MET group stopped meeting on a monthly basis (after "three or four" meetings off-site). As one participant explained: "I think people lost interest. Things were going well at Iris Court and, just like a lot of neighborhood groups, they are crisis driven, and if there is no crisis they move on to the next thing." A popular interpretation of the demise of regular MET meetings was that once the team had created a functioning service delivery network, and the project coordinator had been hired to coordinate delivery of those services to Iris Court residents, MET ceased to function. After the demise of MET, an implementation steering committee was created (made up of some of the MET members) to advise the group on an "as needed" basis. However, while acknowledging that MET had ceased to function, one member said, ". . . if there were some meat and potatoes issues to deal with, then they know where to find us, and we will come out when it is important to do so." B. Enforcement and the Neighborhood Response Team Enforcement. The Iris Court demonstration project did not emphasize law enforcement as a means to reducing drug demand. Its primary means to drug demand reduction lay in the coordination and provision of social services aimed at improving the quality-of-life for the residents of Iris Court in an effort to make drug use less attractive to at-risk youth. In this sense, it is unique among the eight INOP-funded demonstration projects. Prior to the INOP project "kick off" in July, 1990, the PPB targeted Iris Court for strong police presence and enforcement (February--May, 1990). One high-ranking officer associated with the project explained: ". . . there was quite a bit of law enforcement that took place within the complex itself simply because we felt like we had an obligation at the Police Bureau to prepare the people in the complex for this invasion of social service people. We had to impress on the [residents and social service providers] that it was a safe place to be . . . We served quite a lot of search warrants on drug houses and gang houses. The Housing Authority was very cooperative with evictions and that is why we had such a high vacancy rate at the time." One important aspect of the enforcement effort was the attempt (beginning in May 1990) to "stabilize occupant patterns" in the Iris Court development. The primary means of achieving this was through evictions and the enforcement of a trespass ordinance. Both the Housing Authority and Police Bureau reasoned that before residents of Iris Court would take advantage of the social service providers and the community contact office that would eventually be located in the development, they would have to feel safe. According to a Housing Authority official, one of the biggest problems at Iris Court had been "unauthorized guests" of single women using apartments to carry on illegal activities like drug trafficking. Most often, these men were gang members and the boyfriends of single women living in the development. A partial solution to the problem was the use of evictions of tenants who allowed non-tenants to live in their apartments (a violation of the HAP lease). Approximately 10 tenants were evicted during the stabilization effort. A second technique employed by the PPB and HAP was the use of a state criminal trespass ordinance to keep the complex free of non-residents intent on criminal activity. Under an agreement with HAP, police officers may act legally as "persons in charge" for the purpose of enforcing trespass laws upon Housing Authority Property (that is, private, common property) at Iris Court. Thus, when police officers have probable cause to believe that a non-resident has violated any criterion for exclusion from the Iris Court development, the officers are empowered to approach the non-resident and notify him/her of the violation. Officers then fill out an exclusion form detailing why the person is excluded from the property and provide the person with a map of the property that he/she is excluded from entering. Finally, the officers take a photograph of the person and attach it to a copy of the exclusion form (for the on-site manager). The officers then explain to the violator that he/she has the right to appeal the exclusion with a Trespass Control Officer (an HAP attorney) designated by the Housing Authority to process all trespass complaints. The criteria for exclusion from HAP housing developments include: making unreasonable noise; fighting; commission of criminal offenses; drug use or trafficking; destruction of property; littering; reckless driving; and engaging in gang activity including claiming gang membership or wearing clothing or tattoos unique to gang affiliation. Anyone who refuses to leave HAP property when requested to do so, or returns to the property after exclusion, may be arrested by the police under the criminal trespass ordinance. According to most respondents, the trespass enforcement was a particularly valuable tool (at least initially) in reducing fear and decreasing criminal activity in Iris Court because most of the criminal activity at the complex, they claimed, was carried out by non-residents. The constant harassment of non-residents who had made Iris Court their hang- out had, according to residents and police officers, made a substantial improvement in the quality of life at the development. As one officer involved in the trespass enforcement argued: " . . . it [trespass enforcement] made for a great police presence. There would be two or three [police] cars that would go in to target chronic non-residents or persons that we knew had been excluded . . . It [times for enforcement] varied and we wanted to give the impression that this procedure had some meat in it . . . In fact, there was one person who was arrested some 35 times on the property. . . . He was transported to jail every single day. . . . He would get a citation but he would go to jail also and be booked. The point there was to inconvenience all non-residents to the point where it would be unattractive to be back on the property that they would go elsewhere. HAP backed us up a great deal by signing all the complaints for trespass and they went after a lot of the residents who were housing excluded non- residents or letting them back on the property. So HAP was sending those residents notices that they were in violation of the lease . . . some complied, others did not and they were evicted by the Housing Authority. According to one commanding officer, 95 persons were excluded from the property in the first five months of enforcement. The Neighborhood Response Team. Two patrol officers from the North Precinct formed the "Neighborhood Response Team" (NRT) assigned to the Iris Court project. One of the officers was assigned in November, 1990, and the other in February, 1991. These officers made the housing complex a "priority" but did not spend their entire shift there. The officers worked the Iris Court complex every day from November, 1990 through February, 1991 and their duties included high visibility foot patrol in an effort to disrupt open-air drug markets and gang activity and a great deal of community outreach, particularly with young children. The NRT's primary role was community outreach and problem solving. The officers thus attended the regularly scheduled tenants' association meetings at Iris Court and took note of residents' complaints and concerns. They were also instrumental in the Iris Court residents' council that plans special events like the annual job/health fair and various activities for children in the complex. The officers also used (for about a half hour per day) the Police Bureau's "Contact Office" which is located in the housing complex. The contact office allowed the officers to interact with community residents who wished to register complaints or make specific concerns known to the police department. The NRT's proactive enforcement activities included the implementation of the trespass ordinance and general street-level drug enforcement. During their full-time assignment to Iris Court, however, the officers were freed from responsibility for answering 911 calls. According to respondents, the NRT officers received no particular training (other than instruction in the trespass ordinance from the Housing Authority) for their assignment to Iris Court. Because the Portland Police Bureau was only one year into their community policing transition plan at the start of the program, the officers had not received any general training in community policing prior to their assignment to Iris Court, but were selected on the basis of their demonstrated abilities in problem-solving and their ability to interact constructively with members of the community. C. The Project Coordinator Part of the Portland Police Bureau's INOP funds paid for a full-time, on-site project coordinator for the Iris Court project. The coordinator was hired in January, 1991 and has been working in the Iris Court development since February, 1991. The coordinator is a full-time civilian employee of the Police Bureau and works in the Community Policing Contact Office located at Iris Court. The primary function of the coordinator is to act as a link between the various service providers recruited by the Police Bureau (see, "Partnerships" below) and the residents of Iris Court. The coordinator's office conducted a survey in February, 1991 in an attempt to determine what services residents were interested in obtaining. The survey also provided the project with the opportunity to inform residents about programs available to them. The survey also asked residents if they were employed, how many children they had and their ages. Such information would allow the coordinator to supply service providers with a list of potential clients. Thus, from the survey, it was determined that many residents had children in the one-to-three year-old range. As the coordinator explained: I sort of see my role as a facilitator but I also strive to encourage service providers to get involved with the residents, especially from the standpoint of recruiting them. What I now try to do is provide the service providers with a list of people that meet their selection criteria. I'll give them a list and say, "Here's 20 people that have children from 1-3 years-old." That's the criteria for the "Great Start" parenting program. I and my staff will get with the Great Start people and do some canvassing and talk to residents about getting involved in the program. I try to encourage them to stay in contact with the residents who sign up for their programs . . . they need to identify one or two volunteers and use them as go-betweens with the other residents who have not signed up. Being one person, it's hard for me to recruit on a custom basis for all of the service providers. We try to do that as much as possible, but I try to get them involved in their own recruitment. In addition to his responsibility for linking service providers and residents, the project coordinator makes referrals and coordinated outreach activities. The coordinator is also responsible for maintaining records for the project and writing reports to document the project's progress. D. Community Health Nurse One of the most unusual aspects of the Iris Court project was its Community Health Nurse. The nurse, a specialist in chemical dependency, was hired in April, 1991 under a Police Bureau contract with the Multnomah County Health Division. She worked 32 hours per week (Monday through Thursday, 7:30 a.m.- 3:30 p.m.) at Iris Court exclusively in an effort to intervene in family health issues. The nurse's office was located on-site at the Iris Court Contact Office, but did home visits for the purposes of individual and family assessments and provided short- term care where appropriate. The nurse's primary focus was on the prevention of health problems among residents. Although people from the development came to her office for consultations or referrals, the nurse believed that the best way to care for the residents was through active outreach. She thus spent a portion of her day walking through the Iris Court complex and speaking to people informally about their health care needs. She did not do door-to-door canvassing because she had not found it to be an effective form of outreach. Instead, she employed creative outreach strategies that she had found to be more effective. For example, if she saw some older people sitting on their front porch, she would introduce herself and offer to take their blood pressure. She also targeted the children of the community for outreach and found that to be an effective mechanism for gaining access to their parents: . . . what has happened, in establishing rapport with the kids, is that I get to meet their parents. I believe that the outreach portion of my job is directly related to drug and alcohol demand reduc- tion. There are many ways to go with outreach, but I started with the kids because they are the ones that will be trying drugs if they have not already tried them. All these kids love bikes, and I began meeting them when I started fixing the kids' bikes for them. What has happened is that the parents have started coming out of their homes to thank me for fixing their kids' bikes. The nurse's outreach efforts also focused on referring residents to programs offered by other service providers. Her most common referrals were to the "Snack Attack" program, which teaches children and adults about good nutrition, and the "Women's Strength" classes for women's self-defense. Despite her specialty, the most common cases handled by the nurse were prenatal and post-partum care, and care of elderly patients with chronic health problems. During the research period, she had not handled any cases related to drug and alcohol abuse. She was, however, developing plans to bring drug and alcohol support groups like NA and AA on-site and was confident that residents would come to her with alcohol and drug-related problems when she had more time to establish trust and credibility. E. Human Service Partnerships The Portland Police Bureau believed that drug demand reduction at Iris Court could be accomplished best by providing necessary social services to the residents, and it was this emphasis on human services partnerships that made this project unique among the eight INOP-funded research sites. The Police Bureau believed that effective demand reduction strategies must provide both short-term effects and a foundation for long-term prevention by helping to alleviate some of the underlying social problems that make drug use attractive. Thus, by providing residents with on-site job placement assistance, a community health nurse to help with health-related problems, nutrition programs for parents and their children, and supervised activities for youth, the PPB believed that the quality of life would be improved to the point that drug use would not be a desirable or acceptable alternative. In short, the purpose of these social services is prevention. When asked about the project's emphasis on the provision of social services and health (e.g., the community health nurse, the "Snack Attack" nutrition programs for adults and children, and the Great Start prenatal program), one commanding officer argued: ". . we are trying to work through to the root causes of crime, and I guess we are convinced that if people are not in good health and have a good living environment that they can more easily say, . . . "I don't feel good. But if I can get some [drugs] it will make me feel good." . . . People are probably using drugs because they don't feel good about themselves. . . . if we can get young people healthy and provide them with a good quality of life . . . they won't need drugs. So in that sense we felt that the nurse was a real critical component." Thus, strengthening the overall quality of life through the provision of human services would make drug use less attractive. A number of service providers work with the project coordinator at Iris Court. The Oregon Employment Division provides a job placement assistance officer at the Iris Court contact office for 20 hours per week (the other half of her week was spent at Columbia Villa). The placement assistance officer instituted a "Job Club" for residents that monitors state job openings, helped with resume preparation and job applications, and networked with local employers to create jobs. Project Network is an intensive outpatient drug treatment program for pregnant substance abusers that worked closely with the Iris Court community health nurse who helped identify potential clients. Columbia Boys and Girls Clubs of North Portland provides structured activities for Iris Court children and teenagers. The Club runs a shuttle bus to transport children from Iris Court twice a week. The Oregon State University provides volunteers to conduct parenting education classes on-site at Iris Court. The goal of the program is to provide parents with skills necessary to make child-rearing decisions. Five parenting classes had been held at Iris Court and had been attended by five to seven parents. The Oregon State University adult food and nutrition program and "Snack Attack" food and nutrition classes for children also holds classes at Iris Court. The adult program teaches 13 basic lessons in food preparation, nutrition and shopping. Sixteen people had enrolled in the program and seven had graduated during the research. "Snack Attack" teaches the same lessons as the adult class through hands-on food preparation classes. During six different Snack Attack sessions, 96 children attended and 11 adult volunteers were trained. In addition to providing children with knowledge about good nutrition, the program hoped to foster increased self-esteem through positive group interaction and the development of practical skills. The Multnomah County Health Division supplied (under contract with the PPB) a community health nurse who served the residents of Iris Court exclusively (see "Community Health Nurse"). Albina Ministerial Alliance/Head Start runs the Amanti project for early drug prevention and intervention. The preschool Head Start program had served 17 children at their Iris Court Center. The Alliance also provides free child care services through the Head Start program. The Youth Gangs Program was recruited by the project coordinator to do gang outreach at Iris Court. Two outreach workers (one female, one male) worked with tenants on gang- related problems at Iris Court. A particular focus of the outreach workers was "empowering" young, single women who have children by gang members to break free of the influence of gang members who intimidated, threatened and abused them while illegally occupying Iris Court apartments. In July, 1990 the Iris Court project staff conducted a job-health fair. Various service providers were represented at booths arranged along the sidewalks of Iris Court and made information available to residents there. In addition to the service providers directly connected to the Iris Court project, 21 agencies committed staff to information booths for the event (e.g., the Red Cross, U.S. Navy Recruiting, the Sickle Cell Foundation). Community Partnerships. In addition to the human services partnerships created under the INOP grant, HAP and the Iris Court coordinator created a partnership with the residents of Iris Court. Through HAP and the project coordinator's outreach efforts, the Iris Court Resident's Council and Tenant's Association were formed in 1991. The council is composed of elected representatives who serve the interests of the residents of Iris Court and act as liaisons to the police department and the Iris Court demonstration project. The council publishes a monthly newsletter that contains a variety of information including articles prepared by the Iris Court project coordinator and police officers from the Neighborhood Response Team. F. Community Contact Office The Portland Police Bureau Community Contact office is located in the Iris Court development in an apartment donated by the Housing Authority. The primary purpose of the contact office, which opened in October, 1990, is "to establish closer ties between the police and the community." The contact office is not a "mini-precinct" that takes reports or houses full-time police officers; rather, its basic function is to provide social service referrals to the residents of Iris Court. At the time of the research, the contact office was staffed by two women who were placed through the Private Industry Council's Senior Citizen Employment Program. The Portland Police Bureau thus does not pay wages to these civilian employees. Though primarily a social service referral center, the contact office is used by PPB officers (particularly the NRT officers) as a "drop-in center" for afternoon and evening shift officers who needed to write reports or call the precinct. It also gives them a place to meet with tenants on an informal basis and provided a site for public workshops. The contact center also housed the community health nurse's office. G. Landlord Training The Landlord Training program is designed to teach owners and managers how to keep drug activity off their residential property and is considered by many to be one of the department's most successful community-oriented policing projects and a major component of the INOP project. Since the program was instituted in November, 1989, it has trained more than 3,000 landlords and property managers. The development, marketing and implementation of the program is done by Campbell Resources, a private consulting firm, through a contract with the city. The program recruits prospective landlords by accessing the county assessment and taxation database and selecting anyone who owns a residential property. Two-thirds of all trainees are "small" landlords having fewer than 10 units, according to 1990 data. Trainees are attracted to the course through three major sources of information--letters from the chief of police explaining the program (77%); "other" sources, such as property management associations (16%); and media exposure (7%). The training usually takes place over two consecutive week-nights or one Saturday session (five hours for the full course) and contains instruction in applicant screening procedures, signs of dishonest applicants, warning signs of drug activity, what to do if you discover a clandestine drug lab, how to work with the Police Bureau, and instruction on Section 8 housing. The program is available to all landlords or managers for a five-dollar fee to cover the costs of printing course materials. The training manual is a "plain English" overview of basic course content and presents all applicable laws and a listing of support organizations. III. Other Program Components A. Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design In June, 1990, the Iris Court project utilized Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED) as a component in its overall strategy to decrease drug demand. North Sumner Street, for example, had been used by drug dealers and gang members as a drive-through drug market, and drug deals were often carried out in parked cars along the street. In an attempt to reduce space for non-residents who might use N. Sumner Street for such purposes, parking was limited to one side of the street. In addition, N. Sumner Street was made a dead end by installing a barrier, thus making it a cul-de-sac. The barrier has helped reduce the drive through traffic by non-residents. Also, the basement laundry room, long a trouble spot because of drug dealing and thefts, was redesigned and opened in a ground-floor apartment in an effort to make those activities far more difficult. Finally, a newly paved basketball court provides youths from Iris Court a safe place to play (an effort to "encourage desirable behavior"). B. Evaluation The evaluation of the Iris Court project was done internally by the North Precinct command. The evaluation consisted of a pre- and post-survey questionnaire. The first survey was conducted in July, 1990 by volunteers organized by the Piedmont Neighborhood Association and resulted in 77 Iris Court residents being interviewed. The survey questions focused on levels of crime and fear of crime and asked residents about whether they knew where to find good health care in the area, whether they needed child care, and how they felt about police service in the area. In addition to the survey of residents at Iris Court, 61 officers from the North Precinct also participated in a pre/post survey in July 1990, and July, 1991. Officers were asked to assess the quality-of-life in the Iris Court complex, what they believed to be the most serious crime problem in the complex, how they felt about the people who live in Iris Court, and how they would feel about having a mini-precinct in Iris Court. C. Associated Technology The North Precinct used the Community Police Support Division computer system to determine changes in reported crimes for the Iris Court area before, during, and after the implementation of the Iris Court demonstration project. The statistics gathered include the number of Part I and II crimes in the area over the course of the year and more specific data, such as the number of gang-related offenses in the area. Data sources include reported crimes, calls for service and citizen drug house complaints received by the Drugs and Vice Division. The PPB also uses a desktop "Geographic Information System" (GIS) that allows computer mapping of the data sources mentioned above. With GIS, information is downloaded from the Police Bureau's mainframe (for reported crimes, or from tapes for the 911 system). The downloaded information is then subjected to a conversion program (Tralaine) that converts information to geo-coordinates for the GIS (Mapinfo). The benefit of the GIS system is that it allows the analyst to define specific geographic boundaries (e.g., like the streets that form the boundaries of the Iris Court complex) and request all reported crimes or calls for service that fall within those boundaries for a particular time period. Because it allows a map to be printed indi- cating the locations of events, the GIS system provides a visual representation of arrests, calls for service, reported crimes, etc., thus allowing the Bureau to produce hot-spot maps and plan future strategies as well as determine the effects of the Iris Court project. PRINCE GEORGE'S COUNTY I. The Prince George's County INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Prince George's County (PG), Maryland covers an area of nearly 500 square miles and has a total population of over 700,000 residents. The western end of the county, which is directly adjacent to some of the more troubled neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., shares many of the social problems of that city -- relatively high rates of poverty, drug abuse, violent crime and female-headed households. The eastern end, however, is decidedly rural and presents a marked contrast to the western end in density and demographic composition. There are six police districts in PG County, divided into ten separate patrol sectors. The site of the original PG County INOP project (the Community Oriented Policing Squad or COPS) was the G sector in District III, which has seven beats. In 1990, the PG County police force began a planned expansion of the force from approximately 1,000 sworn officers to approximately 1,400 sworn officers. The fiscal crisis of 1991, however, capped the expansion of the force at 1,230 sworn officers. A primary objective of Department commanders in the expansion of the force was to devote staff, for the first time, to continuous neighborhood-oriented, problem-solving policing. B. Community Policing in PG County On January 1, 1990, a new police chief, committed to the principles of community-oriented policing, was appointed to head the PG County Police Department. Then, the BJA Request for Proposals announcing the INOP program provided an opportunity for Department personnel to define ways to operationalize that interest. It represented a way to introduce a new approach to policing in a Department that had admittedly been very "traditional" until that time. Yet the Department did have some prior experience with problem-solving approaches. In 1985, an experimental problem-solving squad, the ACTION (Attacking Crime through Involvement of Neighborhoods) team, was formed to provide a permanent capacity for tactical responses to identified neighborhood problems at the request of District commanders. Although Department personnel reported that they had been impressed with the unit's problem-solving approach, they were concerned with the frequent mobility of the unit (referred to as "hopscotching"), particularly in response to high-volume drug locations. The ACTION team did not provide long-term attention to specific problem locations. In designing COPS, therefore, Department planners reported that they were particularly concerned with developing a "permanent, constant" presence in problem-ridden locations. Department planners sought accountability within the patrol squad for neighborhood conditions and a "continuing . . . relationship between operational line officers and average local residents." According to one Department planner, COPS officers would be "advocates for the community" in a project designed to "take regular street cops and tell them to apply management techniques that would normally be used at the administrative level." As originally conceived, the COPS officers -- a supervising sergeant and seven patrol officers, each assigned to one of seven beats within the G sector -- would function as a "sixth squad" within the sector, which is currently staffed by five rotating patrol squads, responsible for responding to calls for service. Although the "sixth squad" concept was eventually dropped, COPS officers were still expected to interact regularly with officers working on their beats from other squads; to exchange information about problems on the beat with other patrol officers, beat detectives and members of special units; to attend occasional roll calls of other squads; to help patrol officers, if possible, with selected calls for service in the beat; and to function as a general manager of problem-solving activities on their beats. In early February 1991, members of COPS established satellite offices in problem-ridden apartment complexes within their respective beats. Each squad member holds office hours in the satellite office for about ten hours a week. The schedule of office hours is posted; answering machines in each office are available to take messages in the absence of the officer (squad officers also carry pagers). Offices are stocked with brochures for both children and adults on drug prevention, crime prevention and available local services. The officer's presence within the complex itself was expected to reduce the residents' fears, increase police visibility within the complex and provide an accessible role model for neighborhood children. In addition to their regular office hours, squad members are expected to conduct foot, motor and scooter patrols; to conduct home visits and home surveys in selected areas within the beat; to organize and oversee Neighborhood and Business Watch groups; to attend community meetings, marches, rallies, festivals and parades; to conduct crime prevention counseling in residences and commercial locations; to establish and meet regularly with "mini- planning committees" drawn from their respective beats; and to provide service referrals for neighborhood residents. In the course of conducting these various activities, squad members also gather information about neighborhood problems and conditions. Squad members, all of whom have been trained in problem-solving techniques, are also expected to identify and address neighborhood problems, known within the squad as SARAs (Scanning, Analysis, Response and Assessment) and based on Herman Goldstein's (1990) four-stage problem-solving process. They were also expected to document the nature of each SARA on their beats and the actions taken to address it. In the early days of the unit, each squad member created a beat profile, providing descriptive information about the beat. After beat profiles had been developed, squad members were expected to complete Beat Conditions Reports on a monthly basis. These reports outline identified problems (crime reports and calls-for-service patterns, drug activity, environmental conditions and social conditions); describe activities related to community organization and community involvements; and provide information about neighborhood canvassing, crime prevention activities, meetings attended, service referrals, law enforcement activities, departmental interaction and roll calls attended. Documentation of the SARA's addressed by each squad member is appended to the report, along with letters from community leaders. C. The Target Area District III in PG county is known within the Department as a "line" district -- that is, it is one of three districts (containing six sectors) that share a border with Washington, DC. The District shares a number of the problems that characterize troubled areas in Washington, DC -- drug trafficking, drug- related violence, prostitution and poverty. According to a command level staff member, in spite of the suburban character of much of the county, in District III, "This is big city policing." District III is more densely populated than the rest of the county. It comprises only six percent of the total area of the county (29.5 square miles), although it accounts for roughly 18 percent of the county's population (131,384). The COPS target area, the G sector (one of two sectors within District III) constitutes less than half the land area in the district (42%, 12.5 square miles) and houses less than half the District's population (41%, 55,000). There are a number of townships within the sector, although only four (Fairmount Heights, Glenarden, Seat Pleasant and Capital Heights) are fully incorporated municipalities with separate police departments. These departments employ from two to ten officers each. Service calls are dispatched to these departments through the county's computerized area dispatch system (CAD). In the past ten years, the demographic composition of the county has changed dramatically, from 46 percent black in 1980 to 65 percent black in 1990. The proportion of black residents in the target area, however, is substantially higher than in the rest of the county. In June 1992, a New York Times Magazine article described PG County as an up-and-coming area, populated by a high percentage of African-American professionals. While this may be an apt description of the county as a whole, it does not describe the INOP target area. In addition, residents in this part of the county are less likely to be professionals. According to Departmental data, at the start of the COPS program, the G sector (which is one of ten in the county) accounted for a disproportionate number of drug arrests (41%), drug-related calls (33%), and homicides (22%). Open-air and apartment-based drug dealing were common. Although there are three large industrial parks and several shopping malls within the sector, the area is primarily residential. Neighborhoods characterized by tracts of privately owned, single-family houses are adjacent to multi-family housing complexes, heavily populated with families who are dependent on Section 8 housing subsidies and public assistance. COPS officers characterize the residents of these housing complexes as highly transient. Drug trafficking and abuse, loitering, trespassing in housing complexes, street violence and street crimes were commonly cited community problems, according to COPS officers. In addition, several area bars and convenience stores were widely recognized as problem spots by both the police and the community. Other identified neighborhood problems included abandoned houses, underlit parks, the lack of recreational facilities for area youth, the lack of appropriate male role models for youth, trash dumping sites, abandoned cars, inadequate fencing, domestic violence, black-on-black crime and prostitution. Although there are a few recognized heroin spots in District III, the drug problem has been shaped largely by the expansion in recent years of the crack cocaine market. Open-air drug markets are evident in apartment complexes and residential areas throughout the county. District officers are especially concerned about the periodic emergence of Jamaican drug posses from New York City as significant figures in local drug trafficking. II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention COPS officers are involved in a wide variety of drug prevention activities. Several officers actively recruited local youth (14-25 years old) to join the Explorers program, a police- run uniformed troop, loosely modeled on the Boy Scouts; designed to promote a positive interaction between youth and police officers; provide positive role models for youth and help them develop alternatives to drug involvement. According to one COPS officer, quoted in a local newspaper, because of active recruiting by COPS staff, "All of the kids in my [Explorer] Post come from areas that are having a lot of [drug] problems." Explorers meet as a group on a regular basis at the police station. They participate in public service projects at least every two weeks, tutor other young people and distribute anti-drug literature. COPS officers also take part in a male mentoring program, generally catering to pre-adolescent and adolescent boys. This program is also designed to provide positive male role models and develop alternative activities for neighborhood youngsters. The satellite offices provide a center for the dissemination of literature and flyers on drug abuse, prevention and treatment. COPS officers attend DARE programs in local schools. COPS officers participate actively in organizing community anti-drug marches, rallies and festivals, and work actively with Neighborhood Watch groups to encourage such activities in their beats. Some officers have organized citizen groups that maintain an evening presence at the entrances and exits of housing complexes to "keep an eye" on the traffic moving through the complex and, in essence, reclaim the area for residents. COPS officers are trained to advise apartment complex residents about Maryland's FIST (Families Insisting upon Safe Tenancies) programs. Apartment complexes participating in FIST require tenants to sign riders to their leases permitting eviction if a preponderance of evidence points to the incidence of drug trafficking or unlicensed guns in the apartment. According to a representative of FIST, the program is designed "to heighten the awareness of landlords and tenants," to increase the ability to get rapid evictions of troublesome tenants and to promote "zero tolerance" within drug-ridden apartment complexes. COPS officers are encouraged to refer drug abusers within their beats to treatment facilities and to provide information about AA and NA meetings. Monthly Beat Conditions Reports document the number of such referrals by individual officers. B. Law Enforcement Activities The COPS program employs a variety of enforcement techniques in its drug demand reduction efforts. By building community contacts and developing information sources throughout the beat, each COPS officer develops detailed, specific information about narcotics locations. Some of this information is passed directly to the Narcotics Enforcement Division (NED); Beat Condition Reports document drug arrests made by other units based on COPS information. In other instances, COPS officers work directly with the NED or the ACTION team in efforts to close down drug locations. They also respond regularly to drug calls on their beats and establish a visible presence at known drug locations on their beats. Another tactic used by COPS involves traffic checkpoints, conducted in concert with the ACTION team, at the entrances and exits of apartment complexes that are known for drug activity. All cars entering or exiting the area are stopped and licenses and registrations are checked. This activity establishes a short-term, intense police presence designed to deter drug dealers in the complex who drive in from other areas. COPS officers are also actively involved in exploring avenues of civil enforcement. COPS officers regularly investigate abandoned houses that are being used as drug locations and make efforts to have those houses sealed up by either the owners or the county (at the expense of the owner) or, in some instances, demolished. They actively enforce loitering and trespassing provisions within housing complexes and have been exploring methods of enhancing eviction powers to combat drug dealing within those complexes. III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training In early January 1991, PG Department commanders sent a memo throughout the Department describing community policing and asking for volunteers. Fourteen volunteers responded to this notice, and seven were selected to serve in the COPS unit. The initial response to the request for volunteers was recognized within the District as relatively meager. Some COPS officers acknowledged that they were strongly urged to volunteer. The fourteen original volunteers were trained in community policing between January 7 and January 25, 1991. Initial training was provided by the Department, which adapted the ACTION Team training component for the COPS unit, with the assistance of an FBI unit familiar with the theory and practice of community policing. The initial COPS training provided introductions to various county agencies expected to be instrumental to the project (Public Works, the Department of Environmental Resources or DER, the Liquor Board, the County Attorney and the Health Department). COPS officers also received FBI training in community policing, training in civil citations, drug investigations training, and training in officer safety (driving, survival skills and the use of firearms). Training continued on a regular basis even after COPS became operational. In February 1991, all officers on the squad began reading sections of Herman Goldstein's (1990) Problem-Oriented Policing and discussing those readings in weekly squad meetings. At the end of February, all COPS officers went to Newport News, Virginia, to examine the community policing initiative there. In addition, training has continued at weekly squad meetings, which bring together the whole squad, including the Sergeant and supervising Captain, with various guest lecturers. The squad as a whole also received additional training in April on Beat Condition Reports. All squad officers also attended a week-long motorcycle training in preparation for scooter patrol. In April 1991, COPS officers received two days of training by the Police Executive Research Foundation, along with additional PGPD supervisors and members of other units (approximately 40 officers attended). The PERF training was conducted off-site and covered the history of 20th century policing, the nature of traditional police responses, the problem-oriented approach to policing, illustrations of SARAs from other jurisdictions and workshops on addressing and resolving community problems. The PERF training has been supplemented by on-going technical assistance throughout the course of the project. B. Community and Agency Partnerships The COPS Planning Committee. In early January 1991, COPS supervisors sent letters to selected County and private service organizations and members of the Department's Citizen's Advisory Council describing community policing and asking for representatives for the COPS Planning Committee, an advisory group set up to review COPS strategies and to provide inter- agency and community support. By early February, the members of that committee had been selected. The project Planning Committee includes four community representatives (a City Council member; the president of a Recreation Council, the president of a local non-profit youth services corporation and an employee of a large property management company with multiple sites in the target area). It also includes five agency liaisons, representing DER, the Health Department, Child Protective Services, the Department of Public Works and the Apartment and Office Building Association. The agency liaisons were expected to be a central component in developing solutions to community problems. PGPD command staff felt that relying on informal, "bottom-up" relationships which officers developed with agency people would be a mistake: We had a couple of police officers who could get things done through people they know. I didn't want that kind of relationship because I felt that we didn't want to have an informal relationship where you could call Joe and get something done, because what about the next guy that comes along, how about the guy that doesn't know Joe? We wanted a formal relationship where it would get done because it was community policing, and you have to do it when community policing calls. Yet District command staff, along with COPS officers, continued to be frustrated about the nature of inter-agency responses even after the Planning Committee had been established. As one commander put it: ". . . our impression of the program was [that] when I make a phone call to my contact person in public works, they see to it that it's done. My obligation to get it done is to contact the person who does it, and he handles it from there. And I think it took us a long time to realize that we had to change not only our way of thinking but we had to change the way that government, and the services of government, think." Because COPS officers continued to be frustrated by perceived delay in the response of other agencies, in July 1991, the County Executive held a meeting with all agency heads in PG County, featuring a "symbolic cutting of red tape." At that meeting, the County Executive insisted that requests from COPS officers be given priority treatment, as if the requests were from the office of the County Executive himself. District commanders later expanded the Planning Committee to include representatives of other agencies that might contribute to the COPS initiative (e.g., the State Attorney's Office). Although it took about a year to work out a good meeting schedule, by the time of the final research site visit, committee members were happy with meeting bi-monthly. Also, prior to each meeting, an agenda is prepared so members know what to expect. Mini-Planning Committees. Each COPS officer also developed a mini-planning committee to provide advice and support for problem-solving strategies on particular beats. The nature of these committees varies according to the individual beat. Mini- planning committees include area businessmen, political leaders, school representatives, tenant representatives, clergymen, etc. These committees meet on a monthly basis and provide an opportunity for area residents to bring issues to the attention of the officer, for group brainstorming about approaches to short-term problems and long-term issues. They also provide officers with a community workgroup of involved community residents. Other Partnerships. COPS officers work closely with various other groups on their beats -- church groups, members of Neighborhood Watch and Business Watch, and tenant organizations in the apartment complexes where their satellite offices are located. The nature of these organizations varies greatly from beat to beat. One officer organized a Business Watch in an industrial park housing several Fortune 500 companies that were concerned about security in their common parking lot. Another officer works closely with the owners of Mom-and-Pop stores troubled by persistent loitering and drug sales near their premises. COPS officers interact with municipal officials in the various townships on their beats. In some instances, such officials have been included on mini-planning committees, a tactic which can help defuse potential town-county rivalries. In addition, COPS supervisors have been approached by directors of the Interfaith Action Committee (IAC), a consortium of 43 local churches interested in expanding community policing throughout the county. During the first year of the COPS project, IAC established one satellite COPS office within the H sector in District III. The COPS officer working in H sector participated in G sector training, supervision and weekly staff meetings. C. Outreach and Advertising The COPS initiative has been the subject of several articles in local newspapers. These include an article about the formal opening of the satellite offices in housing complexes, an article about the resurgence of the Explorers Post in the County and an article describing one COPS officer's daily activity. The COPS officers themselves have engaged in extensive outreach on their beats. Satellite offices are marked by signs that officially designate the presence of a police substation. The satellite offices are outreach centers, containing flyers about community events and the COPS program, along with crime and drug prevention literature. COPS officers also attend a wide array of community meetings and events where they make presentations about the program. Officers spend some of their time conducting home visits, designed to gather information about perceived problems in a specific location. In the course of conducting an informal home survey, officers go door-to-door on a particular block, introduce themselves to residents and provide information about COPS and other relevant services. D. Volunteers Although the COPS program does not rely heavily on volunteers, individual officers occasionally use volunteers (e.g., they call upon church groups in organizing a barbecue for National Night Out or solicit free materials from a business for a neighborhood clean up). In addition, they draw upon the Explorer's group as needed to help organize community events. E. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) In preparing their Beat Condition Reports, COPS officers are expected to analyze trends in calls for service and crime reports for their beats. To facilitate this process, and avoid the delays inherent in relying upon the Department's Crime Analysis Unit, training was provided for all COPS officers in how to perform crime analysis functions. By the second year of the project, COPS officers had access to a computer terminal in the District office and were able to retrieve beat-specific data. F. Local Evaluation The evaluation of the project was conducted by PERF staff, who have also been involved in providing training and technical assistance for the project. Although the evaluation examined routine pre/post data on calls for service and crime reports, the primary focus of the impact evaluation was on the COPS response to problems within individual beats. Thus, the process evaluation, describing the implementation of the COPS initiative, will be closely linked to the impact evaluation, which will provide a qualitative assessment of the program's effect on identified problems in the various beats. G. BJA Funds The primary expenditure for the COPS program under the INOP grant (approximately $200,000) involved establishing and furnishing the satellite offices. Project funds paid for computer equipment, answering machines, pager rental fees, office furniture and supplies, printing expenses and utilities. In addition, project funds covered the PERF contract for evaluation, motorcycles for scooter patrol and travel expenses. A small propor- tion of project funds subsidized staff salaries. IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects According to one project planner, COPS officers serve as Beat Condition Managers whose primary goal is to "turn things around in [their] neighborhood." To do so, it is expected that COPS officers will respond effectively to identified problems on their beats; reduce the fear of crime, particularly within the apartment complexes where their satellite offices are located; and improve police-community relations. B. Departmental Effects Expanding COPS. Command personnel in PG County had expressed substantial interest in beginning community-oriented policing before the BJA program was announced. According to one project planner, however, "the grant allowed us to do what [the Chief] wanted to do." While PGPD expressed a commitment to expanding the COPS model into other Districts, there was some concern about how readily this model could be adapted to the more rural, less dense western Districts in the county. By the final site visit, community policing had been expanded into other Districts, but not as a "team." Rather, a single community police officer was assigned to each expansion District. Improved Intra-Departmental Communication. If COPS officers are to function effectively as "beat condition managers," it is important that they interact readily with the regular squad officers who work on their beats. COPS officers often need the cooperation of squad officers in addressing neighborhood problems (e.g., establishing a visible patrol presence in known loitering spots). Squad officers interviewed during the implementation site visit reported that there had been some resentment of the squad early in the program, but that the personalities of the individual COPS officers had helped to "override that resentment." Similarly, COPS officers often require the cooperation of other units (NED, Crime Analysis) in identifying and addressing neighborhood problems. These relationships can be problematic for COPS officers. For example, because of delays in getting information from the Crime Analysis Unit, training was provided for COPS officers in crime analysis techniques; in addition, in the second year of INOP funding, support was obtained for a statistical officer to provide enhanced crime analysis (e.g., geo-mapping techniques) for the unit. One COPS officer reported that it was sometimes difficult to engage the Narcotics Division in investigations on his beat. According to this officer, NED gets so many tips that, "I gotta make mine more attractive." He tries to do so by providing very detailed, documented information to NED about specific locations; he believes that the COPS program has enhanced his ability to receive and pass on such information to NED. Improved Partnerships. According to one member of the project Planning Committee, COPS officers provide a valuable link between community groups and county officials. For example, by feeding information to COPS officers about narcotics activity within apartment complexes, apartment managers can try to expedite evictions, based on the arrests of known drug traffickers within the apartment complex. Similarly, by passing on information about drug activity in abandoned houses to DER, COPS officers attempt to address narcotics problems by having these locations either boarded up or torn down. HOUSTON I. The Houston INOP Project and the Target Areas A. Introduction Houston, Texas is a city of roughly 1,700,000 people occupying more than 700 square miles. The work-day population of Houston is said to be to over 2 million. The Houston Police Department (HPD) employs 3,950 sworn officers and 1,550 civilians. By the time of the first Vera site visit to Houston in August 1991, the Houston Police Department's INOP-funded "Operation Siege" project had implemented a Zero Tolerance enforcement detail in both target areas; formed a Cantina Squad focusing on quality-of-life problems associated with local bars in one of the two target areas; enlisted the aid of the department's Tactical Response Unit, which conducts regular street-level buy-and-bust narcotics and prostitution enforcement; formed a special warrant squad to apprehend wanted persons in one of the target areas; conducted a number of neighborhood clean-ups targeting vacant lots in both areas; helped to form a new community association in one target area; developed liaisons in a number of key city and county agencies; identified a group of private sector volunteers willing to help repair the homes of senior citizens and install target hardening hardware; and conducted approximately 200 home security surveys in both areas. Two planned project components had not been implemented at the time of the first site visit. Due to a delay in the release of BJA grant funds from the City of Houston, the target hardening component of Operation Siege had not begun. Home surveys designed to identify houses eligible for target hardening continued, however, as did the estimation of target-hardening costs for those houses deemed eligible. B. Neighborhood-Oriented Policing (NOP) in Houston Neighborhood-oriented, problem-solving policing has a relatively long history in Houston, beginning as early as 1982 with the appointment of Lee P. Brown as Chief of Police. Chief Brown's efforts at transforming the Houston Police Department from a traditional law enforcement agency into a neighborhood- oriented police department are well-documented in the community policing literature, which often cites Houston to emphasize the need for a broad change in departmental style and philosophy to successfully implement community policing (Sparrow et al., 1990; Brown, 1989; Pate et al., 1986). Brown began to shift Houston's policing philosophy in 1983 with a series of programs designed to improve communication between police and communities and to allow officers to work with neighborhood residents in solving local problems. These experiments (which included a police newsletter mailed directly to area homes, a special police unit whose main purpose was to encourage civic groups to organize, and a police substation designed to encourage walk-in traffic and collaborative police/community problem solving) were the focus of an early National Institute of Justice study of fear reduction through innovative policing in Houston and in Newark, New Jersey (Pate et al., 1986). Between 1982 and 1987, the HPD pursued its vision of community policing through the development of additional experimental programs, all of which incorporated the notions of beat integrity, a problem-solving approach to quality-of-life issues, increased and improved interaction between police and citizens, and community involvement in policing decisions and activities (Oettmeier & Brown, 1988; Brown, 1983). In 1987, through a series of executive sessions within the Department, the HPD developed a department-wide agenda for community policing which it called Neighborhood Oriented Policing (NOP). The development of NOP inaugurated the beginning of what Chief Brown then called "Phase II" (Brown, 1989). This shift from Phase I, which sought to implement community policing gradually, through discrete programs in specified locales, to Phase II of community policing in Houston, involved a sweeping resolve by the Department to adopt community policing as its dominant operating style (Brown, 1988). This resolve was clearly stated in the HPD's 1987 mission statement, which mentions first the desire to "enhance the quality-of-life in the City of Houston by working cooperatively with the public . . ." (Oettmeier & Brown, 1988:121). It is within this context of extensive experimentation with community policing and of the post-1987 commitment to NOP as a departmental style that the INOP grant project in Houston, called Operation Siege, developed. C. The Target Areas: Frenchtown and the Near-Northside BOND Area Frenchtown is located in the city's Fifth Ward--nicknamed the "Bloody Fifth" by police officers because it leads Houston in Part I crimes. The area (consisting of about 600 homes) came to be known as Frenchtown because of the large number of Creole immigrants from Louisiana that settled there just after the turn of the century. Today, however, most of the residents of Frenchtown are African Americans. The majority of the people who inhabit Frenchtown are lower-income, although some of the well-maintained homes are occupied by working and middle-class families who own their homes (nearly 70% of the residents rent their homes). The major problems in Frenchtown identified by members of the Frenchtown Community Association (the only active community group in the area) during the Operation Siege problem-identification phase were: prostitution (there are three motels in the Frenchtown area, all of which rent by the hour and, according to residents and police, cater to prostitutes); crack cocaine dealing; abandoned buildings which are used by crack users; and trash in vacant lots. The drug and prostitution problems here are exacerbated, according to respondents, by Frenchtown's easy accessibility from several major highways. The highways make it relatively easy for "drive through" drug buyers and johns to engage in illegal activities and make a quick exit from the neighborhood. The Near-Northside BOND area is named after the neighborhood watch group that covers the second target site. The 155 square blocks that make up the target area are adjacent to the Frenchtown site. Its largely Latino population is lower income and, like Frenchtown, a large number of families rent their homes rather than own them. One of the BOND area's most distinctive features is its large number of cantinas. Because Houston has no zoning ordinances, visitors to the area will find as many as three or four cantinas located in the middle of an otherwise completely residential block. There are 33 cantinas located within the BOND target site. According to surveys done by HPD, BOND area residents identified cantinas and criminal activity associated with cantinas as one of the major problems plaguing their community. Unlike Frenchtown, which reportedly has a serious street-corner drug problem (mostly crack), the BOND area's problems are confined primarily to the cantinas, prostitution and vagrants. Site Selection. The Near-Northside BOND and Frenchtown communities were selected as the Operation Siege target sites because they had high levels of drug activity and drug-related crime and because residents had expressed a willingness to form partnerships with the police in an effort to address the conditions that have contributed to the drug problem. The high-ranking supervisor responsible for the selection of the sites did not base the selection on any formal research or needs assessment. Rather, he felt that the two neighborhoods were reestablishing themselves through revitalization efforts and becoming more formally organized. His belief was that the Operation Siege project could contribute to that revitalization. II. "Operation Siege": The Houston INOP Project A. Goals, Objectives and Strategy: Drug Demand Reduction Operation Siege was unique among the eight BJA-funded INOP sites because its approach to drug demand reduction was primarily enforcement-oriented. It thus stood in contrast to projects like Portland's which rely primarily on the provision of social services. The goals of Operation Siege were to enhance the quality of life by preventing crime at the neighborhood level; introducing crime prevention strategies (e.g., target hardening), and reducing fears associated with reporting crime. The HPD had hoped to enhance its usual drug enforcement strategies by involving the public and private sectors in the demand reduction effort. The project thus allowed for the systematic inclusion of community residents, other criminal justice agencies, city departments, and the public and private sector in the demand reduction strategy. The project was implemented in six stages: (1) a series of meetings were held with community groups to identify problems and plan a crime prevention strategy; (2) heavy enforcement activity by the department's TACT squad (undercover operations, buy-and- bust); (3) saturation patrol and Zero Tolerance; (4) neighborhood clean-ups; (5) crime prevention surveys; (6) target hardening and senior citizen home repair. Operation Siege may also be unique among the eight INOP projects because it was implemented in a police department undergoing large-scale reorganization. In addition, many of the original planners of Operation Siege left the department or had been reassigned by the time the research began. This had a largely negative impact on project implementation for both the BOND and Frenchtown sites, but especially Frenchtown, where the officer placed in charge of the project had less than two months of experience with the project by the time of the first Vera site visit. Operation Siege officially began in April, 1991. B. Enforcement: Zero Tolerance, Cantina Squad, TACT Team and the Warrant Squad Zero Tolerance. Zero Tolerance was one of the three enforcement strategies implemented in Houston's demand reduction effort. Zero Tolerance (initiated on May 11, 1991) was a high-visibility patrol effort using four to five officers in one- and two-person patrol cars working only within the boundaries of the target areas. Officers worked this detail on an overtime basis and did not respond to calls for service. Officers volunteered to work on this program through a sign-up procedure. The times and dates for Zero Tolerance were posted and officers filled in their names in the time/day slots that they wished to work on a first-come, first-served basis. Except for those officers who work Zero Tolerance every day as their regular assignment, officers signed-up to work on their days off and were paid on an overtime basis. Supervisors (sergeants) were responsible for relating the Zero Tolerance strategies to officers who had not worked the program before and for informing them of the particular types of offenses taking place in the target sites. The program was not unique to this project; it had been used by the HPD before (most notably in the 1988 Link Valley Experiment) but had not been used in the two Project Siege target areas. Under Zero Tolerance, uniformed officers in marked units patrolled the two target areas during the day and early evening shifts searching primarily for open-air drug activity and prostitution. However, because open-air activity was not very common (especially during the day/early evening shifts when Zero Tolerance operated primarily), patrol officers attempted to make arrests for any infraction of the law. Officers would, for example, make arrests for public intoxication and urinating in public. As one sergeant who has supervised Zero Tolerance said: Zero Tolerance is going out and enforcing all laws, including all traffic laws and minor misdemeanors -- the more minor things that are generally overlooked. And that can be effective because it lets people know that not only are the police officers out there, but they're actively engaged in policing. Because they arrest or cite people for a great many "minor" infractions of the law, officers who work this detail may make many more arrests than the average patrol officer. Two officers in Frenchtown, for example, averaged 250 arrests per month. Officers who work Zero Tolerance every day of the week as their regular assignment will also take all narcotics complaints that come into the district station desk (which are placed on "alert slips"), and do checks on as many locations as they can during their shift. Since crack houses are often located in abandoned buildings, officers explained, they are often able to close the house down by having illegally installed utilities shut off. The non-project officers who work zero-tolerance every day had developed informal partnerships with individuals within various city agencies. According to officers working the INOP program, no formal partnerships with city agencies or private utilities were established through Operation Siege. Prostitutes are targeted by Zero Tolerance, officers explained, because "they are always looking to buy drugs; that's why they're out there selling themselves for the most part." Officers will use local ordinances like, "hitchhiking and walking in the street" to cite prostitutes plying their trade. Two officers in Frenchtown, for example, created a notebook of ordinances (local, state, federal) that they could use for the Zero Tolerance program. Cantina Squad. During meetings with community leaders in the BOND area, HPD learned that the community's greatest concerns were truancy and the problems (drugs, fights, prostitution, noise, loitering) caused by the local cantinas in the area. Because Houston has no zoning ordinances, it is very common in the Near-Northeast BOND area to find several cantinas located in the middle of residential areas in homes converted into liquor establishments. According to residents of the BOND organization, many cantinas are centers of drug, gambling and prostitution activities. Residents also complain of general quality-of-life problems caused by the cantinas, such as loud noise and parking problems generated by the lack of parking on cantina property. The Cantina Squad was a purely enforcement-oriented response to those concerns that serves to check all cantina/liquor establishments and their surrounding areas for intoxicated people creating disturbances. The detail did not function in the Frenchtown area, where cantinas or bars are few compared to the 33 that operate within the 155 square block BOND target site. This detail, like Zero Tolerance, was staffed by patrol officers and a supervising sergeant working on overtime. The staffing of the Cantina Squad was accomplished by the same sign-up procedure used for Zero Tolerance. The Squad worked a bi-weekly schedule, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 9:30 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. (peak times for the cantinas, many of which are open only on these nights). The Squad was staffed by four uniformed officers in marked patrol units and one sergeant (usually riding in an unmarked unit). Typically, the officers working the Cantina Squad would meet at a designated place where a sergeant would brief them on what cantinas they would check for the evening. Any cantinas that had been the source of numerous calls for service or complaints, for example, would be targeted. Officers would enter a Cantina and check for signs of disorderly behavior and public intoxication. If any patron was intoxicated or causing a disturbance, he/she would be arrested. The Cantina Squad also checked Cantina licenses to be sure that they were in order and for any other violations of the state alcoholic beverage code (e.g., serving a patron who is clearly intoxicated). Under Texas law, citizens may petition the County Commissioner's Court (which is responsible for processing liquor licenses and conducting hearings when license renewals are protested) to deny the renewal of a license to any liquor establishment that has been a source of chronic criminal activity or violation of Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) laws. The officers working the Cantina squad had been trained using TABC manuals to enable officers to recognize common criminal offenses pertaining to the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Code. HPD used arrest reports or records of citations given cantina managers/owners ("Public Disturbance Report for the TABC") to inform TABC of any violations. This information might then be used by the County Commissioner's Court if TABC or community residents wished to protest a liquor license renewal for a cantina that they considered a nuisance to the community. Cantina Squad arrests or citations are thus routed to a TABC liaison who used the information to help Commissioner's Court deny license renewals to chronic trouble spots. Between January and August, 1991, three cantinas had been closed through this process. Because the Commissioner's Court is not a criminal court, officers previously were not paid for the time they spent testifying in licensing hearings. The INOP project facilitated such testimony since INOP funds could be used for overtime expenses. TACT Squad. The Tactical Squad (TACT) functioned in both the Frenchtown and BOND areas. This unit was put into operation for Operation Siege on April 1, 1991. Its covert operations targeted drug sellers (through buy-and-bust tactics) and prostitutes specifically. Prostitutes were targeted because they are active drug buyers, according to police, and because they have been identified as a major crime problem by Frenchtown/BOND residents in police community meetings. The undercover operations ran from three to five days per week and enlisted 18 officers (eight officers per unit and two sergeants) who worked 7:00 a.m. - 3:00 p.m. or noon - 8:00 p.m. Because it would be counterproductive to have extra marked units in an area where TACT is attempting to conduct an undercover operation, HPD did not schedule Zero Tolerance when the TACT Squad was functioning. Warrant Squad. Another enforcement component in the Frenchtown area of Operation Siege was the Warrant Squad which, like Zero Tolerance and the Cantina Squad, functioned on an overtime basis. Officers who worked this detail developed information on suspects on whom warrants had been executed and attempted to make arrests of these suspects. The detail (usually two officers) worked from 2:00 a.m. - 6:00 a.m. C. Target Hardening/Senior Citizen Home Repair In an effort to reduce the fear of crime among the elderly and prevent burglaries (i.e., drug-related crime), Operation Siege planned to replace doors and locks, install window burglar bars, 180 degree door viewers, and drop bolt systems in a "target hardening" effort. Home surveys conducted by HPD officers, volunteers from the BOND organization and volunteers from the Southwest Voters Registration Drive, were used to identify those who qualified for target hardening. To qualify for the target hardening, a homeowner would have to be 65 years old or handicapped and have an income of less than $2000 per month. The home security survey conducted by the police department determined the security needs of a particular home. The home might have needed, for example, two new solid- core doors and two deadbolt locks and burglar bars for the windows. Labor for the installation of the hardware was free of charge and was supplied by volunteers from the community who were trained by the HPD and volunteers of the Private Sector Initiative (PSI), a private non-profit agency. Unfortunately, the BJA funds slated for target hardening (approximately $64,000) were "improperly tagged for it to be channeled to the appropriate divisions." It is still unclear whether the city or the police department was at fault for the delay in the delivery of funds. According to representatives of the Frenchtown and BOND sites, they had completed over 200 security surveys and had absolutely no funds to deliver the work promised. By the final Vera site visit, however, the funds had been released. This delay in the release of funds, however, clearly disrupted the target hardening schedule, and perhaps more importantly, created a crisis of legitimacy for the project. According to several officers responsible for the implementation of the target hardening effort: "The community was all fired-up when we had the April and May kick-off for the project and there was no money for the project. We're not here to point any fingers but someone in this department dropped the ball on this thing." In addition to the target hardening, Operation Siege incorporated a senior citizen home repair program into its overall effort. The program is administered and implemented by the Private Sector Initiative (PSI) based in Houston. Twice a year the PSI home repair program recruits volunteers to paint and repair between 80 and 120 homes owned by low-income, elderly or handicapped people. Homes for repair and target hardening were selected from the home security surveys done by the HPD and its volunteers. The purpose of the program was to instill pride in ownership and reduce the risk of crime by, for example, replacing inadequate doors, locks or windows, and doing some low-level CPTED in the form of trimming shrubberies. In addition, the program was expected to reduce fear of crime, especially burglary, among senior citizens. Thus, the HPD delivered the hardware (doors, locks, security bars) to PSI crews who installed them for homeowners free of charge. D. Community Partnerships Operation Siege created partnerships with two citizen groups that became the focus of the HPD's community outreach efforts. In the Near-Northside BOND area, HPD enhanced an already strong relationship with the BOND organization (which was, according to officers in the area, the only formal civic organization in the target site). The neighborhood watch group assisted the police department by providing volunteers to do home surveys when necessary, helping to organize and provide volunteers for neighborhood clean-ups and senior citizen home repair projects and providing information on drug and prostitution hot-spots in the project site through the CB Patrol. In addition, the BOND group formed a Cantina Committee which monitored community problems related to the many cantinas in the area. The BOND group also offered testimony at liquor license renewal hearings that resulted in helping to close-down three cantinas that had been troublesome to the community. In the Frenchtown community, the police department was directly involved in the recent revitalization of the Frenchtown Association. Like the BOND group, the Frenchtown Association was the only active civic group (meetings are currently held every two weeks) in the Frenchtown community. The Association aided the police department in neighborhood clean-up activities and supplied volunteers in the senior citizen home repair projects. In addition, the members of the association have helped police by providing information on drug and prostitution activity in the target site. III. Other Program Components A. C.B. Patrols Another program used in the BOND area for Operation Siege was the CB Patrol. The patrol is composed entirely of citizens (between 15 and 20 volunteers) who volunteer their time to patrol the BOND area. The volunteers are all part of the BOND organization. The police department provides all volunteers with CB radios (and a base station radio whose operator can contact the police department directly) and signs to put on the side of their private vehicles indicating that they are the civilian patrol. The police department also provides two training seminars (six hours) which every volunteer must complete before being allowed to patrol the street. The CB Patrol was instrumental in supplying the HPD with drug and prostitution locations before Operation Siege began. B. Neighborhood Clean-Ups Operation Siege also conducted neighborhood clean-ups in an effort to instill pride in community and as a vehicle for building community partnerships and trust. Some officers received overtime to work security details for the clean-up efforts. C. Evaluations The evaluation of the Operation Siege project in both the BOND area and Frenchtown was to be conducted internally by the HPD (two evaluations were to be done -- one by officers responsible for the BOND area and another by those officers responsible for the Frenchtown area). According to the project proposal the evaluation would determine "if there has been a disruption in . . . street-level drug trafficking, . . . and other criminal activity." Data would be collected for time periods before and after the Operation Siege intervention to determine whether the project had any impact on reported crime and calls for service. Although the evaluation was not completed, officers involved in the BOND area were able to provide some early details about the evaluation during the last Vera site visit. First, the possible effect of the project on calls for service would not be considered in the evaluation. Second, when target hardening was finally instituted (when money was released for hardware, and it had been installed) the evaluation team would like to see whether target-hardened homes are burglarized less frequently than the average home. The evaluation team, however, was skeptical that enforcement efforts would result in many drug-related arrests (for reasons that are unclear). As one sergeant said: "We are going to end up with a bunch of arrests but they are not going to be narcotics. We are going to have a handful . . . arrests will be nothing near what they said [in the proposal]. But on some of these other programs -- Cantina, Zero Tolerance -- they are just scooping them up. [As far as the program's effect on drug demand reduction] . . . I think that what [Operation Siege] is going to do . . . is that the way we are going to be successful is that we are going to move those people [i.e., drug traffickers, prostitutes] to a different location . . . They know they are not going to go back to that neighborhood and sell the drugs . . ." An officer from the BOND area attempted to get computer programmers in the department to label all crimes reported within the BOND area with a special code. The purpose of this, he explained, would be to make it easy for the evaluation team to monitor Operation Siege and its progress. At the time of the final Vera site visit, he explained that he had been told that this was not possible due to limited programmer resources. At the time of the final Vera site visit, no evaluation plan had been developed for the Frenchtown project. Ultimately, according to officers in the program, no evaluation of the Houston project would be completed in either target site. LOUISVILLE I. The Louisville INOP Project and the Target Area A. Introduction Louisville, Kentucky is a city of approximately 300,000 people. The Louisville Police Department (LPD) has an authorized strength of 671 sworn officers, supported by 295 civilian employees. There are six police districts within Louisville. The Louisville INOP project includes the entire Fourth District. B. Neighborhood-Oriented Policing in Louisville According to current LPD command personnel, at the time that Louisville submitted its original INOP proposal to BJA, there was relatively little command-level support for neighborhood-oriented policing in the LPD. The proposal was developed and submitted by the commander of the Fourth District, a captain who had come to believe that old styles of policing simply were not working in his command -- the predominantly black, relatively low-income "West End." Shortly after the Louisville INOP proposal was funded, a new Chief of Police, a strong supporter of community- oriented policing, was appointed. The Captain's recognition of a need for a more neighborhood-oriented style of policing stemmed in part from the widespread image (both within the LPD and within the community) of Fourth District officers as an "occupying army" in the area. According to several members of the Department, for many years the Fourth District had served as a "dumping ground" or "punishment" for officers who "got into trouble" within the Department. In previous years, according to some members of the Department, district officers under other commanders had developed a reputation of brutality, defined by one outside observer as a "kick ass and take names" approach to policing. This image had reportedly softened a bit in recent years, following a foot patrol experiment in one of the most troubled housing projects in the district. Yet the Captain remained concerned with the District's inability to address recurring problems within identified "hot spots" in the District, to counteract the negative perception of the Department within the community and to mobilize the support of other units within the Department (e.g., the Narcotics Division). To avoid the divisiveness of an "elite" unit approach, the Louisville INOP proposal deliberately did not designate a special neighborhood-oriented unit within the District. Ultimately, all officers within the District are expected to participate in the INOP project, implementing strategic responses to priority problems identified in community forums. INOP was designed to have two phases -- a first phase for planning and problem identification and a second phase for strategy development and strategy implementation. During the first phase, only the six officers selected to work with 12 community leaders on the Project Committee were intensively involved in project work, although all District officers went through community policing training during this period (from February through mid-August of 1991). Project committee officers defined their role as being, at least in part, the "ears and mouth of the community." During the start-up phase, officers on the Project Committee were relieved from their platoons to help develop the project's advertising campaign in collaboration with community representatives on the committee; design the project's computer- aided call diversion effort; conduct three open community forums (held in April, 1991); and define the priority problems of the community by reviewing the content of those forums. During the second phase, which began in August, 1991, officers on the Project Committee returned to their platoons and the nine officers on the Strategy Committee (senior officers selected for their experience in the District) left their platoons for a two-week period of intensive strategy development. At the end of this period, all District officers were to return to their platoons to work collectively on the police strategies selected to address priority problems (e.g., surveillance at drug locations, followed by intensive enforcement; foot patrol). Ultimately, the structure of the project was modified, combining the two committees into a single Project Committee. This committee had police representatives from the original two bodies and the community members from the original Project Committee. According to the original project design, once strategies for addressing priority problems had been defined, the District was to implement a split patrol. Some proportion of each platoon would be freed from responsibility for answering calls for service to carry out problem-solving activities. Assignment to problem-solving would be rotated among the officers in each platoon. Plans for call diversion and delayed response were central to the split-patrol concept; analysis of the District's CFS workload in 1990 revealed that 20 percent of calls did not require that a patrol car be dispatched immediately. According to senior LPD personnel, a central implementation problem involved the computer-aided call diversion component of the COP initiative. Because this component required modification of the central Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) system, and because capital funds for that system were frozen pending an independent review of city- and LPD-based computer systems, efforts to implement the COP call diversion plan met substantial impediments (see the discussion of the MIS component below), and at the time of the final site visit, call diversion was just beginning. In spite of the delayed implementation of several program components, the Fourth District began experimenting in July 1991 with problem-solving strategies in Algonquin Park, an area identified at the community forums as the site of drug activity and loitering. In concert with the Department of Parks and Recreation and the Department of Public Works, the District redesigned the area. With city funding, secured by a local Alderman, barriers were erected, a parking area was replaced with grass and "no stopping" signs were posted. The Algonquin Park experience was cited frequently in interviews with city and Department officials as an example of what COP might accomplish in Louisville. During the time the City was receiving INOP funds, there was substantial support for community-oriented policing in both the LPD command structure and in the city administration. Second- year INOP funds were focused primarily on expansion of community policing to the First District, which includes the downtown area. C. The Target Area The Fourth District in Louisville, one of six police districts in the city, occupies seven of the 66 square miles in the city and has a population of over 42,000 residents. It has the highest volume of violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery and aggravated assault) of the police districts in Louisville. It also has a substantially higher proportion of minority residents than the rest of the city (91% of its residents are African-American compared to 29% for the city as a whole); a substantially higher unemployment rate (18%) than the city as a whole (10%); and significantly lower assessed mean housing values (approximately $18,000) than the city as a whole ($47,000). The Fourth District also has among the highest concentrations of public housing in the city, including four housing developments that are either the locus of or adjacent to many of the quality-of-life problems within the District (domestic violence reports, loitering, drug abuse and trafficking). In addition to these housing projects, administered by the Housing Authority of Louisville, there is a largely abandoned, privately-owned development, known locally as "Peyton Place," where several vacant apartments have been broken into and vandalized or, in some instances, used as "shooting galleries." Much of the area consists of privately-owned single family homes and rented houses, many of which have been abandoned and boarded up, even on relatively well-maintained blocks. Some neighborhoods within the District, however, house the relatively affluent members of Louisville's black middle class -- doctors, lawyers, city officials. There is little commercial development in the area, although there is a concentrated industrial area in the eastern end of the district. There are also a substantial number of liquor stores and bars, many of which have been defined as "hot spots," the locus of repeated crime reports and calls for service. Several of these spots are also identified drug trafficking locations. At the time of the INOP research, Louisville did not have a major crack cocaine problem, although there was a substantial volume of powder cocaine and marijuana trafficking (marijuana is the primary cash crop in the State). The Fourth District, in previous years, had been the center of heroin trafficking within the city, although the heroin problem has reportedly abated in recent years. At the three community forums held in April 1991, residents identified 43 problems, many associated with particular locations in the district. The project committee divided these problems into 13 categories: random shootings; street corner drug dealing; loitering around liquor stores; other congregations of loitering men; congregations of youth; burglary; auto theft; police-community interactions; loud music; vandalism; traffic problems; illegal dumping; and stray dogs. II. Drug Demand Reduction Activities A. Drug Prevention Even before the development of the Louisville INOP project, a number of active, organized block associations had been formed within the Fourth District and several block association leaders became active members of COP's Project Committee. Project planners expected that training in drug abuse prevention received by community resident Committee members would be carried back to their respective block watch groups. In addition, an advertising program, originally planned for Autumn 1991 but not yet implemented at the time of the final site visit, was to be targeted at building community awareness of drug issues through the media, billboards and newsletters. Other strategic responses to identi- fied local drug problems, employing either drug prevention or drug education techniques, were not developed during the research period. COP was included as an integral member of the AWAREE (Area-Wide Alcohol/Drug Rehabilitation, Education and Enforcement) Coalition, a joint city-county initiative, begun in the Fall of 1990. The objectives of the Coalition are to recruit volunteers to serve on AWAREE committees, to develop a drug prevention curriculum, to hold a local conference on drug issues and to conduct a survey, assessing perceptions of local drug and alcohol problems. Through this coalition of enforcement groups and service providers, COP is formally linked to the consortium of treatment and prevention programs (e.g., DARE, the Probation and Parole Drug Testing and Treatment Program, the Community Alliance for Prevention) in the area. B. Law Enforcement Activities The enforcement strategy used almost exclusively to respond to identified drug problems in the Fourth District was to set up a "Task Force" of officers (who volunteered for the assignment). This Task Force would use a variety of techniques (e.g., surveillance, saturation patrol, foot patrol) in response to drug problems, and would last from a few weeks to a few months, depending on the problem. The COP project also received support from the newly reorganized Metro Narcotics Unit (MNU). In October 1990, shortly before the INOP project was funded, the Mayor of Louisville and the County Executive of Jefferson County (where Louisville is located) created a joint city-county narcotics unit of 48 officers. The unit is directed by a Major in the Jefferson County Department, whose appointment marked the beginning of a new cooperation between District police units and the Narcotics Division. The director of the MNU pledged his support to the COP initiative, and in an interview during the implementation site visit, he reported that his street enforcement unit had made over 100 arrests in the past month at one of the most active "hot spots" in the COP target area. Command staff in the Fourth District reported that both the MNU's responsiveness to District problem spots and its willingness to address something other than major cases (e.g., street-level drug sales) represented a departure from previous practice within the LPD. III. Other Program Components A. Recruitment and Training The police officers who served on the Project Committee and on the Strategy Committee were selected by the Captain. District officers were asked to volunteer for both committees. The six officers on the Project Committee were drawn equally from the three platoons. The nine officers on the Strategy Committee, seasoned veterans of the force, were selected for the extensiveness and variety of their police experience within the District. The supervising Lieutenant on the project transferred to the Fourth District specifically to participate in developing the project's approach to neighborhood-oriented policing. All officers in the District underwent two days of training in preparation for the implementation of COP. Training was conducted jointly by faculty from the Southern Police Institute (SPI) and by District Command personnel. Training covered the history, evolution and objectives of community-oriented policing; a description of the Louisville COP project; problem-solving methods and examples of how the problem-solving approach was implemented in other jurisdictions; police-community relations; and practice in problem analysis and response development. Community members of the Project Committee participated in this training to the extent that their schedules allowed. Officers on both the Project Committee and the Strategy Committee received an additional day of training. This training session focused on problem identification; problem management; special investigations and operations; and the development and implementation of tactics. Selected members of the Project Committee, along with several high-ranking members of the LPD, also attended a three-day workshop on community policing held by the National Crime Prevention Institute at the University of Louisville. In addition, the Project later provided training to eight community representatives through the Citizens Training Unit at the LPD academy. This training covered the COP program itself, drug use and abuse, domestic violence, black-on-black crime and crime prevention. Four civilian employees in the Fourth District also received 40 hours of training on the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system in preparation for the call diversion component of the COP initiative. B. Community and Agency Partnerships A primary motivation for developing COP in the Fourth District was to have active community participation in identifying priority problems. According to the Captain, there were both practical and political reasons for increasing community involvement: ". . . as district commander, I was getting complaints, problems fired at me right and left. I had more than I could deal with. It was left up to me to decide what was [most] important, and every time I made that decision, I was continually asked to justify it . . . I'd rather have the community decide . . . . And I wanted to be able to identify some strong community support for [enforcement] activities, rather than the police just responding to a complaint here and there . . ." The central methods of soliciting community involvement in problem identification are through the community representatives on the Project Committee (and, initially, through the three public forums held at the end of April of 1991). Although the project also participates in a set of formal partnerships with twelve city agencies through its Support Committee, these partnerships are used on an ad hoc basis. The Support Committee includes representatives of the Sinking Fund (the Mayor's taxing authority); JTPA (initiative undertaken under the Job Training Partnership Act); the Health Department; Public Works (traffic and highways); the Housing Authority; Inspections, Permits and Licenses; the Department of Law; Public Safety (Police, Fire and Emergency Services); Economic Development; Parks and Recreation; Solid Waste (sanitation); the local Housing and Urban Development office; Human Services; and the Community Action Agency. The Mayor has firmly endorsed the COP project and has insisted upon the active cooperation of all supporting agencies in the neighborhood-oriented policing effort. City officials interviewed during the implementation site visit reported that they expected few problems in operationalizing interagency partnerships because the Mayor and his staff will ensure that agencies "understand the importance of responding." These officials identified three agencies as most likely to be drawn upon frequently by COP -- Inspections, Permits and Licenses (IPL); Solid Waste Management; and Parks and Recreation. They also envisioned the active involvement of the Department of Public Works and the Department of Human Services. By the time of the final research site visit, it was apparent that the most frequently involved agency was IPL. Commanders in the Fourth District had already been working collaboratively with representatives of the Housing Authority of Louisville on problems in the public housing projects in the area well before COP was developed. The OASIS project, developed several years before the COP project, placed Fourth District officers on foot patrol in District housing projects. According to both Housing Authority personnel and the LPD, this collaboration increased with the advent of the COP project. C. Outreach and Advertising Outreach and advertising play a central role in the COP project. During the first few months of the project, the Project Director and the secretary attended 23 community meetings to announce the project and explain its goals. In preparation for the public forums held in April 1991, the project hired a local advertising consultant to publicize the event. The project arranged to have extensive television, radio and newspaper coverage of the public forums. Flyers announcing the forums were distributed throughout the target area and letters were sent to pastors of all local churches. Public service announcements were broadcast on local radio stations. In addition, the Project Committee and the advertising consultant spent over a year devel- oping an advertising/public awareness campaign to run in various forms of media (radio, billboards, print, television). The public awareness campaign focused on drug prevention, domestic violence and black-on-black crime. The project also disseminated 3,000 newsletters about relevant police and community issues in target neighborhoods on a regular basis. D. The Role of the Department's Management Information System (MIS) The COP project initially anticipated purchasing computer hardware to permit the development of a separate call dispatch system for lower priority Fourth District calls, diverted from the central CAD system. Yet consultations with personnel in charge of the LPD CAD system convinced COP project directors of the utility of maintaining records (e.g., the disposition of the run) and procedures for the diverted calls within the central system. These consultations also convinced them that the CAD unit had the capacity to program an automatic diversion of these calls to a satellite computer at the District. Under this system, lower priority calls are automatically transferred to the Fourth District satellite computer. District staff are supposed to place a follow-up call to the caller and either take crime report information over the phone or schedule an appointment. Data are then supposed to be entered and/or updated on the dispatch screen; "clearing the run" (i.e., entering run disposition data) would provide a complete record of call response, linked to the central data system. Implementation problems resulted from the decision to rely on modifying the central CAD system for call diversion. In 1989, the city's data processing department had begun to argue that the independent LPD data processing department should be taken over by the city. In early 1991, the Humana Corporation, which is centered in Louisville, was commissioned to conduct an independent study of the two systems. During the course of that study, the capital budget for LPD MIS expenditures was frozen. Although the Humana study, released in June 1991, fully supported the independent LPD computer system, the period for approving capital budget expenditures in Louisville had passed. While the call diversion system was eventually implemented, it was in its infancy at the time of the final research site visit (a full year after the implementation site visit). E. Local Evaluation The evaluation of the Louisville INOP project was carried out by the Southern Police Institute (SPI), located at the University of Louisville. The evaluation consisted of both an impact analysis and a process analysis. Telephone surveys of random samples of each neighborhood in the target area (N=400) and of a comparison neighborhood outside of the District (N=200) constituted a central component of the impact analysis. These surveys were developed by the SPI research team, based on standardized Fear of Crime survey instruments, similar to those developed by the Police foundation (and used in many community surveys of fear of crime throughout the country); additional questions were developed to address the priority problems identified by target area residents in the public forums. The survey instruments were designed to examine quality-of-life issues, fear of crime, police-community relations, victimization and awareness of the COP project. The surveys were conducted under the INOP grant by the Survey and Evaluation Unit of the Urban Research Institute at the University of Louisville. Baseline survey data were used to verify the list of priority problems identified at the community forums and to provide baseline data on the experimental area and the comparison area. Follow-up surveys, assessing the impact of the project in the target area, were conducted after the implementation of strategies addressing priority problems. In addition to the survey, the impact analysis reviewed changes in calls for service and crime complaints in both the target area as a whole and the comparison area. Findings from the various components of the impact analysis were supplemented by the process analysis, which examined the implementation of the project, problems in the target area, strategy development, community involvement in project activities and the call diversion/split patrol initiative. F. BJA Funds In Louisville, BJA funds ($187,290 for Year 1) supported the evaluation component and the com- munity survey, the advertising consultant and the computer consultant. BJA funds were also allocated to cover the costs of computer hardware and software, training, printing (including newsletters), postage and travel. BJA funds provided the salaries of two support staff hired to work on the COP project -- a secretary and a data entry clerk. The project secretary, a resident of the District, is responsible for correspondence, the minutes of the various committee meetings, scheduling meetings and the transcription of recorded public forums. She is also scheduled to attend the citizen training sessions and will address community groups on the COP project and crime prevention techniques. IV. Expected Impacts A. Community Effects The Louisville INOP proposal clearly identified the goals and objectives of the project with respect to the community. The primary stated goal was to reduce crime and disorder in the target area. An ancillary goal was to improve police-community relations. Reducing Disorder. The Fourth District's experience in redesigning Algonquin Park to reduce drug trafficking and loitering led to optimism among several respondents interviewed during the implementation site visit about the project's ability to reduce disorder. According to a local alderman, the Algonquin Park initiative "served notice" to drug dealers and loiterers that they "can't hang out here." Another city official claimed that the initiative "turned that problem around over night." Community members of the project committee also expressed hopes that inter-agency efforts targeted at abandoned properties or disruptive street-corner locations might make negligent property owners take better care of their property and, thereby, improve some problem locations. Police-Community Relations. Respondents from both the community and the Department were very vocal about the history of hostility between the police and the community. One Department official reported that in the past the LPD had "totally ignored" what the community wanted. An officer remarked that local children "are trained to hate us." A community member of the Project Committee defined the program as an effort to "re-educate the police on how to handle us." A high-ranking member of the Department defined it as an effort to "turn 'them' into 'us'." A few district officers raised questions about the project's ability to maintain community involvement in the project, particularly given the extensive delays in implementation. One officer was particularly skeptical about the community's willingness to become involved with the police or to care about improving conditions; he believed that community residents were "afraid to help us." Yet, on the whole, District personnel expected that, by actively soliciting community involvement in setting police priorities, the project would be able to improve relations between the police and the community. Project staff reported that both police and community members on the Project Committee were surprised to discover a consensus between the two groups on the identification of priority problems in the District. It was hoped that improved communication and interaction between these groups would lead to increased community satisfaction with police services. B. Departmental Effects Another stated goal of COP was the efficient resolution of problems and investigation of crimes. Yet the lengthy delay in the project's efforts to introduce a split-patrol and delayed response model may have decreased expectations in this regard. A few district officers questioned the project's ability to provide sufficient coverage for the calls-for-service workload if this model were implemented. They also were skeptical about the community's willingness to accept anything other than a rapid response to calls for service. Another, less clearly defined, potential benefit of the project for the Department itself is improved communication between individual Districts and centralized units (e.g., crime analysis, the CAD division, the Narcotics Unit). It was hoped that the increased interactions between the District and these units necessitated by the COP project would improve their working relationship. ----------------------------------------- REFERENCES Brown, Lee P. 1983. The plan of action. Houston: Houston Police Department (April). Brown, Lee P. 1989. Community policing: A practical guide for police officials. Perspectives in Policing, No. 12. Washington, D.C.: National Institute of Justice and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Oettmeier, Timothy N. and Lee P. Brown. 1988. Developing a neighborhood-oriented policing style. Community policing: Rhetoric or reality, edited by Jack R. Greene and Stephen D. Mastrofski, 121-134. New York: Praeger. Pate, Antony M., Mary Ann Wycoff, Wesley G. Skogan, and Lawrence W. Sherman. 1986. Reducing fear of crime in Houston and Newark: A summary report. Washington, D.C.: Police Foundation and National Institute of Justice. Sparrow, Malcolm K., Mark Moore, and David Kennedy. 1990. Beyond 911: A new era for policing. New York: Basic Books. NCJ 157934