New Thinkings in Fighting Crimes

choi

Daniel Horan, The Just-Say-No Crime-Busters: By all means, bring the full weight of the criminal justice down on the most violent and incorrigible wrong-doers. The otjers? Tell them to stop. Wall Street Journal, Nov 29, 2011
(book review on David J Kennedy, Don't Shoot; One man, a street fellowship, and the end of violence in inner-city America. Bloomsbury, 2011)

Quote:

"Here we go, I thought, another academic's guide to Everything the Cops Do Wrong. Did Mr Kennedy, I wondered, have any insight into police work beyond what he had gleaned from reading textbooks r watching episodes of 'Law & Order'?

"As a matter of fact, he did. Mr Kennedy is indeed an academic--before teaching at John Jay he did crime-prevention research at Harvard's Kennedy School--but for more than 25 years he has gone out with police officers on some of the America's meanest streets. And unlike many of his scholar-peers, he respects cops enough to listen to them and take their advice seriously. He describes walking with two policemen in the violence-plagued Nickerson Gardens public-housing project in South Los Angeles. 'I've never been so scared in my life,' he writes,' before or sinc.' After seeing what was like for the law-abiding residents of the housing project to live, day in and day out, with such fear, Mr Kennedy decided some new thinking had to be done.

(嚴打 does not work in US, Mr Kennedy claims: not zero tolerance task forces, gang sweeps, drug raids.) "There proved to be a better way, Mr Kennedy says, one that on first glance seems so simple that it couldn't possibly work: tell them to stop. * * * His [Kennedy's] method--developed in the Boston Gun Project in the 1990s and replicated in * * * more than 40 cities [is as follows.] Mr Kennedy writes of bringing street-corner drug dealers in for meetings with policemen, prosecutors and community-service workers. There the dealers would be told, truthfully, that the police had cases on them all ready to take to court--evidence of hand-to-hand drug sales and the like, on videotape. Then the cops would say: We don't want to arrest you; we want you to stop. In Baltimore, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and other cities the targeted neighborhoods saw drug market disappear almost overnight or diminish dramatically, along with the attendant violence.

"As difficult as it has been to cope with gang members, the author says, dealing with politicians, police chiefs and petty bureaucrats can be worse. Each entity in the system, he finds, has its own political master, most with egos that have to be stroked. Getting all the agencies to cooperate, and getting them to keep cooperating overtime, is sometimes impossible.

My comment:
(a) The end of the review introduces: "Mr Horan is a police officer in California."
(b) The review is somewhat interesting. But if you does not want to read it, no one will blame you.
(c) John Jay College of Criminal Justice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Jay_College_of_Criminal_Justice
(a college of the City University of New York; offers programs in forensic science and forensic psychology; Established  1964; Undergraduates  14,000 [no post-graduate or law students])

Quote: "The school's namesake, John Jay [1745-1829; US chief justice 1789-1795], was the first chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and one of the founding fathers of the United States. Jay was a native of New York City, and a New York State governor.