In 1993 the city of New Orleans, Louisiana, found itself in a situation that residents of Mexico City, Buenos Aires or Rio de Janeiro might easily relate to.
Crime had been rising for years. The homicide rate was the highest in the nation, earning New Orleans the dubious media distinction of “Murder Capital of America.” Bad publicity was hurting tourism and discouraging investment.
Worst of all, the police seemed to be part of the problem. A succession of scandals had revealed widespread corruption within the police, including active involvement in the drug trade. Reports of police brutality were making national headlines and very few crimes were being solved. The public distrusted the police and doubted politicians’ willingness or ability to do anything about the problem. New Orleans seemed to be stuck in a perverse cycle that many observers considered irreversible.
But the cycle was reversed. Starting in 1994, New Orleans embarked on an experiment in reform that is now being studied around the world. Between 1994 and 1999 the number of homicides dropped by 64 percent, armed robbery decreased 49 percent, and assaults diminished by 60 percent. Arrests and convictions rose sharply. Police corruption and brutality almost disappeared. Most significantly, opinion polls show that New Orleanians today feel safer than at any time since 1986, and 48 percent of the respondents in a 1999 survey said they consider the police one of the best city services.
What happened? And more to the point, can Latin American cities learn from New Orleans? Graymond Martin thinks they can. A 13-year veteran of the New Orleans Police Department who is now a lawyer and adjunct professor at the University of New Orleans, Martin spoke at a recent workshop at IDB headquarters where he drew parallels between the situations of New Orleans and Buenos Aires—another city that is looking for ways to reduce crime and restore public confidence in the police. Last year Martin and Ignacio Garibaldi, an Argentine lawyer and political scientist, prepared a diagnostic study of law enforcement challenges in Buenos Aires as part of a United Nations-sponsored program.
It’s up to you. “Cities get the kind of police they deserve,” Martin said at the beginning of his presentation, rejecting the notion that politicians and the police themselves should always be blamed for problems with law enforcement. While Martin believes these two groups are part of the problem, he insists the solution “must start with the public.”
Martin said citizens must take the initiative in two ways. First, they must force their elected officials to prioritize law enforcement by making it a central issue in more than one election cycle. Politicians hate to confront the police, according to Martin, because they know that such confrontations always have a high political cost. As a result, elected officials must be forced to conclude that the political cost of ignoring law enforcement problems (measured in diminished voter support) will be higher than the cost of tackling those problems. “Politicians have to see the value in police reform,” Martin said, and that value must be measurable in a “currency”—such as votes—that they can use.
Second, citizens must get beyond a purely reactionary and critical stance. Instead of merely condemning police abuses, citizen groups must be willing to educate themselves about the challenges of law enforcement, work closely with police organizations to craft solutions, and finally support increased public spending on law enforcement.
In New Orleans, citizens took the first step in 1993, when they elected Marc Morial mayor after a campaign in which he made law enforcement the central theme. Yet according to Martin, who advised Morial on his crime initiatives, the mayor immediately realized that voters’ frustration over crime would not necessarily translate into a willingness to spend more on law enforcement. “People thought the police were all thugs,” recalled Martin. “They certainly didn’t want us spending any more money on them!”
But Morial knew it would be impossible to reform the police without a budget increase. Salaries were so low that many officers were supplementing their jobs with up to 40 hours per week of “detail” work as security guards for private companies or individuals. There were not enough patrol cars to go around, and the few available ones were falling apart. Uniforms had not been changed in 30 years, and equipment in general was grossly deficient. Training was infrequent, and morale could not have been worse.
In order to get the city council to approve new spending for these areas, however, the mayor needed to convince citizens that he was not advocating business as usual. Morial began by forming a citizens’ committee to search for a new chief of police. The 26 members of the committee agreed to attend workshops on law enforcement theory and practice on six consecutive Saturdays. Ultimately, the committee interviewed 40 candidates for the job, made recommendations and Morial subsequently selected Richard Pennington, a veteran of the Washington, D.C., police force. “This was crucial,” Martin said, “because in the process of interviewing all these candidates, the members of the committee became real experts in law enforcement, and then they went out and convinced the media and other citizens that we needed resources to do things differently.”
Zero tolerance. Among the first steps Pennington took was to declare a “zero tolerance” policy toward internal corruption. With help from corruption specialists from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Pennington’s staff systematically investigated and initiated court proceedings against officers suspected of breaking the law. Within a 14-month period, 126 officers were suspended and 29 were terminated, while 21 others resigned while under investigation.
The purges had an immediate and decisive impact on public opinion. “We had to convince the public that we were determined to improve the police, not just hire more,” said Martin. “When we showed zero tolerance for corruption, we created the trust that enabled us to request additional funds.”
The Morial government also built support for reform by meeting directly with business and church leaders and various civic groups and asking them to define specific goals. “The business community made a bargain with us,” Martin recalled. “They said if you’ll reduce crime to the point where we can attract more customers and investors, we’ll support a budget increase for the police department.” Similar deals were made with groups that wanted a measurable decrease in the number of police brutality complaints.
By the end of its first year in office, Morial’s government had forged an unprecedented political consensus for a profound reform. “We were able to go to the city council and say ‘This is the community’s plan; they want to raise the revenues to make a lasting and substantial change in the police force’,” Martin said. This consensus, buttressed by the fact that citizens now felt they had a stake in the reform’s success, allowed the government to push through a number of measures that would have otherwise been impossible.
The city imposed a teen-age curfew requiring all people under 17 to be off the streets by 8 p.m. on weekdays during the school year and 9 p.m. in the summers (the weekend curfew was set at 11 p.m.). The police bureaucracy was overhauled and decentralized with the goal of placing as many officers as possible on neighborhood foot patrols (instead of in offices or security teams assigned to politicians, as had been the case). Community policing centers were installed in low-income housing projects where most of the city’s homicides were taking place, leading to a precipitous drop in the murder rate. The city also implemented a comprehensive training program for officers and increased the number of professional homicide investigators. It adopted new recruitment and promotion standards in order to raise the qualifications of officers. And it purchased new uniforms and hundreds of new patrol cars.
Public reaction to these reforms was so positive that in 1997 the Morial government decided to go much further. First, it obtained city council approval for officer pay raises ranging from 12 percent to 62 percent, depending on rank. Then it secured a commitment to recruit and train 200 new officers. A computer database was installed to map precisely where crimes were taking place. District police chiefs were then required to show measurable improvements in the areas under their charge.
This combination of incentives and pressure to deliver results created a virtuous cycle, according to Martin. Better pay, training and equipment, combined with opinion surveys that showed renewed public respect for police officers, produced a more motivated and professional force. And the new emphasis on measurable improvements ensured that officers would stay focused on delivering the service that citizens had come to expect.
Can this virtuous cycle be replicated in Buenos Aires and other Latin American cities? Martin believes that it can. He thinks many of the conditions required for real change are present in Buenos Aires—starting with an electorate that has made crime a hot political issue. Now, the key is to ensure that citizen groups play a central role in designing any reform program. “If you do that, then these groups will become investors in the outcome,” Martin said.