Two of America's top law enforcement officers used business-like approaches to curb crime dramatically.
"The first target in our war on crime was street-level drug dealing," recalls Reuben Greenberg, Chief of Police in Charleston, South Carolina since 1982. Greenberg's account of his successful war on crime in Charleston appears in an anthology of proven crime-control techniques called Making America Safer, published by the Heritage Foundation. "At first we followed standard law enforcement procedure and concentrated on simply arresting dealers," the chief confesses. "We quickly discovered that this wasn't going to work. Within four hours -- sometimes even less time than that -- these dealers would release on bond or bail and just go back out on the street."
Greenberg concluded that "the solution was not to go after the dealer, but to go after his market and to make it unprofitable." He decided to try "something simple, very economical, and, as it turned out, very effective. We assigned one uniformed officer to stand with the drug dealer at his corner." The objective was "to put a crimp on their business by scaring off the customers," Greenberg explains. "Our program had an immediate effect. With a uniformed police officer stationed 40 feet away, no one came near the drug dealer, even to say hello."
This market-based approach to crime control has been a resounding success. "All we had to do was look at street crime and drug dealing as a business, and fight it by reducing the profit margin until the business was no longer worthwhile to operate," Greenberg explains. "Criminals, just like everyone else, respond to market forces."
In another chapter of Making America Safer, former New York City Police Commissioner William Bratton recounts his own successful effort to curb crime. "The police are the most effective when they work in partnership with the community," Bratton explains. Close connection to the community allows the police to identify the most serious problems in each precinct. Rather than merely responding to 9-1-1 calls, they can then concentrate on solving "the problems that generate all those calls." Partnership and problem-solving lead
to prevention, says Bratton, noting that "it is much better to prevent a crime than to solve it after the fact."
Bratton decentralized the New York City Police Department, surrendering much of his power to precinct commanders. Then he inaugurated a sophisticated computer program that generated crime statistics "every week to share with the rest of the department." The program provided "timely, accurate intelligence," which made "rapid response" possible, and provided the opportunity to determine "effective tactics" and engage in "relentless follow-up."
Bratton boasts that he "began to run the NYPD as a private profit-oriented business." The profit he was looking for was "crime reduction." He evaluated his precincts "not on how many calls they responded to, but on how much crime was reduced. And every one of the 76 precincts in New York City," Bratton brags, "saw a double-digit decline in crime."
