CRIME-FIGHTINGPARTNERSHIPS: HOW TO

LEVERAGE THE CAPACITY OFCOMMUNITY DEVELOPERS

By James T. Jordan and Edward F. Davis III

L O C A L I N I T I AT I V E S S U P P O R T C O R P O R AT I O N

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COMMUNITY SAFETY INITIATIVE (CSI)CSI builds formal, long-term partnerships betweencommunity economic development corporations,police departments, and other key stakeholders introubled neighborhoods. The partners' work createsstrong, stable and healthy communities by reducingpersistent crime, disorder and fear, andimplementing economic and communityrevitalization projects.

LOCAL INITIATIVES SUPPORT CORPORATION(LISC)LISC is the nation's leading community developmentsupport organization. Since 1980, it has providedgrants, loans and business expertise to more than2,400 community development corporations (CDCs)across the nation. By supporting and strengtheningthese non-profit, resident-led local organizations,LISC helps renew the communities where lowerincome people live, work, and raise families.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSLISC thanks the MetLife Foundation for its generous

support of the MetLife Foundation Community-

Police Partnership Awards, a program administered

by LISC’s Community Safety Initiative. Building on

the first three years of the awards program, MetLife

Foundation graciously sponsored this document as

part of a series of four in-depth papers examining

aspects of award-winning partnerships. CSI also

acknowledges the U.S. Department of Justice

Community Capacity Development Office, State

Farm Insurance Companies and JPMorgan Chase for

their critical support to CSI that further enhances

these learning tools.

The authors and publishers are solely responsible

for the accuracy of the statements and

interpretations contained herein. Such

interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views

of the MetLife Foundation.

Police departments across the country have seenthe power of police-community developmentpartnerships to evict crime from embattled

urban neighborhoods. This paper looks at theexperience of police personnel from threejurisdictions: Greg Hopkins in Tacoma, Washington;Brian Cunningham in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, NorthCarolina; and Tom Masse in Providence, Rhode Island.

While these departments and their communities aredistinct from one another in many ways, they arealmost identical in the tangible benefits that resultedfrom strategic partnerships between police,community development corporations (CDCs), andother community-based organizations. In each case,individual officers combined old-fashioned streetsmarts with new ways of thinking about naggingneighborhood crime problems. This dynamiccombination of tried and true and bold and new led todramatic decreases in crime and victimization. It alsoled to improved community vitality and renewedofficer enthusiasm for their job.

Significant decreases in reported crime

■ In the Charlotte neighborhood of Grier Heights,reported violent crime fell 55 per cent in the six-year period 1995-2001.

Significant decreases in drug-related crime

■ In Tacoma’s Hilltop, once home to some ofAmerica’s truly brazen open-air drug markets, drug-related calls for service began to decreaseimmediately following implementation of the firstpolice-community partnerships in 1995. Drugs callswere down 76% in 2004 as compared to 1995.During the same period, Hilltop residents’confidence in the police grew.

A surge in confidence in the cities’ commercial

economy and overall viability

■ Providence’s Detective Tom Masse and Patrol Lt.Hugh Clements can cite off the top of their heads(with quiet pride) tens of millions of dollars inprivate investment capital and grant funds thathave flowed into the Olneyville neighborhood andits adjacent old mill district as a direct result of thepolice-community developer partnership.

Increased sense of job satisfaction

■ Lt. Clements: “It makes our job easier in the end.And guys can say, ‘I did something.’”

■ “People will look out for the police,” said OfficerGreg Hopkins about his experience in Tacoma.“People will help. 15 years ago you had to watchyour back.”

A deepening trust between the police department

and the community

■ In Charlotte, Chief Darrel Stephens saw “awholesale, change in the quality of trust betweenpolice and community, based on the communityredevelopment we achieved together.”

For their work on local crime problems, each officerreceived national recognition. The collaborations theyparticipated in were winners of MetLife FoundationCommunity-Police Partnership Awards, administeredby the Local Initiatives Support Corporation’sCommunity Safety Initiative (LISC CSI).

As we shall discuss, at least three major lessons haveemerged from these experiences:

1. With dedication and persistence, an individualofficer can exercise broad discretion to help producesignificant crime reduction and improved quality oflife in a target area.

2. A police department can leverage the capacity ofthe right community and government partners, withina problem-oriented and prevention-oriented strategy,to achieve neighborhood-wide crime reduction andimproved quality of life.

3. Crime reduction creates the conditions conduciveto investment in commerce and housing. Newdevelopment in these areas improves quality of lifeand becomes a bulwark against the re-emergence ofcrime and fear.

In the end, this is a story about what is possible forindividual officers and departments in everyjurisdiction, when they come to see prevention ofcrime and victimization as their core business.

ADDRESSING THE QUALITY OF LIFEThe term “prevention,” as applied to police work, isburdened by many different meanings. For some,prevention means a set of activities that cost a lot ofmoney but have no discernable impact on crime. Butprevention, as it was learned and practiced inCharlotte, Tacoma and Providence, became notrandom tactics but the strategic goal of policing. Inthe strategic context, an array of tactics—from agame of hoops between neighborhood kids toprecision enforcement operations—becomesimportant and necessary. The goal, in every case, is toprevent the next victimization.

Experienced police personnel know that withoutchanging the underlying circumstances in aneighborhood, no crime reduction plan will hold forvery long. This is the foundation of James Q. Wilsonand George L. Kelling’s landmark 1992 article in the

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Atlantic Monthly on neighborhood safety. They citedtheir own and others’ research that suggested astrong link between unchecked disorder and crime,which they called the “Broken Windows” theory.Mismanaged properties, badly-designed buildings,vacant structures and vandalism, left unaddressed,will simply keep attracting more—and more serious—problems. Officers also know that police, bythemselves, cannot address the problems of physicaldecay, blight and abandonment. LISC’s CommunitySafety Initiative strategy is built on this principle. Bypromoting collaboration among police, CDCs andother stakeholders, CSI has helped to increase publicsafety and draw economic investment to more thantwenty communities in nine cities since its inceptionin 1994.

DESIGNING GOOD STRATEGY WITHINTHE DEPARTMENTThe police officers in this story found a way to make adifference by functioning in what two HarvardBusiness School researchers have called “the whitespace.” The metaphor refers to the empty marginsthat surround an organization’s official rules andprocedures on the printed page. It is “the large butmostly unoccupied territory in every company whererules are vague, authority is fuzzy, budgets arenonexistent, and strategy is unclear—but whereentrepreneurial activity that helps reinvent and renewan organization often takes place.”1 In the crimereduction context, the white space is the area justbeyond traditional organizational mandates andidentities in which the visionaries meet to create newapproaches. The three officers in this story foundthemselves in this zone for two reasons.

At first, the officers at first were simply dropped thereby their departments. In the 1980s, most communitypolicing efforts were small programs run as sidelinesto the main business of responding to calls for serviceand doing retrospective investigations. Officers andsupervisors assigned to these first communitypolicing units were left to figure out for themselveswhat to do. Second, and more important, theseofficers soon learned that this is the space theyneeded to occupy in order to get things done. It’s inthe “white space” that the broken windows gotfixed—where the abandoned buildings were boughtand rehabbed as affordable, crime-resistant housing.

What was the organizational posture of the policedepartments and community developmentcorporations that these three officers confronted atthe outset of their work? It is worth pausing to quickly

review the historical evolution of police strategywhich produced the “white space” in which theseofficers would try to write a new police story.

THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY-POLICE PARTNERSHIPBy the 1960s, most American police departmentswere officially limiting their officers to acting asremote agents of the “criminal justice system,”detached from community life. By this time, thenature of police work and the cultural identity ofdepartments were powerfully constrained by the“Professional Model” of policing. Within theProfessional Model, police business is narrowlydefined as reactive law enforcement. Police areprofessional crime fighters, waging a “war on crime”with tactics limited to rapid response to 9-1-1 calls,random patrols and retrospective investigations.

As the decade of the 1990s opened, the onlynumbers that seemed to increase faster than crimewere calls for service, arrests and drug searchwarrants. Police officers’ frustration and communityresidents’ fear grew apace. Innovators in policedepartments, animated by their frustration at notbeing able to make a difference, began to experimentwith new approaches. Chief among these approacheswere problem-oriented policing and the brokenwindows concept.

Proponents of new ways of doing police businesswere often aware of the need for partnershipsbetween police and other organizations. As policechiefs and others called for more robust police-community partnerships, however, few of themunderstood at the beginning of the 1990s howsignificant a partner CDCs might prove to be forneighborhood-focused police efforts.

CDCs first emerged around the nation in the 1960s ascommunity organizers in disadvantaged urbanneighborhoods acted to fill the void left by profit-oriented developers, who were abandoning low-income communities. The core business of thesenon-profit CDCs was reclaiming blighted buildingsand blocks. With financing stitched together frompublic and private grants and other sources, CDCsbegan buying and rehabilitating properties, creatingaffordable housing and new opportunities forneighborhood businesses. LISC, as the nation’sleading community development supportorganization, has provided financial support andbusiness expertise to more than 2,200 CDCs acrossthe nation. Since 1980, it has helped strengthen

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1“Managing in the White Space,” Mark C. Maletz and Nitin Nohria, Harvard Business Review, Feb. 1, 2001.

2 “The Evolving Strategy of Policing,” George L. Kelling and Mark Moore, in William A. Geller & Darrel W. Stephens (eds.), Local

Government Police Management, International City/County Management Association (2004).

3 See Comeback Cities, Paul Grogan and Tony Proscio, Westview Press (2000).

these non-profit, resident-led organizations toencourage the renewal of communities where lowerincome people live, work and raise families.By the early and mid-1990s as community policing,problem-oriented policing, broken windows and otherstrategies were maturing in many cities, police werelooking for new partners. In most cities, the policefound conventional community organizations as newand valuable partners. Something different happenedin Tacoma, Charlotte and Providence that enabledofficers to engage not just with traditional communitygroups but also with their towns’ CDCs.

First, some working cops refused to surrender to thedespair and indifference that many of their colleaguesfelt. Second, these enterprising, visionary officers atthe line level set off a shift in the police mission, fromonly responding to the latest 9-1-1 call to respondingand attempting to prevent the next one from occurring.In some instances, these officers were actingconsistently with the vision and directions of theirorganization’s leaders; in other instances the officershad to operate for the most part below supervisors’radar screens. Finally, as these officers and some oftheir colleagues looked for new partners in these threecities they found like-minded public servants in theirlocal city service agencies and in CDCs.

TACOMABACKGROUNDOfficer Greg Hopkins is a 25-year veteran with theTacoma Police Department. In the early 1990s he wasone of dozens of the 370-member force responding tocall after call generated by the mounting horror ofshootings and stabbings in the City’s most crime-plagued communities. The crime was driven by open-air drug markets. Chief Donald Ramsdell, echoingcomments by most American police chiefs in largercities at the time, described the area as “a battle zone.”In the midst of the chaos of 1990, one Hilltop residentliving across the street from a 24-hour drug houseorganized a vigilante group and set up an armed vigil athis home. On the first night of the vigil gunfire eruptedand over 300 rounds were exchanged. As evidence ofthe near-despair in the community and theshortcomings of police strategy, no arrests were made.

At the time of the shoot-out, Tacoma’s Drug HouseElimination Task Force (DHETF) had been in existencefor about a year. Its core operating principle was anunderstanding that the most valuable commodity inthe economics of the retail drug trade is the physicallocation: the house, the barroom, street corner, etc.Other components, such as labor and merchandise,are comparatively easily replaced if taken out ofcirculation by the police. In Tacoma, the new DHETF

focused on houses and apartment buildings wherethe narcotics trade flourished. In the early years ofTask Force meetings (1989-1994), police participationwas limited to formal representation, and the mostactive participants were community members andrepresentatives from other city agencies.

RESPONSEIn most cities in recent history, a crisis of some kindhas been the driving factor impelling communitiesand police to undertake a significant shift in crime-fighting strategy. The shoot-out initiated the processof change in Tacoma. Among the first signs of theDepartment’s engagement in problem-solving was theinstallation of Ray Fjetland as the new chief. Hedecentralized command to local patrol sectors,putting more ownership and responsibility into thehands of local commanders and officers. By 1994,when Hopkins was assigned to the DHETF, the shiftwas underway. From his new post, Hopkinscollaborated with his colleagues inside the policedepartment, in the community and in city governmentto help institutionalize a community-orientedapproach to public safety.

Greg’s creativity was spurred by the operationallatitude resulting from decentralization and by hiseducation and training. By the time Hopkins startedattending DHETF meetings, Tacoma had beendesignated a federal Weed and Seed site, andmembers of the Tacoma task force had theopportunity to attend national Weed and Seedconferences. He attended his first class in CrimePrevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) in1995. At a Weed and Seed conference in 1996 he was

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Community Liaison Officer Greg Hopkins outside a once troublesome

Tacoma business that in 2001 was the location of 293 visits by the

Tacoma Police. Now in partnership with the police, the locally owned

business is working towards code compliance, improved clientele and

overall improvements to public safety.

introduced to the Mesa, Arizona Crime-Free Housingprogram and brought it home. With help from afederal grant, DHETF adopted the Crime-Free Housingtactic of providing after-school alternatives for youthin some of the neighborhood’s most troubled housingdevelopments. They hired a staff member tocoordinate recreation programs, assistance withhomework and short courses in life skills. Pleasedwith the coordinator’s impact, the City of Tacoma hassince institutionalized this aspect of the strategy byappropriating funds to support this position.

With the support of his immediate superiors, Hopkinswas able to play an active role in DHETF. One ofHopkins’s first lessons in the DHETF was that othercity agencies had more leverage than the police totake drug houses out of commission. “The electricalinspector has shut down more drug houses than anycop,” Hopkins said. Arrests and search warrantsbecame one category of tools in a much larger kit.Indeed, these traditional law enforcement operationsserved as the stage-setter for more lastingapproaches. The tactics that worked most effectivelyfor DHETF were intensive enforcement of the buildingcode, application of CPTED methods, and therevitalization of blighted properties.

RESULTSDHETF used the building code to shut down andboard a row of notorious barrooms in Hilltop.Working with a local Main Streets organization and aCDC, they took the next step and redeveloped theproperties. The effort yielded a new Rite Aidpharmacy—a $4.5 million investment—and other newstores.

The task force used CPTED tactics to shut downoutdoor drug markets. A comprehensive redesign oftwo streets and the surrounding propertiesdramatically reduced the opportunity for successfuldrug dealing and its attendant disorder and crime atone of the city’s then-most infamous intersections,18th Street and Martin Luther King, Jr. Way.

The results have been a drop in reported crime andan upswing in community confidence and quality oflife. “There was a time when we could not keep upwith the number of complaints about problemproperties,” Greg Hopkins said. “As a city we havebeen able to switch strategic priorities. It had beenpublic safety emergencies number one and economicdevelopment number two” in terms of the resourcedemands on Tacoma’s city services. But with thereduction in pressing crime problems, Hopkinscontinued, “now economic development is thenumber one and public safety is the number two”demand on local government energies and resources.“Now we [community and police] spend much of ourtime focusing on neighborhood stabilization andlooking for ways to spur private investment.”

The trust cemented by the shared work on crimereduction also brought rewards to the Tacoma PoliceDepartment at budget time. At one point communityactivists successfully lobbied City Hall to save fundingfor the Police Department’s Community LiaisonOfficers unit, which includes Hopkins. “Ten years agono one would have gone to bat like that for thepolice,” he said.

CHARLOTTEBACKGROUNDUnder the leadership of former Chief Dennis Nowickiand current Chief Darrel Stephens, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department (CMPD) has madesignificant strides in infusing a community policingand problem-oriented approach into its dailybusiness. Sergeant Brian Cunningham was a keyplayer in this transformation in Charlotte’s GrierHeights neighborhood.

When Brian joined CMPD in 1990, service meant thesame activities in Charlotte as it did for Greg Hopkinsstarting out in Tacoma. “It was old school,” Briansaid. “9-1-1 calls, motor vehicle stops, and randompatrol. I did my eight hours, and I left.” For Brian, thepersonal shift in mission that would make him sovaluable to his department and the Grier Heightscommunity was precipitated by a tragedy bothprofessional and personal: the death in the line ofduty in 1993 of a young CMPD officer—his friend androommate. The young officer was gunned down in aCharlotte public housing development in which heand Brian both patrolled. It was the communityresponse to the incident that was, for Brian, “the lightswitch clicking on.” Because the two young cops hadbeen working regularly and successfully in the area,as part of CMPD’s first community policing efforts, thecommunity gave up the name of the shooter.

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“We are going to continue to putresources into the community to

empower residents. We are going tocontinue to get at the chronic

conditions in neighborhoods thatmake people feel unsafe.”

Chief Donald Ramsdell,

Tacoma Police Department

RESPONSEThree years later, Cunningham madesergeant and was assigned to acommunity policing team in GrierHeights. There, Cunningham builton his searing first lessons on thevalue of community trust. By 1999,he was a charter member of aninnovative municipal collaborative,the Neighborhood Action Team(NAT), which crossed long-standingorganizational turf barriers to unitekey city agencies to fix theneighborhood’s “broken windows.”

The NAT worked well for two key reasons. First, itwas genuinely decentralized, with municipalpersonnel assigned full-time to Grier Heights. TheNAT was neighborhood-based and neighborhood-

driven. Local residents hadsubstantial clout in decision-makingabout the reclamation andredevelopment efforts. The team alsoenjoyed leadership and substantialsupport from the Police Department.The NAT’s coordinator was CMPDDeputy Chief Stan Cook, whosevision and deft leadership guided theteam’s successes and whose backingenabled Cunningham to move quicklyand make decisions without havingthe hierarchy block hisunconventional efforts.

RESULTSThe team’s series of successes in addressing blight,disorder and crime rebuilt confidence and trustamong neighborhood residents who earlier in thedecade mistrusted local government in general andpolice in particular. Cunningham cites communicationand trust as the foundation for the Department’ssuccess in Grier Heights. “You start exchangingstories,” Brian said. “As trust increased, they wouldcall us more. They were talking to us. We all got goodat it,” he said, referring to the ability of municipalofficials (including police) and community residentsto communicate and collaborate on solving localproblems.

Cunningham observed that some of the mostimportant work of the NAT was outreach to landlordsin the neighborhood. As the NAT was stepping up itsenforcement of building codes to require propertyowners to improve their buildings and lots, the teamalso educated landlords and made them welcome asfellow problem-solvers. A significant consequence ofthis relationship-building was the willingness ofowners to consult and listen to the police about howto design and maintain their property to reduceopportunities for crime, especially open-air drugdealing. The concrete results were not only reducedcrime but magnificent new housing like that at theWallace Terrace Apartments. The combination of well-maintained developments supported by engagedproperty managers dried up the prospects for crime.“I cannot imagine not doing policing this way today,”

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Thanks to the efforts of the community partnership and training

offered by the CMPD, new construction in Grier Heights, like the

single family homes (above) and Wallace Terrace Apartments

(below), is being well maintained, and a more engaged

management is attracting more responsible tenants.

“If the mission of thepolice is to prevent

the next crime –which I believe

is ‘job 1’ – workingwith the CDCs is just

common sense.” Dennis Nowicki, former Chief of the

Charlotte-Mecklenburg

Police Department

CMPD Chief Darrel Stephens has witnessed “an economic and social

transformation of communities thatwould have been impossible without theeffective collaboration between police,community development corporations

and other key community leaders.”

Cunningham said, reflecting on the value ofCharlotte’s problem-oriented tactics and the officers’close working relationship with the community.

PROVIDENCEBACKGROUNDIn 2000, Officer Tom Masse was beginning to navigatethe learning curve traveled by Hopkins andCunningham just a few years earlier. Working withinProvidence’s Olneyville neighborhood, one of hismany challenges was trying to make sense of themixed signals coming from headquarters.

At first he found himself adrift in the neighborhood asthe community policing division of which he was partwas dismantled around him. (Tom’s beat wasmaintained because Olneyville was a Weed and Seedsite, and the contract required it.) At the time, theDepartment was disconnected, institutionally, from thecommunity. As a result, as PPD Major Paul Fitzgeraldput it, “[Masse] was isolated. That was the biggesthurdle.” But Masse is a personable East Coast-stylecop. He is not one to remain isolated for long.

Whatever was true of the institutional relationshipsbetween the Providence Police Department andcommunity leaders, Tom appeared to have a hardtime with the notion of “disconnected.” Policeofficers know that they exercise broad discretion inevery facet of their work. They must make theinfrequent but dramatic decisions about whether totake liberty or use deadly force. For most officers, themost common discretionary decision they make ismore mundane but just as meaningful. In the day-to-day reality of policing, they make many of thesedecisions per shift: they decide whether or not to getinvolved. Left on his own in terms of the seniorcommand level, but with Fitzgerald (then hislieutenant) and other superior officers willing tocreate space for him to try new approaches, Massebegan to explore how he might begin to help theOlneyville neighborhood.

RESPONSETo start, Masse did what good cops do well: he simplytalked to people—merchants, community center staff,clergy and activist parishioners at the local parishchurch and others. Masse was trying to get a sharperpicture of what was generating the trouble, whatmight be done to prevent it, and who might be willingto join him. Lt. Hugh Clements, who would becomepatrol commander two years later and build on thefoundations that Masse established, said, “Tommy[became] a neighborhood driver.”

With genuine humility, Masse emphasizes repeatedlythat he was one member of a bigger team. But onthat team Tom was the point guard. Through theWeed and Seed coalition that had kept him in theneighborhood, and especially through the OlneyvilleCollaborative, “good people came to the table tohelp,” he says. Together, they began to learn aboutnew tactics that might be employed to reduce thecrime and fear making life miserable for the people inOlneyville.

Some of his earliest and best learning experiences, hesays, occurred at national Weed and Seed trainingconferences. “We learned different ways tocommunity-police,” Masse says. “Once I had theopportunity to see what other departments were doingI brought the best ideas back home.” One of the ideashe brought back to Olneyville was Hilltop’s DHETF fromTacoma. “We learned who you had to have at thetable.” Masse and colleagues put this tool, which theydubbed the Nuisance Task Force, to work on their mosttroublesome locations. High on their hit list for thesenew solutions was 11 Lindy Road.4 In 2000-2001, thePPD went to 11 Lindy 98 times. The 9-1-1 log reads likea prescription for neighborhood misery: “Shots fired,”“Man with gun in car,” “Female saw gun,” “Subjecthas a baseball bat,” and on and on. When Masse firststarted working Olneyville, the police had a policyprohibiting officers from answering calls to 11 Lindywithout back-up.

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Cunningham echoes the observations of agrowing number of police in communitiesaround the nation. One such trail-blazing

cop works in another city where the idea ofpolice-community developer joint-problem

solving is taking hold. “The policedepartment has the capacity to rid

neighborhoods of crime,” Captain MikeCorwin of the Kansas City, Missouri, Police

Department observed, “but only in theshort term. And the police have

relationships with other governmentagencies and community organizations thatcan handle the issue of blight, but only in

the short term. [The CDC] has the capacityto provide a physical anchor that will

create sustainability.”

4 The street addresses in the Providence case are fictitious to protect

the residents living in the neighborhood.

RESULTSWith the lessons learned from the other Weed andSeed sites, the police brought the key city agencies tothe table including fire and code enforcement. Theyalso brought in the state child welfare agency to helpseveral children living with parents who wereessentially squatting in 11 Lindy Road, using it as acrack house. They eventually were able to close thebuilding and board it. “Without the collaborativeapproach we would still be going there,” saidClements.

As the securely-boarded building awaitsredevelopment, it has all but disappeared from the 9-1-1 records management system and the wakingnightmares of its neighbors. One elderly member ofthe board of the Olneyvile Housing Corporation (OHC),the neighborhood’s major CDC, said at a meeting, “Ihave lived in this neighborhood for 25 years, and for 25years [11 Lindy] was a mess. Until now.”

As they made progress on reducing and eliminatingnuisances, police and community developerssearched for more durable solutions. OHC staff relatethat Masse came back from one Weed & Seed/CSIconference looking to sit down with staff membersand get a clearer sense of all that OHC needed to beeffective. “If I know more about what you do, I canhelp you more,” he told them. At the same time,police were realizing, as Major Fitzgerald put it, that“We could use Frank Shea [executive director of OHC]to solve police problems.”

Fitzgerald’s shorthand is significant in at least two

ways. First, it indicates a major change in what policeaccept as being their “business.” He is talking aboutaddressing not just the symptoms of the blight—the9-1-1 call or the peddling and pushing—but the lotsand buildings that facilitate crime. Second, Shea, asexecutive director of the OHC, represents theneighborhood actor who controls the resources toreclaim and restore the built environment. OlneyvilleHousing—and a large network of related community-based organizations—are “the other components”Tom Masse talks about when he says, “After a coupleof years of locking them up, we knew we needed abroader approach. Don’t get me wrong—you needthe enforcement. But you need the othercomponents, too.”

The Providence Police and the community now have abattle-tested formula. After the police execute thesearch warrants and haul away the dealers, the CDChelps change who owns the doors. That has made thedifference in Olneyville. It is notable that two of theworst addresses the partnership turned around werewithin about 100 feet of OHC’s offices in theneighborhood. Indeed they got to watch the traumaand degradation every day from their office windows.Customers and sales staff at the two thriving crimeemporia formed a gauntlet for families and childrenseeking to use a nearby playground. Both wereclosed by the Nuisance Task Force. With persistentsupport from PPD, the CDC was able to buy them.They are now slated for rehab as affordable housing.

This work has tended to attract significant “attaboys”from people representing all sectors of theProvidence community. Merrill Sherman, the CEO ofBancorp Rhode Island, offered praise in an op-edcolumn in the Providence Journal on January 16, 2005.Sherman wrote, “It is incumbent on members of theProvidence community to trumpet the PoliceDepartment’s accomplishments. Getting out the goodnews will facilitate economic development, and theDepartment’s progress sets a great example of whatgood management and de-politicization ofgovernment agencies can accomplish.”

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Officer Tom Masse, shown here with local youth, exemplifies the

impact one individual dedicated to community policing can have.

CONCLUSIONThese three communities harnessed the power ofpolice-CDC partnerships to significantly reduce crimeand improve the quality of life in disadvantagedneighborhoods. Some common threads are woventhrough their diverse stories.

■ A small number of police officers with thecommitment and a sound strategy leveragedsignificant crime-fighting resources. Each started inone of the jurisdiction’s most disadvantaged, crime-impacted neighborhoods.■ In each case, a superior officer created the spaceand provided consistent support over a prolongedperiod to enable the officer to avoid being stymied bythe police bureaucracy.

■ The people closest to the problems—residents,community-based developers and municipalofficials—were allowed to design and implementsolutions. They were not flying columns. They stayedin the neighborhood over the long term to achievesuccess and maintain the progress.

■ Their first steps were to fix the “broken widows”—to reduce and remove physical conditions thatfacilitated crime—using Crime Prevention ThroughEnvironmental Design, code enforcement and othertactics.

■ The second stage of improving the environmentinvolved new commercial and residentialdevelopments that provide affordable housing, jobs,and greater neighborhood prosperity—and repel drugdealing and related crime.

As impressive as these three stories are, even moreimportant is that these partnerships continue to servethese communities as tools for problem-solving andimproving the quality of life for and with residents.Since sustainability has been one of the greatestobstacles to reaping the benefits of police-involvedinnovations over the past several decades, thepersistence of the police-community developerpartnerships in the jurisdictions we reviewed is causefor celebration, indeed.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

James T. Jordan is the Director of Program in

Executive and Professional Development in the

College of Criminal Justice at Northeastern

University, and the former director of the Office of

Strategic Planning and Resource Development for

the Boston Police Department. In addition to

Jordan's 16 years with the BPD, he has served as an

advisor to the National Institute of Justice; the COPS

Office and other national bodies; and to police

departments in jurisdictions across the US. He holds

a masters degree in public administration from the

John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard

University.

Edward F. Davis, III is a 25-year veteran of the Lowell

Police Department and was appointed

Superintendent of Police in 1994. Superintendent

Davis is known for pioneering community policing in

the LPD and has reengineered the department using

geographic assignment of all personnel to storefront

“precincts” that represent each neighborhood. In

addition to receiving the prestigious NIJ Pickett

Fellowship and attending the John F. Kennedy School

of Government’s Program for Senior Government

Executives at Harvard University, Superintendent

Davis holds a Masters Degree in Criminal Justice and

a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Criminal Justice.

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