by Robert O. Varenik

Not surprisingly, Mexico City’s recent decision to contract former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani has created a storm of expectations and diverse opinion, from flag wavers who fear a loss of sovereignty, believers already celebrating the new revolution, and an embarrassed sector that fears, whatever the merits of their new partners, that this city’s emperors have lost their clothes, in full view of everyone, by tacitly admitting that they need help. No one is entirely right, or wrong. There are good reasons to applaud the arrival of new of ideas and experience, but Mexico City’s policymakers, and the private barons who are paying a king’s ransom for a mayor also ought to be aware of several clear caution signs on the road ahead.

Good ideas can and should cross borders. Mexico City is the right place, and this is the proper time to begin to look outwards for the right questions, and some possible answers. During the long Priista era, few of Mexico’s best minds bothered to study policing, for lack of any meaningful hope that a better understanding would lead to a better police. As a result, Mexico has largely missed the party - the last twenty years of intense experimentation and research into practical policing strategies and management in cities and countries around the world. Not all success stories, to be sure, but the overall result has been greater clarity and agreement about both values and tactics. The good news is that catching up is relatively easy, if one looks in the right places.

However, success itself is not so easily imported. Indeed, one of the greatest errors Lopez Obrador could make is to fail to filter New York’s approaches (no matter how successful they were there) through the prism of Mexico’s particular challenges. The trick here is to understand what would fit, what wouldn’t, and what might if appropriately modified. This will require a pretty nuanced sense of the problems - not just crime - but the institutional limitations that characterize the police and the justice system as a whole. Judging from amount of good data local police forces currently have at hand, such an assessment will be a tall order. The authorities here know that things are not working the way they (or the voters) would like, they have some idea of what isn’t working, but very little sense of how or why.

It is also important to approach other experiences in the same way one might comparison shop. One outlet is as unlikely to have everything one needs, especially if the needs are profound and diverse. Within the United States alone, approaches such as San Diego’s community policing (which used a third less officers per capita than New York) and Boston’s creative use of key intermediaries to combat youth crime with minimal racial tension achieved crime reductions comparable to New York’s and may contain elements that could profitably be added to the mix.

And lastly, although one should not expect the Giuliani team to be excessively self-critical, one must ask hard questions about how well the various elements worked in New York itself. For example, although discussion in Mexico has focused on the notion of “zero tolerance” many New Yorkers, including a fair number of police officials, would dispute the that this was the essence of the NYPD approach, much less the magic bullet that more distant observers seem to believe in.

With these considerations in mind, here are some suggestions for local leaders as they examine the NYPD wares — what to take away, and what to leave on the shelf.

What to take:

Management and internal accountability. Compstat, the centerpiece of the NYPD’s innovations, was named for computer statistics, but technology was not the inspiration. It simply facilitated a management vision for compiling data and getting information flowing throughout the Department — providing the basis for permanent institutional exchange. By breaking down crime data in innumerable ways, Compstat let officials track the performance of individual precincts, and even cops. (One early Compstat revelation was the shocking fact that in the first half of 1994, nearly a third of officers in one of New York’s five boroughs had not made a single arrest.) Once combined with the very human dimension of face-to-face review by superiors in the presence of one’s peers, Compstat became an accountability platform that made it much harder for ineffective or uncommitted officials to hide.

Information. An essential element of every facet of New York’s strategy, information was the key to analyzing crime, assessing performance, and ultimately, making the adjustments needed to stay ahead of the curve. Information was both enhanced and decentralized, making it easier for personnel in the field to obtain more and better data, and to make more informed decisions about how to confront local circumstances.

Creativity. Giuliani’s first police commissioner, William Bratton, and his team transformed an relatively old dog force, not known for setting trends, into one synonymous with innovation, in part because they embraced available computer technology, but also because they decentralized authority and decision making, which encouraged new thinking from unlikely sources, and allowed promising junior officials to rise on their merits faster than the old seniority system would have allowed.

Breadth. The NYPD of the 1990s embraced a broad notion of public security that went beyond major crimes to “quality of life” concerns, using various inter-agency collaborations and legal mechanisms such as non-criminal enforcement tools, to shut down selected nuisance and petty offenses. Following the precepts of “broken windows” policing, the police sent word that they cared about ‘victimless’ crimes and made life harder for working people. Undeniably, pursuing smaller offenses also netted criminals responsible for more serious crimes, since those who robbed or skipped bail also tended to jump subway turnstiles without paying.

Connecting the dots. Although it was far from the first police department to use such techniques, NYPD’s crime mapping and analysis of crime data allowed it to identify broader crime patterns and links, for example, between a pattern of robberies in one area and a market in stolen goods and credit cars in another.

What to leave:

“Zero tolerance”. Although local officials have already fallen prey to this largely empty battle cry, the NYPD preferred the far less catchy “quality of life plus”. Whatever its name, at least three obvious objections should make officials here think twice. First, whether viewed as failing themselves or failed by society, New York’s relatively small squadron of often homeless, often aggressive “squeegee men” were not missed by most New Yorkers when they began to disappear from city streets. Mexico’s informal economy, which includes a bewildering army of ambulatory characters, may well be a nuisance to drivers and pedestrians alike - but an extraordinary number of voting families depend on them for survival. The promise of relentless enforcement will have to give way to a judicious appreciation of social (and electoral) realities. Second, every arrest and prosecution (in New York, William Bratton insisting on taking minor cases to court curtailing the traditional practice of giving a simple summons and fine) requires hours of time from police officers, station personnel, prosecutors and the courts. Mexico City’s overburdened, inefficient and unfair justice system risks being drowned by a multiplying caseload — and it doesn’t have New York’s tool of plea bargaining to get rid of cases quickly. Since Mexico City’s preventivos lack even the legal authority to investigate or process a case, such an approach would require infinitely better coordination with the judiciales, a distinctly remote prospect (and if it occurred, it would overwhelm the Procuraduria’s small force). Lastly, giving notoriously corrupt and unskilled street cops a mandate to pursue even the slightest infraction is tantamount to an engraved invitation to take the extortion of ordinary (albeit imperfect) citizens to new heights.

Failing the promise of Compstat. The beauty of Compstat is its malleability. Data can be collected on anything, from homicide rates to human rights complaints, sick days or arrest numbers, and indeed in New York some 400 variables about crime and performance were monitored on a regular basis. The information that a police force tracks, and moreover, what it does with that information, reflect its institutional values better than any brochure or public statement.

In addition to serving as the barometer of crime rates and arrests, Compstat could have been used to ensure tracking and warning system for problem officers whose behavior tainted public perceptions of the police. However, in practice, the NYPD approach became relentlessly arrest-driven. Although the Department’s intensified campaign of stopping and “frisking” young men on mere suspicion of criminal activity prompted inquiries by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, the Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, the New York State Attorney General’s Office and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (not to mention a host of NGOs, journalists and community groups), as well as class action litigation, either Compstat failed to ring the station house alarm, or the Department wasn’t listening.

Ignoring Abuse Complaints. Aggressive police practices, especially “stop and frisk” generated civilian complaints, usually that there was no legal basis for the detention, or that excessive force was used. Indeed, a study by the city’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) found that complaints about street encounters with the police were the most credible it received. Yet from the start of the Giuliani era in 1994 to 1998, his police Commissioners increasingly rejected even substantiated findings from the CCRB - reaching nearly 80% of the cases in 1996. In 90% of those cases in which the Department simply rejected the findings and refused to impose discipline, it did so without conducting any investigation, asking any additional questions, or offering an explanation. Mexico, which counts a lack of police accountability among its most pressing police problems, needs to move in the opposite direction.

Putting the community second. Giuliani’s police department downplayed the value of community policing. Other crime fighting benefits of good community relations, such as neighborhood “intelligence” and cooperation became greatly diminished priorities. When the inevitable tragedy hit (in New York’s case the 1999 Diallo shooting by an undertrained patrol) it surfaced what had been a powerful undercurrent of resentment. NYPD’s neglect in this area was both unwise and unnecessary. A study by New York’s Vera Institute released a month after the Diallo shooting showed how in two nearby precincts, local commanders had balanced strong community relations with the proactive policing raising the inevitable question, if it worked there, why not across the city? In 2000, Commissioner Bernard Kerik belatedly announced plans to institutionalize greater attention to community and citizen concerns but this was never fully developed.
Chilled debate, silenced critics. The style most associated with the Giuliani era, including its police department, was to shout down and cut off those who took a different view. Although it is hard to argue with plummeting crime rates, and it is hard to believe that a better trained equipped and managed police force won’t have an impact on crime, there remains a very serious debate about the extent of New York’s, or any police tactics, on crime. Journalists, academics, even cops who dissented were marginalized, denied information and even ridiculed. This may be a luxury purchased by success, as the public paid little attention — until tensions began to mount. Mexico City is not, despite the statistical claims of its leaders, riding a wave of victories against crime, and cannot afford, as a matter of politics or policy, to close off debate about its most important policy challenge.

Skewed expectations. Mr. Giuliani won a reputation for succeeding where his predecessors had failed to tame crime, it is worth remembering that he stood on important shoulders. For instance, by the 1990s, New York had already engaged in several legendary anticorruption efforts, and made great strides in eradicating the sort of institutionalized graft and criminality that had plagued the force. Indeed, as one student of the department observed in 1982, in the prior ten years, “it evolved from one of the most corrupt and brutal into one of the cleanest and most judicious.” Successive efforts at reform each strengthened a foundation upon which Giuliani’s first commissioner, William Bratton could pile results. Mexico City finds itself in the midst of its first modern reform effort, and history suggests additional phases may be required before the impact is evident.

Interestingly, as a new mayor, Giuliani took pains to dampen expectations about falling crime, telling reporters that he had “never been one who strongly relies on statistics as a way of measuring what we’re doing. . . . I don’t want the department to be overly focused on statistics.” Perhaps that more balanced view of things would have well served the NYPD throughout the rest of the Giuliani tenure — and might be words for Lopez Obrador to live by as well.