Another Year and We Are Still Not Close to Fixing Wilmington’s Violence Problems

This Sunday featured one more Special Report  from the NJ on the current state of violence in Wilmington: A Legacy of Crime Threatens Wilmington’s Progress; Wilmington Mayor Wants to Overhaul Police Force to Reverse City’s Crime Trend; and Florida City’s Police Force Gets Out From Behind Desks is the reporting package on offer. There’s alot to think about here and I’m not sure that I can do one more piece on using the policing assets we have better. But I have a few random thoughts:

1. We should all remember the promise made by Dennis Williams on the night of the Inauguration — that his efforts would make a dent in the city’s crime in 6 months and in 2 years you wouldn’t recognize the place.  He ran specifically promising that he know how to run the WPD so that crime would be run out of the city.  He noted that some of the tactics might make people uncomfortable, but he’d make sure it got ramped up  and the work got done.  I’ve made the point to a couple of WPD friends today that *this* is the basis of the current criticism.  That promise was overdone then — but impressive to the suburbanites with the city phobias in the first place — and now that is how it all gets measured.
2. With approximately 4.5 sworn officers per 1000 residents, Wilmington has a pretty large police force.  Philadelphia’s is 4.8 officers per 1000 residents.  Washington DC’s is 6.5 per 1000.  Would more officers help?  Maybe.  Everyone always thinks they need more staff, but no one has gotten the WPD to demonstrate that they need more officers in any meaningful way recently.  If the WPD can’t talk about how it uses the resources it has, there isn’t much reason to add to those already hefty resources.  That said, dissolving some specialized units to place more resources into patrol might help.  But that gets done at the expense of focused enforcement efforts in conjunction with groups like the Attorney General’s office, which seems short-sighted.  As I’ve discussed before, they’ve fundamentally dissolved the Community Policing unit, which certainly doesn’t help in an effort to build better relationships with the city.  And if you don’t have better relationships, how do you get more residents to speak up?
3. And how *do* you get more residents to speak up?  Some people are genuinely scared.  And given that it is highly likely that some fool threatening you and your neighbors on the corner will be back out on the street by dinnertime, this isn’t unreasonable.  There are multiple disconnects here — one in what constitutes safety and the other in how the system treats those arrested.  Both of these are complex issues, but residents are mostly thinking that calling the WPD should remove the threat they are reporting and the WPD makes the arrests.  But they aren’t responsible for keeping offenders — that’s the AG’s job.  Offenders back on the street shortly after an arrest (possibly looking for some payback) isn’t much of an incentive to step up.  And I can’t fault people who think they are protecting their own safety.  Others don’t call because they’re worn down from calling and not getting much response.  Or because they think it isn’t useful to call.  Building relationships with communities encourages these two groups back into some involvement, but it is hard to see relationship-building when there’s no one to establish a relationship with.
4. There is a fundamental disconnect in how the city represents the need for police on the ground.  If you are in Downtown, you are in the second iteration of a real Community Policing effort — one that goes for almost 24 hours a day.  Because when the people downtown start getting nervous about the local crime, the WPD wants them to know that uniforms conspicuously patrolling are just the thing to make everyone OK.  In neighborhoods just a few blocks away — the places that are generating the headlines that are making the downtowners nervous — you are meant to know that more uniforms won’t solve your problem.  *Your* problem is lack of jobs, a high dropout rate, a lack of cooperation from residents, etc.  And to some extent — all of this does contribute to the levels of violent crime.  But you can’t tell one part of the city that they can have different policing from the rest of the city and not expect the rest of the city to be really annoyed.
5. For all of the problems that do contribute to Wilmington’s crime problem, the city controls none of the resources that might help fix some of these issues.  The city controls no school programs, doesn’t control jobs really (and if the city doesn’t get safer you won’t have much growth there) and provides no social services.  This is where the city has to do more and better partnering with the folks who do provide these services to try to get some of the people who you can capture back on a better path.  The city does control the WPD, so an over-emphasis on what they may or may not be able to accomplish here might be a function of controlling just one tool in the tool box.
6. Philadelphia is working on implementing their version of the “Boston Miracle” — a very focused deterrence effort on the gangs and individuals causing the most problems.  This goes so far as to disconnect them from pirated cable or PECO connections, just to maintain a You Are Watched presence.  But this also includes some outreach to minor offenders, trying to get them off of the street and back to school or in job training and off of the track to jail that too many of them are on.  This outreach, is, of course, Hugging A Thug, and apparently is not going to happen here.  But if you can get some of them off of the treadmill to jail and off to school and perhaps something more productive that doesn’t need police enforcement, I can’t see how this isn’t a good thing.  What Philadelphia does here is worth watching.
7. There really needs to be a better focus on “broken windows” type quality of life enforcement.  I know that the city says they are focusing on this, but I don’t think that they’ve the tools to get this done properly.  Since the process to deal with L&I citations is so long, too many owners just ignore L&I it seems.  I’ve asked the current Chair of the Housing and L&I Committee in City Council to invoke a thorough review of the current process and to get some input on how to sharpen it up, but I don’t have much hope that this will happen.
8. You can see via the NJ comments that there are plenty of WPD officers who are offended by this reporting today.  Frankly, I can’t see why they would be.  In the main, these articles aren’t about the police, but of the overall policing strategy.  Yes there are stories on how people believe they have been under served by the WPD (and hey, I have a couple of those too), but go back to Item 1 in this list.  The newly inaugurated Mayor of Wilmington raised the bar on what the WPD would accomplish here and now the WPD has to live with that.

What else?  It sure seems like we keep having this conversation over and over.  But a better perception of safety is key for Wilmington.