Kathy Jackson grew up on Curtin Street in the 1970s. Life took her to Oklahoma. In 2009 she returned. While the street and most of the houses were still there, her neighborhood was gone. According to Jackson, crack cocaine had taken its place.
“This is very depressing as a resident,” Jackson said after a community meeting in February held Uptown at the Wesley Union AME Church to discuss the city’s application for a $1 million federal anti-crime and blight grant. “It was a culture shock for me when I came home.”
Crime in Harrisburg has become more than just a worry for city officials or a topic of conversation over Sunday night dinner. In some areas of the city, the sounds of gunshots have become as common and excusable as the sound of an unanswered car alarm. What once made some city residents jump and flinch now produces only resigned, barely audible sighs. “Not again,” is the thought bubble inside shaking, frowning heads.
As of mid-March, this city of about 50,000 had seen its fifth homicide. Harrisburg has little money to spend on public safety thanks to a $340 million debt on its failed incinerator and a structural deficit estimated at $10 million per year. During the weekend of Feb. 16 to 17 alone, Harrisburg saw three unrelated homicides. During the weekend of March 9 to 10, South Allison Hill saw a homicide and then a shooting in the same area.
What options do cash-strapped city officials have? Criminologists have long studied what’s known as “hot spot” policing, where available resources are focused on specific high-crime areas. As a result of one of many studies discussed in a recent New York Times article, police and criminologists have credited hot spot policing with reducing crime in New York City by a whopping 75 percent over the past two decades—even with a 15 percent reduction in the city’s police force. But what is not clear to researchers is how this also translated into a one-third drop in the prison population and millions saved annually on prison costs.
Regardless, what is clear jumps out:
“Rates of murder, rape, grand larceny, robbery and assault declined significantly faster in precincts with hot-spot policing than in those without it,” the article said, referring to a study conducted by New York University political scientist Dennis C. Smith.
Recently, Harrisburg Mayor Linda Thompson initiated a “Neighborhood Safe Zones” program where problem blocks are literally cordoned off in an attempt to isolate and eradicate crime. Based on the Baltimore Police Department’s Community Safe Zone Project that began in 2005, it couples enhanced foot patrols, social service resources, community-based reach-out programs and a multitude of relevant city departments, including Code Enforcement to represent the city’s latest approach to fighting crime.
Thompson said that the police department did not fare well under either the city’s financial recovery plan (the department has a 2013 budget of almost $17.1 million) or the prolonged City Council fight over declaring bankruptcy, losing 30 officers in the process. Thompson said that the city should regain 15 cops by July and that several of them are strictly slated for street patrol.
“It gives a sense of security to people. It allows our cops to get out there and build relationships. It allows them to build these relationships so people are willing to be of help to them and give them inside information about a crime and help prevent a crime. I am a staunch proponent of having officers work the street,” Thompson said, adding that the Safe Zones program uses existing policing funds at no additional cost to taxpayers.
In early August, police barricaded Jackson’s Curtin Street after residents complained of constant gunfire. Jackson, daughter of the late Edith I. Jackson, a well-known Uptown community activist who died in 2009, applauds the city’s effort and says that, initially anyhow, the tactic worked very well.
“Absolutely,” she said enthusiastically. “What it did was it flushed them out and made them more visible.”
But then the barricades came down, and the police presence faded.
“No, it doesn’t matter how many police you put in there. It’s not going to help,” Jackson said. “They’re just going to go from one neighborhood to the next. It’s not going to solve the problem.” Jackson said she would welcome additional attention paid to issues such as education, employment and mental health.
Harrisburg police recently opened two community policing centers, one in Hall Manor in Allison Hill and another on S. 15th Street, in its ongoing attempt to make the department even more visible and more accessible.
Keeping enough cops on the job is difficult, said Harrisburg Police Chief Pierre Ritter. The department is now down to about 144 officers, he explained, a decline from around 180 just a couple of years ago.
Drops in personnel have resulted in a conundrum, Ritter said. The city would like to apply for grants to hire more officers, but those grants require basic staffing level requirements that are much higher—in one instance around 250—than the numbers Harrisburg currently has. Many police forces nationwide are in the same boat, Ritter said.
“So you can say, ‘We want to hire X amount of officers on a grant, but you have to maintain the number of officers you have here in order to pay for those officers that are being supplemented by the grant.’ It’s not as easy as ‘Yeah, let’s get some grant money and hire 10 officers’ and then we’re good to go,” Ritter said.
Last August, a coalition of neighboring municipalities, including the state police, joined city cops in patrolling crime hot spots. Going forward, however, Harrisburg may have more trouble getting the state police to boost its depleted force. In February, State Police Commissioner Frank Noonan told the state House Appropriations Committee that his resources were stretched thin due to expanding obligations in the state’s expansive rural geography.
A 2011 study by University of Wisconsin professor Steven N. Durlauf and Carnegie Mellon professor Daniel Nagin concluded that increased police street presence is a more effective deterrent on crime than longer prison sentences. Durlauf and Nagin went on to suggest that, like the results found in the New York study, police on the street reduce crime and the number of prisoners taxpayers must provide for. In turn, that should free up money to fund more police patrols.
More locally, The Philadelphia Foot Patrol Experiment, a Temple University study done on hot spot policing in collaboration with the Philadelphia Police Department, showed initial reductions in criminal activity (referred to as “displacement”), but an eventual return of crime after the close of the experiment—that is, the departure of the patrols.
“The displacement uncovered had decayed during the three months after the experiment, and it is theoretically plausible that previously displaced offenders returned to the original target areas causing inverse displacement,” researchers found.
Foot patrols are best used as part of “a variety of policing paradigms” researchers said, and they suggested ways to incorporate them beyond strictly law enforcement-based strategies.
But researchers warned that these statistics came with a caveat: stop and frisk incidents (identified in the paper as “pedestrian field interviews”) increased by “about 64 percent.”
“While this extra activity likely aided deterrence, police commanders should be conscious of the potential harm to police-community relations in targeted areas, and consider other tactics if this is a concern,” they said.
Ron Tilley is the program director of the Brethren Community Ministries, a Hummel Street ministry devoted to promoting peaceful solutions to violence. In 2009, Tilley helped bring Fugitive Safe Surrender to Harrisburg. In four short days, 1,200 fugitives surrendered, clearing 5,700 warrants. A similar program in St. Louis took a staggering 1,300 guns off the street between 1994 and 1997.
“This could be a peaceful way to take guns off the streets and out of the hands of juveniles,” Tilley said.
Tilley wears another hat as the organizer for Heeding God’s Call Harrisburg, a coalition of congregations from numerous faith backgrounds dedicated to saving lives by ending gun violence in Harrisburg. Heeding God’s Call far too frequently holds vigils for victims of gun violence.
“There’s a lot of suffering, both sets of families, perpetrators and victims,” he said.
Last February, Nate DeMuro and his girlfriend were mugged Uptown. Robbed on the street at gunpoint at around 9:30 on a Thursday night. No one was injured, he said.
“For lack of a better description, it was a rather polite robbery,” he said.
The assailant took their phones and his girlfriend’s purse for its cash and then split. After a minute or two, the pair followed his path looking for their phones. Within half a block, a police officer coincidentally drove by. “Unfortunately he got away.”
That wasn’t DeMuro’s only brush with crime. He said he also broke up the mugging of a woman. He generally gives the Harrisburg police high marks but still wants to see the city conduct more routine foot patrols.
“If we had that, people would feel safer, they would come out,” DeMuro said.
He credits police with taking the time to get to know local residents, but is under the impression that there just aren’t enough police to get the job done.
What would DeMuro do if he were chief of police? “If I was him, I’d probably be out in the neighborhoods more. You got to get to know these people. You want to know the little old lady that lives there in that little house. The town is just too small. Everybody knows everybody one way or the other,” he said.
Reggie Sheffield is a freelance journalist in Harrisburg. He is reachable at troylus@comcast.net.
