Written on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 9:15am by Alan Bedenko | 5 Comments

What a Novel Concept!

An increased police presence, including officers actually walking along the sidewalk rather than driving by in a car, helped improve safety on Chippewa this past weekend?

Well, not just that:

In addition to making six arrests, police also impounded three vehicles and issued 25 vehicle and traffic summonses, and about 110 parking tickets.

Gee, I wonder if cops walking a beat – especially in more crime-prone areas – might improve the lives of people throughout the city and region?

Tagged with: , , ,

5 Comments

  1. Dick Kern says:
    January 22, 2008 at 10:43 am

    It is frustrating to see logic in policing keep being lost. Everybody knows that cops knowing a neighborhood, including its leaders & potential troublemakers is highly effective.

    Why does such common sense have to be repeatedly re-invented?

  2. Ben McD says:
    January 22, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    According to Steven D. Levitt, the only proven ways to reduce crime are increasing the number of officers, or increasing prison sentence. Don’t know how true that is, but the theory seems sound.

  3. Mike In WNY says:
    January 22, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    This contrasts with the millions Brown has wasted on video surveillance cameras.

  4. Denizen says:
    January 23, 2008 at 1:07 am

    Ahh….police presence feels so much more “intimate” when cops are actually standing on the sidewalk.

  5. starbuck says:
    January 24, 2008 at 1:57 am

    Ben is right about that theory of Levitt’s making a lot of sense. While these beefed-up Chippewa patrols were arresting people there, they weren’t doing so elsewhere. Can’t be in two places at once. If it was more cops on the street via overtime, great but that can’t be sustained and it can’t be done in any significant number of dangerous neighborhoods because there’s just too many.

    Moving or adding cops to Chippewa placated business owners (campaign donors) and garnered some favorable TV news publicity (or at least helped undo last week’s bad publicity) but did the total number of arrests city wide increase compared to previous the weekend night shifts? Or did they just arrest people in different places this time that happened to have TV coverage?

    The suggestion for more walking the beat in high crime areas is very simplistic.

    Take a full street map of Buffalo and yellow-highlight the “high crime” blocks you want more beat walking on. There’s many hundreds. Every block of Bailey Ave mile after mile, Same for Broadway, William, Clinton, Jefferson, Fillmore, E Ferry, E Delavan, … countless blocks.

    I’m not picking on the East Side. The lower and mid West Side has many too.

    Beat walking is good symbolism which is needed sometimes but it’s not a sound long term strategy. In a city like Buffalo cops can accomplish much more in cars because criminals don’t announce ahead of time which blocks they’ll commit crimes on among the thousands of high crime blocks and even some lower crime blocks mixed in at their whims. Cops need to move around fast to get where they need to be.

    It also makes prefect sense that more prison cells would be needed as Levitt says. Arresting the same people over and over costs a lot of money but doesn’t accomplish much if they’re soon back on the street.

 

You need to log in to vote

The blog owner requires users to be logged in to be able to vote for this post.

Alternatively, if you do not have an account yet you can create one here.

Powered by Vote It Up