I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force
Less widely-noticed by the public were the APD’s reforms in the rest of its patrol force, where officers were assigned to six geographically-defined “sectors” in order to create viable teams for problem-solving and instill a sense of ownership over particular neighborhoods.
The APD kicked off the effort with directions to its commanding officers about how to form the six sector teams and some suggestions for how to run them.
At first officers received no direct training about how their jobs would change: It was simply expected that neighborhood assignments would somehow lead to ownership and problem-solving.
As Grebert explains it, the main change at this stage was in holding periodic team meetings in each sector for everyone assigned to that area, including cruiser officers, the foot patrol officers, and investigators (most units within the detective division began assigning their cases by sector, and special units like SIU were directed to designate a liaison for each sector).
On occasion, some sectors also invited community members, and others invited representatives from neighboring police agencies to help deal with problems crossed jurisdictional boundaries.
“That sort of thing was never done before,” Grebert explains of the meetings.
You bring them all in off the street at a certain time and you say, “The crime numbers show this, but you tell us what addresses are the biggest pain in the butt because you’re going there the most times.”
Or, “What person is the biggest pain in the butt?”
To try and get them to concentrate on what was going on within that particular neighborhood, the addresses, the people.
The monthly team meetings turned out to be fairly informal events (one department member describes them as “brainstorming sessions”).
For the most part they simply focused officers’ attention on the areas identified by the group as troublespots along the model of what other police agencies refer to as “directed patrol.”
For example, in a Spring meeting, Sergeants might remind officers that they could expect activity to increase in a sector park as the summer approached, and that they should therefore make a particular effort to drive past it and enforce quality-of-life laws.
The Sergeants who ran the meetings summarized their proceedings in an interdepartmental correspondence to the Chief, focusing on new issues raised and on the progress made in dealing with older problems.
In a few cases, sector teams went beyond the directed patrol model to craft less traditional responses to area problems.
For example, a number of department members mentioned one sector’s novel attempt to deal with the problem of false robbery alarms from local convenience stores.
“We were having problems with the stores that were open on the midnight to 8:00 tour, [which] were obviously like little mom and pop [stores],” explains then-Sergeant Lauren Signer of the A sector’s midnight shift.
“They would hit their panic alarm for a lot of things, and we’d get there and the people would just not be able to communicate with us.”
Officers were particularly concerned with a Clinton Avenue store that, as they later discovered, had generated 117 calls for service in the first five months of the year.
Assembled for their monthly sector meeting in June of 1995, the A sector officers on the midnight shift identified two major problems with the store: First of all, employees were apparently treating the panic alarm as an all-purpose way to summon the police, and officers reported being called to the scene for relatively minor suspicious person calls; in police eyes, the alarm was to be reserved for serious incidents, and when they got a call from it, they assumed that a robbery was in progress.
The second problem was simply that responding officers had trouble communicating with employees, for the store was owned and operated by recent immigrants from Afghanistan who did not speak English very fluently.
Moreover, some APD officers felt that the store owners simply were not cooperative when they did show up to investigate incidents.
The problem fed in to a larger team project to assign “liaisons” to various community institutions, including hotels, neighborhood bars, and convenience stores.
Responsibility for the Clinton Avenue store fell to Officer Michael Romano, who had taken the assignment as convenience store liaison.
After discussions within the team about how to handle the problem, Romano began meeting with the owners during his regular patrol in order to establish better communication.
The APD officer used these encounters to ask the owners what safety concerns they had, to suggest possible ways to manage them (including controlling the number of people allowed in the store at one time), and to explain to them when and when not to use the panic alarm.
Since Romano was also the liaison to all other area convenience stores, he began applying the same techniques in other locations, making a particular effort to educate store employees on the proper use of their panic alarms.
By late fall the team began to feel that the Clinton Avenue store’s problems in particular were subsiding, as officers reported fewer false alarms and better cooperation when they responded to calls.
As Romano’s supervisor, Signer decided to verify the progress statistically, and with Grebert’s help she was able to get call data on this particular store over time.
In the department’s eyes, the statistics showed a clear improvement: In the five months immediately before the team established its liaison, the Clinton Avenue market had made 117 calls for service, but in the next six months it made only 78; and unfounded calls fell from 15 to 8 over the same period.
It was not feasible to do the same analysis for all the sector’s convenience stores, and Signer concedes that the analysis did not constitute a full-blown study of the liaison program’s impact.
But it provided the department with rare statistical evidence of community policing’s success, which otherwise had been restricted to anecdotes.
The team went on to develop its other liaison programs as well, and Signer made a special effort to document her officers’ projects, going so far as to publish a regular newsletter that reported sector activities and that printed the minutes of its meetings.
All of these projects pushed the envelope of Albany’s young community policing program at the time: The sector was the only one to turn informal pressure to “get to know the community” into a formal liaison program, and Signer paid much more attention to documentation than most teams.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, continued ...
In developing the A sector’s community policing program along these lines, Signer admits that high-level support was crucial, and happenstance played an important role in helping her to get it.
A newly-promoted Sergeant at the time, Signer had recently completed her Master’s degree in criminal justice at SUNY Albany on a competitive scholarship for police officers.
While she was away from the department attending school, her contact in the APD had been Grebert, and the two began to talk frequently about community policing.
“I had that open communication with him that in some organizations you shouldn’t have, because you’re violating the chain of command,” Signer explains.
But he and I both were really big on community policing and it’s something that we talked about a lot.
And we would discuss [things like] “Well, this is why it will work or it won’t work.” . . .
And I liked trying things and then e-mailing him, and telling him, “Well, this did go,” or “This didn’t go,” or “We’re really having a hard time.”
And sometimes he would help.
He would make things available or say, “Yes, go for that,” and authorize it.
The convenience store liaison was itself an example of this process, as traditionally officers had been discouraged from socializing with store owners.
“Sometimes people think it is an invitation to corruption because you don’t want the officers to hang around these businesses,” Signer explains.
But Grebert was quick to approve of the idea:
Instead of [saying], “Hey, get back in your car and get on patrol,” it was “No, it’s okay to go in and chat with these people and establish this relationship and work out something where you’re working with them.”
So it’s okay for the officer to spend some time here as opposed to, “You better have every minute in the patrol car and you better be able to account for every minute.”
Moreover, when Signer decided to evaluate the project statistically, Grebert was able to help her expedite the data request by telling the administrative services division to expect her call.
(At the time, the APD did not have anyone assigned full-time to crime analysis, and its computer system did not make it particularly easy to process the sort of request Signer was making.)
Indeed, on several occasions Grebert was able to help the team get needed resources, including things as simple as a file cabinet for the team’s problem-solving records, as well as larger expenses like a color printer for the sector newsletter.
Signer points out that these are “things that normally take a long time [in] organizations,” but she and her officers were able to get them done quickly by showing upper management what they were trying to accomplish.
Not all of Signer’s officers were enthusiastic about the many projects her team embarked upon, and some viewed her interest in their work as “micromanaging.”
But she received recognition for her efforts from the department’s top management, and she was even able to get Tuffey and Grebert to attend one of her team’s 6 A.M. sector meetings.
“People were totally astounded,” Signer explains of the two Chiefs’ arrival.
“The fact that they physically came and showed that they thought this was important enough to put on their sweat suits and drag their butts out of bed to come to a meeting at 6:00 o’clock in the morning was tremendous support."
"It legitimizes what you’re trying to do.”
Signer found the experience immensely rewarding, and she attributes the team’s success not just to help from Grebert, but also to the freedom she was afforded by her Lieutenant.
“I had a great Lieutenant who, while not convinced that community policing was necessarily the way to go, saw that the things that we were trying as a team, did, in fact, meet with law enforcement goals,” she explains.
What I enjoyed about being a supervisor in the new community policing framework was the ability to be creative with the officers — to be able to say to the officers, “Okay, you chose to be here; you chose a sector and you chose to be here."
"Now, what is it you’re interested in?"
"What do you think we need to do here?”
And working as a team: I had never experienced that myself as a patrol officer: Having input, working with supervisors as opposed to being directed by the supervisor.
So that, to me, was exciting and a good way to put ideas and theories into action.
And some things work and some things don’t, . . . . but as a supervisor, it was fun to try and tackle problems as a team and see what different officers identified as problems.
Some of the APD’s other teams had similar experiences, in that they were able to generate new ideas for handling problems in team meetings, and they had the flexibility they needed to carry those ideas out.
But many department members also report some difficulties with the fledgling community policing effort, and it is useful to examine how the department responded to them.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, continued ...
In developing the A sector’s community policing program along these lines, Signer admits that high-level support was crucial, and happenstance played an important role in helping her to get it.
A newly-promoted Sergeant at the time, Signer had recently completed her Master’s degree in criminal justice at SUNY Albany on a competitive scholarship for police officers.
While she was away from the department attending school, her contact in the APD had been Grebert, and the two began to talk frequently about community policing.
“I had that open communication with him that in some organizations you shouldn’t have, because you’re violating the chain of command,” Signer explains.
But he and I both were really big on community policing and it’s something that we talked about a lot.
And we would discuss [things like] “Well, this is why it will work or it won’t work.” . . .
And I liked trying things and then e-mailing him, and telling him, “Well, this did go,” or “This didn’t go,” or “We’re really having a hard time.”
And sometimes he would help.
He would make things available or say, “Yes, go for that,” and authorize it.
The convenience store liaison was itself an example of this process, as traditionally officers had been discouraged from socializing with store owners.
“Sometimes people think it is an invitation to corruption because you don’t want the officers to hang around these businesses,” Signer explains.
But Grebert was quick to approve of the idea:
Instead of [saying], “Hey, get back in your car and get on patrol,” it was “No, it’s okay to go in and chat with these people and establish this relationship and work out something where you’re working with them.”
So it’s okay for the officer to spend some time here as opposed to, “You better have every minute in the patrol car and you better be able to account for every minute.”
Moreover, when Signer decided to evaluate the project statistically, Grebert was able to help her expedite the data request by telling the administrative services division to expect her call.
(At the time, the APD did not have anyone assigned full-time to crime analysis, and its computer system did not make it particularly easy to process the sort of request Signer was making.)
Indeed, on several occasions Grebert was able to help the team get needed resources, including things as simple as a file cabinet for the team’s problem-solving records, as well as larger expenses like a color printer for the sector newsletter.
Signer points out that these are “things that normally take a long time [in] organizations,” but she and her officers were able to get them done quickly by showing upper management what they were trying to accomplish.
Not all of Signer’s officers were enthusiastic about the many projects her team embarked upon, and some viewed her interest in their work as “micromanaging.”
But she received recognition for her efforts from the department’s top management, and she was even able to get Tuffey and Grebert to attend one of her team’s 6 A.M. sector meetings.
“People were totally astounded,” Signer explains of the two Chiefs’ arrival.
“The fact that they physically came and showed that they thought this was important enough to put on their sweat suits and drag their butts out of bed to come to a meeting at 6:00 o’clock in the morning was tremendous support."
"It legitimizes what you’re trying to do.”
Signer found the experience immensely rewarding, and she attributes the team’s success not just to help from Grebert, but also to the freedom she was afforded by her Lieutenant.
“I had a great Lieutenant who, while not convinced that community policing was necessarily the way to go, saw that the things that we were trying as a team, did, in fact, meet with law enforcement goals,” she explains.
What I enjoyed about being a supervisor in the new community policing framework was the ability to be creative with the officers — to be able to say to the officers, “Okay, you chose to be here; you chose a sector and you chose to be here."
"Now, what is it you’re interested in?"
"What do you think we need to do here?”
And working as a team: I had never experienced that myself as a patrol officer: Having input, working with supervisors as opposed to being directed by the supervisor.
So that, to me, was exciting and a good way to put ideas and theories into action.
And some things work and some things don’t, . . . . but as a supervisor, it was fun to try and tackle problems as a team and see what different officers identified as problems.
Some of the APD’s other teams had similar experiences, in that they were able to generate new ideas for handling problems in team meetings, and they had the flexibility they needed to carry those ideas out.
But many department members also report some difficulties with the fledgling community policing effort, and it is useful to examine how the department responded to them.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, continued ...
Particularly at the outset, many officers simply felt that they had not been sufficiently informed about what community policing meant for their jobs.
“Community policing was a phrase that many people didn’t understand,” one APD manager concedes, going on to explain that in response, the department decided to offer a wave of in-service training for officers on community policing and related topics, such as cultural diversity.
The department took particular care to give these sessions a community focus, bringing in neighborhood leaders and representatives from other community groups to one forum in order to introduce them to sector officers and to give a sense of what community concerns were.
But the main message the training sessions tried to convey was that sector officers should look behind the incidents they responded to for underlying problems, and that they should feel authorized to develop solutions on their own — including making contacts with other divisions and other agencies.
Indeed, describing the resources that other agencies could offer was an important part of the training sessions.
Many department members report that these training sessions and growing experience with the new style helped diffuse community policing ideas through the force, but most also maintain that there is more work to be done, and they concede that the training efforts got “mixed reviews.”
As one department manager puts it:
I guess some of the older guys thought we were going to show them some new dazzling thing.
And when they realized, “Well hell, I did that ten years ago,” they were disappointed.
I guess in the sense that they thought community policing was going to be this brand new nifty way of doing law enforcement, when in reality, it’s kind of like returning to our roots.
When you had the precincts with the beat cops always walking the same areas, who knew all the same people, they worked with the community to solve those problems.
So they said, “Oh, I remember doing that years ago.”
The other disappointment was I think some people thought we weren’t moving fast enough, that maybe we should do more.
Because we talked about that zero tolerance philosophy on those minor issues [referring especially to the “crackdowns” the APD undertook in a few areas, described below].
Still other department members reportedly rejected community policing at a more fundamental level.
For example, though Grebert insists that after the first year many officers did begin to develop a sense of ownership for their areas, he admits that the department is “still a long way from [having] complete acceptance of the concept,” and he attributes this problem to some officers’ preconceived notions that community policing is “soft.”
“I wish we had used any other expression rather than ‘community policing,’ because ‘community’ is a soft word,” Grebert explains.
“Cops are tough guys . . . ."
"If we called it ‘Assertive Policing’ or something they all would have jumped on board.”
Other officers did not necessarily reject the message entirely, but neither did they completely assimilate it: As one department manager puts it, officers were “pretty accurate in identifying law enforcement-related problems,” but they had more difficulty coming up with solutions other than patrol and arrest.
Finally, a number of officers and Sergeants report that there was uneven support for community policing at higher levels as well, as some squad Lieutenants simply did not see the need for change.
“It was like, ‘Do it this way because I’m the Lieutenant.'"
"'This is the way we’ve always done it,’” one department member recalls.
Management was not unprepared for such reactions, and it tried to get the message out to officers to be patient: “We tried to tell them that you don’t go from here to there without doing some transitional work in between,” one APD manager explains.
In particular, upper management often reiterated the idea that it would take a generation to fully implement community policing, in order, as one puts it, “to get rid of the older guys that are used to doing it a certain way.”
In the meantime, the department continually revised its in-service training to meet the needs upper management identified.
It did not, however, decide to repeat the entire community policing curriculum, despite the desires for some department members to do so.
For different reasons, many APD managers explain that staffing limitations partly underlay this decision: First of all, given the vagaries of the police workload, management felt that it was difficult to schedule the entire department for training on any given week.
As it was, the APD — like most police departments — found it logistically difficult to give large groups of officers their yearly in-service training, and it often needed to shift work hours and use other officers as backfill to do so.
So instead of repeating the training en masse, the department opted to repeat key sections of the original community policing curriculum — like problem-solving and interagency service referral — as part of its standard in-service training, which came to at least 40 hours a year per officer (including firearms training). 35
Second, the training division itself had somewhat limited manpower, as even by the time of my Spring 1998 site visit, only three officers worked for the division that covered not only training, but also research and computerization.
The APD’s original community policing plan called for the addition of two new full-time training specialists to Administrative Services, and for another staffer to be added to help with other administrative functions.
But in an era of tight budgets, these positions did not materialize for some time.
Recently the department did expand ASB, adding two officers, a Sergeant, and two civilians in June of 1998, and in comments on a draft of this paper, one department manager expressed optimism that these new positions would help improve the APD’s ability to offer training.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, continued ...
Particularly at the outset, many officers simply felt that they had not been sufficiently informed about what community policing meant for their jobs.
“Community policing was a phrase that many people didn’t understand,” one APD manager concedes, going on to explain that in response, the department decided to offer a wave of in-service training for officers on community policing and related topics, such as cultural diversity.
The department took particular care to give these sessions a community focus, bringing in neighborhood leaders and representatives from other community groups to one forum in order to introduce them to sector officers and to give a sense of what community concerns were.
But the main message the training sessions tried to convey was that sector officers should look behind the incidents they responded to for underlying problems, and that they should feel authorized to develop solutions on their own — including making contacts with other divisions and other agencies.
Indeed, describing the resources that other agencies could offer was an important part of the training sessions.
Many department members report that these training sessions and growing experience with the new style helped diffuse community policing ideas through the force, but most also maintain that there is more work to be done, and they concede that the training efforts got “mixed reviews.”
As one department manager puts it:
I guess some of the older guys thought we were going to show them some new dazzling thing.
And when they realized, “Well hell, I did that ten years ago,” they were disappointed.
I guess in the sense that they thought community policing was going to be this brand new nifty way of doing law enforcement, when in reality, it’s kind of like returning to our roots.
When you had the precincts with the beat cops always walking the same areas, who knew all the same people, they worked with the community to solve those problems.
So they said, “Oh, I remember doing that years ago.”
The other disappointment was I think some people thought we weren’t moving fast enough, that maybe we should do more.
Because we talked about that zero tolerance philosophy on those minor issues [referring especially to the “crackdowns” the APD undertook in a few areas, described below].
Still other department members reportedly rejected community policing at a more fundamental level.
For example, though Grebert insists that after the first year many officers did begin to develop a sense of ownership for their areas, he admits that the department is “still a long way from [having] complete acceptance of the concept,” and he attributes this problem to some officers’ preconceived notions that community policing is “soft.”
“I wish we had used any other expression rather than ‘community policing,’ because ‘community’ is a soft word,” Grebert explains.
“Cops are tough guys . . . ."
"If we called it ‘Assertive Policing’ or something they all would have jumped on board.”
Other officers did not necessarily reject the message entirely, but neither did they completely assimilate it: As one department manager puts it, officers were “pretty accurate in identifying law enforcement-related problems,” but they had more difficulty coming up with solutions other than patrol and arrest.
Finally, a number of officers and Sergeants report that there was uneven support for community policing at higher levels as well, as some squad Lieutenants simply did not see the need for change.
“It was like, ‘Do it this way because I’m the Lieutenant.'"
"'This is the way we’ve always done it,’” one department member recalls.
Management was not unprepared for such reactions, and it tried to get the message out to officers to be patient: “We tried to tell them that you don’t go from here to there without doing some transitional work in between,” one APD manager explains.
In particular, upper management often reiterated the idea that it would take a generation to fully implement community policing, in order, as one puts it, “to get rid of the older guys that are used to doing it a certain way.”
In the meantime, the department continually revised its in-service training to meet the needs upper management identified.
It did not, however, decide to repeat the entire community policing curriculum, despite the desires for some department members to do so.
For different reasons, many APD managers explain that staffing limitations partly underlay this decision: First of all, given the vagaries of the police workload, management felt that it was difficult to schedule the entire department for training on any given week.
As it was, the APD — like most police departments — found it logistically difficult to give large groups of officers their yearly in-service training, and it often needed to shift work hours and use other officers as backfill to do so.
So instead of repeating the training en masse, the department opted to repeat key sections of the original community policing curriculum — like problem-solving and interagency service referral — as part of its standard in-service training, which came to at least 40 hours a year per officer (including firearms training). 35
Second, the training division itself had somewhat limited manpower, as even by the time of my Spring 1998 site visit, only three officers worked for the division that covered not only training, but also research and computerization.
The APD’s original community policing plan called for the addition of two new full-time training specialists to Administrative Services, and for another staffer to be added to help with other administrative functions.
But in an era of tight budgets, these positions did not materialize for some time.
Recently the department did expand ASB, adding two officers, a Sergeant, and two civilians in June of 1998, and in comments on a draft of this paper, one department manager expressed optimism that these new positions would help improve the APD’s ability to offer training.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, concluded ...
In any case, some department members argue that the challenges in building support for the young community policing effort had less to do with training than they did with other administrative practices.
For example, one argues that department decisionmaking has been too closed, and that the result is too little sense of ownership and understanding about the reforms:
I think what was not well communicated was the interest of the command level staff and the Chief in hearing what officers wanted to contribute or do.
The officers felt like, “You’re saying that, but you don’t mean it.”
. . . I think community policing is very important.
I’m very, very enthusiastic about it.
I wish I were more in a position to help implement it.
Maybe — I don’t know necessarily as part of the decision making, but part of the vision would be nice; to have more input there.
[Because] I don’t know how things are done.
Nobody knows how they’re done.
They’re just done . . .
We just don’t know where stuff comes from and that’s frustrating. . . .
Why are we doing this?
Why are these changes being made?
How do I fit into this? . . .
How am I . . . better able to serve the public this way than I was before?
Others argue that the zone meetings were and are too “unwieldy” to focus attention on problems effectively, and the lack of administrative systems to document and track problems may have contributed to this sense.
Finally, important secondary reforms did not always go off as planned.
For example, although the community policing plan called for a close relationship between SIU investigators and the sectors (particularly community outreach officers in the zones), many department members report that SIU still rarely notifies patrol officers when they execute search warrants in their neighborhoods — a practice that the plan explicitly encouraged.
(In fact, one officer goes so far as to say that “the main [problem] with community policing is that this relationship with the special units isn’t there.”)
On the other side, some special units maintain that sector teams sometimes fail to notify them about their team meetings even though they are supposed to attend.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Bringing a Neighborhood Focus to the Patrol Force, concluded ...
In any case, some department members argue that the challenges in building support for the young community policing effort had less to do with training than they did with other administrative practices.
For example, one argues that department decisionmaking has been too closed, and that the result is too little sense of ownership and understanding about the reforms:
I think what was not well communicated was the interest of the command level staff and the Chief in hearing what officers wanted to contribute or do.
The officers felt like, “You’re saying that, but you don’t mean it.”
. . . I think community policing is very important.
I’m very, very enthusiastic about it.
I wish I were more in a position to help implement it.
Maybe — I don’t know necessarily as part of the decision making, but part of the vision would be nice; to have more input there.
[Because] I don’t know how things are done.
Nobody knows how they’re done.
They’re just done . . .
We just don’t know where stuff comes from and that’s frustrating. . . .
Why are we doing this?
Why are these changes being made?
How do I fit into this? . . .
How am I . . . better able to serve the public this way than I was before?
Others argue that the zone meetings were and are too “unwieldy” to focus attention on problems effectively, and the lack of administrative systems to document and track problems may have contributed to this sense.
Finally, important secondary reforms did not always go off as planned.
For example, although the community policing plan called for a close relationship between SIU investigators and the sectors (particularly community outreach officers in the zones), many department members report that SIU still rarely notifies patrol officers when they execute search warrants in their neighborhoods — a practice that the plan explicitly encouraged.
(In fact, one officer goes so far as to say that “the main [problem] with community policing is that this relationship with the special units isn’t there.”)
On the other side, some special units maintain that sector teams sometimes fail to notify them about their team meetings even though they are supposed to attend.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Monitoring Change
In any case, department managers have not always been able to tell for certain whether or not community policing is “working” in the city.
Arrest data for low-level offenses did seem to show that officers were beginning to take quality-of-life problems more seriously — as described below, that element of community policing seems to have made the most progress in Albany.
But without any type of record keeping on neighborhood problem-solving or any new forms of performance measurement, it has been difficult for department managers to tell for certain how well other aspects of community policing — such as problem-solving and the development of community trust — have taken hold in the city. 36
To be sure, when asked how they know whether or not community policing is both accepted and effective in the city, many APD managers are able to point to an overall decline in the city’s crime rates since 1994, when community policing began in earnest.
But Grebert, at least, concedes that these aggregate trends are somewhat ambiguous: “It was happening all over the country,” he explains, referring to the decline in crime rates Albany began to experience at the time, and admitting that “people talk about demographics and there being that crack cocaine epidemic [as explanations of crime trends].”
(Some historical perspective is helpful here, for the city’s recent drop in crime reversed the trend that immediately preceded it: Index crimes gradually rose from 6,800 per 100,000 residents in 1990 to 8,600 by their peak in 1994, and then they fell again to 7,700 by 1996.)
But Grebert insists that community policing may have had something to do with Albany’s trends, continuing his concession to the possibility of other explanations by saying: “Other people do talk about police tactics as being part of that movement to bring the crime rates down.”
In any case, he maintains that for all the problems in untangling its cause, the drop in crime rates did convince some in the city that community policing was effective: “When that happened, more and more people said ‘Gee, maybe some of this stuff is working,’” he explains.
The absence of any alternative way to evaluate community policing did not result from a lack of interest in the subject.
For example, early on in the APD’s reforms, the local newspaper called for comparisons of crime rates in foot beat areas versus car patrol areas, saying, “it will satisfy more than idle curiosity to record exactly how effective one officer on the beat is in comparison to one officer in a car."
"It will give the city a better idea how to spend its money and how to protect its citizens.” 37
And within the department, the community policing plan itself charged the Administrative Services Bureau with “developing and implementing an evaluation system that will determine the effectiveness of the community policing plan and recommend changes to the plan.”
Indeed, the department did begin to identify a few novel ways to evaluate the community policing, and in some cases it even drew up fairly elaborate plans to do so.
But in the end, nothing apparently came of these ideas.
For example, Grebert explains that the department had “a fairly well-developed plan” to hire interns to administer a community survey that would measure perceptions of safety and of the police department, and that he himself supported the idea.
But in the end, the department did not follow through on it.
So absent more formal measures, APD managers have looked to anecdotes and other indicators to get a sense of the progress of reform.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Monitoring Change
In any case, department managers have not always been able to tell for certain whether or not community policing is “working” in the city.
Arrest data for low-level offenses did seem to show that officers were beginning to take quality-of-life problems more seriously — as described below, that element of community policing seems to have made the most progress in Albany.
But without any type of record keeping on neighborhood problem-solving or any new forms of performance measurement, it has been difficult for department managers to tell for certain how well other aspects of community policing — such as problem-solving and the development of community trust — have taken hold in the city. 36
To be sure, when asked how they know whether or not community policing is both accepted and effective in the city, many APD managers are able to point to an overall decline in the city’s crime rates since 1994, when community policing began in earnest.
But Grebert, at least, concedes that these aggregate trends are somewhat ambiguous: “It was happening all over the country,” he explains, referring to the decline in crime rates Albany began to experience at the time, and admitting that “people talk about demographics and there being that crack cocaine epidemic [as explanations of crime trends].”
(Some historical perspective is helpful here, for the city’s recent drop in crime reversed the trend that immediately preceded it: Index crimes gradually rose from 6,800 per 100,000 residents in 1990 to 8,600 by their peak in 1994, and then they fell again to 7,700 by 1996.)
But Grebert insists that community policing may have had something to do with Albany’s trends, continuing his concession to the possibility of other explanations by saying: “Other people do talk about police tactics as being part of that movement to bring the crime rates down.”
In any case, he maintains that for all the problems in untangling its cause, the drop in crime rates did convince some in the city that community policing was effective: “When that happened, more and more people said ‘Gee, maybe some of this stuff is working,’” he explains.
The absence of any alternative way to evaluate community policing did not result from a lack of interest in the subject.
For example, early on in the APD’s reforms, the local newspaper called for comparisons of crime rates in foot beat areas versus car patrol areas, saying, “it will satisfy more than idle curiosity to record exactly how effective one officer on the beat is in comparison to one officer in a car."
"It will give the city a better idea how to spend its money and how to protect its citizens.” 37
And within the department, the community policing plan itself charged the Administrative Services Bureau with “developing and implementing an evaluation system that will determine the effectiveness of the community policing plan and recommend changes to the plan.”
Indeed, the department did begin to identify a few novel ways to evaluate the community policing, and in some cases it even drew up fairly elaborate plans to do so.
But in the end, nothing apparently came of these ideas.
For example, Grebert explains that the department had “a fairly well-developed plan” to hire interns to administer a community survey that would measure perceptions of safety and of the police department, and that he himself supported the idea.
But in the end, the department did not follow through on it.
So absent more formal measures, APD managers have looked to anecdotes and other indicators to get a sense of the progress of reform.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Modifications to the Plan
As implementation of the original community policing plan was taking shape, some department members and city officials began talking about ways to extend and hopefully improve it.
The major effort that emerged came to be known as the “four station plan.”
That plan emerged out of a 1996 proposal to re-open or simply replace the old Arbor Hill substation, which was championed at the highest levels of city government — including both Tuffey and Jennings.
"I always thought that was wrong,” Tuffey says of the decision to close Arbor Hill.
So I talked to Jerry [Jennings], and we talked about opening a station over here [Arbor Hill]. . . .
And I also wanted to build one down in the South End area down here.
I wanted to go back to the way it was.
Because I think that you have to give cops an identity of where they work. . . .
[When] they get to an area they like, they want to work in that area — they’re comfortable working there.
They know it and they know the people there and are comfortable working with the people. . . .
And if you work in Arbor Hill or you work in the South End or you work in the West End or Pine Hill, where-ever you work, if you go there every day you have part of an ownership.
And I think that’s what community policing tries to make people think about.
That you really own that area you work in.
During his campaign for Mayor, Jennings had said that he did not think the police department needed to open a new station.
But after hearing “loud and clear” from neighborhood residents that they wanted one, 38 he eventually came around to Tuffey’s view.
Today, he explains his thinking on the matter in essentially the same terms as the Chief:
An outreach office with a couple of people doesn’t do the same job that a permanent, twenty-four hour a day, three shift, fully-staffed station does.
Psychologically, it’s good for people to see that . . .
And you know, they go to work there — they park there, the men and women in the department.
They’re a constant presence.
They get to know everyone that lives in each building, and what person owns what store, and who belongs and who doesn’t belong there.
That’s the key to it.
Identification.
They build up trust with the residents in those neighborhoods because they get to see them.
And believe me, it’s a very effective way, and it’s well worth the bricks and mortar that we have to put together to place them in the facility.
The two men also saw a new substation as a way to help alleviate long-standing tensions with the largely-black Arbor Hill community, which had repeatedly complained of police harassment (most recently when state correctional officers swept the neighborhood in search of an escaped convict).
“In all honesty, there’s some distrust between the minority community and the police,” Tuffey explains of Arbor Hill.
“And I felt that putting a station over there [would help]."
"We have a community room there where people come in and use it."
"It’s a step to build up the trust between the community and the police."
"Because a lot of times all they see over there is a cop . . . making an arrest."
"And we have to build that trust back up again.”
Jennings announced the plan to open an Arbor Hill station in March of 1996, and while his first proposal fell through over cost considerations, a second and more modest design eventually garnered support in the Common Council.
Even then some Council members expressed concerns: For example, Alderwoman Sarah Curry-Cobb, whose ward encompassed some of the neighborhoods that the new station would serve, argued that a building alone was not enough to deal with tensions in Albany’s minority communities, and she proposed further reforms designed to fill the gap.
(One proposal asked the APD to offer Arbor Hill officers added training on topics like cultural sensitivity, and another asked Jennings to institute a neighborhood advisory board for the area.)
Other aldermen worried that the new station would rob their own wards of police staffing, and one simply felt that the proposal was rash.
“It’s not well thought out,” Alderwoman Shawn Morris told a reporter.
“There isn’t a plan for this building other than to put one person on the desk. . . ."
"Do we need a 3,500-square-foot, $400,000 building to do that?” 39
All told, five Albany aldermen expressed opposition to the plan, and their votes alone would have been enough to derail it: In order to expedite the project, the city intended to sell the site to a quasi-public agency called the Albany Local Development Corporation, which was exempt from regulations like bidding requirements.
But to do so it needed 12 votes on the 15-member Council.
Nevertheless, Jennings refused to compromise on the plan, and he dismissed Curry-Cobb’s proposals as an attempt to “bog this thing down with additional legislation,” specifically rejecting the idea of a neighborhood advisory council on the grounds that his citywide Police-Community Council — then nearing completion, and described in detail below — made more sense. 40
Ultimately, his position prevailed: The five council members who initially opposed the substation eventually backed off, and the vote for the new substation was unanimous.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Modifications to the Plan
As implementation of the original community policing plan was taking shape, some department members and city officials began talking about ways to extend and hopefully improve it.
The major effort that emerged came to be known as the “four station plan.”
That plan emerged out of a 1996 proposal to re-open or simply replace the old Arbor Hill substation, which was championed at the highest levels of city government — including both Tuffey and Jennings.
"I always thought that was wrong,” Tuffey says of the decision to close Arbor Hill.
So I talked to Jerry [Jennings], and we talked about opening a station over here [Arbor Hill]. . . .
And I also wanted to build one down in the South End area down here.
I wanted to go back to the way it was.
Because I think that you have to give cops an identity of where they work. . . .
[When] they get to an area they like, they want to work in that area — they’re comfortable working there.
They know it and they know the people there and are comfortable working with the people. . . .
And if you work in Arbor Hill or you work in the South End or you work in the West End or Pine Hill, where-ever you work, if you go there every day you have part of an ownership.
And I think that’s what community policing tries to make people think about.
That you really own that area you work in.
During his campaign for Mayor, Jennings had said that he did not think the police department needed to open a new station.
But after hearing “loud and clear” from neighborhood residents that they wanted one, 38 he eventually came around to Tuffey’s view.
Today, he explains his thinking on the matter in essentially the same terms as the Chief:
An outreach office with a couple of people doesn’t do the same job that a permanent, twenty-four hour a day, three shift, fully-staffed station does.
Psychologically, it’s good for people to see that . . .
And you know, they go to work there — they park there, the men and women in the department.
They’re a constant presence.
They get to know everyone that lives in each building, and what person owns what store, and who belongs and who doesn’t belong there.
That’s the key to it.
Identification.
They build up trust with the residents in those neighborhoods because they get to see them.
And believe me, it’s a very effective way, and it’s well worth the bricks and mortar that we have to put together to place them in the facility.
The two men also saw a new substation as a way to help alleviate long-standing tensions with the largely-black Arbor Hill community, which had repeatedly complained of police harassment (most recently when state correctional officers swept the neighborhood in search of an escaped convict).
“In all honesty, there’s some distrust between the minority community and the police,” Tuffey explains of Arbor Hill.
“And I felt that putting a station over there [would help]."
"We have a community room there where people come in and use it."
"It’s a step to build up the trust between the community and the police."
"Because a lot of times all they see over there is a cop . . . making an arrest."
"And we have to build that trust back up again.”
Jennings announced the plan to open an Arbor Hill station in March of 1996, and while his first proposal fell through over cost considerations, a second and more modest design eventually garnered support in the Common Council.
Even then some Council members expressed concerns: For example, Alderwoman Sarah Curry-Cobb, whose ward encompassed some of the neighborhoods that the new station would serve, argued that a building alone was not enough to deal with tensions in Albany’s minority communities, and she proposed further reforms designed to fill the gap.
(One proposal asked the APD to offer Arbor Hill officers added training on topics like cultural sensitivity, and another asked Jennings to institute a neighborhood advisory board for the area.)
Other aldermen worried that the new station would rob their own wards of police staffing, and one simply felt that the proposal was rash.
“It’s not well thought out,” Alderwoman Shawn Morris told a reporter.
“There isn’t a plan for this building other than to put one person on the desk. . . ."
"Do we need a 3,500-square-foot, $400,000 building to do that?” 39
All told, five Albany aldermen expressed opposition to the plan, and their votes alone would have been enough to derail it: In order to expedite the project, the city intended to sell the site to a quasi-public agency called the Albany Local Development Corporation, which was exempt from regulations like bidding requirements.
But to do so it needed 12 votes on the 15-member Council.
Nevertheless, Jennings refused to compromise on the plan, and he dismissed Curry-Cobb’s proposals as an attempt to “bog this thing down with additional legislation,” specifically rejecting the idea of a neighborhood advisory council on the grounds that his citywide Police-Community Council — then nearing completion, and described in detail below — made more sense. 40
Ultimately, his position prevailed: The five council members who initially opposed the substation eventually backed off, and the vote for the new substation was unanimous.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
From Arbor Hill to a Four-Station Plan
Some people within the APD agreed with the dissident aldermen, arguing that Jennings and Tuffey were placing too much faith in physically opening up a station.
Deputy Chief Grebert was the most prominent among them.
“Albany is not that big of a city,” he argues.
If money was going to spent, I would have preferred to see one new headquarters building built that everybody would have worked out of, and then the decentralization would have taken place in the form of the outreach offices — there’s about thirty of them around the city.
To use those more proactively as meeting places with community and that sort of stuff — that was the decentralization that I was looking for, in the hopes that we could get one new headquarters building out of the whole thing.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen.
The Mayor said he was building that building in Arbor Hill.
Grebert eventually became resigned to the fact that the city was not going to build a new headquarters or even put money away for such a project, and given this reality he conceded that it “was not a bad idea” to put a station in Arbor Hill.
But he and others still had concerns about the potential for the new station to fragment the patrol force, worrying that the need to reassign existing staff would wreak havoc with the existing pattern of patrol deployment.
These concerns eventually led Tuffey to appoint a 5-member committee headed up by Grebert to study how the new substation would affect the APD.
The group’s main conclusion was that the substation should not simply be grafted on to the existing organizational structure: Instead, the department used the opportunity it presented to reorganize the patrol force completely.
Physically, Arbor Hill would allow the APD to decentralize into four separate stations: The existing Division I and Division II buildings, Arbor Hill itself, and an old underutilized substation in the West end of the city — a station that had opened in the late 1970s with roughly 8 officers per shift but was now down to only one or two.
Organizationally, the department would do away with the old divisions and give officers permanent assignments to the four stations, and it would reorganize management at the same time.
Lieutenants would see their roles change most dramatically, trading in their current responsibilities for squads for a new responsibility for the stations.
In doing so, they would take on responsibility for handling community concerns and identifying neighborhood troublespots, thereby replacing Sergeants (who had overseen the sectors) as the department’s primary point of geographic accountability.
The old temporal structure would still be superimposed over this newly-strengthened geographic logic: The night and evening Commanders would still have final say over the street during their shifts, and two of the department’s six patrol Lieutenants would take on new assignments as their assistants.
But the new plan clearly sought to strengthen neighborhood focus, which it essentially pushed up in rank and therefore importance.
Grebert was still concerned that the Arbor Hill station would upend the department’s patrol deployment: Although his committee had broad scope to examine organizational roles and structure, it had to work within a fixed budget, and that constraint in turn affected the distribution of manpower.
The result was that staffing for Arbor Hill was fixed by the capacity of the building that the Mayor had proposed there: “Rather than saying, ‘OK, how many officers do we need over there to staff this?’ it was built in terms of, ‘OK, here’s so much money that we have to spend over there, and for that amount of money, put there what you can,” Grebert maintains.
In part, Grebert simply worried that the neighborhood would be disappointed when they found out that their new station had far fewer officers than the old neighborhood unit.
But more important, he felt that the lack of staffing would make it impossible to avoid violating beat integrity: “What’s going to happen when they open it [is that] cops from the other stations will constantly be called into that neighborhood, and it will really screw up this ownership idea that we were trying to create.”
Despite reservations like these, many department members are optimistic about the four station plan, believing that it will improve officers’ sense of ownership and solve some of the problems that exist under the sector plan.
Its implementation, originally scheduled for 1997, is still delayed as of this writing because of construction problems with the Arbor Hill station.
But management is confident that the station will open shortly, and that community policing will take an important step forward when it does so. 41
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
From Arbor Hill to a Four-Station Plan
Some people within the APD agreed with the dissident aldermen, arguing that Jennings and Tuffey were placing too much faith in physically opening up a station.
Deputy Chief Grebert was the most prominent among them.
“Albany is not that big of a city,” he argues.
If money was going to spent, I would have preferred to see one new headquarters building built that everybody would have worked out of, and then the decentralization would have taken place in the form of the outreach offices — there’s about thirty of them around the city.
To use those more proactively as meeting places with community and that sort of stuff — that was the decentralization that I was looking for, in the hopes that we could get one new headquarters building out of the whole thing.
Well, that wasn’t going to happen.
The Mayor said he was building that building in Arbor Hill.
Grebert eventually became resigned to the fact that the city was not going to build a new headquarters or even put money away for such a project, and given this reality he conceded that it “was not a bad idea” to put a station in Arbor Hill.
But he and others still had concerns about the potential for the new station to fragment the patrol force, worrying that the need to reassign existing staff would wreak havoc with the existing pattern of patrol deployment.
These concerns eventually led Tuffey to appoint a 5-member committee headed up by Grebert to study how the new substation would affect the APD.
The group’s main conclusion was that the substation should not simply be grafted on to the existing organizational structure: Instead, the department used the opportunity it presented to reorganize the patrol force completely.
Physically, Arbor Hill would allow the APD to decentralize into four separate stations: The existing Division I and Division II buildings, Arbor Hill itself, and an old underutilized substation in the West end of the city — a station that had opened in the late 1970s with roughly 8 officers per shift but was now down to only one or two.
Organizationally, the department would do away with the old divisions and give officers permanent assignments to the four stations, and it would reorganize management at the same time.
Lieutenants would see their roles change most dramatically, trading in their current responsibilities for squads for a new responsibility for the stations.
In doing so, they would take on responsibility for handling community concerns and identifying neighborhood troublespots, thereby replacing Sergeants (who had overseen the sectors) as the department’s primary point of geographic accountability.
The old temporal structure would still be superimposed over this newly-strengthened geographic logic: The night and evening Commanders would still have final say over the street during their shifts, and two of the department’s six patrol Lieutenants would take on new assignments as their assistants.
But the new plan clearly sought to strengthen neighborhood focus, which it essentially pushed up in rank and therefore importance.
Grebert was still concerned that the Arbor Hill station would upend the department’s patrol deployment: Although his committee had broad scope to examine organizational roles and structure, it had to work within a fixed budget, and that constraint in turn affected the distribution of manpower.
The result was that staffing for Arbor Hill was fixed by the capacity of the building that the Mayor had proposed there: “Rather than saying, ‘OK, how many officers do we need over there to staff this?’ it was built in terms of, ‘OK, here’s so much money that we have to spend over there, and for that amount of money, put there what you can,” Grebert maintains.
In part, Grebert simply worried that the neighborhood would be disappointed when they found out that their new station had far fewer officers than the old neighborhood unit.
But more important, he felt that the lack of staffing would make it impossible to avoid violating beat integrity: “What’s going to happen when they open it [is that] cops from the other stations will constantly be called into that neighborhood, and it will really screw up this ownership idea that we were trying to create.”
Despite reservations like these, many department members are optimistic about the four station plan, believing that it will improve officers’ sense of ownership and solve some of the problems that exist under the sector plan.
Its implementation, originally scheduled for 1997, is still delayed as of this writing because of construction problems with the Arbor Hill station.
But management is confident that the station will open shortly, and that community policing will take an important step forward when it does so. 41
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
4. A Focus on Quality-of-Life
If decentralization and problem-solving were one strand of the APD’s community policing efforts, a second and equally important strand centered on quality of life enforcement.
This shift in priorities was a dramatic one for the APD: As noted earlier, the department has had a long tradition of what James Q. Wilson called a “watchman” style of policing, in which officers on patrol paid little attention to minor violations like traffic offenses, gambling, and other misdemeanors.
As one department veteran puts it: “Twenty years ago, if you brought that stuff into the station house — if you arrested somebody, say, for an open container — people would have said, ‘Get out of here.'"
"'We’re not going to book this guy on a charge like that.’”
One APD manager attributes this sentiment directly to the desires of upper management, explaining: “I don’t want to throw rocks, but with the command staff that was here before, nobody cared [about quality of life offenses].”
But the advent of community policing began to change this situation markedly.
As already described, early training for the community outreach unit and later for the sector officers and the directed patrol unit began to stress the importance of quality-of-life offenses.
Tuffey reiterated this message with his command staff, who in turn took it to their subordinates to emphasize with patrol officers.
One crucial link seems to have been with the Sergeants, who were addressed as a group by the command staff and told that what had long been considered “low-level” offenses should in fact be treated seriously.
Sergeants, in turn, have repeatedly stressed that message at roll calls and sector meetings for the patrol force.
“I’m trying to convey that to them, that all these things all add up to dissatisfaction,” one APD supervisor explains.
“The poor man didn’t get a night’s sleep because somebody was waking him up with their boom box in the middle of the night."
"And then he goes outside to get his paper and he steps in a pile of dog poop."
"And then he comes out and his car has been vandalized.”
This message about the seriousness of “low-level” violations came directly from Albany’s political leadership — most notably Jennings’s two campaigns for mayor, when he made quality of life a major theme.
“Basic policing is getting to know the community [and] dealing with issues that are quality of life,” Jennings explains.
“Then hopefully the larger crimes will dissipate and diminish.”
Once in office, Jennings’s very public pronouncements on the subject, his high-profile tours of some of Albany’s most deteriorated neighborhoods (sometimes accompanied by Tuffey), and his specific directions to department heads all apparently fed a growing emphasis on quality-of-life issues not just in the police department, but in many Albany agencies.
More general public sentiment also pushed the APD to re-emphasize quality-of-life problems.
A few high-profile incidents, like a shooting associated with a craps game gone bad, created some public pressure to take formerly neglected categories of crime seriously, as some city residents began to believe that minor violations could escalate into serious crime.
But as community policing brought police into greater contact with neighborhood groups, they simply began to hear about low-level offenses more often.
“A lot of those issues,” Tuffey explains, referring to concerns about quality-of-life, “we hear from community groups, whether it be CANA, Council of Area Neighborhood Associations [a citywide umbrella organization for Albany neighborhood groups]; Beverwick, which is part of Washington Park; Park South; or Mansion Hill."
"That’s a big issue for them, [and] if it’s a big issue for them, then it’s our big issue.”
Finally, police themselves began to feel that it made sense to target these low-level offenses in order to get at their underlying goal of reducing serious crime.
In this vein, many Albany officers recite something like the “Broken Windows” theory to explain how left unchecked, low-level disorder can escalate into serious crime — and indeed, department training tried to make this link explicit, both through in-service sessions with officers and through the Citizen’s Academy for residents. 42
As explained by Commander William Bowen, who oversaw the department’s training division during the early months of community policing:
What we tried to do was to show the rank and file, the officers on the lowest level, that it was a partnership with the community to make life better [when we were] talking about quality of life issues.
You know, many times the officer would think . . . “That bag of garbage out on the street on a night that it doesn’t belong out there, that’s not a big deal.”
And we tried to show them that that was a big deal when it came to the overall philosophy of quality of life.
That is, if a place looks bad, it’s going to get bad — the broken window theory and that kind of thing.
Using a somewhat different logic, many officers also argue that enforcing misdemeanor laws can have a more direct relationship to the control of serious crime, for offenders stopped on minor violations often turn out to have signs of serious criminality like drugs, concealed weapons, outstanding warrants. 43
As Tuffey puts it:
If you go through a red light, they want to stop you and see who you are.
They don’t have to give you a ticket . . . but stop and see why David Thacher is driving through that red light. . . .
You’re there in the front seat and the woman is driving, [but] who’s to say that . . . you’re not holding a gun on Mrs. Jones, or you wife, or your girlfriend? . . . .
Maybe that’s why that woman went through [the light] there.
I don’t know that until I stop the car.
Maybe it’s an old person who is disoriented and lost, has Alzheimer’s or diabetes or whatever it may well be.
These are all the issues that they never [checked] before — it was a no-no. 44
Finally, one Albany officer argues that by citing people on minor violations, police effectively alert the courts to a potential pattern: If police fail to write these citations, a first offense for robbery may look like a forgivable aberration, when in fact it is the culmination of years of unrecorded petty crime. 45
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
4. A Focus on Quality-of-Life
If decentralization and problem-solving were one strand of the APD’s community policing efforts, a second and equally important strand centered on quality of life enforcement.
This shift in priorities was a dramatic one for the APD: As noted earlier, the department has had a long tradition of what James Q. Wilson called a “watchman” style of policing, in which officers on patrol paid little attention to minor violations like traffic offenses, gambling, and other misdemeanors.
As one department veteran puts it: “Twenty years ago, if you brought that stuff into the station house — if you arrested somebody, say, for an open container — people would have said, ‘Get out of here.'"
"'We’re not going to book this guy on a charge like that.’”
One APD manager attributes this sentiment directly to the desires of upper management, explaining: “I don’t want to throw rocks, but with the command staff that was here before, nobody cared [about quality of life offenses].”
But the advent of community policing began to change this situation markedly.
As already described, early training for the community outreach unit and later for the sector officers and the directed patrol unit began to stress the importance of quality-of-life offenses.
Tuffey reiterated this message with his command staff, who in turn took it to their subordinates to emphasize with patrol officers.
One crucial link seems to have been with the Sergeants, who were addressed as a group by the command staff and told that what had long been considered “low-level” offenses should in fact be treated seriously.
Sergeants, in turn, have repeatedly stressed that message at roll calls and sector meetings for the patrol force.
“I’m trying to convey that to them, that all these things all add up to dissatisfaction,” one APD supervisor explains.
“The poor man didn’t get a night’s sleep because somebody was waking him up with their boom box in the middle of the night."
"And then he goes outside to get his paper and he steps in a pile of dog poop."
"And then he comes out and his car has been vandalized.”
This message about the seriousness of “low-level” violations came directly from Albany’s political leadership — most notably Jennings’s two campaigns for mayor, when he made quality of life a major theme.
“Basic policing is getting to know the community [and] dealing with issues that are quality of life,” Jennings explains.
“Then hopefully the larger crimes will dissipate and diminish.”
Once in office, Jennings’s very public pronouncements on the subject, his high-profile tours of some of Albany’s most deteriorated neighborhoods (sometimes accompanied by Tuffey), and his specific directions to department heads all apparently fed a growing emphasis on quality-of-life issues not just in the police department, but in many Albany agencies.
More general public sentiment also pushed the APD to re-emphasize quality-of-life problems.
A few high-profile incidents, like a shooting associated with a craps game gone bad, created some public pressure to take formerly neglected categories of crime seriously, as some city residents began to believe that minor violations could escalate into serious crime.
But as community policing brought police into greater contact with neighborhood groups, they simply began to hear about low-level offenses more often.
“A lot of those issues,” Tuffey explains, referring to concerns about quality-of-life, “we hear from community groups, whether it be CANA, Council of Area Neighborhood Associations [a citywide umbrella organization for Albany neighborhood groups]; Beverwick, which is part of Washington Park; Park South; or Mansion Hill."
"That’s a big issue for them, [and] if it’s a big issue for them, then it’s our big issue.”
Finally, police themselves began to feel that it made sense to target these low-level offenses in order to get at their underlying goal of reducing serious crime.
In this vein, many Albany officers recite something like the “Broken Windows” theory to explain how left unchecked, low-level disorder can escalate into serious crime — and indeed, department training tried to make this link explicit, both through in-service sessions with officers and through the Citizen’s Academy for residents. 42
As explained by Commander William Bowen, who oversaw the department’s training division during the early months of community policing:
What we tried to do was to show the rank and file, the officers on the lowest level, that it was a partnership with the community to make life better [when we were] talking about quality of life issues.
You know, many times the officer would think . . . “That bag of garbage out on the street on a night that it doesn’t belong out there, that’s not a big deal.”
And we tried to show them that that was a big deal when it came to the overall philosophy of quality of life.
That is, if a place looks bad, it’s going to get bad — the broken window theory and that kind of thing.
Using a somewhat different logic, many officers also argue that enforcing misdemeanor laws can have a more direct relationship to the control of serious crime, for offenders stopped on minor violations often turn out to have signs of serious criminality like drugs, concealed weapons, outstanding warrants. 43
As Tuffey puts it:
If you go through a red light, they want to stop you and see who you are.
They don’t have to give you a ticket . . . but stop and see why David Thacher is driving through that red light. . . .
You’re there in the front seat and the woman is driving, [but] who’s to say that . . . you’re not holding a gun on Mrs. Jones, or you wife, or your girlfriend? . . . .
Maybe that’s why that woman went through [the light] there.
I don’t know that until I stop the car.
Maybe it’s an old person who is disoriented and lost, has Alzheimer’s or diabetes or whatever it may well be.
These are all the issues that they never [checked] before — it was a no-no. 44
Finally, one Albany officer argues that by citing people on minor violations, police effectively alert the courts to a potential pattern: If police fail to write these citations, a first offense for robbery may look like a forgivable aberration, when in fact it is the culmination of years of unrecorded petty crime. 45
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Building Support for Quality-of-Life Enforcement
Thus for all these reasons, the public and political pressures on APD officers to take low-level violations seriously did not strike all of them as unreasonable demands, and some had wanted to enforce these laws all along — they had simply felt constrained by organizational norms.
But none of this is to say that APD officers took to the new style of enforcement without pause, nor that all APD officers embraced it wholeheartedly.
Officers had a number of reasons for resisting the idea of quality-of-life enforcement at the outset, ranging from distaste for the required paperwork, to a belief that it was not “real police work,” to a firm conviction that it was counterproductive.
For example, one Albany resident, echoing the sentiments of some department members, argues that some officers had a deep-seated aversion to enforcing the laws against minor crimes, feeling that it is “beneath them” to do things like write parking tickets — even when neighbors feel strongly about the issue.
Officers themselves sometimes insist that it is inappropriate to crack down on minor violations in some neighborhoods, which will view such actions as harassment, and they sometimes interpret management directions to the contrary as naïve to the point of being dangerous.
(When asked why the department did not crack down on disorderly behavior in one Albany neighborhood, one officer explained: “You would have a riot on your hands.”)
Moreover, even those officers who agree with the principle of “zero tolerance” in the abstract find many exceptions in practice.
For example, one officer who insisted that he would unequivocally cite people for open container violations admitted that he excluded a certain group of corner drunks from the rule, since they had useful knowledge about what was going on in the neighborhood, and “they aren’t bugging anyone” anyhow.
Unprincipled reasons like the aversion to paperwork proved relatively straightforward to handle: If too much paperwork was getting in the way, the department could cut that paperwork down.
For example, when community policing got started in Albany, existing procedure required officers to fill out as many as four different forms to make a so-called “field booking” for less serious offenses — a process that one department manager describes as “cumbrous.”
In response the department sought to streamline the process down to a single short document that would reduce the officers’ workload greatly.
Local courts initially resisted the change, arguing that the APD had eliminated important information with the new forms, and that in effect its zeal to “streamline” had gone too far.
But with some fine-tuning, all parties wound up reasonably satisfied.
Officers who simply did not want to enforce quality-of-life offenses — however simplified the process — were more difficult to deal with.
Few officers would refuse direct orders about specific problems (though that apparently happened on occasion).
“If I told them, ‘I want you to tag and tow the cars at 300 Lark Street,’ they’re not going to disobey,” one department manager explains.
But direct orders aside, these officers are unlikely to be proactive about quality-of-life enforcement.
“What they might not do is notice it on their own,” the department manager continues.
“In fact, they’ll sort of play dumb about it."
"You’ll say, ‘Hey, didn’t you see those cars at 300 Lark Street?’"
"And the guy will say ‘No, I didn’t.’”
In these situations, the onus is on supervisors and managers to identify specific quality-of-life problems for officers to focus on, perhaps by reviewing citizen calls, or perhaps by listening to complaints in neighborhood meetings.
Unfortunately, at least one department manager reports that fifty to eighty percent of his officers fall into this category, and he, like many APD managers, says that at least with the most recalcitrant officers, “nothing will turn these men around”; the only strategy that avails is to wait for these officers to retire, replacing them with younger and more malleable personnel.
Support for quality-of-life enforcement clearly varies considerably around the department.
For example, most department members argue that the 18 APD foot patrol officers are very willing to cite people for minor offenses, while other officers who are less in tune with community sentiment are less enthusiastic.
“Our outreach guys, they know a lot of people in their neighborhoods,” one department manager explains.
But the guys in the cars, they really don’t know [residents].
And I want them . . to go to the community meetings.
And I want them to be on the hot seat like I’ve been on the hot seat: You know, “How come this hasn’t been corrected?"
"How come they’re still dealing out of twenty-one Main Street?”
And I think if the officers go to these meetings — the regular uniform patrol officers, not just the foot patrol officers — if they start [going], they will take a little more responsibility for what’s going on in their areas: The junk cars, the refrigerators left out somewhere.
All these things all add up to aggravation.
Nevertheless, the bottom line, top management insists, is that quality-of-life enforcement has gone up (though despite repeated requests, the department was not able to provide statistics to support these claims).
“We have a lot of young, new police officers here that are learning it,” Tuffey explains.
“But you know what the nice part about it is?"
"They believe in it, they really do."
"You can see that by a lot of the quality of life issue arrests.”
In any case, many community members noticed and appreciated the new emphasis on these matters.
To be sure, some decried stronger enforcement as harassment, arguing that police were singling out the homeless, the poor, and minorities for attention (a charge that police invariably deny).
“No one is happy when their children are arrested for drugs,” one department member explains.
“Nobody likes a speeding ticket."
"No one likes parking tickets."
"Nobody likes to get an open container ticket."
"These are unpopular things.”
Another explains:
Pretty regularly [we’ll put] intensive manpower on one single corner, or one single block — sort of sweep that area for a few hours. . . .
And you go to a neighborhood meeting and you tell them that you are going to do it, it’s all “Rah, rah!” until a few of them have gotten tickets for not having their seat belt on. . . . .
And I always tell them whenever we move from one block or one neighborhood to another, that some of the problem people are friends, maybe relatives.
So be prepared.
You know, justice is blind: We are going to come in and identify the problems and eliminate them.
But they are likely to be closer to home than you think.
So when they are, don’t blame us.
Such mixed messages from the community clearly create a dilemma for police, and Albany managers like this one recognize the complexity of their situation and do not take the decision to “crack down” lightly:
If a problem is a problem for a neighborhood, if it’s a problem for the majority, then it’s dealt with.
If it’s the kind of situation that only arises to the elevation of problem for a few, then we try and work something out. . . .
Generally speaking, those problems [where we crack down] are neighborhood wide.
They are not usually small problems. . . . .
You may get one or two chronic pains in the neck in that respect that are constantly calling every time someone else turns their radio on in their house.
But generally speaking, when problems get to that elevation, they are serious problems.
And then we apply whatever is necessary to deal with them.
In any case, the manager continues, when backlash does arise, it is necessary to “take some action.”
Especially if the perception is that it’s racial issue.
Then the potential for that problem to be bigger than life, than it really is, is huge.
And I think that’s my feeling, that you’ve got to step right in . . . and take some action: Either reduce enforcement, disperse enforcement, [or] get involved and get to the people who see themselves as the victims. . . .
You need to get to the leaders in the community, . . . be that the clergy, or community activists, or neighborhood association activists.
You need to get to them.
You need to have a dialogue with them.
Because they are the ones with credibility amongst the population, whatever that population is.
And you now are in a position where your credibility is in question.
Many of these situations have arisen in Albany, as vigorous enforcement has pleased some groups who called for it but alienated others — or even the same ones — who feel harassed.
In a few cases, like the department’s crackdown on underage drinking, some APD members believe that the department has faced political pressure to back down entirely, both from parents of the underage youth and from well-connected tavern owners.
But in other cases the department has resisted efforts to rein in quality-of-life enforcement by explaining the rationale behind it.
In any case, for most department members these concerns do arise, but the opposite message predominates.
For example, asked if complaints about harassment have been common at the community meetings he attends, one department manager responds that they have not been, pointing out that “usually the people that are at these meetings are the people who want arrests made: They want enforcement of the difference ordinances."
"They want DGS to go after someone."
"They want the animal control officer to take care of the dog problem.”
And when asked the same question, Jennings insists that most citizens he hears from do not complain about stepped-up enforcement: “I hear about us not enforcing it,” the Mayor explains.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
Building Support for Quality-of-Life Enforcement
Thus for all these reasons, the public and political pressures on APD officers to take low-level violations seriously did not strike all of them as unreasonable demands, and some had wanted to enforce these laws all along — they had simply felt constrained by organizational norms.
But none of this is to say that APD officers took to the new style of enforcement without pause, nor that all APD officers embraced it wholeheartedly.
Officers had a number of reasons for resisting the idea of quality-of-life enforcement at the outset, ranging from distaste for the required paperwork, to a belief that it was not “real police work,” to a firm conviction that it was counterproductive.
For example, one Albany resident, echoing the sentiments of some department members, argues that some officers had a deep-seated aversion to enforcing the laws against minor crimes, feeling that it is “beneath them” to do things like write parking tickets — even when neighbors feel strongly about the issue.
Officers themselves sometimes insist that it is inappropriate to crack down on minor violations in some neighborhoods, which will view such actions as harassment, and they sometimes interpret management directions to the contrary as naïve to the point of being dangerous.
(When asked why the department did not crack down on disorderly behavior in one Albany neighborhood, one officer explained: “You would have a riot on your hands.”)
Moreover, even those officers who agree with the principle of “zero tolerance” in the abstract find many exceptions in practice.
For example, one officer who insisted that he would unequivocally cite people for open container violations admitted that he excluded a certain group of corner drunks from the rule, since they had useful knowledge about what was going on in the neighborhood, and “they aren’t bugging anyone” anyhow.
Unprincipled reasons like the aversion to paperwork proved relatively straightforward to handle: If too much paperwork was getting in the way, the department could cut that paperwork down.
For example, when community policing got started in Albany, existing procedure required officers to fill out as many as four different forms to make a so-called “field booking” for less serious offenses — a process that one department manager describes as “cumbrous.”
In response the department sought to streamline the process down to a single short document that would reduce the officers’ workload greatly.
Local courts initially resisted the change, arguing that the APD had eliminated important information with the new forms, and that in effect its zeal to “streamline” had gone too far.
But with some fine-tuning, all parties wound up reasonably satisfied.
Officers who simply did not want to enforce quality-of-life offenses — however simplified the process — were more difficult to deal with.
Few officers would refuse direct orders about specific problems (though that apparently happened on occasion).
“If I told them, ‘I want you to tag and tow the cars at 300 Lark Street,’ they’re not going to disobey,” one department manager explains.
But direct orders aside, these officers are unlikely to be proactive about quality-of-life enforcement.
“What they might not do is notice it on their own,” the department manager continues.
“In fact, they’ll sort of play dumb about it."
"You’ll say, ‘Hey, didn’t you see those cars at 300 Lark Street?’"
"And the guy will say ‘No, I didn’t.’”
In these situations, the onus is on supervisors and managers to identify specific quality-of-life problems for officers to focus on, perhaps by reviewing citizen calls, or perhaps by listening to complaints in neighborhood meetings.
Unfortunately, at least one department manager reports that fifty to eighty percent of his officers fall into this category, and he, like many APD managers, says that at least with the most recalcitrant officers, “nothing will turn these men around”; the only strategy that avails is to wait for these officers to retire, replacing them with younger and more malleable personnel.
Support for quality-of-life enforcement clearly varies considerably around the department.
For example, most department members argue that the 18 APD foot patrol officers are very willing to cite people for minor offenses, while other officers who are less in tune with community sentiment are less enthusiastic.
“Our outreach guys, they know a lot of people in their neighborhoods,” one department manager explains.
But the guys in the cars, they really don’t know [residents].
And I want them . . to go to the community meetings.
And I want them to be on the hot seat like I’ve been on the hot seat: You know, “How come this hasn’t been corrected?"
"How come they’re still dealing out of twenty-one Main Street?”
And I think if the officers go to these meetings — the regular uniform patrol officers, not just the foot patrol officers — if they start [going], they will take a little more responsibility for what’s going on in their areas: The junk cars, the refrigerators left out somewhere.
All these things all add up to aggravation.
Nevertheless, the bottom line, top management insists, is that quality-of-life enforcement has gone up (though despite repeated requests, the department was not able to provide statistics to support these claims).
“We have a lot of young, new police officers here that are learning it,” Tuffey explains.
“But you know what the nice part about it is?"
"They believe in it, they really do."
"You can see that by a lot of the quality of life issue arrests.”
In any case, many community members noticed and appreciated the new emphasis on these matters.
To be sure, some decried stronger enforcement as harassment, arguing that police were singling out the homeless, the poor, and minorities for attention (a charge that police invariably deny).
“No one is happy when their children are arrested for drugs,” one department member explains.
“Nobody likes a speeding ticket."
"No one likes parking tickets."
"Nobody likes to get an open container ticket."
"These are unpopular things.”
Another explains:
Pretty regularly [we’ll put] intensive manpower on one single corner, or one single block — sort of sweep that area for a few hours. . . .
And you go to a neighborhood meeting and you tell them that you are going to do it, it’s all “Rah, rah!” until a few of them have gotten tickets for not having their seat belt on. . . . .
And I always tell them whenever we move from one block or one neighborhood to another, that some of the problem people are friends, maybe relatives.
So be prepared.
You know, justice is blind: We are going to come in and identify the problems and eliminate them.
But they are likely to be closer to home than you think.
So when they are, don’t blame us.
Such mixed messages from the community clearly create a dilemma for police, and Albany managers like this one recognize the complexity of their situation and do not take the decision to “crack down” lightly:
If a problem is a problem for a neighborhood, if it’s a problem for the majority, then it’s dealt with.
If it’s the kind of situation that only arises to the elevation of problem for a few, then we try and work something out. . . .
Generally speaking, those problems [where we crack down] are neighborhood wide.
They are not usually small problems. . . . .
You may get one or two chronic pains in the neck in that respect that are constantly calling every time someone else turns their radio on in their house.
But generally speaking, when problems get to that elevation, they are serious problems.
And then we apply whatever is necessary to deal with them.
In any case, the manager continues, when backlash does arise, it is necessary to “take some action.”
Especially if the perception is that it’s racial issue.
Then the potential for that problem to be bigger than life, than it really is, is huge.
And I think that’s my feeling, that you’ve got to step right in . . . and take some action: Either reduce enforcement, disperse enforcement, [or] get involved and get to the people who see themselves as the victims. . . .
You need to get to the leaders in the community, . . . be that the clergy, or community activists, or neighborhood association activists.
You need to get to them.
You need to have a dialogue with them.
Because they are the ones with credibility amongst the population, whatever that population is.
And you now are in a position where your credibility is in question.
Many of these situations have arisen in Albany, as vigorous enforcement has pleased some groups who called for it but alienated others — or even the same ones — who feel harassed.
In a few cases, like the department’s crackdown on underage drinking, some APD members believe that the department has faced political pressure to back down entirely, both from parents of the underage youth and from well-connected tavern owners.
But in other cases the department has resisted efforts to rein in quality-of-life enforcement by explaining the rationale behind it.
In any case, for most department members these concerns do arise, but the opposite message predominates.
For example, asked if complaints about harassment have been common at the community meetings he attends, one department manager responds that they have not been, pointing out that “usually the people that are at these meetings are the people who want arrests made: They want enforcement of the difference ordinances."
"They want DGS to go after someone."
"They want the animal control officer to take care of the dog problem.”
And when asked the same question, Jennings insists that most citizens he hears from do not complain about stepped-up enforcement: “I hear about us not enforcing it,” the Mayor explains.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
Re: HISTORY OF ALBANY POLICE
I. THE ALBANY POLICE DEPARTMENT THROUGH 1994
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies
Close collaboration with other local agencies was woven into the fabric of Albany’s community policing efforts, but this focus on quality-of-life offenses made it particularly important.
At the very least, growing police attention to low-level offenses would create a larger workload for the local criminal justice system.
At the most, this attention, as well as the growing focus on community problem-solving, would lead police to use entirely new avenues for protecting public safety: Police would call on agencies that had had little or no interaction with them in previous years to do things like board up dangerous buildings, channel the flow of traffic, and clean up neglected streetscapes.
The fact that most city agencies have been responsive to these growing demands from police stems from a few structural changes in local government.
TO BE CONTINUED ...
II. THE EVOLUTION OF COMMUNITY POLICING IN ALBANY, continued ...
3. Reforming the APD, continued ...
5. Building Support in Outside Agencies
Close collaboration with other local agencies was woven into the fabric of Albany’s community policing efforts, but this focus on quality-of-life offenses made it particularly important.
At the very least, growing police attention to low-level offenses would create a larger workload for the local criminal justice system.
At the most, this attention, as well as the growing focus on community problem-solving, would lead police to use entirely new avenues for protecting public safety: Police would call on agencies that had had little or no interaction with them in previous years to do things like board up dangerous buildings, channel the flow of traffic, and clean up neglected streetscapes.
The fact that most city agencies have been responsive to these growing demands from police stems from a few structural changes in local government.
TO BE CONTINUED ...