[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 26, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: January 26, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                           COMMUNITY POLICING

  Mr. DOLE. Mr. President, no one can dispute the need to put more 
police officers on the street. More police usually means more security.
  Nevertheless, an article appearing in today's New York Times 
demonstrates that the concept of community policing, which is the 
centerpiece of the Clinton administration's anticrime efforts, may 
sound good in theory, but in practice it is far from perfect.
  According to the article, thousands of New York City police officers 
who are engaged in community policing do not work during those time 
periods when crime is most prevalent--on weekends and late at night. 
The article also cites high turnover rates, poor training, and the lack 
of coordination among community police officers and the other agencies 
within the New York City police department.
  Those who beat the community-policing drum should read this article. 
As the New York City experience demonstrates, community policing 
certainly has its strong points, but the jury is still out on its 
effectiveness in fighting crime.
  Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the New York Times 
article be inserted in the Record immediately after my remarks.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

         Community Police Officers Cited on Hours and Training

                            (By Alan Finder)

       The thousands of New York City officers working in 
     community policing do not work enough weekends or late at 
     night and are not coordinating well with other police units 
     and other city agencies, according to nearly two dozen 
     internal police reports that analyze the program.
       The 22 reports, prepared from November 1992 to August 1993, 
     do not represent a wholesale indictment of the Police 
     Department's major tactical shift to community policing, 
     which was introduced by Dinkins administration three years 
     ago. The reports, in fact, seldom draw broad conclusions.
       But in small, often mundane ways, the reports outline 
     significant problems with the long-term effort to make the 
     30,000-officer department more responsive to community 
     concerns and more attuned to preventing crime than just 
     responding to it.
       The internal reports, which were made public earlier this 
     week after an article about them appeared in The Daily News, 
     were prepared by former Assistant Chief Aaron H. Rosenthal. 
     He was assigned in November 1992 by Raymond W. Kelly, who was 
     then the Police Commissioner, to critique how well the Police 
     Department was adjusting to community policing. Both Mr. 
     Rosenthal and Mr. Kelly have now left the department, Mr. 
     Kelly earlier this month and Mr. Rosenthal last summer.
       ``I wanted the unvarnished truth,'' Mr. Kelly said in a 
     interview on Monday, explaining why he had asked for the 
     reports. ``We recognize that everything in community policing 
     is not going to work.'' Last February, in fact, Mr. Kelly and 
     Mr. Rosenthal said publicly that the transformation to 
     community policing has been hampered by a lack of follow-up 
     training. They said they expected to identify other problems 
     in the transition and intended to make adjustments.
       These are among the major findings in Mr. Rosenthal's 
     reports:


                                weekends

       Not enough of the more than 3,000 officers who are 
     specifically assigned to walk a neighborhood beat are working 
     on weekends, several of the reports say. Community policing 
     gives individual officers considerable flexibility in 
     determining their schedules; they are supposed to work shifts 
     that best enable them to confront the problems of the people 
     on their beats.
       The problem, Mr. Rosenthal wrote, was that many of the most 
     pressing criminal and quality-of-life problems highlighted 
     for attention by the community police officers themselves in 
     their internal reports did not take the weekend off, and 
     neither should many of the officers.
       ``One issue that still needs to be addressed is the sparse 
     coverage that continues to exist on the weekends,'' he wrote 
     in a report last May. He repeated the criticism in a report 
     last July.
       In the study last May, Mr. Rosenthal examined the records 
     of five officers and a supervisor in each of nine precincts 
     during the first three months of 1993. He found that 78 
     percent of the officers were off routinely on Sunday and 61 
     percent were off on Saturday.
       In a related finding, Mr. Rosenthal said that narcotics 
     officers did not work on Sunday and that they made few 
     arrests after 6 P.M. These hours do not reflect the concerns 
     of the neighborhood about drug activity at nights and on 
     weekends. Senior police officials said that undercover 
     narcotics officers can work more safely during daylight, 
     because backup officers can see them better, Mr. Rosenthal 
     wrote.


                                training

       In-service training of community police officers at the 
     city's 75 precincts ``has been a dismal failure, primarily 
     due to an overall blase attitude on the part of management 
     which has filtered down to the attendees,'' according to a 
     report written on Jan. 19, 1993.
       Mr. Rosenthal did not say in that report how or why he came 
     to the conclusion, but he did recommend that the Police 
     Academy train precinct supervisors and then monitor the in-
     service training at each precinct.
       In two reports the next month, Mr. Rosenthal described 
     visits to four precincts that were made by members of his 
     staff. In three of the four instances, Mr. Rosenthal's staff 
     found appropriate training taking place. The officers 
     conducting the sessions were well prepared and informative, 
     he wrote.
       But at one precinct, the Seventh, in Manhattan, no training 
     was taking place at the designated hour. It began only after 
     Mr. Rosenthal's staff member raised questions, and the 
     officer running the session was ill prepared and the session 
     was disjointed, Mr. Rosenthal wrote.
       In another report, this one last June, he examined the 
     records of in-service training sessions at 15 precincts 
     selected at random. Mr. Rosenthal concluded that the record-
     keeping was inadequate, with the result that some officers 
     were exposed repeatedly to the same topics and not exposed to 
     other subjects.


                                turnover

       Turnover of officers assigned to community policing appears 
     to be high, and Mr. Rosenthal suggests in one report that it 
     may be tied to a lack of incentives to remain in the new 
     units.
       In an analysis last February of community police officers 
     in seven precincts, Mr. Rosenthal determined that between 
     October 1990 and February 1993 a total of 32 sergeants and 
     326 officers were newly assigned to community policing units.
       In the same period, 13 of the 32 sergeants, or 40 percent, 
     and 119 of the 326 officers, or 38 percent, left for other 
     police assignments.
       Mr. Rosenthal does not say directly why he thinks so many 
     officers are leaving community policing. He does say, without 
     elaborating, that the department needs a rewards system to 
     keep officers walking their beats. In another report, in 
     April 1993, he reports on a survey of 15 precinct commanders, 
     who were asked what problems they had encountered with 
     community policing. Eight of the 15 said the top problem was 
     a ``lack of incentives to retain qualified community police 
     supervisors and officers.''
       More traditional forms of policing, including riding in a 
     patrol car, apparently leads to more arrests and to 
     traditional kinds of advancement in the department.


                              coordination

       Mr. Rosenthal concluded that community police officers 
     often did not coordinate well with other police units, 
     including detectives, narcotics officers and auxiliary police 
     officers, or with some other city agencies. In a report last 
     August, he said that six precincts identified traffic 
     congestion, and particularly illegal parking, as a local 
     problem, but then did not consult with city traffic agents 
     about solutions.
       In a report last April, he cited precincts that had 
     identified prostitution as among their communities' biggest 
     problems. But community police officers often did not work 
     late at night, when prostitutes were most evident on the 
     street, and they did not make many of the prostitution 
     arrests made within their precincts, Mr. Rosenthal wrote. 
     Often uniformed officers and officers from the public morals 
     division made most of the arrests, he contended.

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