NOT ON MY WATCH: Deterring Crime & Keeping the Peace
/By Joel E. Gordon
“A cop has a calling. It’s not about making money. Being a cop is about making communities safe, caring for children, and doing what it takes to stop someone from hurting another person.” – The Wounded Blue
Peter Moskos, a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore city police officer, recently noted, “There's an arrogance among academics towards the public I dislike. I guess that's the game, but academics are often wrong. ‘We know police don't prevent crime’ was a doozy.”
A police presence can be a deterrent for criminal behavior. My own goal as a community cop was to eradicate criminal behavior on my watch in my area of responsibility. In fact, I was always proud to belong to a shift or agency where crime prevention, to the extent possible, was a number one goal behind staying safe and returning home unharmed at the end of each tour of duty.
One evening just past dusk back in my inner city policing days, I remember noticing a young teenager standing on a corner near a hardware store. This didn’t look right, as he appeared to be nervous. I did not tip my hand, driving past him and parking out of his sight. He must have either frozen, or maybe I really tricked him into thinking I wasn’t paying attention, because he failed to sound the customary “5-0” signal verbalizing a police presence (as in “Hawaii 5-0”). Upon my walking back toward the store I saw that the kid was a lookout and his accomplice was chiseling out cinder blocks with a hammer in an attempt to break into the store without activating its alarm. Both were arrested before they could gain access to the inside of the store.
In a response to attempt to reduce crime and juvenile mischief later at night, the city had enacted a curfew law for those underage.
Then there was the group of teenagers who were breaking into businesses on my post while I was working midnight shift in the summer of 1982. In Baltimore City, the curfew existed for school age youth past 10 p.m. on weekdays and 11 p.m. on weekends where they were not allowed on the street without adult supervision. Numerous burglaries were occurring on my post in ways not easily detected, such as through rooftop ductwork and the like. Mind you, I was very good at “trying up” or checking to see that my businesses were locked up tight. In the winter, supervisors would occasionally meet you to see if you had been out of the car checking by feeling to see if your badge was cold. I would also leave “tell tales” at areas and doorways already checked. A tree branch or Coke bottle would do. If when I spotlighted past these areas the “tell-tale” would have to have been moved for an intrusion to have occurred at that potential point of entry. In spite of this, just about every day of the week, dayshift was getting a call at one of my businesses for a burglary. I stepped up my patrol efforts and began to discover a group of four or five teenagers in violation of curfew, nightly. I would catch them and transport them to the “Best Western” as we would refer to our station. There they would wait for their parents to sign for their future court appearance and pick them up. They were back out before I completed my paperwork on them. After several nights of charging the same kids for curfew violations, my problems with businesses being broken into ceased. Being the most southwestern post in the Western District, the Southwestern District was at the southern and western boundary to my post. The officers who worked on the other side of the street worked off a different radio frequency than I did and reported to a different station for roll call. It was really not much different than if we worked for different jurisdictions. You see the curfew violators got tired of dealing with me and my burglary problem stopped. But the adjacent post of the Southwestern District, to the south of my Baltimore Street boundary, saw a sudden spike in midnight shift commercial burglaries. The police and the criminals know these artificial boundaries and the juveniles just moved their activity to the south. Although I never caught them at it, they were the burglars.
I learned a valuable lesson from this that would later serve me well as a security consultant for an alarm company years later. That is you can’t always truly prevent crime but you can move it by taking opportunity away through risk of being caught. This is why signage and a well-placed alarm system reduces your chances of being a victim and increases your unprotected neighbor’s chances of a break in.
Do police ever truly prevent crime? Yes, through preventive patrol, arrests, community involvement, treatment and outreach programs, although never eradicated, criminal activity can and will continue to be reduced.
