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Beating Crime from the Bottom Up
New jails and mandatory sentencing attract the politicians, but the combined efforts of the Medical School and the New Haven police force suggest that what works best is taking action long before a crime can be committed.
March 1994
by Marc Wortman
Few problems in America today seem so intractable as crime, and none more disheartening than the rapid spread of violence among the young—from gun-toting children selling drugs to schools struggling to keep learning in and mayhem out. The war-zone statistics are telling: A recent Newsweek/Children’s Defense Fund poll found that one youth in six between the ages of 10 and 17 has seen or knows someone who has been shot; surveys at Boston City Hospital showed that one of every ten children visiting its primary-care clinic had witnessed a shooting or stabbing before age 6; and the FBI reports that children under 18 are 244 percent more likely to be killed by guns today than they were in 1986.
Spurred by such statistics, political leaders around the country have been demanding with ever greater stridency that the nation “declare war” on crime, calling for more police, greater firepower, new jails, and tougher sentencing.
New Haven’s police chief, Nicholas Pastore, wants none of that. “You don’t wage war on crime,” the chief says. “You get smart on crime.”
It is a message that is getting national exposure: Pastore has been written up in Parade and New York magazine, and in early January he appeared on “60 Minutes” to explain why his “get-smart” strategy is making a difference where others have failed. He has his own statistics to prove it. While every other major city in Connecticut has experienced increases in crime—and especially violent crime—in recent years, New Haven’s crime rate has plunged 12 percent annually for three years in a row. Most dramatic, the number of murders in the city fell from 34 in 1991 to 20 this past year. “We are bucking the trend,” says Pastore. “We really can have an effect.”
Pastore and his colleagues attribute the improved statistics directly to what is generally known as “community-based policing.” A controversial crime-prevention strategy now being implemented in a number of communities around the nation, community-based policing disperses many previously centralized police services in “substations” scattered around the city, especially in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods. The goal is for officers to establish ties to their neighborhoods, becoming part of the community rather than an alien force sent out only when a crime takes place. Under Pastore’s leadership, New Haven has become one of the largest cities in the country to adopt the strategy department-wide. Last year, he notes, a federal, state, and city task force arrested most of the leaders of New Haven’s major drug-dealing gangs by using intelligence gathered in part through community policing techniques.
The approach evokes images of the 1890s, with a kindly cop strolling his beat, twirling a billy-club, and schmoozing with the locals. There is some of that to the idea, but much is decidedly modern, including one aspect of the program unique to New Haven. Called the Child Development-Community Policing Program, it is the product of an alliance Pastore has struck with Yale’s Child Study Center, the Medical School’s renowned department for the study of child development and psychology and family-related issues. Every week for the past two years, New Haven police officers have been meeting with Child Study Center (CSC) staff members to plan strategy for dealing with the effects of crime from the bottom up.
The program is designed to train front-line police in clinical psychology and then link them to a variety of support services. CSC psychiatrists work with the officers to help them understand the thinking and feelings of children who are victims of violence and those who witness violent acts. Clinicians in turn learn more about the traumatic experiences their young patients have to cope with. Armed with their findings, both groups are then able to work with parents and young people alike in trying to keep potential crimes from happening.
One of the first officers to undergo the training, Sergeant Doug MacDonald, is a 21-year veteran of the force who heads the city’s narcotics unit and now helps train other officers. “We are teaching cops to be able to see the world through the eyes of kids,” he says. “Until you can do that, you’re missing the boat.” Sergeant Rick Randall, a 15-year veteran, agrees. “The hardest thing any cop has to deal with is a group of teenagers standing on a corner,” he says. “Understanding their mindset is worth its weight in gold to the average police officer.”
Launched in November of 1991, the program is divided into three parts. Veteran officers are selected to be Child Development Fellows, spending four to six hours a week for three months at the center in a graduate-level course on clinical psychology and the types of support services available for children. Fellows are then paired with CSC clinicians to sit in on counseling sessions and learn first-hand about the thinking of children. Fellows also attend weekly case conferences to discuss ongoing issues in policing. “Understanding psychology is not just esoterica,” says Steven Marans, CSC program coordinator and the Harris Assistant Professor of Child Psychoanalysis. “It’s a chance to bring together observations with strategies for action. And it doesn’t just go one way. We have a tremendous amount to learn about life on the streets.”
As part of their regular training, all New Haven police recruits and many veteran officers now attend an eight-week seminar on child and adolescent development conducted by Yale faculty and one of the CSC fellows. At the heart of the seminar are sessions in which techniques of child psychology are applied to situations police are likely to encounter in their daily work, from family fights to unruly teens. According to Marans, much of what the officers learn is how to use their authority in benign but effective ways without “stepping over the line into authoritarianism.” The links don’t end inside the classroom; Yale faculty and specially trained police sergeants also provide an around-the-clock consultation service that responds to other officers’ immediate need for help in a crisis. It is no longer unusual for a psychologist to arrive at a crime scene along with a police officer.
“The police officer knows how to do law enforcement,” says Pastore, “but the Child Study Center takes that to another dimension by getting at the root causes of violence and crime. By having the knowledge and access to the appropriate resource, we can use our authority to broker the resource into the problem. We’re helping to break the cycle of violence.”
The 55-year old Pastore seems an unlikely man to be taking such a radically different approach to law enforcement. The burly New Haven native joined the police force in 1962, rose up the ranks to director of operations, and then retired in 1988, only to be asked by former Mayor John Daniels to return as chief of the 400-officer department in 1990. By then, Pastore and the mayor were committed to bringing the community policing movement to New Haven, but the link to the University facilitated the process. According to Pastore, who did not receive a college degree until age 40, “Police officers in this city now have a sense of interacting with Yale. It has become a badge of honor.”
Pastore, who is not above forming personal relationships with gang members and wading into threatening crowds to calm passions, says, “Mean-spirited policing leads to mean streets. There’s beast and nobility in all of us. Bring out the nobility, and the violence will subside.” As proof, he notes that not only has the crime rate fallen, but so have the arrests. But not everyone endorses that approach. Some critics both within and outside the New Haven police department complain that community policing undermines police authority and “coddles” criminals. One of Pastore’s more mediagenic critics is Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels street patrol organization, who recently told a New Haven business leaders’ organization that, “In this town I’d get better service as a gang member than as a crime fighter.” Sergeant Randall responds: “We’re not soft on crime. We can chase criminals down all day long, but we have to look for other solutions than increasing the number of cops. We’re not social workers; we’re not providing the service, just the referral.”
Whatever the merits of the criticism, the collaboration between the CSC and the police has already served as a model for a handful of smaller communities in the Northeast in setting up services of their own. And even big-city officials are interested.
The new mayor of Los Angeles, Richard Riordan, elected as a law-and-order Republican, invited Donald J. Cohen, director of the CSC and the Irving B. Harris Professor of Child Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology, out for several days to discuss implementing a similar program in his city. “After Watts,” says Cohen, “what next? What we’re doing now hasn’t worked. The answer isn’t to do more of it. We already have a whole nation of poor men in jail. There are more than a million young men in prison. Will the cities be any safer with 1.4 million in jail?”
Ironically, the impetus to launch the Child Development-Community Policing Program came out of violence a world away from New Haven. When the Persian Gulf War broke out in 1991, the CSC created a special program to assist families, schools, mental health professionals, and community programs in easing the fears of children exposed to the war through the media. But when Cohen, an expert on the effects of trauma on children, presented his plans to the local school superintendents, they told him to focus on what was happening in his own city.“‘The war that concerns us is on the playgrounds.’” Cohen recalls them saying.
In response to that challenge, Cohen went for the first time in his life to police central headquarters. There, he discovered that Pastore already had personal ties to the CSC because of assistance he had received years earlier in work on a murder case from the former CSC director, Dr. Albert Solnit, now a Sterling Professor Emeritus of Pediatrics and Psychiatry and commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Mental Health. Pastore had also worked regularly with former University secretary Sheila Wellington to smooth relations between Yale’s own police force, which has adopted a community policing approach of its own, and city officers.
Although the CSC was already involved in various clinical programs in the New Haven community, it was having limited success. “We were seeing the same children as the police,” says Cohen. “I had the feeling that we were there too late and too little. I wondered, how can we deliver services earlier and more effectively?”
Soon afterwards, Cohen and Pastore sat down together to discuss ways to make the city safer while helping its children. They found a remarkable number of shared goals, and each saw treatment as one of the best ways to save children exposed to violence from becoming violent themselves. “Cohen picked up immediately on the philosophy of where I wanted to go,” says Pastore. “The worst victims of violence are children. Children, especially poor children in our society, have the fewest resources to protect themselves.” Indeed, studies show that children exposed to violence early in life are much more likely to turn to violence themselves later on.
The police officers were also frustrated that law enforcement by itself was not halting the rise in crime. Sergeant Randall now directs one of 11 police substations that have been established as community centers around the city. He says, “Historically, once an officer solved a crime, that was all he was interested in. He was not equipped to deal with the aftermath or, if he was, even to know where to send the kids who witnessed the violence. Our interest in the child was minimal, even though we knew we’d have to deal with him ten years down the line.”
Pastore and Cohen decided to try changing that. With a $50,000 grant from the Rockefeller Foundation and an equal amount in private donations—as well as funds from the Justice Department and Yale—Cohen, Marans, Pastore, and other faculty members and officers collaborated to develop a comprehensive education and follow-up program. Marans and others went on “ride-alongs” with officers, and officers observed sessions with children and psychologists. “Each brings experience invaluable to the other,” says Marans.Since the program began, Yale faculty members have been called in more than 350 times to assist police in dealing with approximately 1,000 children, in cases ranging from arson to drive-by shootings. In less than two years, the program has provided training for more than 150 new and veteran officers. A total of 15 officers, including the assistant chief of police, have held fellowships, and four of the fellows have joined the consultation service. “The value of what we learned has been immeasurable in terms of how we think of children and solving problems on the streets,” says McDonald. “Now when we investigate a drug complaint, if we find children there we’re better placed to help. For the child it has got to be traumatic when we just come through their door, weapons drawn, arresting a relative or family friend. We can help resolve that situation in a child’s mind. Once after a raid, a cop fixed dinner for the kids and went to the store to get infant formula.”
Barely six months into its existence, the program dealt with one of the most dramatic and terrifying incidents in recent city experience. A busload of elementary school children was being driven home from school in the early afternoon when the bus was caught in a crossfire between rival drug dealers. Several bullets struck the bus, and one rider, six-year-old Cesar Sandoval, was severely wounded in the head. “Within five minutes of the shooting,” recalls Marans, “the consultation team went into action. Three clinicians and three officer-fellows were on the scene. With violence and tragedy, there is a tremendous amount of disarray, with police and crowds and media, and it is difficult to think about what is best for the children, but in this case the first and foremost goal was to limit further traumatization. We moved the children away from the hubbub to a school nearby and located their parents. We went in with paper, markers, and crayons. The curious thing was that none of them wanted to draw at first. Each of them wanted us to draw pictures of their mommies and daddies, and when they trusted us they told us what they needed to talk about.”
“There’s still the emotional scarring,” says Pastore, “but now the cop has become a positive role model, part of the family. When families have access to the police it diminishes violent tendencies, and we don’t have to go back to the same problems all the time.”
The impact of such unorthodox policing hasn’t escaped notice by political leaders. One of the strongest supporters of the Yale program, Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut, amended the Senate version of the much-publicized crime bill under debate in Congress to include funds for what he terms “police partnerships for children.” Attending a meeting last spring at the Medical School to learn more about community policing and especially the Child Development Program, Dodd said: “There will be no peace, no security, if we do not strike at the root causes and seek to prevent crime and violence before they happen. By giving prevention a credible role in our attack on crime, we have taken a huge step toward making our cities and towns safer.”
No one is saying that such prevention efforts are a panacea, least of all Pastore. “The number of crimes in this city is a travesty,” he says. But he hopes to see similar programs developed throughout the criminal justice, health care, and social service systems. “The concept should be replicated in other areas, such as drug dependency and spousal abuse,” he argues, declaring that with sufficient support, he could reduce the city’s crime rate within five years to less than half the level of what it was when he became chief. As usual, his response to skeptics is: “It’s doable!”  |
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