Pubdate: Tue, 15 Jan 2002
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2002 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Section: New York Region
Author: John Tierney

KEEPING TABS ON THE PEOPLE KEEPING TABS

YESTERDAY morning, as usual, the report on Operation Clean Sweep was 
sitting in the center of Theodore Roosevelt's old desk on the 14th floor of 
Police Headquarters. It informed the current commissioner, Raymond W. 
Kelly, of notable incidents the day before:

PSummonses for urinating in public were issued to three people on Port 
Richmond Avenue near Charles Avenue, in Staten Island. Seven other people 
in that stretch were cited for under-age drinking.

POne squeegee operator got a summons at Queens Plaza South and Jackson 
Avenue in Long Island City, Queens.

PTwo summonses for aggressive panhandling were issued on Jerome Avenue near 
the Cross Bronx Expressway.

It's probably safe to assume that Theodore Roosevelt did not spend a lot of 
mornings at Police Headquarters worrying about the precise number of New 
Yorkers caught urinating or panhandling the day before. But then, he didn't 
have the benefit of computers or of the broken-window theory of controlling 
crime by preventing disorder in public spaces.

"You take care of the little things and you help stop big things from 
happening," said Mr. Kelly, who gets the daily reports from 200 spots in 
the city, with recurring complaints about disorderly conduct and other 
petty offenses. It's part of his new effort to track these problems with 
the same computerized tools used to track more serious crime in the 
department's vaunted Compstat program.

"What you measure gets done," Mr. Kelly said, and repeated his appeal for 
New Yorkers to call in complaints to the quality-of-life hotline at 
888-677-LIFE. "We want to know where the work is. Tell us."

He pointed to what had happened at the Customs Service after he and Paul J. 
Browne, an adviser there who is now a deputy police commissioner, began 
monitoring the number of searches to see if they were being made 
unnecessarily. "Paul and I put in a system where I got a report every 
morning on the searches," he said. "The number of searches went down by 70 
percent, while at the same time the number of drug seizures went up 25 
percent."

For New Yorkers worried about a return to the bad old days, for Giuliani 
fans concerned that some of the appointments at City Hall sound like 
Dinkins Redux, the new effort to monitor quality-of-life offenses is 
probably the most encouraging news so far from the Bloomberg 
administration. Longtime cranks like myself are delighted to think that the 
police will pay attention to our complaints now that their boss is keeping 
tabs.

But some of us cranks can't help complaining about one very big 
quality-of-life problem that so far is not a focus of Operation Clean Sweep 
even though it's by far the No. 1 complaint of New Yorkers: noise.

LAST year, more than 80 percent of the calls to the quality-of-life hotline 
were about noise, while fewer than 2 percent were about the problems 
monitored in Operation Clean Sweep: public drinking and drug use, squeegee 
operations, public urination, aggressive panhandling, prostitution, 
disorderly conduct by homeless people, illegal peddling.

"Why aren't police focusing on the most important quality-of-life problem?" 
said Arline Bronzaft, a psychologist who is a member of the mayoral agency 
the Council on the Environment. "Last year more than 97,000 calls to the 
quality-of-life hotline were about noise, and 20 were about squeegee men. A 
squeegee man doesn't cause sleeplessness and learning problems in children."

Dr. Bronzaft, who for decades has been the city's most dedicated antinoise 
crusader, said that noise was one of the top three environmental issues, 
along with air pollution and litter, cited by community boards in a 
citywide survey conducted by the Council on the Environment in 1999. 
Research by the Census Bureau has shown that noise, not crime, is the major 
reason Americans give for wanting to move.

Mr. Kelly said that the police in the future would be paying more attention 
to noise complaints received at both the quality-of-life hotline and the 
911 system, in order to identify trouble spots and send in extra officers. 
Dr. Bronzaft wants to see noise tracked as carefully as criminal offenses.

"Many police officers don't see noise as a serious issue, but it's often 
symptomatic of bigger social problems, and it can lead to violence," she 
said. "Police have told me there's nothing they can do about most noise 
complaints, but just having an officer show up can make a big difference in 
bringing peace and avoiding future complaints." And that officer is a lot 
more likely to show up if he knows that someone high above him is keeping 
count of each complaint.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart