Pubdate: Fri, 02 May 2003 Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC) Copyright: 2003 The Vancouver Sun Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouver/vancouversun/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477 Author: William Boei, Vancouver Sun U.S. EXPERTS DEBATE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE'S POLICE CRACKDOWN Criminologists Flown In By Opposing Lobby Groups Square Off Over Use Of New-York-Style Get-Tough Approach Vancouver's Downtown Eastside becomes a battleground today for competing theories on how to bring law and order to decaying inner cities. The conservative Fraser Institute is bringing in one of the world's best-known criminologists, Californian James Q. Wilson, co-author of the "Broken Windows" approach to policing that was used by New York City police to sweep drug dealers, prostitutes, gang members and panhandlers off the streets of Manhattan. New York hired thousands of extra cops in the mid-1990s to drive visible crime and disorder off the streets. The campaign made a crime-fighting hero of then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Downtown Eastside activists, meanwhile, are flying in Chicago law professor Bernard Harcourt, who criticizes Broken Windows as a civil liberties nightmare that attacks the poor and homeless and doesn't necessarily reduce crime. Their visit may heat up the debate over the Four Pillars program being implemented to tackle the drug problem on the Downtown Eastside. The Fraser Institute has not taken a stand on Four Pillars. But executive director Michael Walker, calling Wilson "the top conservative criminologist in the world," said if there's any conflict between Four Pillars and Broken Windows, "I would be guided by Jim (Wilson)'s insights rather than by anything else." Only one of the four pillars -- enforcement -- has been launched so far with a beefed-up police presence on downtown streets. Mayor Larry Campbell has been struggling to find resources for the other three: prevention, treatment and harm reduction. But Wilson said in an interview he is skeptical that Four Pillars will do much good in cleaning up the Downtown Eastside. He said he's not against harm reduction for drug users, but "that doesn't say anything about how you make downtown safe for people who are not drug users." Harcourt said there is no evidence Broken Windows reduces crime, and that while the New York campaign produced more orderly streets, it also spawned complaints about police misconduct. Elsewhere in the U.S., Broken Windows ignited what has become known as "the Blue Revolution," a series of big-city police crackdowns on minor offenders in high-crime neighbourhoods with the hope that major crimes would also be deterred. The term "Broken Windows" was coined in an Atlantic Monthly article by Wilson and co-author George Kelling in 1982. They wrote that "if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken." They applied the same rule to whole neighbourhoods, which they said can deteriorate into chaos and disorder if criminals and non-criminals alike get the message that nobody's in charge and vandalism and crime are tolerated. They argued that law-abiding citizens fear not only crime and criminals, but are also afraid of "being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor necessarily criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed." In practice, Broken Windows crackdowns have chased such people out of troubled neighbourhoods, and the crime rate in those cities has fallen sharply. But crime has fallen just as sharply -- and farther, in some cases -- in cities that did not conduct crackdowns. It also fell during the same period in Canada, where there were no Broken Windows campaigns. Wilson toured the Downtown Eastside on Thursday evening and was scheduled today to make media appearances and possibly do another tour, followed by a speech to a Fraser Institute luncheon on Broken Windows: Cleaning up the Downtown Eastside. After the speech, Wilson is off to Walker's Vancouver Island retreat. The two have been friends for years. Harcourt will also make the media rounds and tour the neighbourhood and will likely hold a news conference outside the Hyatt Regency Hotel following Wilson's luncheon speech inside, said organizer Thia Walter of LINES -- the Life is Not Enough Society. Harcourt planned to spend the weekend studying harm-reduction measures in the Downtown Eastside. Wilson said he can't prove Broken Windows-style policing reduces the crime rate, and that its principal aim is "improving the conditions of public order." "Suppose you go into a neighbourhood and clean up the graffiti, disperse the prostitutes, make sure that teenage gangs are not harassing innocent citizens, suppose you do all of these things," he said. "Will the crime rate fall in that neighbourhood? "George Kelling and I speculated that it would, but we as yet have no firm evidence that it does, because nobody has tried to test the Broken Windows idea in a way that would permit you to evaluate it honestly." Wilson wasn't familiar with Four Pillars but on the basis of some of the phrases used to describe it, such as harm reduction, he declared himself skeptical. "I think that making drugs safer for drug users does not solve the problem of drug-related crime," he said. He denied accusations by Amnesty International and others that the New York Broken Windows campaign used racial profiling, targeting more blacks and Hispanics than others. "I have little patience with civil liberties advocates that tell us that no crime enforcement policy can ever be successful unless it treats all racial and ethnic groups equally," Wilson said. "That is simply statistically impossible. We are concerned about behaviour. We are not concerned about identity." Harcourt said he plans to discuss the track record of Broken Windows-style policing while he's in Vancouver. Many proponents of Broken Windows claim it does reduce the crime rate, Harcourt said, even though "it's pretty clear that there's no good social-scientific evidence that disorder is related to serious crime." He said there is evidence that when street people have been targeted in Broken Windows campaigns, civil liberties were violated. Allegations filed with a civilian complaint review board of police misconduct rose 68 per cent in New York from 1993 to 1996, he said, complaints of police abuse filed in court rose 40 per cent and Amnesty International reported "racial disparities" in the way police chose their targets. - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom