A UCLA School of Law professor has found that an initiative to crack down on crime in Skid Row has not created a statistically significant decrease in serious crime between areas with heavily increased police officers and areas not part of the initiative’s focus.
The Safer Cities Initiative cost the Los Angeles Police Department $6 million, and the program began in September 2006.
The initiative added 50 more patrol officers, 25 to 30 additional narcotics officers, and mounted police to the 50 square blocks that make up Skid Row, which is defined as going from 3rd Street to 7th Street and from Main Street to Alameda Street in central Los Angeles.
In UCLA School of Law Professor Gary Blasi’s report, he compares patterns of serious crime in areas where the initiative was applied with other nearby areas in central Los Angeles where it was not.
According to the report, the patterns of serious crime, such as homicide and
burglary, were nearly identical in both areas.
The initiative gave Skid Row perhaps the highest sustained concentration of officers anywhere in the world except Baghdad, according to the report.
The only statistically significant decline in crime has been in the number of robberies in the areas.
However, the decline in robberies was not drastic.
According to Blasi’s research, the initiative prevented 50 robberies a year from happening, so each new policeman added to Skid Row prevented just one robbery a year.
“Reducing crimes is certainly good,” Blasi said, “but there needs to be an effect comparable to the resources deployed.”
In a CBS2 report, the LAPD denied that the initiative has not had an impact on serious crime. They were unable to give further comment.
When the initiative was first proposed, it was a two-pronged attempt to include greater police enforcement as well as “enhancement” for Skid Row that increased shelters, drug treatment, and care for the mentally ill.
But the enhancement branch of the plan never came through.
“While people were being cited for littering (including such offenses as dropping cigarette ash) in areas with no trash cans, the city’s enhancement team struggled, but failed, to find the resources for 11 trash cans for the area,” according to the report.
Forrest Stuart, a sociology graduate student, also worked on research with Blasi, and spends time every week in Skid Row as an organizer for the Los Angeles Community Action Network.
Stuart said he wishes the money spent on enforcement would instead be put toward welfare projects.
“Policing our way out of homelessness, out of poverty, out of an absent health care system, is not the way to go,” Stuart said.
He said he frequently sees firsthand how the Safer Cities Initiative has increased the police force so much in that area that people on the street are constantly pulled over and harassed.
“If you are really trying to build a community, putting them in handcuffs and making them fearful is not the way to do that,” Stuart said.
The additional officers in the area have been cracking down on petty crimes ““ such as jaywalking and graffiti ““ in hopes that people in the community will see that crime of any kind will not be tolerated, according to the study.
But Blasi said his research seems to show that cracking down on small crimes does not actually decrease much more serious crimes.
The initiative takes the approach that “if you stop the condition of petty crimes, like graffiti and jaywalking, the culture of lawless will subside and major crimes will subside,” Blasi said. “(However it’s a) rather difficult claim to make that jaywalking leads to robbery and homicide.”
In Blasi and Stuart’s report, they also looked at each type of serious crime specifically and found that there was no statistical change in aggravated assault, theft, burglary, homicide and rape between areas included in the initiative and uninvolved areas. Stuart’s worries go beyond the inefficacy to stop serious crime though, he said.
“On the ground is a population that is being systematically targeted, with the permission of this initiative,” he said. “This study is just a small piece of what’s going on down there.”