cuchulainn
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from the Detroit News
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0304/30/c01-151179.htm
http://www.detnews.com/2003/metro/0304/30/c01-151179.htm
Shootings, crime drop in Detroit
Collaborative police efforts pay off
By Ronald J. Hansen and Norman Sinclair / The Detroit News
DETROIT -- As crime rates rise in major cities around the country, a yearlong crackdown on gun violence in Wayne County has produced a sharp decline in shootings and a drop in overall crime in Detroit, authorities said Tuesday.
Shooting incidents in the city dropped by more than 300 in the past year, resulting in a 32 percent decline in homicides and a reduction in overall crime of 8 percent.
Law enforcement officials credit a partnership between federal agencies, the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office and Detroit police. Police now aggressively investigate every reported shooting in the city, sending more gunmen to prison.
The joint program is one of several initiatives with other public safety agencies that officials credit with helping Detroit police become more effective in combating other gun-related crimes.
Project Safe Neighborhoods, as the federal cooperative effort is known, has sent a message to the community that gun violence in particular is no longer tolerated, said Jeffrey G. Collins, U.S. attorney for eastern Michigan.
"There will be hard time for gun crime," Collins said Tuesday. Hundreds of prisoners caught with guns in the past year are now behind bars in federal or state prisons.
In the past 12 months, Wayne County Prosecutor Michael Duggan, the impetus behind Safe Neighborhoods, referred 172 county gun cases to federal court for prosecution. That equaled the number of cases sent to federal court in the previous five years.
Police Chief Jerry Oliver Sr. praised the work of Detroit police while crediting Duggan for putting prosecutors in police precincts to help officers develop better cases.
"The Detroit police officers on the streets have been really magnificent in responding to the challenges and programs we have asked them to do," Oliver said. "We have been very specific in targeting those areas in the city that are the engines for crime. At the same time, we have gone after the nuisance crimes such as prostitution and street drugs that create an environment for other crimes."
David Carter, a Michigan State University professor who is also the director of the National Center for Community Policing, said the crime reduction achieved after one year of the safe neighborhood program is impressive.
"It is certainly logical and reasonable to conclude that (those efforts) are the cause of the reduction in the homicides and shootings," Carter said.
Carter said the targeting of gun crimes and the effective deployment of resources to attack those crimes will have positive results in the short run.
"If the pressure is not kept on, however, the problems will creep right back up again. The key is to keep the pressure on," he said.
In the year that Safe Neighborhoods has been in effect, Detroit police reported a 20 percent decline in overall shootings. Since 2000, monthly shootings are down more than 40 percent.
Homicides -- most of which involve guns -- have also dropped.
In the six months before the program began, Detroit had 235 homicides. In the past six months, the city has had 160, a 32 percent decline. Overall, crime in Detroit is down about 8 percent this year.
At the same time, authorities are charging suspects more often, even in nonfatal shootings.
Three years ago, for example, 78 percent of the shootings in the city went unsolved. In the first three months of this year, prosecutors filed charges in 47 percent of the cases.
"You want to know why the murder rate in Detroit has been what it's been? When 1,400 people can shoot somebody, and not get charged, and brag to their friends, you can imagine," Duggan said.
Nationally, crime has surged as the nation's economy has sputtered. Cities like Boston and Chicago, which saw dramatic declines in crime in the 1990s, have seen their crime figures creeping upward once again.
But in Detroit, which never registered crime reductions as dramatic as cities like New York and Philadelphia, violence is still tailing off.
Duggan, for one, credits the changes to a serious commitment made last year by his colleagues. After the slaying of 3-year-old Destinee Thomas in March 2002, Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick summoned Oliver, Duggan and Collins to devise a way to combat the rash of shooting of children in the city.
"Our resolve was to take more guns off the street and put more bad guys in prison," Oliver said. So far, they have.
Last year, Duggan's office sent 1,228 people to prison for illegally toting firearms.
By comparison, there were 422 convictions for felony firearm possession in 2000.
So far this year, 288 have been convicted and sentenced to two years in state prison on the firearms charge.
Additionally, Duggan's office referred 172 gun cases to federal court in the past year. About half have already gone to court, and about 90 percent of the defendants have been convicted. The average sentence in those federal cases has been 49 months in prison, Collins said. Twenty-one of the pending federal cases have minimum sentences of 15 years.
"We have only one rule: no egos. Wherever we can get the biggest sentence, that's where the cases are going," Duggan said.
Charles Cook, 24, is a case in point.
Detroit police stopped Cook for a traffic offense and found him wearing a bullet-proof vest and what appeared to be cocaine in his car. Near the glove box, police found Cook had stashed a .45-caliber pistol.
Cook, who had a prior conviction for carrying a concealed weapon, was sentenced in June to 10 years in federal prison for being a felon in possession of a firearm.
In another case, police found parolee Jamall Marcus Mobley with drugs in his house last year but it was the loaded pistol they found that worried him. Mobley banged his head against a wall and yelled, "You found my gun. I can't take a gun case."
Today, Mobley, 26, is back in prison for 3-18 years for the gun crimes, drugs and breaking his parole.
One of the county's most compelling law enforcement success stories is the Wayne County Jail. For the past six months no inmates awaiting trial have been released from the jail to avoid overcrowding.
For nearly two decades, administrators kept the jail population in check by letting inmates out the back door to make room for new ones coming in the front door.
To keep the jail below its 1,885-bed capacity, administrators released 60,000 inmates without posting bond over a seven-year period on the promise that they would return to court for their next scheduled hearing.
A series of stories in The News last year pointed out that nearly half disappeared into the streets without showing up for court and hundreds committed new crimes including murder, rape, robberies, and other crimes involving guns.
Oliver also credited the lower crime totals to a joint Detroit-Wayne County Sheriff's Department team that hunts fugitives. The team, formed after The News reported police had stopped hunting fugitives in all but high-profile cases, has arrested more than 500 suspected felons this year.
The two departments combined to create the fugitive squad a month after The News reported there were 26,000 fugitives, mostly from Detroit, roaming the county with minimal effort by police to find them.
Another component of the federal program is the continuing dialogue officials hold with members of the community and with new parolees. Collins and Duggan routinely warn ex-cons about their gun enforcement policy in an effort to deter them from picking up a weapon in the first place.
There are now federal agents who exclusively work gun cases in Detroit and Inkster, said Gregory L. Holley, special agent in charge of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Detroit.
Duggan said all the changes have yielded historic improvements.
Boston and New York recorded steep drops in their murder rates in the mid-1990s after waves of new officers were hired to patrol their cities, he said. Detroit's improvement is now eclipsing the changed murder rates in those cities, Duggan said.
"In the middle of a recession -- not during the boom years of the '90s -- with no more police, we are seeing the largest homicide drop in (Detroit's) history," he said.
You can reach Ronald J. Hansen at (313) 222-2019 or [email protected]. You can reach Norman Sinclair at (313) 222-2034 or [email protected].
