<DOC>
[106th Congress House Hearings]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office via GPO Access]
[DOCID: f:56931.wais]
NATIONAL PROBLEMS, LOCAL SOLUTIONS:
FEDERALISM AT WORK
PART I
FIGHTING CRIME IN THE TRENCHES
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
COMMITTEE ON
GOVERNMENT REFORM
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
ONE HUNDRED SIXTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 3, 1999
__________
Serial No. 106-7
__________
Printed for the use of the Committee on Government Reform
Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.house.gov/reform
______
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
56-931 WASHINGTON : 1999
COMMITTEE ON GOVERNMENT REFORM
DAN BURTON, Indiana, Chairman
BENJAMIN A. GILMAN, New York HENRY A. WAXMAN, California
CONSTANCE A. MORELLA, Maryland TOM LANTOS, California
CHRISTOPHER SHAYS, Connecticut ROBERT E. WISE, Jr., West Virginia
ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN, Florida MAJOR R. OWENS, New York
JOHN M. McHUGH, New York EDOLPHUS TOWNS, New York
STEPHEN HORN, California PAUL E. KANJORSKI, Pennsylvania
JOHN L. MICA, Florida GARY A. CONDIT, California
THOMAS M. DAVIS, Virginia PATSY T. MINK, Hawaii
DAVID M. McINTOSH, Indiana CAROLYN B. MALONEY, New York
MARK E. SOUDER, Indiana ELEANOR HOLMES NORTON, Washington,
JOE SCARBOROUGH, Florida DC
STEVEN C. LaTOURETTE, Ohio CHAKA FATTAH, Pennsylvania
MARSHALL ``MARK'' SANFORD, South ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS, Maryland
Carolina DENNIS J. KUCINICH, Ohio
BOB BARR, Georgia ROD R. BLAGOJEVICH, Illinois
DAN MILLER, Florida DANNY K. DAVIS, Illinois
ASA HUTCHINSON, Arkansas JOHN F. TIERNEY, Massachusetts
LEE TERRY, Nebraska JIM TURNER, Texas
JUDY BIGGERT, Illinois THOMAS H. ALLEN, Maine
GREG WALDEN, Oregon HAROLD E. FORD, Jr., Tennessee
DOUG OSE, California ------
PAUL RYAN, Wisconsin BERNARD SANDERS, Vermont
JOHN T. DOOLITTLE, California (Independent)
HELEN CHENOWETH, Idaho
Kevin Binger, Staff Director
Daniel R. Moll, Deputy Staff Director
David A. Kass, Deputy Counsel and Parliamentarian
Carla J. Martin, Chief Clerk
Phil Schiliro, Minority Staff Director
C O N T E N T S
----------
Page
Hearing held on March 3, 1999.................................... 1
Statement of:
Giuliani, Rudolph W., mayor, New York City................... 20
Shorstein, Harry L., state attorney, Jacksonville, FL; John
F. Timoney, police commissioner, Philadelphia Police
Department; and Robert Cheetham, senior analyst,
Philadelphia Police Department, Crime Mapping Unit......... 61
Letters, statements, etc., submitted for the record by:
Burton, Hon. Dan, a Representative in Congress from the State
of Indiana, prepared statement of.......................... 6
Cheetham, Robert, senior analyst, Philadelphia Police
Department, Crime Mapping Unit, prepared statement of...... 75
Giuliani, Rudolph W., mayor, New York City, prepared
statement of............................................... 28
Horn, Hon. Stephen, a Representative in Congress from the
State of California, information concerning early childhood
development programs....................................... 45
Owens, Hon. Major R., a Representative in Congress from the
State of New York, prepared statement of................... 13
Shorstein, Harry L., state attorney, Jacksonville, FL,
prepared statement of...................................... 64
Timoney, John F., police commissioner, Philadelphia Police
Department, prepared statement of.......................... 99
Walden, Hon. Greg, a Representative in Congress from the
State of Oregon, prepared statement of..................... 19
NATIONAL PROBLEMS, LOCAL SOLUTIONS:
FEDERALISM AT WORK
PART I
FIGHTING CRIME IN THE TRENCHES
----------
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 3, 1999
House of Representatives,
Committee on Government Reform,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 10:11 a.m., in
room 2154, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Dan Burton
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Burton, Morella, Shays, Ros-
Lehtinen, Horn, Barr, Hutchinson, Terry, Biggert, Ryan, Owens,
Mink, Maloney, Fattah, Kucinich, Blagojevich, Davis of
Illinois.
Staff present: Kevin Binger, staff director; Daniel R.
Moll, deputy staff director; Barbara Comstock, chief counsel;
David Kass, deputy counsel and parliamentarian; John [Timothy]
Griffin, senior counsel; Mark Corallo, director of
communications; Corinne Zaccagnini, systems administrator;
Carla J. Martin, chief clerk; Lisa Smith-Arafune, deputy chief
clerk; Tom Bossert, assistant to the chief of staff; John
Mastranadi, investigator; Jacqueline Moran, legislative aide;
Phil Schiliro, minority staff director; Phil Barnett, minority
chief counsel; Cherri Branson, David Rapallo, and Micheal
Yeager, minority counsels; and Jean Gosa, minority staff
assistant.
Mr. Burton. The committee will come to order.
Good morning. A quorum being present, the Committee on
Government Reform will come to order. I ask unanimous consent
that all Members' and witnesses' opening statements be included
in the record.
Without objection, so ordered.
Today's hearing is the first in a series that will take a
close look at the relationship between State and local
governments and the Federal Government.
Many of the most innovative and successful public-policy
reforms enacted in recent years originated at the State and
local levels. From crime and welfare reform, to education and
taxes, State and local governments have led the way in reforms.
For example, much of the highly successful welfare-reform
law that we passed in the 104th Congress was taken directly
from reforms enacted in Wisconsin by Governor Tommy Thompson.
President Clinton vetoed welfare reform twice, but once the
law was enacted, it revolutionized the welfare system across
America, and the welfare rolls declined dramatically.
Also in response to the Governors and the mayors, the
Republican Congress curbed the practice of imposing unfunded
Federal mandates, which placed burdensome demands on State and
local governments. And while Governor Huckabee has abolished
the marriage penalty from the income-tax laws in Arkansas, we
are still working to eliminate the marriage penalty at the
Federal level.
So once again we have a Governor and the State far ahead of
the Federal Government. The successful reforms in many States
and local governments have been widely reported. However, less
attention has been paid to determining the appropriate role
that the Federal Government should play in helping them solve
their problems.
So we want to hear from State and local leaders across this
Nation on this issue. I think it is important to learn what has
enabled these leaders to govern successfully.
Over the next several months, this committee will hold a
series of hearings entitled, ``National Problems, Local
Solutions: Federalism at Work.'' Through these hearings, the
committee will highlight successful and innovative reforms at
the State and local levels.
The committee will show that many of the solutions to the
problems facing America originate at the State and local levels
and not at Washington, DC, determine which existing Federal
programs best assist States and cities, explore new ways that
the Federal Government can help State and local governments in
the most cost-effective way, and participate in the national
dialog regarding the respective roles of the local, State, and
Federal Governments in addressing America's problems.
An examination of these issues fit squarely within the
committee's jurisdiction over inter-governmental relations.
The States have often been described as the laboratories
for change where new policy ideas are created, developed, and
tested. Ideas are measured by the results they produce, and
successful ideas are shared and disseminated from State to
State.
As new ideas are implemented, and as public policy changes
at the State and local levels, the Congress and the
administration must reassess the role of the Federal
Government. As old assumptions and ideas are replaced by
innovative and successful reforms, it is reasonable to take a
fresh look at the role of the Federal Government and its
relationships to State and local governments.
Today's hearing, entitled, ``National Problems, Local
Solutions: Federalism at Work, Part I--Fighting Crime in the
Trenches,'' is the first installment in our series of hearings
that does exactly that, reassess the role of the Federal
Government.
We will hear from three public officials, a mayor, a
prosecutor, and a police commissioner. They have all enjoyed
great success in fighting crime at the local level.
First, we will hear from the mayor of New York City,
Rudolph Giuliani. Mayor Giuliani has been a leader in fighting
crime for almost 30 years. He first served as an assistant U.S
attorney in New York. He then became an Associate Deputy
Attorney General under President Gerald Ford.
In 1981, President Ronald Reagan named him Associate
Attorney General, the third highest position in the Department
of Justice.
Mayor Giuliani also served as the U.S. attorney for the
southern district of New York during the Reagan administration.
And in 1993, he was elected the 107th mayor for the great city
of New York.
The statistics describing Mayor Giuliani's first term in
office are nothing short of staggering. New York City has the
lowest crime rate among the nine American cities with a
population over 1 million. Overall crime is down 50 percent,
and murder is down by 69 percent.
Mayor Giuliani is in an ideal position to suggest ways the
Federal Government can help cities fight crime. While crime is
on the decline nationally, New York City's success has
contributed disproportionately to the national trend. For
example, from 1993 to 1997, New York City accounted for 38
percent of the total reduction in the FBI index crimes in
cities with a population over 100,000, 28 of the reduction in
homicides and 63 percent of the reduction in larceny theft.
In 1997 alone, 146 percent more crimes were committed in
Detroit and 95 percent more in Dallas than in New York City. In
other words, crime has been reduced to a far greater degree in
New York City than the national average.
It deserves mention that New York City's success in
reducing crime was accompanied by a 21-percent decrease in the
use-of-force allegations against police officers from 1995 to
1998.
Now I would just like to say as an aside, that I have been
to New York City many, many times over the years, both as a
private citizen and as a public office holder, and during the
first term of Mayor Giuliani, I want to tell you, New York City
has been transformed. You can walk through Manhattan without
any fear. There are policemen in cubicles on every other
corner, or every corner. The area has been cleaned up. The
restaurants are really nice.
I just want to tell you, it was like a transformation. And
Mayor Giuliani, from one citizen to a great mayor, you have
done an extraordinary job and people across this country ought
to visit New York City. [Laughter.]
This is an unsolicited testimonial to try to get you a
little tourism. [Laughter continues.]
Now, you see, you've got some applause from one of your
Congressmen. [More laughter.]
On our second panel, we will have State Attorney Harry
Shorstein of Jacksonville, FL, and Police Commissioner John
Timoney of Philadelphia.
After serving in the Marine Corps in Vietnam, for which he
was highly decorated, Mr. Shorstein returned to Florida, where
he gained experience as both a defense attorney and a
prosecutor. He served as the division head in the office of the
public defender and subsequently as the division head and chief
assistant State attorney. Mr. Shorstein has served as the
elected State attorney for Jacksonville since 1991.
Mr. Shorstein has received high praise for his juvenile
justice reforms, which combine prevention with punishment and
rehabilitation. Since the implementation of Mr. Shorstein's
juvenile justice strategy, juvenile crime in Jacksonville has
plummeted. Murder is down 78 percent, and vehicle theft is down
58 percent.
According to a recent Florida State University study,
Jacksonville's approach to juvenile crime under the leadership
of Mr. Shorstein has averted more than 8,700 crimes between
1992 and 1995. Mr. Shorstein is a Democrat, but his approach to
juvenile justice has enjoyed widespread bipartisan respect. He
has earned the support of Jacksonville's Republican mayor, a
Democrat sheriff, and a Jacksonville City Council.
He has briefed Democratic U.S. Senators at their 1998
issues conference and Republican U.S. Senators at their 1998
retreat.
The juvenile justice model developed in Jacksonville by Mr.
Shorstein deserves national attention. It has been featured on
CBS' ``60 Minutes,'' ``The News Hour With Jim Lehrer,'' and
``NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw,'' among many others.
Philadelphia Police Commissioner John Timoney will be
joining Harry Shorstein on our second panel. The Commissioner
was born in Ireland.
Won't be long until we will all be Irish. Isn't St.
Patrick's Day coming up here pretty quick? [Laughter.]
He was born in Ireland and began his law-enforcement career
in 1969 as a rookie police officer in New York City. The
Commissioner rose through the ranks and was appointed first
deputy commissioner on January 13, 1995, the second highest
rank in the New York City Police Department. Commissioner
Timoney was appointed police commissioner on March 9, 1998 in
Philadelphia.
Although he has been a commissioner less than a year, there
are already signs of his progress. Murders are down 19 percent,
narcotics arrests are up 70 percent, and arrests overall are up
17 percent. One of Commissioner Timoney's most innovative
reforms, Operation Sunrise, an anti-drug initiative, has
resulted in 2,363 arrests, and the seizure of $1.9 million in
drugs, 73 guns, and 122 vehicles.
Commissioner Timoney is also implementing high-tech
solutions to stalk criminals and reduce crime. Under his plan,
police personnel input timely, accurate crime data into a
computer system linked throughout Philadelphia. Analysis of the
data through mapping techniques allows Commissioner Timoney to
distribute his resources where they are most needed.
He has recruited a former economics professor and British
police science expert under Margaret Thatcher's government,
Gordon Wasserman, to assist with this high-tech program.
In the wake of the success our witnesses have experienced
over the past few years, it's time to ask these questions.
How has the Federal Government impacted your success in
fighting crime? Has the Federal Government hindered your crime-
fighting efforts? And, if so, why? What future steps should we
take to assist your crime-fighting efforts?
Today's witnesses will help the committee answer these
questions. The Congress needs to know when to help, how to
help, and when to step out of the way.
We need to be a partner with State and local governments,
not a hindrance and not a nuisance.
I'd like to welcome all of our witnesses to the committee.
We are delighted you are here with us today, and we look
forward to hearing your testimony. And with that, we will start
off with Mayor Giuliani.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Dan Burton follows:]
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Mr. Owens. Mr. Chairman?
Mr. Burton. Yes, sir.
Mr. Owens. May I have a chance to make one opening
statement on my side.
Mr. Burton. Oh, yes, sir. We will be glad to--we will yield
to my colleague, Major Owens, for an opening statement. And if
any of my other colleagues would like to have an opening
statement, we will yield to them too.
Mr. Owens.
Mr. Owens. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome, Mr. Mayor.
I want to start by congratulating you, Mr. Mayor. As a
fellow New Yorker, I applaud your leadership in lowering the
crime rate in New York City. Every citizen, including my
constituents in the 11th Congressional District, benefits from
the comfort level achieved in neighborhoods over the past few
years.
They also benefit from the improvement in the city's image,
which enhances our huge tourism industry and generates budget
surpluses, which one day, because I also serve on the Education
Committee here, one day I hope will be used to replace some of
the 250 coal-burning furnaces in public schools, which pollute
the schoolyard air and add to the children's asthma crisis that
we have in the city.
I also hope the surplus from the tourism revenue will one
day be used to build new schools and end the widespread
practice of overcrowded schools, which forces students to eat
lunch at 10 a.m. because the cafeterias can only function by
feeding children in shifts.
These are some of the problems I think the surplus
accumulated from our successful tourism industry should be
dedicated to. What I'm saying, Mr. Mayor, is that the stakes
are high for all of us. When law and order are pursued with a
respect for civil rights and justice, we all benefit.
However, when a preoccupation with a scorecard on crime
drives the crime-fighting effort to the point of diminishing
returns, then all of those benefits face the danger of sudden
evaporation. One or two massive riots in any large city could
overnight greatly alter the image of that city. One immediate
consequence would be a drastic decline in revenue from a much-
needed tourism industry.
The greatest consequence, however, of such an urban
upheaval, would be the damage done to the psyche of its
citizens and the poisoning of relations among its diverse
groups.
My hope here is that New York City has maximized its short-
term benefits from reduced crime. My understanding is, and we
all applaud that--however, we face a loss of these benefits
over the long haul because your administration now seems to
have an obsessive preoccupation with a quest for some imaginary
trophy to be awarded to the No. 1 crime fighter in the Nation.
The casuality of this obsession, is civil rights and
justice in New York City. There are immediate dangers looming,
and the tips of the iceberg are clearly visible in the series
of unjust police atrocities that have occurred over the last 2
years.
The recent shooting of Amadou Diallo has moved the city
closer to a negative climate that could be very harmful. The
cases of Diallo and Abner Louima are well known. However,
within the neighborhoods where citizens feel they are targeted,
the accounts of serious police abuses are endless--within my
district, the accounts are endless.
First, people feel there is a strangeness there that
surrounding the fact that police killings, and police
atrocities of any kind, never occur with white victims in white
neighborhoods. The victims are never white.
This is 1999, not 1963, but those of us who were in
positions of urban leadership in the sixties, can now clearly
see some unfortunate parallels. We should all read the Kerner-
Lindsay Commission--called the Kerner report usually, but Mayor
Lindsay was the mayor of New York City at that time and also
was co-chairman of that commission.
That report talked about the alienation of large segments
of a city's population and how it creates what they called two
societies, and how the highly visible and dramatic police
abuses in these situations always are the spark plugs to set
off spontaneous violence and riots.
Before the New York City model is offered to the Nation,
and I'm glad to see the positive features of that model offered
to the Nation, before that is done, however, I strongly urge
that you examine its weaknesses in the areas of civil rights
and justice for ordinary citizens in their day-to-day
interaction with the police.
The communal environment of our great city has been
polluted with an extremism that must be checked immediately. I
have attached a set of very familiar questions related to
civilian review boards, special prosecutors to police abuse
cases, and the nationwide process of requiring residency for
local police.
These are logical, reasonable, common-sense demands that
you have heard often, and they are often repeated. They,
nevertheless, no matter how often repeated, still make good
sense. It is imperative that these demands are addressed, will
be addressed, if the long-term law-and-order benefit of what we
have now is to continue over the long term, is to be achieved
and preserved in New York City and in America in general.
And I have here five questions, and one of those questions
asks for statistics, which relate to the perception of people
in my district and neighborhoods like mine, who think that they
are victims unnecessarily. So among these questions, which I
hope you will get back to us with answers on, to the committee,
are statistics on the number of parking tickets written by
police precincts so we can see which neighborhoods get the most
parking tickets, the number of cars towed by the police by
precinct, the number of youth arrested, the number of them
prosecuted by precinct, the number of whites killed in New York
City by the police, the number of non-whites killed, the amount
of money paid by New York City in settlement of police
misconduct cases, the number of white youth in juvenile
detention centers.
Some of my constituents told me the other day that they
worked in juvenile detention centers and they have never seen a
white youth there. Where do white youth who are in trouble go
in the city? And is that another example of segregation,
special treatment, that our youth are subjected to?
So these are pretty common-sense questions. Most of you
heard them before. I think they are imperative if we are to go
forward and realize over a long term the benefits that have
been gained by the crime reduction in the short term.
The population of the city must be an ally and not an
enemy.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Major R. Owens follows:]
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Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Owens. We will get back to
questions shortly so some of those questions you asked can be
answered.
Are there further opening statements by Members of the
committee, further comments? On our side? Any on your side?
Danny. Mr. Davis.
Since I'm named Danny, sometimes I let it slip and use that
first name first.
Mr. Davis. Well, you know, we are so close together,
Indiana and Illinois, and so we do that.
Mr. Burton. OK, buddy.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. And I
certainly would like to welcome and thank the witnesses, New
York Mayor Giuliani, State Attorney Shorstein, and Police
Commissioner Timoney for taking time to share with us today,
and look forward to your comments and insights.
It is my understanding that the panel, in all probability,
will assert that the role of the Federal Government is not an
appropriate one in much of the crime policy area. However, the
approach to fighting crime is an issue that should not be
overlooked.
I maintain that an individual is innocent until proven
guilty, and this should be kept in mind at all times. However,
oftentimes civil liberties have been threatened at time by
police misuse, abuse, and misconduct. I know that in my own
hometown of Chicago, IL, we have had several cases of concern
where it is evident that there is a deepening crisis of police-
community relations.
Names like Jeremiah Mearday, Jorge Guillen, and Andrew
Sledd come to mind as only a few. I know that many times those
in the African American and Latino communities are weighed down
by the burdens of danger and fear. Our communities are visited
with the plagues of crime and drugs. As we continue to struggle
to overcome these plagues, we are further weighted down by an
even-more devastating epidemic of police brutality.
This has caused a rising tide of disaffection and mistrust
in our community justice system. Not only does police brutality
directly threaten our life and safety, but it also destroys the
trust and cooperation between communities and police that is
necessary if we are to effectively address the problems of
crime and drugs and justice.
We also need to address the issue of new controls on those
who engage in police brutality and misconduct. In Chicago, for
example, there are over 8,500 complaints filed of excessive
force from 1993 to 1995. And almost three-quarters of the cases
were never resolved.
The failure of current police procedures to address the
issues of alleged police brutality have been documented well in
community forums, hearings, and the newspapers.
I'd like to submit, Mr. Chairman, some of these articles
for the record. I also, again, want to thank the witnesses,
indicate that we look forward to their testimony, and I trust
that at the end of the day, not only will we have gleaned
information relative to our ability to fight crime and reduce
criminal activity, but hopefully, we can also find a way to
create a more harmonious relationship between those whom we
expect to enforce the law and those who must abide by it.
Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I look forward to
your testimony.
[The prepared statement of Hon. Greg Walden follows:]
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Mr. Burton. Thank the gentleman.
Mayor Giuliani, welcome. We are looking forward to your
statement. You might want to even allude to some of the
questions that have been asked so far. We will have a question-
and-answer session after your opening remarks.
Mayor Giuliani.
STATEMENT OF RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI, MAYOR, NEW YORK CITY
Mayor Giuliani. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, members
of the committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss with
you some of the things that are going on in New York City and
how we can improve the relationship between city government,
State government, local government, and the Federal Government.
As I think you all know, New York City is the Nation's
largest city. We are also the world's most diverse city; 100
languages or more are spoken in the city of New York. Every
racial, religious, ethnic group and subgroup is represented in
the city of New York. And it is a source of a lot of
challenges, obviously, but of probably the greatest strength
that the city has, that people of so many different
backgrounds, so many different points of view, religions,
cultures, join together in one place.
And it gives the city a vibrancy. It gives the city a
culture. And it offers really a proving ground for solving
human problems that's probably on a scale unmatched anywhere.
Although, in many, many ways, New York City is very much like
every other American city. It goes through the same sets of
problems, the same sets of difficulties. The scale of our
problems is sometimes larger. And sometimes when we have
solutions, the scale of the solution has to necessarily be even
larger.
When I became mayor of New York City, I believed very, very
strongly that the city of New York was in a tremendous crisis.
We had lost 320,000 jobs in a 2\1/2\-year period. That was the
largest job loss we had since the depression.
If you looked at the city from the point of view of the way
people looked at it from outside the city of New York--and many
people shared that view inside--the city was thought of as the
crime capital of America, and the welfare capital of America.
It was thought of as a place that was too frightening for
people to come to. And it was thought of as a place that did
not offer people opportunity.
I tried very hard in the 5\1/2\, 6 years to turn that
around. We began with crime. We began with crime because it was
the most basic problem that we had to solve. Until people can
feel reasonably secure about their well-being, then nothing
else can work. Schools can't work; businesses can't work.
People want to leave.
There was a poll taken in 1993, which is the year I ran for
mayor, in which about 70 to 75 percent of the people in the
city said that if they had a choice, they would rather live
somewhere else. That represented the views of the poorest
people, the richest people, the middle-class people. Roughly,
all shared that same view.
Now, those numbers have roughly been reversed. That still
means that there are 20 to 30 percent of the people that
haven't felt the opportunity, haven't felt the change, still
feel alienated. And it's our job, city government, and all of
ours, to reach them and to see if we can make them share in the
turnaround that has taken place.
But it is a substantial turnaround. And I'm going to focus
on one or two aspects of it.
We have talked about crime. In the area of crime, the city
of New York really has had a great deal of success based upon
many things. I'm going to emphasize three of them as things
that can be replicated elsewhere, and much of which is being
done elsewhere. It isn't just unique to the city of New York:
the CompStat program, the broken windows theory, and drug
enforcement. I believe that those are the three main reasons
why crime is down as dramatically as it is.
The CompStat program is a program of measuring crime every
single day. We have 77 police precincts in New York City. Every
single day we gather all of the crime statistics from each one
of those precincts. They go into a computer program. And then
on a weekly, monthly, regular basis they can be analyzed. So we
can determine if crime is going up or if crime is going down.
And if it is going up, why? And what has to be done about it.
It allows for two things to happen. It allows for very,
very intense strategic planning to take place so that in a city
as large as New York, 7.5 million people with sometimes as many
at 2 to 3 million visitors, you can focus on where the increase
in car theft is taking place, where the increase in mugging is
taking place, where the increase in rapes are taking place. And
then you can develop strategies for reducing it before it
becomes a major problem.
In the past, crime statistics were used after the fact. We
looked at crime statistics a year after the crimes actually
took place. Now we look at the crime statistics essentially the
day after the crime takes place so that we don't let crime get
out of control and that we can bring about crime reduction.
That's played a very, very large part in the crime
reductions that have taken place.
The second is the broken windows theory, which simply means
that you cannot allow things to fester for long periods of time
that you might regard as small things.
Senator Moynihan described this in 1993 with the phrase
that always stuck in my mind. He gave a speech in the city of
New York at a time in which we were averaging 2,000 murders a
year, which had become records, even for the city of New York.
And he said that we were engaged in a process of defining
deviancy down. What he meant by that was we were looking at
deteriorating standards of human behavior: graffiti, street-
level prostitution, street-level drug dealing, aggressive
behavior on the streets. And we were ignoring it because we
felt we had no capacity to deal with it, that we had more
important problems to deal with.
So we were finding excuses and rationalizations for
deteriorating standards of behavior. He called it defining
deviancy down.
It seemed to me, when I listened to that, and I was
planning to run for mayor then, that we had to, essentially,
just reverse the ship. Rather than defining deviancy down, we
should set higher standards. And we should continually try to
ask people to act better, to act better toward each other, to
be more civil. And if we did that, we would start to ultimately
affect even the more serious crime.
Professor Wilkens, of Harvard and later Northwestern and
other universities, wrote a book about this about 25 years ago.
He called it the broken window theory. It meant if you have a
building and somebody breaks a window and you say to yourself,
I'm too busy with my business, I'm too busy with everything
else to worry about that one broken window, it is very likely
that in a short period of time somebody will break another
window and another window. Eventually, they will break all the
windows in your building, and your building will fall down
because you thought the first problem was so small you didn't
have to deal with it.
On the other hand, if somebody breaks your window and you
fix it right away, and you find the person who did it, and you
make it clear to them that this is unacceptable behavior, that
you can't destroy property of other people, and this is an
important thing, then you are probably going to save your whole
building. And if you keep fixing those windows right away,
eventually, they will get the point.
So other cities that tried the broken window theory before
New York, smaller cities, by and large, cities with populations
of 100,000, 120,000, 150,000. In 1994 I put that theory in
place in the largest city in America. I was faced every time we
did with tremendous cynicism as to whether it could work in New
York. New Yorkers love to say, ``It can't work here.''
And the fact is, it has worked better in New York now than
in some of the smaller cities. And it means that we are
improving our standard of behavior.
I have some charts. If I could show you these things in
charts, it may actually illustrate things even more effectively
than a lot of words.
The first chart is a chart of the total FBI index crime
complaint. And what it demonstrates is that in 1998 New York
City had the lowest level of crime since the FBI started
measuring crime; 1968 was the first year they began measuring
it. And that crime decline represents about a 50 percent
decline since the time that I have been in office.
And 1998 was the safest year that New York City had since
before 1968.
The second one, which is maybe even more dramatic, because
it is the area of crime that unfortunately you can measure the
most accurately, murder, New York City, as I said, was
averaging about 2,000 murders a year in the early 1990's. In
fact, we hadn't had a year with less than 1,000 murders at any
time in the 1970's, 1980's, or 1990's. Last year we had 629
murders, which was the lowest number that we had since 1966.
For example, Mr. Davis, and this is not meant in any way to
create a conflict with Chicago. I think you have a great mayor,
and there are things you are doing in your city that I wish we
were doing in our city, like the reform of the school system,
which I think is a model for the rest of the country.
But Chicago, which has half the population of New York
City, had 700 murders last year. And that was a decline. New
York City, which has double the population, had 629.
So the city has established itself, not only as the safest
large city in America, but when you compare cities with
populations of 100,000 or more, I believe we are now city No.
167. So a city that was thought of as the crime capital is now
seen as a place that has, to a large extent, become a much
safer place.
Crime statistics for a whole city, however, are hard to
measure. And I think Mr. Owens made that point before. I think
that you have got to look at individual neighborhoods--you
almost have to look at individual blocks. The CompStat program
that we have allows us to do that.
Washington Heights in Brooklyn--in Manhattan, rather--is an
area that used to be the cocaine center for the city of New
York and for much of the Northeast. I had the benefit, before I
was mayor, of being a U.S. attorney, for 5\1/2\ years. So I
guess maybe I had a preparation in understanding where the
problems were.
But this was a community that was at the center of the
crack epidemic for much of the Northeast and much of America in
the early 1980's. The crime rates in the 33rd and 34th
precincts in Washington Heights were among the highest. And it
was one of the areas of intense activity when I was a U.S.
attorney, including an area in which we lost police officers to
drug dealers who slaughtered them in the line of duty.
I'm very, very happy to report that, you know, crime is
down in Washington Heights by even more than in the rest of the
city. Washington Heights has an 80-percent decline in murder;
the city has a 70-percent decline in murder.
In 1993, the year before I came into office, there were 75
people murdered in Washington Heights. Last year, there were
15. In my view, Mr. Owens, 15 is too many, but a lot better
than 75 of 1993.
And the same thing is true for overall crime decline. It is
down 51 percent. It means the people in Washington Heights, and
that is a multi-lingual, diverse community, now can live in a
lot more freedom, a lot more liberty, can pursue their own
opportunities, and have a much different quality of life than
they had back in 1993.
One other community, which is in East New York, the 75th
precinct, which I know Mr. Owens knows well--I picked that
precinct because I knew you were going to be here and I wanted
to show you the results in the precinct. But also because in
1993 that precinct led the city in murders. It had 125 murders
in that one police precinct in the city of New York.
Last year, it had 41, for a decline of 67.2 percent, which
is a major reduction in crime. And I thank God that as I talk
to you now this year, there haven't been any, which we hope
continues for the rest of the year.
And there hasn't been a period of time in which there
haven't been murders for this long in that precinct for
something like 35 to 36 years. And we hope that that continues.
The point that Mr. Owens made before, I also tried to take
a look at on a citywide basis and on a local basis, and that
is, what is happening with the behavior of police officers?
Are police officers becoming less restrained? Are they
acting in an improper way? Are they using their weapons more,
let's say, in order to produce for us these declines in crime?
And I understand and share the shock and horror at the
terrible incidents that take place when police officers act
improperly, when police officers act violently, when police
officers act brutally.
When I was a U.S. attorney, I not only prosecuted drug
dealers and prosecuted organized criminals, during my time as
assistant U.S. attorney and a U.S. attorney, I prosecuted many
police officers, police officers for corruption, police
officers for brutality, police officers for acting in a
criminal way--and feel that they have to be held to a higher
standard.
But we can't allow the understandable emotions that emerge
from a horrible incident to cloud reality and to cloud truth.
And we can't allow perceptions, if they are false, to overwhelm
truth. Otherwise, we are really not advancing society.
The reality is, and I think this may come as a surprise to
a lot of people, that the New York City Police Department, as
it has reduced crime, has even by a greater extent reduced its
own use of weapons, reduced its own use of force. The New York
City Police Department, as it matches up with other police
departments in this country, it's one of the most restrained.
In this city, for example, in Washington, DC--and again
this is not meant at all, because I understand all of the
internal problems. Some cities do one thing well and other
cities do something else well. In this city, there is a six-
time greater chance that you will be shot by a police officer
per capita than in the city of New York. In the city of Dallas,
there is like a four-times greater chance.
New York City is among the most restrained police
departments in the country in the use of weapons and in the
shooting of their guns. That doesn't mean that they can't make
a mistake. That doesn't mean that some of them can't act
criminally, which is tragic and unfortunate.
But it does mean when that does take place, much like if a
terrible murder takes place in New York City today, between and
among civilians, I could--we all could--feed into the
impression that murder is running rampant in the city of New
York, or we can say to people, this is a tragic, awful thing.
Justice should be brought to this situation.
But the reality is that murder is down 70 percent. And
whereas there used to be 125 murders here, there are now only
15. Or the reality is that there have been 75, there now only
25.
So, I hope that offers some other way of looking at this
because it is enormously important, where if we are going to
have reality square with perception rather than having false
perceptions rule us.
Let me see if I can give you some of the reality of what
has taken place in the last 4 or 5 years. While citywide
arrests--if we could put that chart up--while citywide arrests
have gone up to record highs, which is one of the ways in which
we have also brought down crime, we arrest a lot of people,
particularly drug dealers, police officers using their guns has
decreased by 50 percent, by over 50 percent, almost 51 percent.
And, just to give you the actual numbers, back in 1993,
there were 212 people who were shot intentionally by police
officers in the city of New York. That was a time in which we
had 10,000 fewer police officers. We now have 10,000 police
officers, and in 1998, there were only 111 people that were
shot by the police.
That's a per-capita decline of 67 percent. So, before
people attack an entire police department and make it appear as
if they are bringing about this level of record safety by
shooting wildly, the reality is just the opposite. They have
reduced dramatically, even more than they have reduced crime,
the use of their weapons, the times that they shoot, and the
times that they use violence with regard to effecting arrests.
Can they do better? Yes.
Should we avoid all of these incidents if we can? Yes. Yes
we should.
And are we trying to do that? The answer to that is also
yes.
The CompStat that I mentioned to you that measures crime in
every precinct of the city based on an innovation of Police
Commissioner Safir of a year and a half ago, now measures all
civilian complaints, all reports of abuse. So when a precinct
commander comes into the police department every 2 or 3 months
and is being evaluated, in the 75th precinct, for example, with
regard to what's happening to murders, what's happening to
rapes, are there more car thefts, are there problems that the
community is having from the point of view of crime, one of the
things that is featured in that review is, have your civilian
complaints gone up or down? Have your allegations of use of
force gone up or down? If they have gone up, what are you doing
about it? Is it a particular officer that is causing the
problem? Is it a group of officers?
So I think the reduction in the use of force by police
officers, which is dramatic, comes about from deliberate
policies that are intended to accomplish that.
And I would be happy to answer any more or additional
questions about that.
I would like to touch on quickly, two other areas, other
than crime, because I think it illustrates the ways in which we
can cooperate together.
One is welfare reform, which you mentioned before, Mr.
Chairman. And then the other is the area of taxes.
In the area of welfare reform, we have reduced the number
of people on welfare by about 460,000 to 470,000 people since
1995. We began our welfare reform program about a year and a
half before the Federal welfare reform bill passed and the
President eventually signed it.
It has been enormously successful. And what we are doing is
trying to substitute work for welfare every place that we can
and in every way that we can. And if I could urge on you and on
the Members of Congress, both with regard to crime reform and
welfare reform, the maximum degree of flexibility that you give
us is by far and without any doubt the best way to allow us to
accomplish the reduction and the changes that are taking place.
Our welfare offices by August of this year will all become
job centers. Instead of the sign that used to be on the door
that said Welfare Office--actually the sign used to say, Income
Support Center--we are changing all the signs and we are
putting up the sign that says Job Center. But it is more than
just a sign.
The purpose of that sign is to turn the people inside that
office into employment counselors. And when you walk into a
Welfare Office now in New York City, and you ask for welfare,
out of compassion, understanding, and a much, much higher form
of wisdom, we ask you: ``What kind of job would you like? What
have you done? What's your work history?''
If you have a work history, we try to followup that work
history with finding you a job in the area in which you have a
work history. If you don't have a work history, we try to
create one for you so that you begin to have a work history
because that is the only way in which you are going to get a
job. And we are, to the largest extent possible, trying to turn
our welfare offices into employment offices.
The change has been dramatic. The welfare numbers are down
below 700,000 since in the first time since the 1960's; we went
to a million people on welfare in 1970 and virtually stayed
forever. But the most dramatic change that I can't measure for
you, and I would invite you to come and see it.
I would invite you to come to the job centers, take a
visit, have them take you around and talk to the people who
work for the city of New York in the job centers now, the
people who work for our Human Resources Administration. And
what you will find is, that they now have a very, very
positive, very refreshing outlook about their work, which used
to be very depressing work 5 or 6 years ago.
Just registering more and more people for welfare doesn't
give you a sense of accomplishment. It gives you a sense of
helping, but it doesn't give you a sense of accomplishment.
Finding jobs for people, having competition between job centers
that used to be welfare offices over who can find jobs and who
can find them more quickly, and which jobs are the most
lasting, creates a real sense of positive attitude. You are
really helping someone. I think this is something in which we
need to make further refinements, because a lot of the
regulations that used to exist in the Federal agencies that
administer welfare have not been changed, even though you
changed the law.
They still impose enormous mandates on us, enormous burdens
that should not exist, and tremendous contradictions between
the prior philosophy, which was largely to encourage people to
be on welfare, and the present philosophy, which is, welfare
should exist, it should be there, it should help people who
need help, but our first endeavor should be to have people help
themselves, that we should, in essence, fight hard to keep
people from dropping out of the work force. Because if we do
that, we give people a chance to take care of themselves.
And although you changed the law, and the reform is taking
place, some of the Federal agencies have not changed the
regulation. So that creates a real problem, I think, not only
for New York City but for a lot of communities in the city.
And I will reserve my comments on taxes and some of the
further comments that I have on some of the questions that came
up
from you and from Mr. Owens, until later, when we get to the
questions.
But thank you very, very much for this opportunity to
address these issues.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Giuliani follows:]
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Mr. Burton. Well, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just hope that
everybody in America gets a chance to go to New York and see
first hand the fantastic results that have been achieved under
your administration. I do not want you to take conventions away
from Indianapolis, but at the same time, I do think people
ought to be aware of what you have been able to accomplish
because it is really sensational.
I cannot tell you, my family and I were there visiting,
along with some of our friends, and we had always heard that
you couldn't be safe in downtown Manhattan. You get around
Broadway, the porno shops and everything, you had to be very,
very careful. And it was just the opposite. There was a
policeman on every corner. They were courteous. We didn't' feel
any danger whatsoever. And I was just amazed. I didn't think
things could change that much.
So you are to be congratulated.
Mayor Giuliani. Come often and spend a lot of money.
Mr. Burton. Spend a lot of money, yes. I don't have a lot
of money, but I will come often if I get a chance.
Mayor Giuliani. Whatever you can spend we appreciate.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Burton. All right. I do have a few questions I would
like to ask, however.
You said that you had 320,000 jobs lost in a 2-year period,
and that's been completely reversed since your administration
took office. Briefly, could you tell us how you did that?
Mayor Giuliani. The turnaround in jobs, which I have in
front of me here, is really based on many factors. I think the
crime reduction has a lot to do with that. I think we were
losing jobs because people were afraid to put their business in
the city of New York. Or they were leaving the city because
they were afraid.
I also think we had a tax policy that was destroying the
private sector. So one of the things that I began doing in
1994, at a modest level and then increased dramatically as the
city's fiscal health improved, was tax reduction. I reduced
taxes by $34 million the first year, $200 million the second
year, and now the tax reductions are at $2.4 billion.
So we put money back into the private sector. The hotel-
occupancy tax was the best example of about 10 examples. We had
a hotel-occupancy tax that was the highest in the country. We
were, in fact, losing all of our conventions, not only to
Indianapolis but to every city in the country, because nobody
wanted to pay our hotel-occupancy tax.
In the first year that I was in office, I persuaded the
City Council and the State Legislature to cut it by 33 percent.
And now we collect about $70 million to $80 million more from
the much-reduced hotel-occupancy tax than we used to from the
higher one.
Mr. Burton. You know, I----
Mayor Giuliani. And jobs are up dramatically in hotels and
restaurants, by about 20 percent.
Mr. Burton. That is a point that I hope everybody gets very
clearly across this country. When Ronald Reagan cut taxes in
the early 1980's, we were bringing in about $500 billion in tax
revenues annually. And all I heard around here was, my gosh,
it's going to cause the depletion of our tax revenues. But
because it stimulated economic growth, we almost tripled the
amount of tax revenues in 3 years. It went to $1.3 trillion
from $500 billion.
And you make the same case. When you cut the taxes, you
brought more industry and business into New York City, and
therefore, you brought in more tax revenue because there were
more people producing taxes.
Mayor Giuliani. One of the things that we are trying to do
now, is to eliminate the sales tax in the city of New York. And
we have persuaded the State legislature to eliminate it on
clothing purchases of $110 or less, which will help the
citizens in the city who are the poorest. It's a big burden on
them.
But eliminating the sales tax on clothing would be the best
jobs program that we could possibly create. Much healthier than
the jobs programs that used to come out of Congress and that
used to be forced on cities and States, that I used to
investigate as a U.S. attorney and put people in jail for
defrauding.
And a jobs program that says, no sales tax in the city of
New York means 20,000 more jobs, 25,000 more jobs in department
stores, retail stores, outlets. And those are good entry-level
jobs when you are going through a welfare-to-work change in New
York City or in America.
The tax reduction can help. It can be the most effective
form of a jobs program.
Mr. Burton. You just had a moratorium for 1 or 2 days,
didn't you, on sales taxes in New York----
Mayor Giuliani. We had a moratorium--as part of the effort
to convince the State legislature to eliminate the sales tax on
clothing purchases, we did four pilot programs, 4 weeks over a
2-year period in which we eliminated the sales tax or we
eliminated at a certain threshold level. And in those weeks,
sales increased from 50 to 250 percent in our stores.
The main reason that I want to do it is in order to produce
more jobs. If the store could count on an increase of 10, 15,
25 percent more in revenues, it can hire more people. And
therefore, the transition we are going through, 450,000 fewer
people on welfare, the growth of 300,000 private-sector jobs
during that same period, we could match the reduction with the
growth in jobs.
Mr. Burton. So by reducing the sales tax during that brief
period, you increased from one- to fivefold the amount of
people that were buying products in New York City.
Mayor Giuliani. Absolutely. And that offered the--it was a
very hard sell for a lot of reasons internal to the politics of
New York City, which is not all areas of the State can reduce
the sales tax or eliminate it. But we at least got the
elimination of the sales tax on clothing purchases of $110 or
less.
What we are trying to get, just do away with it completely
on clothing, and we could see a big jump in employment.
Mr. Burton. I see my time is running out. Let me just get
back to the issue I wanted to talk to you about in general, and
that is crime. What can we do at the Federal level in Congress
to assist you in helping continue to bring down those crime
rates and those crime statistics in New York City?
Mayor Giuliani. The more of what you do in the area of
block granting and discretion given to local communities, the
better. When you did the crime bill, you made a change that was
very important to the city of New York. You allowed us to
include civilians in the hiring of police officers. That was
enormously important to us because we had a lot of police
officers, but we needed civilians.
That kind of flexibility is important, and the more often
you can do block grants, the better off we are going to be.
Probably the area where the Federal Government could help
the most, and where there is the greatest lack, is in the area
of drug enforcement, both from the point of view of using our
authority through foreign policy and our ability to persuade
much more effectively than we have. And in the area of border
enforcement, assistance in terms of drug enforcement all
throughout the country. That's an area where I don't think the
same emphasis has been there that used to be there,
particularly with making it a major priority of our foreign
policy.
The State Department should be talking about drug
enforcement and agreements with countries about reducing the
crops and the trans-shipment countries cooperating with us.
They should be talking about that as much as they are talking
about international trade, border disputes, because it is as
important to our future and to our children's future as any of
the other things that we are engaged in.
And after all, foreign policy is the art of trying to
enforce what is needed for your country into the policies and
programs of other countries, through persuasion, if you can,
through, more than that, if you have to.
Mr. Burton. Mr. Owens.
Mr. Owens. Yes, Mr. Chairman. To stay on the high road, let
us all recognize that tourism is one of those areas where we
get back some of that tremendous amount of money that flows
overseas to foreign countries. And we would like to see more of
our money flow back to this country via tourists visiting.
We will make a deal with you and recommend all the foreign
tourists coming in that their second stop be Indianapolis. If
you want a deal?
Mr. Burton. How about 50-50? You take half, we take half.
[Laughter.]
Mr. Owens. It is important that we understand our big
cities are the primary place that tourists go. They are major
features of American culture. I would like to see our big
cities survive. I would like to see our big cities thrive. I
would like to see the experiments in diversity succeed and get
good results. That is the reason I want to engage in this
dialog with you, Mr. Mayor, because we have a problem in terms
of perception, you know.
When I perceive smoke, there is fire somewhere. The reality
is that there is fire somewhere.
We ought to take perceptions into consideration, knowing
full well that they don't really reflect reality, necessarily.
But the perceptions are important.
Dealing with perceptions may be over-exaggerations based on
highly visible, atrocious cases. When someone is shot down with
41 bullets fired, you know, it sets off a chain reaction of
emotions that is hard to contain.
Would it cost much for the city to have a safety valve
through an effective civilian-review board? This is not
anything new. You have heard this proposition many times. And
mayors before you have heard it many times.
A civilian-review board, which is effective because the
people feel it is really going to reflect the decisions of the
civilians. That you don't have a veto by the police
commissioner which abrogates the whole thing, you know. Nobody
has the faith in the civilian-review board that has veto by the
police commissioner or that has its budget greatly reduced or
to be ridiculed by the mayor.
So a low-cost remedy for perceptions that may get out of
control, it seems to me, would be a civilian-review board.
On the appointment of a special prosecutor, it is just
common sense to say that district attorneys work with police
everyday. The likelihood that they are going to be objective in
the prosecution of police is nil, I mean, as hard as they may
try.
Our former colleague here, Elizabeth Holzman, was district
attorney of Brooklyn, she set up a special unit to investigate
police-brutality cases. And they put 5,000 policeman around her
office the next day.
The police demonstrated--5,000--around her office. To give
you a visible markup of what that kind of intimidation can do.
So special prosecutors for these cases seems to me a reasonable
remedy. And we have been asking for this for the last 25 years.
Let's have dialog and move on with it.
The residency requirement. Now towns and cities across the
Nation have residency requirements. In New York State, there
are residency requirements in many counties and cities. But New
York State Legislature discriminates against New York City and
will not let them have home rule and impose a residency
requirement, where you reduce the likelihood, or you greatly
help the situation, by having more police who live in the
cities, live in the neighborhoods, and are not suspected by the
population of treating them with contempt because they come
from outside. They make all kinds of remarks. They really don't
know in many cases the culture, etc.
I think three of the policemen in the Amadou Diallo
shooting were from outside of the city. That strikes me as
strange. And also, they were mostly young people. The oldest
was 27, and so they have life and death decisionmaking over
people in the streets. And it was a very young group--
inexperienced.
One of them came from the New York, East New York precinct
that you just mentioned. And he shot a young man out there, and
that young man had been allowed to bleed to death. And he had
no life-threatening wound, but they didn't treat him right
away. So he bled to death.
All of these facts examined by the public, it adds up to a
certain set of perceptions that are very serious. So could we
not deal with that?
And then I asked for some statistics that you might provide
us with. Obviously you have the statistics so, by precinct. So
people who complain that we are getting more parking tickets in
our neighborhood than they are in other places, and other parts
of the city are allowed double parking. Nobody ever gives them
a ticket. But we have all these tickets. The number of cars
towed away as people try to reach their quotas in cars towed
away, to create more revenue for the city. It is greater in our
neighborhoods than they are. The number of youths arrested and
hassled on the street corners are greater, etc., and some of
the other questions. I will submit them to you.
And then most of all, the question of you must deal with
the fact that whites are almost never the victims of police
brutality, or certainly police killings. We have very few
records of whites being victims. And that creates a perception
which you have to deal with also.
Mayor Giuliani. That was a lot to deal with at one time,
but I'll just try, and I'll submit answers----
Mr. Owens. Mr. Mayor, if you need more time when the light
goes out, go ahead and finish. [Laughter.]
Mayor Giuliani. The first thing I can assure you, although
this I do not have the statistics on, that people throughout
the city of New York feel they get too many parking tickets. I
get that complaint--I do a radio show every week between 11 and
11:45 on WABC, a local station in New York. And one thing that
can be said, is fair, impartial, equitable, and across the
board is we give out a lot of tickets all over the place. And
they all blame it on the mayor. Every community, ethnic,
religious, racial of all different kinds and mixed complain
about parking tickets.
But I honestly don't know, I have never looked at, which I
get so many complaints about it, I just have an intuitive
feeling that that goes on----
Mr. Owens. They do collect statistics by precinct?
Mayor Giuliani. Oh sure. I'll get that for you.
Let me take up a few of the things that you mentioned.
First of all, the percentage of police shootings, and we have
gone back to 1991 to 1998. But I can assure you, and I will
submit the statistics to you, that it pretty much breaks out
about the same every single year.
Over the last 7 years, when there has been a police
fatality, police shooting that ended up in a fatality, about 50
percent of the victims have been black, about 13 percent have
been white, about 36 Hispanic, and about 1 percent Asian.
Now, when you look at shootings in society, in other words,
what is going on in New York City, that is almost exactly the
same as the percentage of shootings that take place in the
population.
Over that same period of time, 49.5 percent of the people
who were murdered in New York City were black, 35 percent were
Hispanic, and 11.6 percent were white, and 2.5 percent were
Asian. And the reality is that as a percentage, police
officers, slightly more, actually shoot white people than they
are shot in society, if you understand what I am saying. I can
give you the chart.
Then if you look at people arrested for murder, 54.5
percent arrested for murder between 1991 and 1998 were black,
35 percent were Hispanic, 7.5 were white, 2.6 were Asian, and 5
percent are unknown. And that spans the administration of two
different mayors, Mayor Dinkins and myself.
So when you try to take a look at police officer shootings,
you say to yourself, well, a police officer is shooting blacks
in a higher percentage than the shootings are taking place
throughout the entire city, the answer is no, it is about
exactly the same.
Mr. Owens. The statistic I asked for accidental shootings,
not criminal cases----
Mayor Giuliani. I will submit this all to you, but I can
assure you these numbers work out about the same. And if you
will look at the raw numbers, that means that from 1991 to
1998, police officers in fatal shootings shot 100 blacks, but
5,553 blacks were the victims of murder during that period of
time. Both worked out to about 50 percent.
So it doesn't look like police officers are shooting
blacks, over a 7-year period, in a higher percentage than is
happening in society. The only difference is, police-officer
shootings of blacks or anybody else are infinitesimal in
comparison with the number of times that somebody else in
society murders them: 5,553 blacks were murdered in New York
City; 100 were fatally wounded by the police. That is a very
big difference.
Mr. Owens. You are mixing criminal cases with accidental
shootings of victims like Amadou Diallo, Eleanor Bumpers, and
the people who obviously were not criminals.
Mayor Giuliani. The percentage goes down even more
dramatically. It goes in the other direction.
Mr. Burton. Let me interrupt just a second, Mr. Owens. We
will have a second round of questioning if you would like to
have it. But why don't we let him complete----
Mayor Giuliani. On the civilian-review board, we do have a
civilian-review board. I have increased its budget over the
last 2, 2\1/2\ years. I have increased the number of
investigators that it has. Not only that, we just added 13
senior investigators to the civilian-review board so that we
could have a much higher level of investigatory talent there.
They are disposing of their cases about three times as fast as
they have in the past.
And, the number of civilian complaints in the city is no
where near the all-time highs that we used to have in the mid-
1980's of 6,000 and 7,000. And between 1996 and 1997, which is
the last statistic that I had, they actually went down 13
percent.
So I think the civilian review board, which is civilian
controlled, not police controlled, independent, is doing its
job more effectively than it has in the past. I don't agree
that they should ultimately have the disciplinary authority. I
think they can make the recommendation. I think you are going
to destroy a police department if you take the disciplinary
authority away from the police commissioner.
And this police commissioner, police commissioners say for
prior police commissioners in New York City, have not been
unwilling to dismiss police officers. We had a very tragic,
unjustified killing in New York City by a police officer named
Livotic. And he was acquitted, you might remember, by a court
in the Bronx. He was dismissed by the police commissioner. So
the police commissioner has shown that he has dismissed many,
many people on civilian complaints that turn out to be
justified.
Then when you ask me about residency, I agree with you that
the Police Department of New York City should be representative
of the city of New York. It is better that it be
representative.
We have done everything within the law to allow us--we have
done things that my predecessors didn't do. First year that I
was in office, the present police commissioner, who was then
the fire commissioner, gave 5 extra points to people who live
in the city of New York for taking the exam, and for taking
them into the police department. We increased the residency; we
increased the percentage of residents.
The only thing I have to tell you, and this was reflected
in an article in the New York Times this week. There is no
connection at all between police misconduct and residency. When
we look at police complaints, and this I find, according to the
Times article, is true of police departments throughout the
country, there is no connection between residency and police
officers acting properly.
And in fact, for some reason that I can't quite explain,
when we look at police complaints, we actually get more
civilian complaints against resident police officers than we do
against non-resident police officers by about 10 percent.
So I don't know, even if we achieve residency, is this
really the answer to a police department being more courteous
and more respectful either in New York or in the other cities
that appear to have the same experience.
Mr. Burton. Mr. Horn.
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I would like
unanimous consent to put two pages in the record here.
Mr. Burton. Without objection, so ordered.
[The information referred to follows:]
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T6931.020
[GRAPHIC] [TIFF OMITTED] T6931.021
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much. These are resolutions of the
National Association of Counties Board of Directors and
appropriate committees.
One concerns resolution on early childhood development
programs, such as establishing a flexible Federal program that
allows counties and States to develop home visitation programs
for children and their families, including prenatal care. And
there is a whole series of other worthwhile things.
The second resolution is the resolution on services for
emancipating foster youth. And among other things, it would be
permitting the States and cities to extend Medicaid to children
up to age 22 who are in foster care but left the system at age
18 and to youths who were in assisted adoptions.
This is a predicate to a book review that appeared in the
New York Times back in May 10, 1998, headed ``Thugs in
Bassinets'' and the book, ``Ghosts From the Nursery: Tracing
the Roots of Violence.''
It is a fascinating book in terms of what is affecting the
young people in the first few months through 3 in a
neurological sense of absolutely having no objection to violent
behavior. And what needs to be done in the school system and
the health system, in our cities, in our rural areas is to work
with that type of child.
And I just wanted to put that in the record, and ask then
another question, which I have an interest in this since I was
a small person. My mother was welfare director of the county
for 25 years. She was also probation officer for 5 years. She
was superintendent of the county hospital for a number of
years.
So I grew up with these problems. It is rather fascinating
what has happened in America. We have a lot of very well-
meaning people that try to help young people, but some of this
is, without question, psychological in terms of the behavior of
the completely amoral behavior in killing each other and not
having one sign of remorse.
That leads me to another question, which I have long
advocated, as an educator, and that is that the neighborhood
schools should not just relate to education but also to the
city's or the county's health services, to the city or county
recreation services so we could get one-stop service for both
the children and the parents.
I agree with you completely in praising the mayor of
Chicago. He deserves great praise. I think the major mayors of
our cities and the major county executives ought to have the
education programs under them. Now, in 1975, when I was vice
chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, we went to New
York, held 1 week of hearings on the school system.
Three of us were university presidents at the time: Father
Hesburgh as chairman, myself as vice chairman, and Maurice
Mitchell of University of Denver. We were shocked to learn that
in about the 1890's the State of New York had, in its wisdom,
put a merit board over the hiring of various teachers in the
New York schools and various administrators.
I understand that, I am half Irish, and I know that a lot
of my Irish ancestors barely went beyond the third grade. I
guess in New York, they were able to teach the sixth grade for
never having gone beyond the third grade.
So the State moved in and wanted meritocracy. Well, that
was all very well, but when you look at the assistant principal
test, none of three college presidents on the commission could
even get 50 percent of the answers. They might as well have
been students of physics and chemistry. That had nothing to do
with the job they are doing, which is mostly the disciplinary
job and the counseling of younger people. I don't know if that
law is still on the books and that New York has freedom in that
then they didn't have before. That was the State merit board
put in over the school system.
So I would just like to know your reaction to the role of
the mayor in education, getting those services in one place,
and have you any thoughts on dealing with the violence that is
some youths from bassinet on?
Mayor Giuliani. Well, Mr. Horn, I believe that law was
repealed, the merit law.
Mr. Horn. Well, we criticized it.
Mayor Giuliani. The fact is, that in New York, the mayor
does not control the educational system. And that is true not
only for New York City but all of the big cities in New York
and most of the cities in the country. And it is a very, very
big mistake.
And the changes that have occurred in Chicago are the best
example of what could happen. I had two votes on a board of
seven, and could be outvoted at any time. You know, 4-3, 5-2.
And therefore, have some indirect influence, but not the kind
of control that you would have over a police department or a
welfare system or a fire department. And you can't make the
changes that you would like to make.
You can't make sure, in the way you would absolutely like
to, that the money is actually getting to the schools and the
classrooms. I have tried innovative ways to do that, which
maybe produce half the results you could have if you really had
control.
I'm sorry that Mr. Owens left because I wanted to describe
to him--he was talking about how we don't have enough schools
and we haven't built enough schools. Since I have been mayor,
we have actually added 95,000 seats to the school system, which
is the largest increase since the baby boom.
I inherited a deficit of 78,000 seats. In other words,
there were 78,000 places in which we had new students but we
didn't have seats for them. And we have rectified some of that,
not all of it. Could have done it a lot faster if I had control
of the school system.
And now, when I put money into the school system, and I
have increased the budget dramatically of the school system--
but now when I put money in I try to tie it to performance-
based measures. We put $120 million more into what I call
Project Read. In order to get that money, you have to give 10
to 12 hours more of reading instruction to students.
We have had 133,000 students go through it. Their reading
scores have gone up by 60 percent. We are specifically
restoring arts education to the public schools.
So when I put money into it, it has to be in return for an
arts program going in. We have now done that in 835 schools.
And we are way ahead of schedule on doing that.
But I have to almost set up, like a review committee, every
time we do something because I have to make sure that the
additional $100 million or $200 million has actually gone into
the school system.
I am fortunate to have a chancellor, Rudy Crew, who I think
is the best in the country and is willing to take on the
educational bureaucracy in aid of the children.
The biggest problem that we face, however, is principal
tenure. The chancellor and the superintendent who oversee the
school system are all based on contracts that are performance-
based. However, they run a system that is a job-protection
system. You cannot remove a principal who has tenure, no matter
how bad the school performs, no matter how many kids have
dropped out, no matter how many kids don't graduate. The
principal is there for life, cannot be touched.
And what I maintain is, that politicians who debate
education have to stand on one side of the line or the other.
Either you are in favor of a job-protection system or you are
in favor of a school system, and it is about educating
children. And that is a major debate we are having in New York.
Governor Pataki is a very strong supporter of ending
principal tenure, but there is an awful lot of resistance to
it. And you can imagine where it comes from, which is the
supporters of the status quo in education.
Mr. Horn. Thank you. We will pursue that in our second
round on a number of other issues.
Mr. Burton. Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. Morella. Mayor Giuliani, it is a pleasure----
Mr. Burton. Excuse me, I didn't see Mr. Davis. Pardon me.
Mrs. Maloney. You are jumping over me.
Mr. Burton. I apologize. I must be getting myopic. The
gentlelady will be recognized, then you, Danny, after we
recognize Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and it is a great
privilege to welcome the mayor from the great city of New York
who has done a great deal to improve the safety of the
residents of New York City, I might add, combined with Federal
policies that banned assault weapons, passed the Brady Bill,
helped get guns off the streets, yet sent over $800 million to
the city of New York to hire more police officers and augment
the Police Department's efforts. And we now have, I understand,
a 24-year low in crime in the city of New York.
I am very pleased with that, but I am sure that you agree
that a local police force, in order to be successful, must
enjoy the trust and respect from the community they serve. The
recent tragedy has seriously damaged that trust. I am sure that
all New Yorkers share your deep concern over the tragedy over
the shooting of a 22-year-old, who was shot 41 times by four
police officers.
But the main problem here is that we have a serious problem
and what are we going to do about it. I am sure, Mr. Mayor,
that even though the number of police shootings have decreased
in recent years, as you have pointed out with statistics, but I
am sure you agree that the problem is beyond simple numbers.
It is a problem now of broken trust by many of New York
City's minority residents, a distrust that they feel toward the
Police Department. I am really puzzled by the fact that you
downplayed recommendations made by your own task force on
police-community relations.
And, Mr. Mayor, how do you respond to the fears of many of
New York's minority residents that as the New York Times
stated, people, ``are frisked on the basis of race.'' And what
do you plan to do about restoring that trust? About alleviating
those fears?
I specifically would like to hear how you plan to respond
to your own task force recommendation. I know that you
responded to roughly 61 percent of their ideas. But in the area
of minority recruitment, expanding the cadet force, the police
oversight board that was passed by the City Council but was a
stronger oversight board that you vetoed, you then enacted a
weaker CCRB. You stated that it is funded, yet I have read some
reports where it is under-funded by $1 million.
In the area of minority recruitment, the city is 66 percent
minority, yet the police force is roughly 30 percent. And why
haven't you responded to this really serious, obvious disparity
before this tremendous tragedy?
I would like to ask you, specifically, about alleged
selective responses to information requests by your Police
Department. A Dominick Carter of New York 1 has alleged that
Mr. Safir will not respond to his request for statistics,
specifically the number of minorities on the street crime unit.
If you could help get that number, that would be helpful.
I really look forward to your comments.
Mayor Giuliani. I look forward to my answers.
I think Dominick Carter should directly communicate with
the police department, rather than using me and you as the go-
between for information for the media. So I would suggest that
Dominick----
Mrs. Maloney. He says he has. He says he has asked but
never received it.
Mayor Giuliani. Yes, but I really don't think it is the
role of a Member of Congress and the mayor to try to aid the
media in getting information from the police department. So why
don't we see if we can have him work with the police department
to do that.
I responded to the recommendations of the task force that I
agreed with. And I put them into effect.
I disagreed with certain recommendations of the task force,
and certain recommendations of the task force were entirely
unrealistic, like residency requirements. Residency
requirements are set by the State of New York. They are set by
the Legislature of the State of New York. I can't change them.
They have been in effect for 25 or 30 years. And the political
reality is they are not going to be changed because you would
be asking legislators from outside of the city of New York to
vote to get rid of jobs for their citizens.
And I can't present them with a compelling case. I would be
happy to present you with the same statistics that I gave to
Mr. Owens. The reality is, you know--the difference between
perception and reality, and the reason that we are all, we all
pride ourselves on being educated human beings, is that there
are times in which perception is correct and there are times in
which perception is incorrect.
And do you serve an incorrect perception by just pandering
to it? Or do you tell the truth about it?
And it seems to me we expand all of our horizons when we
react to the truth as opposed to pander to incorrect
perception.
The reality is, in the same New York Times that I think you
incorrectly quoted, and I will go back to that in a moment,
that you cited, had an article this Sunday that pointed out
that there is absolutely no connection between residency and
proper behavior.
And in our own statistics, in the New York City Police
Department, we actually have a higher percentage of resident
police officers who have complaints that are filed against
them. And that appears to be, according to the New York Times,
the experience of just about every other city that has similar
residency requirements.
So you can't make out, whether you like residency or you
don't, given the political realities of life that we live in,
you can't make out a compelling case to do away with residency.
But having said that, here is what we have done that you
didn't mention, in fairness to the work of the Police
Department and my own work, and the work of the people who have
tried to make a change here.
We have done more to change residency than any prior
administration----
Mrs. Maloney. Mr. Mayor, my question was not about
residency.
Mr. Burton. The gentlelady's time has expired. Can we let
the mayor finish because we are running short on time?
Mrs. Maloney. My question was about residency.
Mayor Giuliani. Oh yes it was. You asked me about the
recommendation of the task force that I implemented and I did
not implement. The major recommendation that I disagreed with
and did not implement, was a recommendation that I impose a
residency requirement. So if you would like an answer to the
question, the answer revolves a great deal around residency.
The task force, that you said, I did not implement their
recommendations--one of the major recommendations that they
made that I didn't implement was a residency recommendation.
First of all, I can't impose residency.
Mrs. Maloney. My question was minority recruitment,
expanding the cadet force, the police oversight board, and
restoring the trust--what are you doing to restore the trust
between the minority community and the police department.
Mr. Burton. Before the mayor answers, Mrs. Maloney, your
time has expired. Let the mayor conclude his answer because we
have other Members and the mayor is under time constraints.
Mayor Giuliani. I think what we are doing to restore the
trust of the minority community in New York City is precisely
the same thing that we do for all communities in New York City.
I don't have a separate agenda for the different communities of
New York City.
What we are doing to restore the trust of the minority
communities in New York City is reducing murder in New York
City by 70 percent. So that in a community that had 125 murders
last year or 5 years ago, there were only 15 murders last year
and none this year. What we are doing to restore the trust of
the minority community in New York City is having employment
rates that are the highest in 20 to 25 years. What we are doing
to restore the trust of the minority community, we are seeing
national businesses go into Harlem and other areas of the
minority community that wouldn't go there in 30 to 40 years
because they were too afraid to put businesses there because
crime was so high.
Crime is down now, national businesses are investing. What
we are doing for the minority community in New York City is
funding the New York City public school system at the highest
level that it has ever been funded, producing reading and math
score improvements for the last 5 years.
But we are doing that for the whole city of New York. What
we are doing for the minority community is making a Police
Department that has reduced crime more than any in the country,
become the most restrained in the country.
Because over the same 5 years, something I didn't hear in
all the things you said before, because the question is, are
you feeding incorrect perceptions or are you creating correct
perceptions. The correct perception is that the New York City
Police Department, in the last 5 years, has actually a better
record for restraint than it does crime reduction.
It is more restrained by 67.2 percent. It has reduced crime
by 50 percent. And when you compare your Police Department, the
New York City Police Department, to the police department in
just about every other major city in this country, the New York
City Police Department is more restrained.
So, yes, there are times in which there are tragic
circumstances. And all of us in politics can do one of two
things with those tragic circumstances. We can exploit them to
feed misperception or we can try to learn from them, put them
in proper perspective, and explain to people that although this
was a terrible thing that happened, and the criminal justice
system should answer it, we shouldn't use it to give people
increased fears that they shouldn't have--any different than if
there was a terrible murder today in New York City among
civilians, which happens 50 times more than any encounter with
the police, that we would use that to give people the
misperception that crime is not down because there was some
terrible murder involving four or five civilians.
So that is what we are trying to do, deal with people
honestly in order to create a situation of real trust, rather
than pander to them.
Mr. Burton. Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. Maloney. Mr. Chairman, a point of personal privilege?
Mr. Burton. We don't have the time to allow a point----
Mrs. Maloney. Point of personal privilege, since it was
alleged that I misquoted the New York Times to put the article
in the record. I think that is legitimate if someone alleges
that I misquoted to have the article put in----
Mr. Burton. I will allow you to put the article in the
record, without objection.
[Note.--The document referred to was not supplied for the
record.]
Mrs. Maloney. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Burton. Mrs. Morella.
Mrs. Morella. Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor Giuliani, we appreciate your passionate
commitment to making New York City the shining city on the
hill. You know, the District of Columbia Subcommittee, is one
of the subcommittees of this Government Reform Committee, and
we have been trying very hard to revitalize the District of
Columbia with I think a great element of success, looking to
some of the procedures and techniques and policies that you
have employed: the CompStat, the broken windows, establishing a
culture of civility, and cleanliness, and anti-crime.
I want to pick up on the crime scene, and then, if I have
time, go into the job-income support concept that you employed.
I think throughout the country, violent crime has gone
down. The difficulty is, the age of the perpetrator has also
gone down, and the age of the victim has also gone down. Now in
looking at your statistics, I don't know whether or not in the
city you have compiled anything with regard to age and what
that does show are probably a little less dramatic than the
rest of the country. The crime reductions in New York City have
been about five times the national average, but there have been
crime reductions throughout the country and crime reductions in
New York. Our victims are getting younger; our perpetrators are
getting younger. But it isn't quite as dramatic as it is in the
rest of the country. But we share the same problems.
Then we can see an increased role in our society to begin
to look at what is happening with our younger people and what
their values are and what they are doing with their time.
Mayor Giuliani. No question about it.
Mrs. Morella. And you talked about increased flexibility
for cities. I would imagine that you would give strong support
to something like a youth development block grant that could
bring Big Brothers, Big Sisters, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts,
all of those groups together?
Mayor Giuliani. Enormously valuable programs. We have many
of them in New York City. We have Police Athletic League. We
have the Boys' Clubs and the Girls' Clubs. We do a lot to
support them. They are enormously valuable.
We have a program called Beacon Schools which we have just
expanded to 81 schools in which we--I think Mr. Horn referred
to something very much like it in which we use the school as
the community school. And the school remains open until 11 p.m.
The school is the place that not only the young people are
educated, but the parents can come back for adult education,
job training, language assistance. We try to make the--health
services. We try to make the school the center of the community
that needs rebuilding. And it is an enormously valuable
program.
The program was put in----
Mrs. Morella. It would be good to see a correlation between
those programs.
Mayor Giuliani. And we have gotten money from the crime
bill and other laws that you have passed that we have been able
to use to expand those programs. And those are areas that could
be very, very crucial collaborations. And we have been able to
get the money more recently with not as many mandates attached
to it as used to be the case before because the fact is this is
true of every city in America. There is no one formula that
works. And when you try to have a mandate, we then start using
money in unwise ways just to get your money.
The more flexibility you give us--give us money and say use
it to try to improve the opportunities for young people--we are
going to be able to use that money a lot more wiser than if the
Federal Government tries to micromanage the program.
Mrs. Morella. Which is a good reason for getting good
people in local government to make sure they do use it wisely.
With your income support plan, I believe in welfare reform
and it appears to be working, but I have some concerns about
people being able to make livable salaries, to earn livable
salaries. I have great concerns about child care. I have great
concerns about medical care for the children. I don't know
whether you would like to comment on what you are doing to
ameliorate that problem.
Mayor Giuliani. New York City has an enormous
infrastructure of services for people. We have a hospital
system and this way we are unlike any other city. We own and
operate 11 acute care hospitals and 7 long-term hospitals. And
anyone in New York City can get medical service for free. And
they get it, if no place else, in the public hospitals of the
city, which account for about 23 to 25 percent of the hospital
beds in the city.
We have a vast array of services for young people, which we
also provide in the schools. Most of our schools have health
care facilities as well as public hospitals right in the
neighborhood that can care for young people who do not have the
ability to access hospital services. So we keep trying to
expand it but----
Mrs. Morella. How do you handle child care? It is so
frightfully expensive and there don't seem to be adequate
facilities.
Mayor Giuliani. We have put a lot of money into our budget
for day care. And when I said before that we require people on
welfare to work, we don't require them to work unless we can
help them find day care. So that, as part of the welfare-to-
work program, we have invested hundreds of hundreds of millions
of dollars in day care. So that if a woman comes in, wants
welfare, has two children, they are, let us say, 5 and 7 years
old, and needs day care to help during the hours that the
children are home from school, we will not require that woman
to work unless we are able to provide the day care for her.
And, at this point, we are able to do it. We are going to
need more assistance, more money, when we start getting into
further reductions in welfare. Up to this point, we have been
able to afford it in our budget, with the help of the State,
and the money that we get from the Federal Government.
Mrs. Morella. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Burton. Mr. Davis.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayor,
let me again compliment you and all of New York City, for your
crime reduction activity and the ability to reduce crime. You
also mentioned, though, that in the process of doing so, you
have also reduced allegations of misconduct or complaints
against the police, that there has been a reduction in the
number of instances where overt action is alleged. Did you put
into effect any additional training activities or--how did you
accomplish that?
Mayor Giuliani. Well, the most dramatic and maybe the most
reliable thing to look at are shooting incidents, fatalities,
because they all have to be reported. There is a practice in
New York City, which predates my administration, I am not sure
exactly when it began, but it probably is one of the most
helpful in bringing those shooting incidents down to very, very
low levels, and lower than in most cities. Every single
fatality, even if completely justifiable, goes before a grand
jury. It has to be investigated criminally. And every single
shooting incident has to be investigated with a formal report
of what happened, why it happened. So it is treated very, very
seriously. And that has probably helped a great deal.
At the same time, we invest a lot of money in training. And
we keep increasing it and improving it. And I mentioned before
the CompStat program that we have. The CompStat program not
only intricately measures crime at every single precinct in
this city, on the same basis that we put emphasis on that, we
look at the number of complaints in that precinct.
So if we were reviewing the 75th precinct that we were
looking at before, at the police department today, it would be
an analysis of how many complaints have there been about police
officers? How many complaints of use of force? We divide them
into use of force or abusive behavior. And if they are going
up, then the precinct commander is expected to describe: which
police officer, is it a certain group of them, are they being
trained, do they need retraining, do they need discipline? And
the commander is expected to present a picture in which we have
got to see those things start going down, otherwise, he or she
is going to be removed. I think that is one of the ways.
The other way that we did it is--the civilian complaint
review board that was mentioned earlier was very, very
inefficient. And there are many reasons for that including just
the whole structure of it. It is a difficult process to start
with. We have tried to improve it. We have put more people into
it. We have hired more senior people. We have given them more
resources. And they are doing their job better now. They are
not doing it perfectly. They are never going to be able to do
it perfectly, but I think they are doing it better now.
Mr. Davis. Let me shift for a moment. In the past you have
mentioned that the Department of Human Resources was going to
develop a program where individuals who are known drug users
and also are on public assistance, where their benefits may be
paid to a third party contractor.
Mayor Giuliani. Yes.
Mr. Davis. Could you tell me how that would work?
Mayor Giuliani. I can. It is a program that we are doing on
a pilot basis right now with just a small number. The idea of
it is we don't want the city, State, and Federal Government to
be funding the drug trade. And, therefore, if you are a drug
addict and you want welfare, you have got to show us that you
are doing something about your drug problem. And, therefore,
you have got to be going into treatment, serious treatment
programs. You have got to be presenting us with a plan to do
something about it.
But if we are going to be required to give you money and
you are not doing anything about your drug problem, we don't
want to indirectly be handing that money over to the local
heroin dealer or cocaine dealer, which is what you are doing.
So what we will do is have a third party take over that money,
make sure the money is spent on the children, is spent on food,
is spent on the needs that the person has. For sure as heck, we
don't want to be giving the money to an addict that then turns
over $100 bucks or $200 bucks or $500 bucks to the local heroin
dealer or organized crime. So that is the idea of it.
But also it is part of the much bigger picture of trying to
get much more intelligent, rigorous drug treatment programs
than the unaccountable drug programs. And here is an area where
a Federal mandate absolutely hurt us. And this is mostly the
State of New York because they run our drug treatment programs,
the city doesn't. We spend 60 to 70 percent of our drug
treatment dollars keeping people addicted and we spend only 30
percent in drug-free programs.
Methadone maintenance is the treatment of choice in New
York City. And the reason it is the treatment of choice, just
speaking very candidly with you, is that Federal mandates give
you more money more quickly and large industries have developed
handing out methadone to people because it is a lot easier
saying take your methadone than it is to put them into Phoenix
House or Daytop Village or one of the places where you can have
the possibility of drug freedom.
Mr. Davis. Let me just ask is this a court ordered or court
sanctioned--I mean the power of attorney, in effect, is what
the individuals or the contractor receives over the person's
money.
Mayor Giuliani. No, it is something that you work out with
the Human Resources Administration. It is part of a theory of
the social contract, which is if you want benefits, then there
are certain things that you owe society in return for those
benefits. If you are not working and taking care of your own
family and you are expecting everybody else to take care of
your family, then we expect you to work as soon as you can. If
you have a drug problem and that is the reason you are
requiring the rest of society to support you, then you should
be doing something about your drug problem.
We shouldn't be sustaining your drug problem, the taxpayer
shouldn't be sustaining your drug addiction for 20 years, 30
years, 40 years and then when you multiply this out nationwide,
the United States of America and the city of New York and the
city of Chicago and elsewhere are supplying a lot of the funds
for drug dealers, if we don't do something about it, right? So
it is that really the attempt is to try to do something about
it.
And, finally, we are handing the welfare money to the drug
addicts only because the drug addict has two or three kids that
have to be supported. But if the drug addict is using the
welfare money to buy the heroin, the kids aren't getting
supported. We want the money to the place that it would
actually help people.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much. And when you have generated
enough data for a report, I would appreciate it.
Mayor Giuliani. On that one, I would be happy to keep you
informed. That is a new program, like the last 2 months, so I
don't really have any. But I would be happy to keep you
informed.
Mr. Davis. Thank you very much.
Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Davis. Mr. Hutchinson.
Mr. Hutchinson. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mayor, greetings
to you. I congratulate you on the good work you have done in
New York City. Coming from Arkansas, while I was U.S. attorney,
there were a number of drug cases that we handled that
originated and had suppliers in New York City. So I am
delighted with the progress that you have made because it does
impact a large part of our country.
Yesterday I had an interesting debate at Georgetown Law
School concerning mandatory minimum sentences with Judge
Sporkin, who has been outspoken on mandatory minimums. I wanted
to get your feedback a little bit. I understand you all have
had a measure of success in New York City on crack cocaine and
the street vendors in regards to that. And, of course, crack
cocaine, you have a 5 gram level for mandatory minimum for
possession of crack cocaine in that amount.
Could you comment on your view of mandatory minimums and
the impact it has had on crime in your city, both firearms and
drugs and, specifically, crack cocaine?
Mayor Giuliani. Mandatory minimum sentences, I think, can
be enormously helpful in creating a certainty of punishment if
you are caught which then has a much bigger deterrent impact
than the calculation that many criminals, particularly drug
criminals, can make that, No. 1, they can find a way to beat it
and, No. 2, if they don't beat it, they can find a way to
convince the judge or, eventually, the Department of Parole or
whatever to let them out of prison in a very short period of
time. I think it has a very dramatic impact, particularly in
the drug area, which, after all, is professional crime.
I think you know this as well as I do. I mean, drug
criminals know the criminal penalty process better than U.S.
attorneys, assistant U.S. attorneys, or lawyers. I mean, they
have it memorized because it is their business. We used to have
drug dealers in New York City that would know precisely the
levels at which you could plead and how much drugs you had to
have in your pocket. And then they would go back and replenish
it. But if they got caught, they could always claim to be a
low-level drug dealer. But on a given day they would be selling
five times as much, but they would never appear to be doing
that.
So having these mandatory minimums, which convinces someone
that you are really going to have to do actual time and it is
going to be 5 years or 10 years, I think can be very, very
helpful in playing itself out in professional criminal areas
because they will calculate what they are doing based on it.
And I think actually they are more necessary for State courts
than for Federal courts. Because with the sentencing guidelines
that the Federal courts have, you come pretty close to having
mandatory minimums and maximums and a judge's discretion is
restrained. In a place like New York where there is no
restraint on discretion, they would be enormously valuable. The
areas where we have them, we get a big impact. The areas where
we don't we are very much in need of it.
Mr. Hutchinson. If I recall correctly, while you were the
Federal prosecutor years back, that you advocated prosecutions
even at the Federal level of street pushers----
Mayor Giuliani. Yes.
Mr. Hutchinson [continuing]. Because believing in the sort
of broken window theory that you have got to prosecute crime at
all levels. Are we having the right balance in terms of our
Federal law enforcement going after the kingpins and the big
dealers versus the street pushers?
Mayor Giuliani. You should do more street-level
prosecution. U.S. attorneys should. That was a very valuable
exercise for me and my office as a U.S. attorney. What we did
was we would take in a small number, because that is all we
could really do, of street-level cases, we started it in the
Lower East Side of Manhattan. It was called ``Federal Day.'' We
would never let the drug dealers know the day of the week it
was going to be. Some days it would be a Wednesday; some days a
Thursday; some days a Friday.
But when they came into Federal court with the ability to
focus more on an individual case, they tended to have high
bails so they didn't go right back out on the street. They were
getting 10- and 15-year sentences for what they would spend a
year in jail in the New York State system for, it had a massive
impact. It was a tremendous learning experience for me, because
after we did it for about 3 months, all of the other crimes in
the Lower East Side went down by 30, 40, and 50 percent. It
taught me firsthand that if you put the emphasis on drug
enforcement, you can reduce all other crimes.
Mr. Hutchinson. Let me see if I can get a couple of quick
questions in. The FBI was started in the early 1980's being
engaged in the drug war and in drug prosecutions, supporting
the DEA and our Federal effort. Do you see the same commitment
on the part of the FBI today as was initiated in the early
1980's? And, second, I want to ask a question. Do you believe
the drug war is winnable?
Mayor Giuliani. That is an excellent question because I
think the right answer to that is it is winnable to the extent
that the reduction of any social problem is winnable. It is as
winnable as turning around welfare, which nobody thought you
ever could do and now the successes are faster than I even
believed was possible, and I was in favor of turning it around.
If we have the national will, we can--maybe we can't win the
war on drugs and maybe that isn't the right way to describe it.
We can vastly reduce the problem of drugs. We could reduce the
problem of drugs as fast and as quickly as we have turned
around welfare and we need it even more.
But the national will isn't there and--no, I don't see it
as a lack of commitment on the part of the FBI or the DEA. I
think they have tremendous commitment. I think this has to be
something that goes to very top. I mean the President of the
United States has to lead the effort against drugs if you want
to affect our foreign policy. If you want us to enforce our
priorities on other countries, which is what we are really
talking about, then it has to be a major obsessive concern of
our foreign policy apparatus. They should be as concerned about
that as they are wars in various parts of the world, settling
border disputes, dealing with international trade because,
frankly, if we don't turn around the problem of drugs, then,
you know, we are going to lose a very, very large percentage of
our young people.
This is enormously important to the United States of
America and our foreign policy should be driven by the things
that are important to the United States of America and I don't
see that kind of commitment at the foreign policy level, at the
border patrol level, and I honestly don't see the commitment to
even law enforcement that used to be the case when I was more
familiar with it in the 1970's and the 1980's. But I am not as
familiar with that part of it as I was 8 or 10 years ago.
Mr. Hutchinson. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mr. Burton. Just say Amen to that last one. Mr.
Blagojevich.
Mr. Blagojevich. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Mayor, you
mentioned a moment ago street-level prosecutions. Can you talk
a little bit about the concept of community prosecution? I know
you have it in Brooklyn--the community prosecution program
which you have in, as I understand it, in Brooklyn and
Manhattan. And if I could just tell you that the President's
21st Century Policing Initiative calls for $200 million of
Federal funds to be dispersed to the various community
prosecution programs across the country. I have letters from
the different district attorneys from across the country, the
national district attorneys' office, arguing for that money.
Last year the President asked for $50 million. We were able to
fund it to the level of $5 million.
I am interested to hear what your thoughts are on the
program, how it is working in Brooklyn and Manhattan and the
level of funding that you received last year, which, in my
view, is significantly too little, and that is $5 million, as
well as the President's request for the $200 million.
Mayor Giuliani. Well, the community--there are two
different things--I want to make sure that I am responding to
the right thing--community courts and community policing. You
are asking about community courts?
Mr. Blagojevich. I am talking about the community
prosecution program----
Mayor Giuliani. Right.
Mr. Blagojevich [continuing]. The idea that you have
prosecutors in neighborhoods that work closely with community
leaders, sort of the extension of the COPS program.
Mayor Giuliani. We have two programs like that and they
work very, very well. And they allow us to put focus on a lot
of the quality-of-life crimes that if you went to a higher
court, citywide court, it just wouldn't get the same kind of
attention because in that court they are going to be dealing
with a person who was arrested for murder, the person who was
arrested for rape, the person who was arrested for the far more
serious crimes. It allows communities to have more innovative
solutions to problems.
One of the things that we have made a lot of inroads in
that might not seem like a big thing but it is, I think, in
many, many ways is reducing graffiti. Graffiti is an act of
vandalism. A city that has increasing amounts of graffiti is a
city that has increasing amounts of people who are vandals and
disrespect the rights of other people. A city that has a
reduction in graffiti is a city that is moving in the right
direction.
One of the things we do in our community program is if we
catch someone doing graffiti, what we will often do is just
have the person sentenced to 5 days or 10 days of cleaning up
graffiti. It has a practical result: it cleans up a lot of the
graffiti in the neighborhood. But it also has a symbolic and
maybe even teaches a lesson. It teaches the person how
important this is. And our community courts and our community
programs have allowed us to do that.
I think they are very valuable. I don't know what the right
level of financing of them would be, but we could certainly
expand them and they would be valuable in any place in which we
operated.
Mr. Blagojevich. And, Mr. Mayor, you have got prosecutors
in those neighborhoods so that they are just not seeing the
community leaders when they come to court as complaining
witnesses, but they are also out there working with the
community leaders on a daily basis?
Mayor Giuliani. Yes. It gives them a sense of the
priorities of the neighborhood. New York City is so large that
this is probably even more valuable to us than it might be to a
smaller city or town. In many ways, the local court, which
would be like say in downtown Brooklyn, can be very, very far
away from the concerns of the neighborhood that is many, many
miles away. When the prosecutors are actually in that
neighborhood, then they know in this neighborhood when somebody
comes in and is complaining about radios being on late at night
and making a lot of noise, this is a real problem for them.
And, therefore, we should be doing something about it. It is a
program that is very sensitive to the differing concerns that
occur in different neighborhoods and it is very valuable.
Mr. Blagojevich. And fair to say that if there was more
Federal funding for programs like that, you would have places
to place more of those neighborhood prosecutors, right?
Mayor Giuliani. Yes.
Mr. Blagojevich. OK.
Mayor Giuliani. Yes, sir.
Mr. Blagojevich. My next question, Mr. Mayor, is
legislation that isn't going on in New York, but is potentially
going on in Florida, and that is the possibility that, in fact,
Florida State House legislation was introduced that would make
it a felony for a locality to sue a gun manufacturer. Can you
share your thoughts on that idea with us?
Mayor Giuliani. I never heard of that. I have never heard
of that idea. I can only share----
Mr. Blagojevich. New idea.
Mayor Giuliani [continuing]. My ideas as a lawyer. I don't
think you can make access to the courts a felony. It doesn't
make sense to me.
Mr. Blagojevich. OK. And, of course, you have no opposition
to suing gun manufacturers.
Mayor Giuliani. No, no. Look, I stopped having opposition
to suing after I became mayor of New York City and there were
about 90,000 lawsuits against me. The more the merrier. But I
don't see how you can block access to courts.
Mr. Blagojevich. OK. Thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Mr. Burton. Well, we have an official from Florida here who
might be willing, after the break, to answer those questions
for you Mr. Blagojevich.
Mr. Blagojevich. Thank you.
Mr. Burton. Well, we have gone a little bit beyond our
time. I understand you have another commitment so the committee
will stand in recess and hear from the next panel at 1:30.
Mayor Giuliani. Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You have done a good job.
[Whereupon, at 12:03 p.m., the committee recessed, to
reconvene at 1:47 p.m., the same day.]
Mr. Burton. The committee will reconvene.
And I apologize for holding you gentlemen for so long, No.
1. And, No. 2, I apologize to you for not having all of our
Members here. Our Members are running all over the place. They
have different committee hearings and I guess I ought to have
my hearings on a Monday, Tuesday, or Friday because it seems
like on Wednesday and Thursdays everybody's holding hearings.
But I really appreciate your being here and I appreciate the
records that you fellows have.
State Attorney Shorstein, why don't we start with you and
we will have your testimony and then we will ask you questions
after we hear from both of you.
STATEMENTS OF HARRY L. SHORSTEIN, STATE ATTORNEY, JACKSONVILLE,
FL; JOHN F. TIMONEY, POLICE COMMISSIONER, PHILADELPHIA POLICE
DEPARTMENT; AND ROBERT CHEETHAM, SENIOR ANALYST, PHILADELPHIA
POLICE DEPARTMENT, CRIME MAPPING UNIT
Mr. Shorstein. Mr. Chairman, distinguished members of the
Committee on Government Reform, my name is Harry Shorstein and
I am the State attorney for the fourth judicial circuit of
Florida. Thank you for the invitation to speak with you today
about our Nation's criminal justice system.
The title of your hearings, ``National Problems, Local
Solutions'' is a perfect description of what I am here to talk
about today. State and local government are better prepared and
equipped to deal with problems of public safety than the
Federal Government. It may be politically popular to tell the
American people you are tough on crime, but do they know that,
while passing scores of new death penalty laws, you seldom seek
it? Congress is considering Federalizing juvenile crime. But if
you do, I will prosecute in a day more cases than you will
prosecute in all of the Federal courts, including the Indian
reservations, in a year.
The recent dramatic increase in the number and variety of
crimes prosecuted by the Federal Government significantly
overlaps and duplicates what has traditionally been within the
purview of State courts. Between 1982 and 1993, Federal justice
system expenditures increased at twice the rate of comparable
State and local expenditures. Though politically popular,
reduction of crime, particularly violent crime, has been
adversely affected by federalization. Even with the trend to
federalization, Federal prosecutions comprise less than 5
percent of all criminal prosecutions.
However, there is a legitimate and important role for the
Federal Government in crime prevention. That role is through
financial support of State and local law enforcement. That
should not be curtailed. A perfect example of the appropriate
and important role that the Federal Government can play is the
Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. This
agency provides critically needed support for creative locally
developed solutions to the problem of juvenile crime.
When a local community comes together and makes a
commitment to implementing a comprehensive approach to deal
with crime, remarkable things can be accomplished. I would like
to take just a few minutes of the committee's time to tell you
about Jacksonville's approach to curbing juvenile crime. Since
1993, there has been a 44 percent reduction in the arrest of
juveniles for violent crime in Jacksonville. This includes a 78
percent reduction in murder; 51 percent reduction in rape and
other sex offenses; 45 percent reduction in robbery; and a 40
percent reduction in aggravated assault. In addition to these
violent crimes, there has been a 67 percent reduction in
arrests of juveniles for the gateway crime of vehicle theft and
a 56 percent reduction in weapons crimes.
The picture in my community was not always so positive.
When I took office, our city had faced a 27 percent increase in
the number of juveniles arrested from 1990 to 1991. And during
the 4 years prior to the implementation of our program, 1989 to
1993, juvenile violent crime arrests had increased 78 percent.
Ours is a two-pronged approach to the problem of juvenile
crime, one that incarcerates repeat and violent juvenile
offenders and, at the same time, intervenes at an early age
with children at risk of becoming criminals. In an article
written for the New York Times, Fox Butterfield called our
program of sanctions and intervention a preemptive strike
approach to reducing juvenile crime and, of course, ultimately
reducing all crime. The term preemptive strike describes
vividly what we are trying to accomplish by moving decisively
to head off problems before they occur or worsen.
Our goal is to incapacitate serious habitual juvenile
offenders during their most violent and prolific criminal
period and do everything possible to return them after
incarceration to an environment different from which they came.
The combination of early intervention for at-risk youth and
swift, hard punishment for juvenile criminals when appropriate
is working in our community. We have shown that if we let
common sense and not rhetoric guide the system, we can greatly
reduce juvenile crime.
Simply warehousing juveniles in jail is not a long-term
answer. Working with other agencies, we have developed the
jailed juvenile program. Juveniles in the jail attend school in
regular classes held in the jail facility. They also receive
drug counseling and participate in living skills, family
planning classes, and anger control training. In an effort to
provide these young offenders with positive role models, they
are paired with mentors recruited by my office. The mentors
visit them on a regular basis in the jail and continue to
provide guidance for the juveniles after they are released from
jail.
Many of our prevention-early intervention efforts are
school-based. A career educator in my office coordinates
programs with our schools. Truancy and avoiding out of school
suspension are critical to juvenile crime prevention. When
appropriate, we aggressively prosecute parents for not sending
their children to school.
To address the increasing juvenile drug abuse problem, I
implemented a juvenile drug court. Juveniles accepted in the
drug court are immediately enrolled in a multi-phased out-
patient program. Juvenile drug court includes an educational
component and psychological services for the juvenile and the
parents.
In summary the answer is not punishment or prevention. It
requires both. I incarcerate more juveniles as adults than any
prosecutor in the country. Equally important, I have more
prevention-early intervention programs within my office. The
answer is punishment and prevention-early intervention working
together. A non-partisan, balanced approach can have an
unbelievable impact on crime and the welfare of our children.
I thank the committee for their interest in the issue of
criminal justice and, more specifically, juvenile crime and the
children of America. There is no simple solution to this very
complex and difficult problem. Perhaps today's hearing should
be entitled, ``National Problem: Localities Seeking
Solutions.'' Because every day we are trying new ideas and
approaches. Some work and others fail. Some children turn their
lives around while others fall into a life of crime.
The one certainty is that unless the Nation remains
vigilant and focused on the problem of juvenile crime, the
gains we have made will fade as we enter the new century. I
feel confident, however, through aggressive prosecution
combined with intensive intervention and prevention, the
progress we have made will continue into the next century and
beyond. Thank you.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Shorstein follows:]
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Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Shorstein. Before we go to your
video--and I understand you have a video you would like for us
to see--Mr. Fattah represents, I guess, part of Mr. Timoney's
area and he wanted to make a remark or two about the new
commissioner.
Mr. Fattah. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I just wanted to
welcome the commissioner to Washington. And, unfortunately,
here in the Congress we don't coordinate scheduling so even
though I am a member of this committee I also have two other
committees that are meeting at this identical time. But I did
want to welcome you. And your comments and your testimony today
here obviously will be helpful as the Congress goes forward.
And, in addition of which, the effort by the Congress and
this administration to provide additional police officers,
which our city has benefited from, has been quite, I think, a
significant part of both the New York story and the
Philadelphia story. But nationwide and earlier today, the
President has offered the notion that he was going to push for
an additional 50,000 police officers on the street. And I know
that there is something very bipartisan about this issue of
fighting crime in which both as Democrats and Republicans, I
think we have the same desire.
So I want to welcome you here and, inasmuch as your work in
Philadelphia has, I think, brought appropriate attention in the
wisdom of the chairman and his staff to invite you, I wanted to
stop by and say hello. Thank you.
Mr. Timoney. Thank you very much, Congressman.
Mr. Burton. OK. I think we will see the video of Mr.
Shorstein's right now and then we will proceed with Mr.
Timoney.
[Video shown.]
Mr. Burton. Mr. Shorstein, that is very impressive. I would
like to have a copy of that tape so I could show that to some
of the mayors in other parts of the country where I travel. So
I hope you will give me a copy of that when we are through.
Mr. Shorstein. You have it.
[Note.--A copy of the video is held in the committee
files.]
Mr. Burton. Mr. Timoney, thank you for being with us as
well.
Mr. Timoney. Thank you, sir. Good afternoon, Chairman
Burton, and other members of the committee. My name is John
Timoney and I have been the police commissioner of Philadelphia
for the last year. Prior to that experience, I spent 29 years
in the New York City Police Department, retiring as the first
deputy commissioner in 1996, which is the No. 2 person in that
organization, under Commissioner William Bratton. The 2
intervening years I spent as a consultant advising governments
and police departments around the world.
However, in 1994, as the chief of department under
Commissioner Bratton, which is the highest ranking uniform
member, I had the good fortune of being a member of a team that
changed fundamentally the way in which the New York City police
department approached its core mission. As part of our new
approach, we developed an entirely new and much more effective
set of policies and procedures for tackling urban crime and
disorder. It is the results of this experience as well as my
experience as a consultant to police departments around the
world that I want to share with you today.
As most of you already know, the heart of the new approach
to fighting crime, introduced by Commissioner Bratton in New
York, is a process known as CompStat. Many experts have written
at length about CompStat: about its origins, its key features,
and why it has proved so effective in reducing crime in the
country's most densely populated city. It is not my aim today
to add to this historical and largely theoretical discussion
about CompStat or even to defend my decision to introduce it in
Philadelphia. I prefer to use this opportunity to tell you how
the Federal Government can make the CompStat process an even
more powerful tool in fighting crime in our cities.
In my view, there are three main features of the CompStat
process. The first is the centralization of the decisionmaking
to local commanders. It is the local commanders who are the
closest in touch with crime and quality of life conditions in
his or her neighborhood. He or she is, therefore, best placed
to develop and implement the strategies necessary to tackle
these conditions and it is in his or her responsibility to take
the lead in doing so.
This is the approach that we have adopted in Philadelphia.
The role of top management in headquarters is to support,
advise, and supply the local commander and to set the policy
framework within which he or she must work. It is also our role
to monitor the performance of the local commander and to hold
him or her accountable for that performance.
To formalize this monitoring and accountability process, we
have also introduced the second important feature of CompStat,
namely the weekly meetings at which local commanders report
their performance to the department's top management, including
myself and deputy commissioners and the heads of all the
special bureaus. At these meetings, local commanders describe
the conditions in their districts and what they are doing about
them. Some of these presentations are success stories. At other
times, however, local commanders find themselves having to
explain why the strategies they outlined at earlier meetings
have not been nearly as successful as they had suggested they
would be.
The third and most important feature of the CompStat
process is the use of computerized maps of crime information.
Rather than talking about what these maps show and why they are
so valuable, I have brought with me today Mr. Robert Cheetham
who is a senior policy analyst with the Philadelphia Police
Department's Crime Mapping Unit who will give you a brief
demonstration of this exciting and powerful new technology.
Robert.
Mr. Cheetham. Thank you, Commissioner. Mr. Chairman, ladies
and gentlemen, Commissioner Timoney has asked me to show you a
few examples of what we do in Philadelphia in terms of crime
mapping. He has just told you a little bit about a process
known as CompStat. And there are several facets to this, as he
has explained. But one of the most important is timely and
accurate data, as well as the maps used to visualize that data.
The information technology that has brought crime analysis
and mapping to the mainstream is known as Geographic
Information Systems. As with all things, in information
technology, this has an acronym. It is also known as GIS. After
CompStat, that is the second acronym for the afternoon and I
promise I won't give you any more.
In fact, I am not here to tell you about GIS technology.
Rather, I would like to more concretely show you how it can be
and is being used in terms of law enforcement efforts. Now,
unfortunately, I can't show you the live maps we use in the
weekly CompStat meetings. However, I have prepared a few static
examples to illustrate some of the concepts Commissioner
Timoney has just discussed. Slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
[Note.--A copy of the slides are appended to Mr. Cheetham's
testimony.]
Mr. Cheetham. A brief introduction. The city of
Philadelphia covers about 144 square miles. The police
department breaks the city up into a couple of dozen districts
ranging from about 1 square mile to as much as 16 square miles.
The weekly CompStat meetings are on a 4-week rotation so that
over the course of a month, each of these districts is examined
in detail. Tomorrow, for example, the northwest and northeast
police divisions will be up.
Mapping and GIS are used in law enforcement in a variety of
ways and I will just briefly go through a few of them.
Visualization is one. Accountability and, for planning
purposes. Slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. At their most fundamental level, the maps and
charts that are used for this are very much visualization
tools. This is not necessarily new. Law enforcement officials
have been making and using pin maps for over 100 years, long
before we had computers to assist us. With information
technology, officers have some significant advantages in terms
of mapping and analysis of crime. We can construct maps more
rapidly; we can assign symbols in several different ways; we
can deal with the enormous data sets. And we can mix data from
a variety of different sources.
The map you see in front of you is very typical of what
officers and command staff will see at tomorrow's CompStat
meeting. It is symbolized in this case according to 8-hour
shifts that police officers work and the incident sets are
drawn from data bases that literally include millions of unique
events that occur in a given year. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. Several days prior to each weekly CompStat
meeting, copies of maps and charts, such as the ones you are
now viewing, are sent out to each of the district commanders
and then, later, at the actual meeting, these are projected
live on the wall, much as we are doing now, except the maps can
be manipulated to follow the conversation. Next, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. As the dialog between the command staff and
district officers progresses, the maps are used as a support
tool to visualize both the geography of the area being covered
and the most recent events occurring in that area. Next,
please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. For example, if the conversation turns to a
few blocks in a particular neighborhood, we can zoom into that
area, dynamically add or subtract thematic layers of
information, comparisons can be visually drawn between events
in the current 4-week cycle and the previous 4-week cycle. If
we have data that we can use, we can actually overlay other
kinds of information, such as the locations of schools, ATM
machines, or vacant lots in juxtaposition to where a particular
class of events is occurring.
In this way--next slide, please--we can attempt to ferret
out patterns, clusters, and relationships between events. Now
it is important to understand that the computers don't do the
work for us. Computers are notoriously poor at any kind of
pattern recognition. But we as human beings are very good at
this. The computers allow us to rapidly manipulate and
visualize complex information so that we can take advantage of
the human being's unique genius for pattern recognition. Next
slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. The example you see before you is one in
which we have drawn a simple circle around, at about a 1,000
foot radius, around public schools. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. The slide that is in front of you now and the
next couple that I will show are actual examples of what will
be seen in tomorrow's CompStat meeting. The first one shows
some burglaries in the northwest section of the city, district
35. The burglary patterns are often different for commercial
burglaries as opposed to residential burglaries. Similarly,
daytime burglary patterns are different from nighttime
patterns. So we adjust our symbology accordingly. In this
particular example, the red homes on the map represent
residential burglaries and the black buildings commercial. Next
one, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. The one we are now looking at shows stolen
vehicles and recovered vehicles. The stolen vehicles are in red
and the recovered in blue. There are also thefts from vehicles
overlaid on top of that and those are the light blue dots. The
other colored regions indicate the location of where school
grounds are, the yellow areas, and parks. We can also, I think,
show things like shopping malls and so on. Next, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. We can also indicate where multiple events
occur at the same location and where arrests have brought in a
suspected perpetrator. It is somewhat difficult to see on these
particular maps, but there are white stars on top of the areas
in which we have multiple events. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. At a more sophisticated level, we can also
use this technology for more planning-oriented and tactical
purposes. Here you can see how concentrations of events change
in time. The large orange blobs may look like I spilled my
lunch on the map, but in fact they are quite revealing. What
you see here are actually concentrations of crimes involving
firearms in some very troubled neighborhoods in north
Philadelphia. Over the past 6 months, we have been engaged in a
large cross-agency, cross-jurisdictional anti-narcotics
operation called Operation Sunrise.
On the righthand side of each of these maps, there is a
phase I and a phase II in roman numerals. And these are the
areas that Operation Sunrise has already had some impact in the
first 6 months. In the top map, you can see July to December
1997, gun crimes in that area. And in the bottom map, July to
December 1998. The darkest orange area show where the
concentrations of violent gun-related crimes are occurring.
From this display, we can see, upon examination, that Operation
Sunrise is clearly having an impact. The darker orange areas
are decreasing in size and intensity. This is important for the
people involved in Operation Sunrise to see.
One of the rules in this operation is that we don't move to
the next phase until we can clearly show that the current area
has been stabilized. Based in part on these maps, Operation
Sunrise will begin phase III this week. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. Taking these maps of change to the next
level--if you could click on that map, please--taking these
slides of change to the next level, we can actually take the
same sorts of information over, let us say, a 6-month period,
and slice that up into much smaller periods. If you would press
play, please. And string these along into a sort of filmstrip
in which we can show how the concentrations move across the
urban fabric through the course of time. Thank you. Next slide,
please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. In addition to these displays of change over
time, we can look at real estate information, aerial
photography, socioeconomic data, public health information,
several kinds. All of these information sources help us to plan
these operations to be a more effective use of public funds and
to minimize the risks to police officers and other public
officials involved.
Now, before handing this back to Commissioner Timoney, I
would like to return to a couple of the maps I showed you
before.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. This is an earlier one in which there are
concentrations of thefts from vehicle and then there are--
previous slide please----
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham [continuing]. Concentrations of thefts from
vehicles with the outlines of the police districts drawn on top
of it. Those are the black lines on the map.
I would like to point out something very important here.
That is even at statis--and crime patterns are rarely in a
state of statis--these concentrations span boundaries. In other
words, the criminals have no respect whatsoever for the
political boundaries drawn by governments. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. Returning to the maps that we will use in
CompStat tomorrow, we can see something else. I would like to
draw your attention to this upper northeast corner of
Philadelphia, the seventh and eighth districts. You will notice
several clusters of automobile-related crimes along the edges.
One of these is a mall, the other is a housing development and
transportation artery through the region. What you will also
notice is that the dots, representing incidents of crime, stop
at the edge of the city. The same is true on the next slide,
please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. But, in fact, we all know that those dots
don't stop and that crimes are occurring just across the
boundary, we just can't see them. Next slide, please.
[Slide shown.]
Mr. Cheetham. In this final slide, we are looking at stolen
vehicles again. This time the stolen vehicles are in the city
and they are represented by red stars and the vehicles outside
the city are the blue cars. In addition, we have drawn a red
line between the two events. In other words, when we can link
where a car was stolen and the place from which it was
recovered, we have made that link explicit.
We often use maps such as this to locate so-called chop
shops where stolen vehicles are chopped up into parts for
resale. In this particular case, these vehicles are recovered
outside the city. Or, in many cases, such as Camden, the city
of Camden in the lower right, outside the State. But what you
see is only half the story. We cannot see where the cars are
either stolen outside the city or recovered inside. We lack the
data and, more importantly, we lack the standards to exchange
information with other law enforcement agencies that surround
the city.
That ends my presentation. I will turn things back to
Commissioner Timoney and he will discuss some of the ways in
which this might be cured.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Cheetham follows:]
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Mr. Timoney. Thank you, Robert. As we said prior, we use
the CompStat process to set strategic and target goals.
Probably the most fundamental, important step is timely and
accurate information. To guarantee that we have timely and
accurate information, I have established a quality assurance
bureau, which reports directly to me, which makes sure that our
information is both timely and accurate. Additionally, I have
appointed an independent expert, Professor Larry Sherman of the
University of Maryland, to advise me on the matters of crime
reporting and the correlation of crime.
But accuracy and timeliness, although necessary, on a
necessary basis on which to plan a crime-fighting strategy, is
not sufficient alone. In order to fight crime effectively,
police commanders have to identify crime patterns that Robert
mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, as you saw from the maps,
these patterns often cross boundaries because criminals
recognize no artificial political boundaries.
As a result of our meetings in CompStat, I decided, along
with the concurrence of Mayor Rendell, to host a meeting of the
four major counties surrounding Philadelphia, along with about
100 different police jurisdictions, to share the information
and give them a demonstration on the mapping capabilities of
Philadelphia and also to promise them we would assist them in
setting up, if they so desired, mapping for their individual
areas. And the response on the part of the chiefs in the
surrounding areas was nothing short of spectacular.
I am delighted to report that they welcomed these
suggestions enthusiastically and we have begun working out a
formula to make sure that this happens over the near future.
But my suggestion might have not been so enthusiastically
endorsed. My colleagues may have preferred to continue doing
things on their own. All of us would have suffered and none of
us would have been able to tackle the problems on our own. That
is why I believe the Federal Government has an important role
to play here. Enabling police departments across the country to
exchange crime information electronically is too important a
goal to be left to the voluntary actions at the local level.
I know that the Department of Justice is now thinking about
how best to approach this subject, but I believe that the time
for thinking is past. It is now time for action. If the Federal
Government is serious about helping local communities to fight
crime more effectively, it is this area in which it can and
should take a strong lead. It should set up a commission to
develop common data and technical standards for the criminal
justice system and to take positive steps to encourage local
agencies to endorse and adopt them.
Computer mapping of the kind you have just seen is only one
example of how science and technology can significantly
strengthen the crime-fighting capabilities of local police
departments. DNA, automatic fingerprint identification systems,
ballistic identification systems are other areas with which
members of the committee may be familiar. The point I want to
make is that, as we approach the new millennium, effective
policing requires more than uniformed police officers on the
street. Police departments also need sophisticated scientific
and technological support. This means specialist equipment,
systems, and professionals to operate them. For example,
forensic scientists, information technologists, and
communications engineers.
Here again, I believe the Federal Government can play a
vital role. For too long, the law enforcement community in this
country has relied on others, mainly in the Defense industry,
to develop the science and technology that it needs to do its
job. But policing local communities is very different from
fighting foreign enemies. The police have special needs that
are unlikely to be understood or met by military suppliers. I
therefore believe that the time has come to establish a
national laboratory of criminal justice and of law enforcement
science and technology, similar, but independent of the well-
known laboratories that support the Department of Defense.
It should be staffed by the finest professional scientists
and technologists, working alongside the best criminal justice
professionals. Its mission should be to become the center of
excellence in the application of science and technology to the
problems of the criminal justice system. As well as carrying
out a program of applied research and development, it should be
available to assist individual departments with difficult
operating requirements, expensive specialist equipment, or
other expertise.
A model for such a laboratory already exists in the United
Kingdom. It is funded and managed by the national government
and it is an important part of the UK policing scheme, both
because of its research findings and its technical support
activities. It was that laboratory which was responsible for
first applying DNA technology to the world of criminal justice.
The establishment and maintenance of such a facility is not
the project which one can expect an individual community to
take on, no matter how large or how rich this community is.
Some might argue, however, that this is something in which the
FBI or some other Federal law enforcement agency should take
the lead. But this would give the institution a much narrower
focus than I believe it should have. I would like to see it
serve the whole criminal justice community, not just the law
enforcement sector. And its principal focus should be on local
concerns, rather than national ones.
Crime is primarily a responsibility of local communities
and the experience in New York and elsewhere has proven that it
is most effectively tackled at the local level. But I believe
that the Federal Government can play an important role in
helping local communities carry out their responsibilities even
more effectively. It can do this by providing those things,
like the development of national standards and the support of
major research and development programs, that can only be
delivered nationally. In this way, the Federal Government can
legitimately help local communities to help themselves. I thank
you, Mr. Chairman.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Timoney follows:]
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Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Timoney. Has anybody ever told
you you resemble Richard Harris, the movie star?
Mr. Timoney. Only about 1.5 million times. [Laughter.]
We are from the same country, maybe that is what it is.
Mr. Burton. I just was waiting for you to start singing
McArthur Park.
Well, first of all I want to thank you both very, very much
for being here. You know, in the press I think you have been
described as a cop's cop and, toward that end, what makes you,
a cop's cop, more capable of making decisions than somebody who
has just graduated from some crime school?
Mr. Timoney. Oh, I think, while I am all for education--I
have a lot of education--there is nothing to beat experience on
the street, dealing with especially in large urban areas,
dealing with diverse communities. And, you know, having worked
in some of the tougher parts of New York in a variety of
assignments from patrol, plainclothes, to narcotics, combined
with a formal education, I think I bring a unique experience
and resume, if you will, into fighting crime.
And I think, with good leadership, good systems, police
departments can be much more effective at the local level in
fighting crime, I think, then they ever have in the past.
Mr. Burton. You are adopting, I presume, a great many of
the programs and systems that Mayor Giuliani talked about
earlier today.
Mr. Timoney. Right.
Mr. Burton. You were the chief deputy commissioner in New
York.
Mr. Timoney. That is correct.
Mr. Burton. And so I presume that what you are doing is
taking a lot of those same ideas, augmented by new ideas you
are coming up with, to Philadelphia.
Mr. Timoney. Correct. And the one addition--I mean, there
are a lot of additions--but the one this young man sitting next
to me, he and two of his colleagues are graduates of the
University of Pennsylvania that have degrees, sophisticated
degrees, in computer science. And that is a new appreciation
that I have for the civilian end of the policing world that
even us tough, hardened veterans can learn from young civilians
that are specifically trained in this high-tech area.
Mr. Burton. Very good. This CompStat program that you are
talking about, do you know how many American cities are
adopting that, besides Philadelphia and New York?
Mr. Timoney. I don't know the exact number, but I think
most of them have taken on some form of the CompStat process.
Although I think a lot of them don't do it quite correctly. The
one thing that is misunderstood, I think, about CompStat, the
one important feature for me, is the CompStat process, those
weekly meetings that are chaired by myself and the executive
staff, for the first time ever in American policing, it has got
top management involved in day-to-day crime-fighting. Before,
trust me, in the old organization, the big chiefs never got
involved in fighting crime on a day-to-day basis.
In the CompStat process, the crime is laid out on maps. It
forces you to deal with it. It forces you to get actively
involved. It forces you to help the local commanders come up
with the decisions regarding strategies and how to deal with
that stuff effectively. That, I think, is the unappreciated
side benefit of the CompStat process.
Mr. Burton. Do you think a great many more policemen being
funded at the Federal level and sent to the local communities
would be helpful? Or do you think the money would be better
spent giving it to the city police chiefs in the form of a
block grant and let them come up with the innovative ideas on
how to stop crime? I mean, you know, we have a limited number
of Federal dollars that we are going to spend.
Mr. Timoney. Right.
Mr. Burton. And I am not going to get partisan in any way.
Mr. Timoney. Yes.
Mr. Burton. But the administration has one view and that is
to put more policemen on the streets, with which I share a
great deal of support. But then there is another attitude which
has been expressed I think by Mayor Giuliani and I think you
guys, to a degree, and that is that it would be better to block
grant the money back because cities have individual problems
and needs and it would be better to let them come up with
innovative ways to spend that money.
Mr. Timoney. Yes. I mean, it is always nice, as you said,
to have more police officers, but the idea of having a lot more
discretion sometimes to choose between a single police officer,
for example, at $40,000 per year and a piece of technology that
may benefit 100 police officers and leaving it up to the local
chief to make that decision I think is always a wise decision.
Mr. Burton. So you think that would be a better approach
because you understand the problems better at the local level
than the Federal level.
Mr. Timoney. That is correct. Yes, without a doubt, I think
the more discretion that the local commanders are allowed to
have regarding spending money is always desirable.
Mr. Burton. Do you agree with that?
Mr. Shorstein. Yes, I do.
Mr. Burton. That was a quick answer.
Mr. Shorstein. No, I think there is a lot of analogy that
can be drawn between CompStat and our juvenile justice program.
And we hate to use the war analogy, but, essentially what
mapping does is recognizes where the problems are and you
direct your efforts and your resources or your troops, if you
will, to the most important fronts.
I think the same analogy can be drawn to focusing on
juvenile crime. That historically the Federal and State and
local governments have ignored juvenile crime and waited and
addressed crime by programs such as three strikes you are out,
which are programs we often support because the punishments are
warranted. If the war is raging on the 11 to 18 year old and,
as Mr. Horn pointed out earlier, starting with fighting crime
at 0 to 3, stopping teenage pregnancy, dealing with welfare
reform so that you are not making decisions here in Congress
that essentially contribute to future criminal problems.
So I do agree--it is quite a long answer to your question--
that we not only are better able to understand what I refer to
as traditional crime, the rape, robbery, and murder type crime,
than you are, because we deal with it more comprehensively, but
when we develop programs, hopefully with your support, if they
are effective, then we are better able, even politically, to
enhance our own efforts. As you have seen, I think, in our
video, the support is very, very broad within my jurisdiction.
Mr. Burton. OK. I have some more questions, but I will now
yield to Mr. Horn.
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman and I
appreciate the testimony that you gentleman have provided. It
is really excellent what you are doing and it deserves to be a
national model and I guess you probably have a lot of
inquiries, both of you, every day. And Mr. Giuliani, Mayor
Giuliani, this morning, certainly had a turnaround. And I know
it can be done.
I was in Philadelphia when I was vice chairman of the U.S.
Commission on Civil Rights and we examined the police
department and I am delighted to see you, Commissioner. Because
it was absolute chaos in that department 20 years ago where
they had no deadly force policy, for example. You just shot at
somebody. There was no policy. And we had the good mayor at
that time, ex-police commissioner, who had left a lot of
problems there. And I tried out a deadly force situation on him
and I said, you have got 10 seconds to make up your mind, not
just 3. And where is the policy? And we found two young
children had been killed by the police, both 16, one white, one
black. And it was just a mess. So I am sure you are
straightening that one out.
But what interests me here is what you are doing is right
at the core of it and that is to get them early out of the
cycle. And you are right about the truancy. And you are right
about keeping them busy and all the rest. And I guess I would
like to know, under either the laws you have to operate or the
grants you have to operate--I hear you want them discretionary
and I certainly agree with that--but how much flexibility do
you have in both cities to do what you think needs to be done,
based on your practical experience? Are the laws and ordinances
and grants, Federal, State, do they limit you in some ways that
you would like not to be limited if you are going to be even
more successful?
Mr. Shorstein. More, to answer to would we like more
flexibility. Yes, I can give you some examples. Another area
where the Federal Government has been helpful to us has been in
establishing a drug court program office where we have received
Federal funding for drug courts, which I believe are very
effective. I have an adult and a juvenile drug court in
Jacksonville. But, again, there are some very, very strict
limitations that are not always practical. It seems as if well-
intentioned grant policies get bogged down, understandably in
some cases, with restrictions that are not practical.
Now, conversely, or as lawyers always say, on the other
hand, I respect your very, very difficult decision in trying to
understand where the money should go. I jokingly addressed the
other body last year and I told the Senator we don't want your
advice, we just want your money. Which is sort of truthful, but
it was a joke.
I am always asked how do we tell Congress to draw the
legislation so as to see that the money gets to the place it is
intended. It is a very, very difficult problem, Congressman,
and, again, sarcastically, I could say, I am just a prosecutor,
that is really your problem.
Mr. Horn. What we are doing to education in this Congress
is to make sure that 95 percent of every grant in education
gets into the classroom, not skimmed off by the Federal
Department of Education, not skimmed off by the State
department of education, not skimmed off by the county
department of education or the local unified school district.
And I think that will help get the money where the people that
are on the firing line do the good things and make the
difference. And that is exactly what you are asking for and we
ought to do it.
I think the best thing Congress ever did in this area was
the Revenue Sharing Act that lasted from Nixon to Reagan.
Unfortunately, Reagan gave into the lobbying forces here and
the Democrats and they destroyed the program. And yet it gave
local council members who know their city a lot better than any
of us do sitting here and gave them the authority to get the
job done, be it parks or police or whatever was the need of
that city. I hope one of these days when we retire the national
debt a few trillion dollars that we can get back to that.
But let me ask you in a couple of other areas. You
mentioned DNA and I am curious, Commissioner, what is your
thinking along that line? Is that that we keep juvenile files
on DNA in case crimes develop and you can check the DNA against
the file? Or what is your thinking on that? It is a great----
Mr. Timoney. Yes, but I am hesitant against central data
banks unless somebody has been arrested and convicted of a
crime. I think you have to be real, real careful. Any time you
put any kind of central files, you just have to be extremely
careful. The thing I am arguing for as far as DNA, though, is
that where the Federal Government has the role, whether it is
in DNA or other technologies or standards, is coming up with
clear Federal standards and guidelines. Even for DNA it is not
compatible, for example, between Philadelphia and Pennsylvania
State police and Philadelphia and the FBI. They need certain
standards that go across the country. The same thing for crime
reporting.
What we are trying to do in Philadelphia is recognize the
artificial political boundaries that surround Philadelphia and
encourage our chiefs of police in the surrounding areas to
become a partner with us, using this mapping. And we are taking
now CompStat to the next level, a regional-type CompStat where
we do not recognize for planning purposes, strategic planning
purposes, artificial boundaries. That what we are all about
and, you know, we are receiving great enthusiastic response
from the local communities surrounding Philadelphia.
But the importance of DNA or anything else is setting up
standards, national standards, that all police departments can
abide by.
Mr. Horn. Now, to what degree do we have any sort of a
national standard now? Has the FBI ever generated some thinking
in this area? What is happening?
Mr. Timoney. Gordon Wasserman who is my chief of staff and
adviser also on technology sits on some of these committees.
Mr. Wasserman. This is a very technical and the edges are
not straight. There are, at the moment, several ways of doing
DNA profiles and that is why the Commissioner is right saying
some profiles don't compare with others. The Federal Government
is working on standardizing this, simplifying the way DNA is
taken and standardizing on a particular method for taking DNA
profiles.
After all, DNA developed from medical technology is now
being applied to the criminal justice system. But it is very
much something which has come from another sector and there is
no, yet, agreed--that is nationally agreed--way of taking a
profile. But it is the standards the Commissioner has been
talking about, not only of DNA, but even fingerprint systems,
as you probably know, don't talk to each other. There are
proprietary standards of fingerprint systems or ballistic
identification systems so that we in Philadelphia have one
method of identifying ballistics of shell casings, but we can't
compare ours electronically with those shell casings analyzed
across the river in Camden, NJ.
So there are many examples of how proprietary standards,
which suppliers develop in order to sell their products,
whether it be a ballistic identification system or an automatic
fingerprint system or some other systems, develop their own
proprietary systems which prevent local agencies from
exchanging this information electronically. And we all know
this from our own computer systems that computer systems can't
be linked together unless common standards have been developed.
So with this very specialized technology used for criminal
justice, we need to have agreed standards. We couldn't have
telephone systems which spoke to each other, I mean, you
couldn't speak to someone living in China unless the Chinese
telephone authorities and the American telephone authorities
had agreed on a common standard. And so that is the problem we
have of comparing fingerprints or ballistics or anything else.
And that is why we want to----
Mr. Horn. Well I am glad I asked that question, because you
have educated me on this. And, Mr. Chairman, either at the full
committee level or at my Subcommittee on Government Management,
Information, and Technology level where we have jurisdiction
over the information laws of the Federal Government and
electronic transmittal of data over that. You raise a very
interesting question. It isn't that something is wrong with the
DNA test and its value, if you can analyze it correctly. But
what is not agreed upon is right now will any of these
different samplings around the country fit in where you can
have reliance on what the data are telling you. So we will take
a look at it and you two look like good witnesses in this area,
down the line.
Let me ask about arms that----
Mr. Burton. Stephen, would you yield on that real quick.
Mr. Horn. Yes.
Mr. Burton. I want to make sure I understand what you just
said. There is an inconsistency in the systems that are used by
different locales in keeping these records. And, therefore, it
makes it difficult to compare them across State or county
lines, for that matter. Would you advocate that there be some
kind of a national norm set up, maybe by Congress, not to
interfere with the collection of this data, but to make sure
there is consistency in the way they keep these records so that
they could be compared?
For instance, fingerprints from L.A. to New York, DNA
samples from L.A. to New York, so that in a moment's notice
they could be compared for law enforcement purposes and you
wouldn't run into this problem with different systems?
Mr. Timoney. That is clearly it. But even now, for example,
in the ballistics area, where the FBI and the ATF has two
separate systems, one has Drug Fire, the other has Brass
Catcher. They are two completely different systems.
Mr. Burton. What I am saying is should we move toward
uniformity?
Mr. Timoney. Oh, absolutely. Clearly, yes.
Mr. Burton. Well, then that is something that we probably
ought to look at. That might even be much more cost-effective
in the long run if you had that kind of uniform requirement.
Mr. Wasserman. Chairman, can I just say--I mean, what makes
the Internet work so well is there are standards that have been
developed so that we can now look up, at a press of a button,
we can read the newspaper from Paris and London and that is
because certain standards have been agreed. What we would like
to see in the criminal justice field and not so much in the
DNA, that is a very specialist field and people are working
toward a common way of analyzing DNA, but the information which
is so much more important and the preparation of the criminal
information and the collection of the information.
Every single police department collects the same
information. It is there in their computer systems, but it is
there in a different way. And there are two ways: the data is
different. They collect in a slightly different way. And the
computer system is different. If we could agree on that and we
could produce these same maps for the whole of the Philadelphia
region through electronic interchange. And the Department of
Justice is thinking about it but----
Mr. Burton. Which would help the whole justice system.
Mr. Wasserman. Absolutely.
Mr. Burton. Go ahead, Mr. Horn.
Mr. Horn. If you will indulge me on two more questions.
Mr. Burton. Well, I will be glad to indulge you.
Mr. Horn. Mr. Chairman, I realize there is a real back up
here. [Laughter.]
But the arms in an urban area, what is your policy and
feelings that ought to be done in that area? The degree to
which arms, be they Saturday night specials, be they handguns
of one sort or the other, what would you, as commissioner of
police in Philadelphia, recommend in that area and what would
you as State attorney in Jacksonville recommend? I am
interested in your views on that.
Mr. Timoney. Well, there is a particular problem with
Pennsylvania now. As a result of certain States, notably
Maryland and Virginia, passing one-gun-a-month legislation,
Philadelphia now, all of a sudden, when you are looking at
illegal guns that are confiscated in New York, Philadelphia all
of a sudden, in the last 2 or 3 years, has become a source
State, largely as a result of the ability for strawman
purchases where a legitimate citizen can go in and purchase 30,
90, 100 weapons and then go file down the numbers and go sell
these guns out on the street in west Philly or up in New York
City.
I testified in Harrisburg on Monday to try and get a
reasonable piece of legislation that doesn't infringe upon the
rights to bear arms. There's nobody attacking the Constitution
that way. But to try to remove the profit from illegal sales of
handguns through strawman purchases. And that is what we are
looking at. Right now that is a front-burner issue for myself
and Mayor Rendell in Philadelphia. Other States have gone that
way, but Pennsylvania has not.
Mr. Horn. Mr. Shorstein.
Mr. Shorstein. You are addressing an unbelievably difficult
problem. I firmly believe that there are too many guns out
there and I believe that there is no justification for not
doing everything in the world to separate juveniles from
firearms. The types of crimes we see today are so different
than the crimes I prosecuted in the 1960's and the 1970's. They
mirror the sensationalism of the violent television shows. You
seldom ever find a revolver used in a--of course, that is an
exaggeration. But everything now is a semi-automatic weapon or
a firearm.
But, politically, it seems as if Washington and I know my
State bogs down on the issue of firearms. So I guess we can't
let it destroy good legislation and I am afraid it may have
last year with the Federal legislation on juvenile crime, both
in the House and in the Senate. The word we got, those of us
who were fighting for the Federal legislation, is it is going
to die on the issue of firearms and gun locks because the NRA
cannot live with gun locks.
My response to you would be----
Mr. Horn. Which is outrageous, I think.
Mr. Shorstein. Let us address it some other day and get on
with the--and let me give you one last example that I am very
proud of because I do believe there are too many guns. In my
jurisdiction, I got with Marion Hammer who at the time was the
Florida director of the NRA and I think, ultimately, the
national president. And I said we disagree somewhat on gun
control, but let us get together and implement the Ed the Eagle
gun safety law program which is an NRA program that teaches
children to get away from firearms. And it was a great joining
of hands between two people who had different views on firearms
generally, but who agree on the issue of juvenile crime and
violent juvenile crime.
So all I can tell you is firearms in the inner-city, to my
knowledge, an unbelievable problem.
Mr. Horn. On the inner-city and the gangs in the inner-
city, some cities have tried to bring a class action against
the gang as a whole to accept responsibility when one of those
gang members is killing some poor 4-year-old who just
accidentally happened to be out at 8 p.m., and they are going
to fire bullets into the house because that is where another
gang member or brother, perhaps, lives. Have you thought of or
pursued that line in any way, either in Philadelphia or
Jacksonville, where you just nail them and they have to start
paying the bills for the people there one of their members is
killing?
Mr. Shorstein. Well, you address a very interesting point,
which I understand was done in New York. I was on a national
panel----
Mr. Horn. In California there was some lawsuit.
Mr. Shorstein. And in California. It was a good, a rare
good, marriage between local and Federal law enforcement
because generally I believe you should leave the violent crime
war to those of us on the local level. But they did use the
Federal RICO statutes, I understand, in New York to target
gangs and prosecute the gang itself as a racketeer enterprise,
leaving the individual substantive prosecutions to the State
level. That was one of the rare presentations I have heard
where the Federal Government did help us, effectively, in
addressing violent and serious crime.
Mr. Horn. What else do you think you need to do along the
line that you are already doing it and haven't done, for one
reason or the other? Is there another stage here that both of
you feel we ought to be doing nationwide?
Mr. Shorstein. Well, I agree with what the Commissioner
said as far as standardization, not just in the area of DNA
because that addresses a lot of legal problems. Various States
have different legal bases for the admission of DNA or for any
scientific evidence, throughout the United States.
I guess you could tell by my original presentation I am
just fanatically sure that addressing crime at 0 to 18 is the
answer to overall crime reduction. And I can tell you,
Congressman, when I started this in 1991 or 1992, no one
listened to us. But now you are. And I think we are about to
turn the corner on what I think is the most overlooked
addressing of critical crime prevention in the United States.
If you just picture a chart that I use that shows crimes
committed by all criminals, 8-0 to death--it is really 11
through 40--from 11 to 18, the line goes straight up in the
degree of violence and the degree of activity of a criminal.
From 18 to death, it goes straight down and goes down
drastically to age 25, essentially separating the juvenile from
the adult criminal justice system. And regardless of everyone's
understanding and acknowledgement of that, you and we continue
to devote all of our resources--almost all of our resources--to
the adult system, ignoring the juvenile system. And I think
that's unforgivable.
Mr. Horn. Thank you very much. It is impressive what both
of you have done.
Mr. Burton. Thank you, Mr. Horn. Let me ask a couple.
During your conversations, you in particular talking about the
young people, you kept talking about how violent it is between,
as far as crime is concerned, with children under 18. And do
you have any statistical data or do you have any feelings about
how television relates to that and movies relate to the
explosion of violence among young people?
Mr. Shorstein. No, Mr. Chairman. I don't have statistical
data and I hate to use anecdotal examples, but I have never
heard an intelligent presentation that didn't acknowledge the
correlation between the violence on television, in the movies,
in the music, and crime. I just can't envision someone saying
that that is not impacting particularly on violent juvenile
crime.
Mr. Burton. Well, I just wish somebody would think up a way
that would not violate the first amendment so that we could
encourage, cajole, browbeat, whatever you wanted to call it,
the entertainment industry into being a little bit more
responsible. You know, I am not for censorship, but it just
seems like to me there has got to be some way. I remember in
New York City, they had this movie about a boy that came in and
wanted the money from a teller at a toll gate at a subway and
they sprayed a flammable liquid in and set him on fire.
Mr. Shorstein. Yes.
Mr. Burton. And I think within a week they actually did
that.
Mr. Shorstein. Yes.
Mr. Burton. And so there are examples of where they really
do emulate the violence they see on TV. So if you, as law
enforcement experts, come up with any ideas that you think
might stimulate the entertainment industry to head in a little
different direction, please let me know because I would like to
work with you on that.
You indicated--what is wrong? You indicated that you
compromised with the NRA down in your area on the----
Mr. Shorstein. Ed the Eagle gun safety program.
Mr. Burton. Yes. Do you think there are other areas where
there could be some agreement reached between you and the
people who believe very strongly in the right to own and bear
arms, so that we could protect young people, keep guns as much
as possible out of the hands of young people, while, at the
same time, protecting the second amendment rights of people?
Mr. Shorstein. I think we are doing it now, Congressman. It
has to be done because when I sit in my office and hear that
the juvenile justice legislation pending before Congress may
die on the NRA's opposition, that is just unacceptable. I
understand everyone's right to bear arms. I am not so sure that
I agree with the number of arms they are bearing. I guess if I
had my choice, I would tell you only those of us in law
enforcement should have guns and none of the rest of you
should. But I do understand that constitutionally that is not
the principle.
And I think we have to do what I did. It was somewhat
symbolic, but we could get together and agree on legislation
and efforts to take guns away from children. And I don't think
the NRA disagrees with that.
Mr. Burton. Well, I wish that maybe you and some others
like you who are working very hard in the youth area would talk
to--I know a lot of the people at the NRA. I would be very
happy to facilitate meetings with you and Wayne LaPierre,
Charlton Heston, or whoever it might be over there to try to
come up with some compromises that would satisfy both, or as
close as possible, both. So that we could solve some of your
problems while, at the same time, protect those rights.
I want to ask you a couple more questions, Mr. Timoney.
What kind of support has the Justice Department given to you
and other law enforcement officials like you around the
country? Are you getting much support out of the U.S. Justice
Department? Or do you kind of just do these things on your own?
Mr. Timoney. No, that wouldn't be fair. We would like to
get a lot more support as far as in the area of research and
development. Most police departments, even a rich police
department like the New York City police department, does not
have the money to engage in any kind of real research and
development to do pilot programs. And I think that is an
appropriate area for the Justice Department to get into.
And they did. They get into it a lot more, I would say, in
the academic area, but I think that more could be done in the
area with the practitioners on the ground. That is clearly one
area, but overall they have been very supportive of us.
Mr. Burton. Have they helped you at all with the CompStat
program?
Mr. Timoney. No, the CompStat program, believe it or not,
most people don't know how the CompStat program started. I do
since I was one along with Commissioner Bratton and Jack Maple.
The CompStat program started as pin maps and when we brought in
about 50 corporate citizens into police headquarters back in
1994, explained to them what we were trying to do, it was the
business community that went out and bought the--actually
adopted a district; 76 stand-alone PCs with printers with map
info for about $8,500, $9,000.
It was the business community that actually purchased the
original machinery, the individual PCs, that started the
original CompStat process.
Mr. Burton. Do you know how many cities across the country
have adopted that?
Mr. Timoney. I know hundreds of them have gone to New York
and have seen it, but I don't know how many are practicing it.
My sense is most of them. I was at the major city chief's
conference in Los Angeles 2 weeks ago and the sense was at
least, certainly in the 50 major cities, the vast majority of
them are doing some form of CompStat.
Mr. Burton. Well, I think I have exhausted the questions I
wanted to ask you. What I would like to end up by saying is if
you have some data that you could give to me on like the tape
that you had, Mr. Shorstein, which we could show to mayors in
other cities that may not be conversant with, you know, what is
happening in your area. And if you could give us the CompStat
program or information on that that we could give to mayors
that are not yet using it, maybe we could stimulate some
interest that might help other cities that have high crime
problems.
Mr. Timoney. Yes.
Mr. Burton. I know a lot of them are probably doing this on
their own, but I would like to be able to make copies of your
tapes and make copies of your charts and everything and your
statistical data and send it out to them so we can maybe
stimulate them getting started.
Let me end up by saying I really, really appreciate your
being here. It has been a long day. I know you waited a long
time to testify, but you guys have done a great service for
your communities and for the country and I think the
information you have given us today is going to help other
communities around the country, so you are not only doing a
service for yourselves and your communities, but you are going
to help other cities as well.
So to you and Mayor Giuliani, thank you very much. Nice
being with you today.
Mr. Timoney. Thank you, Mr. Burton.
Mr. Burton. We stand adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 2:59 p.m., the committee adjourned subject
to the call of the Chair.]