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ON THE WATERFRONT

Originally appeared in Policy Review, Summer, 1994
by BRET SCHUNDLER

President Bill Clinton has made the passage of a federal crime bill a top priority of his agenda this year. Congress is accommodating him with sweeping new legislation that will federalize scores of crimes and use federal funds to put more police officers on America's streets for a five-year period. The bill is complicated and will cost Americans billions more in taxes, but will do virtually nothing to reduce crime.

Why? Because our problem in America is not that we spend too little money on policing, but rather that in return for our money we get too little policing. The solution to this problem is to give local government more power over police department management. Bill Clinton's legislation does not do this. In fact, if we don't watch out, his increased federal "involvement" in local policing will become increased federal "interference," which together with state government interference is the root of our problem.

TEACHING MORAL ORDER
The keys to an effective anti-crime policy are not difficult to identify: Teach moral order and enforce it, but as state and federal interference in education and police department management have become greater, teaching moral order and effectively enforcing the law have become more difficult. Sharing state and federal revenues with local governments is appropriate and necessary. But what we in local government really need -- rather than more federal money- is more autonomy. What we really need is for state and federal politicians to get out of our way so that we can do our jobs.

Today many talented teachers leave higher paying public schools for positions in lower-paying private schools simply because they are tired of not being able to enforce order in their public-school classrooms. They will readily tell you that federal and state regulatory interference in the public schools destroys teacher autonomy and diminishes student learning. In Jersey City, we spend $9,000 per child per year in our public system, yet more than half of our public school 9th graders drop out before graduating from high school. Even measuring the less than half of students who do remain in school, fewer than half of these students pass our state-mandated high school proficiency tests. But in New Jersey's private schools, there is much less state and federal regulatory interference. Teachers are still allowed to maintain direct control of their classrooms, and student graduation rates and achievement levels are significantly higher. At the Chad school in Newark, spending per child one-fourth to one-third of that in New Jersey's public schools. And yet, even though the vast majority of Chad students come from single-parent, low-income families, 98 percent go onto college. The teachers, free to control their classrooms, maintain a disciplined learning environment and assign over two hours of homework a night. Clearly this work-load teaches the students not only basic skills, but also diligence and discipline.

If we had less state and federal interference in our public schools, and we funded education through school vouchers, competition would force all of our public schools to become more like the Chad school. With educational power in the hands of parents and teachers instead of politicians, accountability for results would replace accountability by regulation, and our public schools would once again be able to teach moral order effectively. A decrease in crime would be only one of the many positive results.

BROKEN WINDOWS
Once more order is properly taught, enforcing it is not conceptually difficult. If we put a well-trained cop -- either on foot or scooter patrol -- on every other street corner in our city, we would be able to reduce crime dramatically. This approach is just what the Jersey City Police Department did a generation ago. Cops walked a small and very manageable beat, and as a result there was less crime.

The fact is that intensive police presence on the streets deters crime. If an officer walked or scootered past your house every 10 minutes, car and house thieves committing crimes of opportunity- as distinct from crimes of passion or psychosis -- would not view your block as a very good place to do business. The incidence of quality of life offenses, such as vandalism, graffiti, and the playing of loud music (three terrible banes of contemporary urban existence) would plummet. Perhaps most importantly, this intensive law enforcement would reinforce the moral teaching that should be taking place at home and in our schools. A child born today into a world of litter, graffiti, open-air drug dealing, violence, and general chaos 0- where society makes little effort to curb such abuses- does not know that these things are wrong. Even if a child hears that these things are wrong, if that child does not see such things being punished, then as far as that child's experience of life is concerned, such things will be noted as normal and acceptable.

George Kelling and James Q. Wilson have described this mindset as the "broken windows syndrome." Surely all of us, as children, saw an abandoned, deteriorated house with all but one of its windows broken and were tempted to pick up a stone and break that last window. And yet none of us, when we passed a well-maintained home with all of its windows intact, even gave a thought to breaking its windows. Today we are raising children in the inner city amidst the chaos and "broken windows" of unenforced laws. Ours is not a lawless society but a society of increasingly unenforced laws. The results is that our children see chaos, they internalize chaos and, not surprisingly, they learn to participate in chaos. But a lot more police on the street and instructing them to rigorously enforce our laws and to reestablish order will be absolutely necessary to bring up the next generation of children to be law-abiding.

PATRONAGE PAYBACKS
Of course, putting more police on the street is much harder in practice than in theory. And it hard precisely because of federal and state political interference in local police management. I know from personal experience.

When I ran for Mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey, in 1992, I promised the voters that my first priority would be to make our streets safe. Despite a very high crime rate, fewer than half of the city's police officers were assigned to street patrol; over 60 percent were assigned to specialist units or were in the precinct station houses shuffling paper. Two officers were actually delivering inter-office mail. This situation was the product of Jersey City's patronage-politics past, where comfortable jobs in all city departments were given as a reward for political service and loyalty.

This corrupt policy has had tremendously negative results. First, the lack of an effective deterrent to crime has encouraged crime. Second, it has weakened the social reinforcement necessary for the moral education of our children. Finally, as far as the police department is concerned, the patronage system has made assignment to street patrol intolerable.

Imagine the circumstances our police offices must confront out on the street. Because there is little deterrence, and because the moral education of our children is ineffective, there is a lot of crime. With too few cops on the street, police response time has grown longer and a response backlog has developed. Those unfortunate officers who are assigned to street patrol, therefore must spend eight solid hours flying from one crime scene to the next, almost always arriving long after the fact. By the time the police arrive, the victimized citizens are as angry at the police as they are at the criminals. This situation has made patrolling the streets of Jersey City absolute hell; the first interest of many police officers is to do whatever they can to get off the street and into a desk job as quickly as possible.

CIVILIAN ASSIGNMENTS
I vowed to end this destructive patronage in the police department and to civilianize all jobs in the precinct houses that could reasonably be performed by a civilian. I also promised to put more than three-fourths of our police officers out on street patrol, with half of that number specifically committed to community-based policing. My determination to accomplish these goals helped me win election as Jersey City's first Republican mayor since World War I. Upon taking office, I immediately moved to carry out my plan. My first goal was to supplement the 300 officers on rapid response -- policing in patrol cars -- with another 300 officers performing community-based policing. The city would be divided up into 133 patrol districts, varying in size according to the density of their population and the incidence of crime. Individual police officers would be assigned to patrol specific districts for a period of at least one year without rotation so that a relationship could develop between the police officer and the community.

Once these re-assignments were completed, the next goal would be to properly train the community officers to work cooperatively with district residents whom we would form into neighborhood police committees. As a final step, we would institute a professional-standards unit staffed with superior offices and police department civilian managers to meet with the neighborhood police committees on a regular basis, in order to ensure that the community officers were performing satisfactorily.

UP AGAINST THE UNION
In those areas of the city where we have been able to carry out this plan , crime is falling and the citizens are happy. But putting this plan in action has been a real challenge. Our efforts to re-assign police officers from desk jobs to street duty ran us smack into the police union. The moment we re-assigned those two police mailmen to street patrol, they initiated a suit against the city charging us with an unfair labor practice. You might ask why it is unfair to ask police officers to do patrol work. The answer, according to the police union, is that a clause in the police contract states, "Police work cannot be diminished except through contract negotiation." What makes delivering inter-office mail police work? The fact that a police officer is doing it, says the union.

According to this reasoning, to have civilians perform duties that prior patronage-oriented administrations have allowed police officers to do diminishes the total number of jobs that police officers perform, and therefore diminishes police work. Reducing the number of police functions must be negotiated in the union contract; it cannot be ordered by executive fiat.

Naturally, I have refused to accept this definition of police work, and fortunately, the city has been successful in the first stage of the officers' legal challenge, winning its case before a state mediation board. These two officers are now appealing their case to the courts and the case is in litigation. We may ultimately win the suit, and if we do, our community-policing efforts will be significantly bolstered. But it is also possible that we will lose this case, and that is where interference by distant government becomes so evident and totally destructive.

We now have a score of police suits filed against the city on the same grounds as those cited above. None of these suits would have the slightest chance of success were it not for the offending clause in the union contract which suggest that the supposed diminishing of police work must be negotiated. If I could exorcise this clause from the contract, I could fully implement my community-policing plan.

But that's the rub. Clauses cannot simply be erased from contracts, they must be negotiated away. In New Jersey, we have binding arbitration laws written by the state legislature that govern local government contract negotiations. When we in the city administration want to change a contract clause that impedes effective police department management, the union has the right to just say no, and we are then automatically forced into arbitration.

The arbitrators are not randomly assigned to the case, they must be accepted by the union. Arbitrators are not paid a fixed wage by the state, but earn their pay on a per-diem basis when they are working. The local law firms representing different city administrations before these arbitrators are legion, but the law firms representing the many state police unions are few. Accordingly, the arbitrators know that if they make an award that hurts management they will still be able to find work. But if they give an award that hurts the union, the few law firms that represent New Jersey's police unions can blacklist these arbitrators; if blacklisted, they will never arbitrate in New Jersey again.

DOUBLE THE RAISES
These ludicrous arbitration rules do more than impede effective personnel deployment; they also inflate police department wages, which makes fielding a large enough police force to patrol our streets prohibitively expensive. In Jersey City, the average police officer earns approximately $55,000 in base pay, $15,000 in overtime, a $5,000 longevity bonus, and has a benefits package worth another $15,000. In a low-income city where per-capita income is only $10, 000, our average police officer earns a package with a total value of nearly $90,000. Surely if we had the legal means to reduce police department salaries we would still be able to attract many qualified candidates to the force. A wage reduction would allow us to put many more police officers on the street without increasing taxes.

But we don't have the legal right to reduce salaries. In fact, far from declining, or even holding relatively steady, the average police-contract award coming out or recent arbitrations in New Jersey has increased police salaries at twice the rate of inflation.

Inflation is the average rate of the growth in prices in a given economy. If one sector is consistently getting twice the average rate of price growth, then other sectors must be getting less than the average rate. That means an ever-bigger portion of our total economic pie is going to pay just the police salaries in Jersey City. In fact, even adjusting for productivity gains, one can mathematically demonstrate that if the Jersey City Police Department continues getting salary increases at twice the rate of inflation, and this trend continues indefinitely, there will eventually come a day when it takes all the money in the city just to pay the salaries of the police department.

IN THEIR FACES
It may sound silly to talk about absurd trend extensions, but from where I sit what is really silly is the fact that we mayors cannot more easily re-assign police officers to street patrol, and cannot more easily afford to hire sufficient numbers of police officers to make our streets safe. America is supposed to be a country where government exists to serve the people, not to serve organized government special interests. But in spite of the fact that the New Jersey League of Municipalities has made binding arbitration reform its top legislative priority for the last five years, no reform bill has ever made it to the floor of both houses for a vote.

As I said previously, our crime problem is not the result of our spending too little on policing, but rather of our getting too little policing for our money -- and the root cause of this problem is non-local government interference in police department management. In a non-regulated labor negotiation environment that is free of arbitration laws and federal and state interference,

THE SOLUTION TO CRIME WILL COME FROM REFORM OF FEDERAL AND STATE LABOR LAWS.

I would be free as mayor to do the right thing. If I paid police officers too little, I would not be able to find quality personnel to do the job well, and the people of Jersey City would blame me for it.

On the other hand, if I paid police officers too much and demanded too little, we would not be able to put enough police officers on the street to effectively enforce the law -- as is the case today -- and the people would blame me for that too. In either case, because I am the one the people are holding accountable for policing, I would have an incentive to manage the department intelligently, or I would get thrown out of office.

Now let's consider the position of our state legislators. They are removed from the people. If someone gets mugged, I am the one who gets the angry phone call at night, not our state representative. On the other hand, the state legislators have the police union's lobbyists in their faces continually, and the union is dead set against changing the binding arbitration laws in New Jersey. The union is not afraid of telling our legislators that if they disappoint the union, the union will make their lives miserable. Not surprisingly, the state legislators, who are human and self-interested like everyone else, grant the union demands.

A LITTLE REVOLUTION
It doesn't matter if we replace one politician with another; whenever politicians are given power in matters where they are not directly held accountable by the people, and where their interests are not necessarily commensurate with the people's, it will be the politicians interests that are served and not the people's. This will always be the case, which is why the only solution to our current crime problem is, as Thomas Jefferson might recommend, a little revolution.

Reform is when you change what you are doing. Revolution is when you change who has the power to do things. We need to have a revolution and get the federal and state governments off our backs at the local level so that we mayors, who are held directly accountable by the people, can have the power to manage our police departments in a way that makes sense. Hence it is less regulation and more autonomy that we mayors need right now, far more than additional money, to win the war against crime.

EMPOWER THE MAYORS
Bill Clinton's crime bill, in the finest Democratic party tradition, does little more than throw additional money at the crime problem while shifting the cost of policing from the local to the national taxpayer. His proposal completely misses the target. If nothing is done to control soaring salaries or permit more intelligent personnel deployment, then more federal aid will do nothing.

Many political leaders in the Republican party are calling for an increase in the building of new jail spaces, and for truth in sentencing laws which would lengthen the minimum time spent in jail by those convicted of serious crimes. These Republican proposals would indeed reduce crime -- especially violent crime -- since the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by a relatively small number of repeat violent offenders. Still, we could achieve these same ends without the expense of building more jail cells simply by deterring most petty crimes more effectively. And we could easily do this through empowering local governments to manage their police departments more effectively. If we can put enough police back on the streets, we will be able to re-establish general order and deter most crimes of opportunity before they happen. That will leave plenty of spaces available in our jails for the career and psychopathic criminals who we really need to keep locked up.

Most politicians will be reluctant to speak the truth that the solution to crime will come from reform of federal and state labor laws. To do so will antagonize a very organized and powerful governmental interest group -- the police union. Indeed, it will always be politically easier to talk about almost any other strategy. But every now and then, when times become bad enough, having the courage to speak about truly revolutionary ideas does equate with good politics, and can lead the way to truly revolutionary, much needed results. Now is just such a time.

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