Testimony of

Dr. Lawrence W. Sherman

Director, Fels Center of Government

Albert M. Greenfield Professor of Human Relations

University of Pennsylvania

Before the

Subcommittee on Crime

Committee on the Judiciary

United States House of Representatives

October 28, 1999

Summary: The COPS Program may be responsible for our historic reduction in crime. But the program could still be run more effectively, putting more money in high crime hot spots. We need more research to better understand and maximize this substantial investment of our tax dollars. I urge the Subcommittee to set-aside 10 percent of the COPS funding for scientifically rigorous research, evaluation, and innovation run by the National Institute of Justice, the research and development arm of the U.S. Justice Department.

Good morning, Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee.

We are all aware of declining crime rates in America, most notably in several large cities. But the causes of this remain largely unknown and widely speculated  more police, changing demographics, a growing economy, the ebbing of the violent crack epidemic -- it could be some or all or none of these. While rigorous scientific evaluation is helping us understand what works to prevent crime and what doesnt, we are still too often in the dark. Federal policies and spending priorities need to be based upon evidence not anecdote, and a strong research and development effort to further refine that evidence.

The COPS Program may be responsible for our historic reduction in crime. But the program could still be run more effectively, putting more money in high crime hot spots. The legislation as currently written has little possibility of evaluating the effectiveness of these new officers because of lack of requirements on how they should be used. To the extent that the term community policing is used to guide the program, it is a vague, overused term meaning different things to different people. We need more research  research that is not done after the fact, but simultaneous, ongoing research partnerships  to better understand and maximize this substantial investment of our tax dollars. I urge the Subcommittee to set-aside 10 percent of the COPS funding for scientifically rigorous research, evaluation, and innovation run by the National Institute of Justice, the research and development arm of the U.S. Justice Department.

I was the senior author of a 1997 congressionally mandated report, Preventing Crime: What Works, What Doesnt, Whats Promising (www.preventingcrime.org). We found an ample body of scientific evidence that the more precisely patrol presence is concentrated at the hot spots and hot times of criminal activity, the less crime there will be in those places and times. Putting police at the right places and right times can make a difference. Crime in America is highly concentrated; so too should our federal efforts.

So how can the COPS program be better used to reduce crime? I will offer two broad answers this morning:

Put money in the right places and the right programs

Half of all homicides in the US occur in the 63 largest cities, which house only 16% of the population. Most of the homicides in those cities occur in a handful of concentrated poverty areas, which in turn may constitute some 15 to 20 percent of the populations of those cities. Our national rates of serious crime are heavily determined by what happens in our most violent census tracts. With very few exceptions, however, federal policy does not focus funding on those areas where the most violence occurs.

The mismatching of federal funds and the problem of violence is not the policy of any federal agency, but of the legislative formulas used to allocate the funding. Most of those formulas are based on population, and give zero weight to the per capita level of violence in a state or community. The formulas put violence prevention funding where the votes are, not where the violence is.

Even if the legislative formulas were to allocate prevention funds on the basis of FBI crime rates, there would still be a large mismatch. In the cities with the most violence, it is rare to see prevention funds concentrated in the neighborhoods with the most violence. The record suggests that only formulas identifying high-violence census tracts can reasonably assure that the funds are spent where they are needed the most. Congress should either require at least half of the federal funds be spent in census tracts with homicide rates at least 5 times the national average and/or restrict certain funds only to census tracts where a homicide occurred in the last year.

Research has shown that more police, if properly deployed, can reduce crime. But the existing body of evidence doesnt speak well for two other police efforts: the D.A.R.E. program and gun buy-backs.

When federal funding diverts police from patrol duties to teach classes on the Drug Abuse Resistance and Education (D.A.R.E.) program, they are being put in the wrong place at the wrong time. Several independent, scientifically rigorous studies have shown D.A.R.E. as commonly implemented to be ineffective in preventing future substance abuse.

D.A.R.E. is taught by police officers, who visit schools to teach primarily 5^th and 6^th graders over 17 lessons. This most common version of D.A.R.E. showed no impact on reducing drug use, according to several studies. A study by the prestigious Research Triangle Institute found the programs limited effect on adolescent drug use contrasts with the programs popularity and prevalence... D.A.R.E. could be taking the place of other more beneficial drug education programs. While Seattle, Houston, Omaha, and Burlington, Vermont have just said no to D.A.R.E, why does it continue to be offered in 80 percent of the nations school districts at a tune of $750 million each year? It is a program supported by strong advocates, not strong evidence.

President Clintons recent decision to spend $15 million on gun buybacks for public housing projects is a step in the right direction in putting the money where the crime is. However, it is the right place but the wrong program. Several scientific studies have shown that gun buybacks do not work. It is a sellout to doing what works to make news, not public safety.

A 1995 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a group of big city police chiefs, shows clearly that gun buybacks do not work. The report assembled the best evidence available on the impact of buyback programs. It included evaluations of major programs in St. Louis, Seattle, and other major cities. Not one of these evaluations showed any effect of the gun buybacks on the cities homicide rates.

Advocates of the buyback programs declare them a success simply because they removed guns from circulation. One police chief even claimed that for every gun bought back, a life is saved. But if that were true, we would have some 200 million gun deaths a year in this country, rather than the 32,000 we actually did have in 1997, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. Put another way, each gun in circulation, on average, causes a death once in every 6,000 years. With some 4 million new guns sold legally in the U.S., sold legally in the U.S., the odds are very good that the 300,000 gun bought back near public housing projects will be replaced very quickly.

If the guns bought back are older, less powerful weapons than the ones replacing them, the new program could actually increase the homicide rate. Kansas City (Mo.) police data over a 15 year period show that increases in the proportions of guns used in crime to large caliber barrels were directly linked to increases in the homicide rate. Anecdotal evidence that gun buyback cash has been used to buy such bigger guns should prompt great concern about whether to expose public housing residents to this potentially dangerous effect.

If crime prevention programs had to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration using the same standards imposed on new cancer treatments, neither D.A.R.E. nor gun buybacks would not be deemed safe or effective. A hot spots strategy of policing would be.

Research and Demonstration: Innovate and Evaluate

While those evaluations only scratch the surface of what we need to know, there is a tremendous hunger among policymakers to know what works. Only the federal government has the resources to provide the necessary knowledge.

Federal funding constitutes a drop in the bucket of all state and local crime prevention expenditures, less than 4 percent of criminal justice expenditures and under 1 percent of all crime prevention funds. Yet no locality can muster the resources or expertise to conduct major program evaluations. That is why the bipartisan Reagan administrations Attorney Generals Task Force on Violent Crime suggested that the most important federal role in fighting crime is testing programsnot funding themto learn what works. Building better scientific knowledge about the bottom line of state and local expenditures will have far more impact than thousands of small federal program grants, many of which amount to little more than local pin money.

In addition to refining the evidence of how and when to best deploy police resources, I would like to suggest two additional areas in which Congress could simultaneously use the COPS program launch bold innovation and evaluation: restorative justice and school safety.

Restoring Youth Justice

Far beneath the tip of the iceberg in Littleton and other schools lie the nonviolent 95% of the 3 million juvenile arrests each year. The vast majority of these arrests result in no action taken against the juvenile. Almost all of them leave the victim completely unheeded, and fail to confront the offender with the harm the victim suffered. This situation has long frustrated victims advocates, police, prosecutors, and even offenders parents.

This frustration is feeding a rapidly growing social movement in the US: restorative juvenile justice. Congress should fund pilot programs of this innovative idea. Inspired in part by recent innovations in New Zealand and Australia, this movement is diverting juvenile cases from court in order to hold conferences involving offenders and their families, victims and their families, and other concerned parties. The conferences are far more emotionally intense than court, and focus on the moral duty of offenders to repair the harm they have caused. The conferences result in a restitution agreement, the completion of which will lead to dropping charges and a clean criminal record.

Working with the Australian National University, I am conducting the Reintegrative Shaming Experiment (RISE) comparing the effects of standard court processing with the effects of a diversionary conference for four kinds of casesdrink driving (.08 blood alcohol content), juvenile property offending with personal victims, juvenile shoplifting, and youth violent crimes. The diversionary conferences consisted of a meeting between the offender and at least some of the offenders family or friends, the victim, and a police officer to facilitate the conference. What we have found:

School Safety: Partnerships between Education and Law Enforcement

Youth violence knows no boundaries, but governments at all levels can take steps to work more closely to prevent youth violence. Confidentiality laws and turf battles often keep law enforcement and education leaders from working together. In the spirit of innovation and evaluation, I would encourage Congress to create demonstration sites where computer networks --with strong safeguards against privacy violations  be created to allow local officials to work together more closely to share information and work together toward common goals. Federal incentives attached the $4 billion in annual federal funding for crime prevention programs would be a strong way to ensure cooperation and innovation in the area of data sharing.

I thank the Subcommittee for its attention would be glad to answer any questions.