Ramsey's 21-page crime plan is, 10 or so pages of filler aside, a steady and sober one. It completely skirts the most troubling parts of Mayor Nutter's campaign rhetoric. Sure, like a bunch of us have observed, it's all in the implementation. But if they can implement this basic return to high visibility, community-based policing, the city will be much better off.

I like when Chief Ramsey says that the changes he is making are sustainable, that it's not Safe Streets and Safer Streets and the Return of Safe Streets--short-term infusions of money that get eaten up in overtime and then are gone.

But I really hope that 'high visibility' 'community-based' policing is not code for bringing misguided 'broken windows'-style policing to Philadelphia.

That would add more victims--and deep costs--to the battle against crime and neighborhood decay.

The Inquirer this morning has an article that claims the crime plan is about just that, those broken windows: "Small arrests aim for major impact."

The new commissioner aims to drive violent crime down 20 percent this year by focusing on fundamentals - shifting more officers from special units to basic patrol. A key tactic of the plan is to focus on quality-of-life issues - such as public intoxication, loitering and gambling - that sometimes escalate into violent crimes or drive law-abiding residents to move elsewhere.

This is a startling leap: is it really 'gambling' that is driving people out of their deeply-scarred neighborhoods? Is there a causal link between cracking down on public intoxication and stopping shootings, rapes, and violent assaults?

The real question the article raises is, will our violent crime problem be fixed one $10 marijuana bust at a time?

As [Officer] Schoch patrolled the neighborhood, he looked for unusual behavior or groups on corners.

"Any time there's a large group of people, you have the potential for victims," he said. He was also on the lookout for pizza deliverers, who have been targets of recent robberies.

About an hour after he hit the road, driving east on Godfrey Avenue near Mascher Street while listening to the police radio and carrying on a conversation, Schoch jerked his head to the left. In seconds, he wheeled his car into a U-turn to intercept the drug transaction. The time was about 5:40.

"Come here," Schoch ordered the first man, who made a quick move away from the officer and tossed a wadded tissue under a parked car. Schoch forced him against his car. He told him to relax and extend his arms behind him for the handcuffs. The suspect, Ivory Jackson, 48, was still clutching a few dollars in his fist.

"I don't want to go through this again," said a bewildered Jackson, who wore a knit cap and an oversize coat.

After Schoch put the suspect into the back of the squad car, he explained what he had witnessed.

"Everything happens with your hands - a narcotics deal, a weapon. I couldn't even tell you what his face looks like. You watch the hands."

It's a small deal, a 1-gram bag of marijuana worth $10. A "dime bag" in the vernacular.

One of the two guys turns out to have a fraud warrant out on him, and they both get taken in and booked. The article is blase about whether or not this is productive or a waste of resources:

Some officers say the effort invested in making a case like this - Schoch and Leva spent two hours processing paperwork and evidence - removes officers from the street to hunt for worse offenders.

But Schoch said such arrests sent a strong message of intolerance for all crime. And it's impossible to say, until the arrest is made, when a minor stop might yield a bigger fish - somebody with a warrant for a violent crime, or somebody carrying an illegal weapon.

Sometimes these small arrests lead to information about bigger crimes, Schoch added.

"Some cops tell me I'm wasting my time with these arrests," he said. "I say I wouldn't want that stuff going on in my neighborhood."

Someone, explain to me what we get from an arrest like this?

The jury is somewhat out on the exact mechanics of the alleged deterrent effects of this "order-maintenance" or "broken windows" policing. I am happy to fight it out in the comments. But the costs of this policing are clear. A Temple study found that 88% percent of inmates in the city prison system are there for nonviolent, low-level offenses. We are under court order to get people out of the prisons who don't need to be there. The collateral costs of incarceration have been catalogued again and again: difficulty finding jobs, loss of resources in families and communities. Our new mayor and concilpeople like Wilson Goode have recognized the need to target reentry and probation to help get people out of the system, into jobs, and away from crime.

We don't need a crime plan that will throw a bunch more people into jail who don't really need to be there. Let's hope the article just shows irresponsible journalism, not policing.

So you have a suburban readership. Today you started an article series that takes that fact and uses it for good. Shows your readers some serious institutional inequity in their own counties, and for good measure, tells us and our new mayor that Philadelphia has some lessons here too.

I was pretty mean about your dumb columns, like the one about the woman who moved to the suburbs and was finally happy, and the insultingly thin coverage of violent crime and the neighborhoods and people it affects.

You're not all bad after all.

Love,
Jennifer

The article, "Suburban Cops, Tough Tactics", takes a long hard look at the penchant for area cops to take on zero-tolerance policies that they enforce mainly in heavily-black areas. Pottstown, Darby, and Coatesville all have or had arrest rates for minor, nuisance-type crimes that way outpace the averages for other cities across the nation.

The laws they use to make the arrests are mostly vague, almost certainly unconsitutional anti-loitering ordinances. And the police doing the arrests are overwhelmingly white.

The Inquirer convened local and national experts to review the laws and arrests. There are revealing and useful graphs here. There is a lot of rich information that I sincerely hope leads to political and legal pressure and policy change.

But the Inquirer also turns the heat on Philadelphia. This article is the first measured look by a local media outlet at the sort of easy criminology-speak rhetoric that got bandied about during the mayoral primary and is invoked in columns all the time. It takes aim at those who claim the "broken windows" theory is some self-evident truth.

What the article has given us a window into is the effect of zero-tolerance, broken-windows-theory influenced policing. Well, the effect: a ton of low-level drug and other nonviolent arrests, and bad or very inconclusive numbers on the more serious crimes that the theory says should be dropping. Broken windows fixes the broken windows, and arrests a bunch of people who really shouldn't be in the system in the process.

(It's not that there is no truth to the theory. Broken windows are signs of deeper decay. But that decay cannot be reversed just through ramped-up policing tactics. It evidences real social breakdown that needs rehab grants for the decayed houses with the broken windows, among a host of other interventions.)

Granted, the suburbs are a cautionary tale. Most generously, the polices examined here seem clumsily applied. More realistically, there is direct and submerged racism at work. Well designed policing programs in the city, including a policy not to prosecute low-level drug possession charges that are the product of stop and frisk, will help. But the Inquirer raises some serious questions about how we go about cracking down on violent crime under the new mayoral administration, and to its great credit, it asks those questions directly to the mayor and to us.