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Q & A with Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl
Video: Police chief talks with community
Friday, May 09, 2008
Editor's note: On April 6, the Dayton Daily News invited readers to ask new Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl questions about crime and policing. Many of you responded. Here are your questions and the answers from the chief.
Extras
Question: When juveniles commit crimes against the community they live in, I believe their punishment should be fixing up that community and doing deeds such as picking up trash, removing graffiti tags, cleaning alleys. What do you think?
Chief Biehl: I agree with your suggestion. There has been an emerging trend in criminal justice over the past two decades called "restorative justice" that views crime as harm and justice as reparation. This is a victim-centered approach to justice wherein direct reparation to the victim is emphasized, which may also include service to the community that also may experience harm when crime is committed. It is a way to make the victim and community whole and to hopefully restore the relationship between the community and the individual who caused harm. I believe this approach holds much promise for many minor offenses and even some more serious ones.
Q: I live in Five Oaks. The concern I have is the boarded up houses and the drugs that are prevalent. If you keep calling the law when you see drug dealers on the corner, they will eventually move to another corner. How can neighborhoods like this be helped?
CB: Drug activity can be and often is chronic in many communities and is frequently resilient to traditional law enforcement efforts. Abandoned buildings, particularly when they are not secure, often provide havens for drug use in areas where drug activity is present. Securing these buildings, and where appropriate and necessary, demolishing them can help curtail drug activity.
Property owners can be held accountable if they allow drug activity on their property. When they are uncooperative in addressing conditions that allow for such activity, they can lose their rights to own and manage the property. Engaging regulatory officials (building, heath, sanitation inspectors, etc.) to take enforcement action can often be very effective in having property owners, when they are uncooperative, to take appropriate action to address underlying conditions which contribute to drug activity.
Some cities have utilized city code enforcement in conjunction with social services, traffic restrictions, and other strategies to make dramatic reductions in drug activity in neighborhoods. High Point, N.C., utilized an innovative strategy based upon targeted deterrence (delivering a message of consequences directly to those engaged in drug selling) to eliminate open air drug markets.
There are a number of ways to address the problem you identified but the strategies must fit the problem. There is not any single answer. For more on crime reduction strategies, you may wish to go to www.popcenter.org for problem-solving guides that address specific crime problems.
Q: Police only seem to appear when there is a crime, then they leave and the neighborhood goes back into the control of the bad guys. Is there a solution?
CB: Police presence and strategic enforcement can be beneficial but intensive enforcement efforts usually are difficult to sustain. Targeted enforcement against chronic offenders, if they are incapacitated (incarcerated, under community control, etc.), can significantly reduce crime.
What is needed to sustain crime reductions is "guardianship" by the community of vulnerable persons and places as well as community members acting to enforce community norms (challenging unacceptable conduct when it occurs, assuming it does not entail undue risk).
An example of guardianship is that of parents standing at the bus stop with children. They are much less likely to be victimized if an adult is providing supervision. In fact, one way to make communities safer is to increase what is called "natural surveillance" — increasing the ability of (law abiding) persons to see what is occurring in the community. This is only effective if persons are willing to act on what they see, i.e. to challenge conduct that violates community norms and when the conduct is unlawful, to report it and cooperate with police in appropriately addressing it.
Q: Is the residency requirement a barrier to hiring good minority officers?
CB: You bring up an often hotly debated issue. First, let me address hiring and then comment on residency and the hiring process.
I believe the answer to hiring promising candidates is to have a highly focused recruiting campaign. A significant component of this strategy needs to be an intensive marketing campaign that answers why Dayton (as a place to live, work, recreate and raise families) and why the Dayton Police Department?
The answers need to highlight the progress and promise of the City of Dayton as a "community of choice" and employment with the police department as a great opportunity for "honor in service" in promoting future success and vitality of the city. (As an important point regarding both issues, the city has experienced significant reductions in serious crime overall in the past five years, which has not necessarily been the case for other cities.)
Another important component of a focused recruiting strategy is a clear message that the department welcomes diversity and values inclusion as inherent and as a practiced organizational value.
To add perspective, a recent poll conducted by Wright State University indicated that approximately 80 percent of Dayton's citizens believed it is "important" that the safety forces reflect the diversity of the city. The department has far to go to achieve this aspiration, given that only about 10 percent of the sworn members are of minority race/ethnicity.
Residency, as a requirement of employment, can present a barrier to recruitment and hiring. It is understandable philosophically (people have a tendency to be invested and to care about the communities in which they live) and pragmatically (employees contributing to the economic base of the city by spending their income locally and counting toward the census for government funding allocations) for municipalities to want their employees to be residents of the community that employs them.
An important consideration is whether it is the most effective to require residency as a condition of employment verses offering incentives for establishing residency.
What becomes a challenge is the time frame in which residency is fulfilled if it is a requirement. Depending on the amount of time allotted to comply with this requirement, it can be reasonable or unnecessarily burdensome and potentially impossible to achieve, thus limiting potential qualified candidates (minority or otherwise).
On the other hand, allowing too much time for residency to occur can result in qualified individuals being hired and trained by a municipality, only to see them walk out the door to work for someone else when the deadline for residency nears.
There is no easy answer to the issue of the benefit or detriment of residency without considering how it is incorporated into the employment process.
Even given an optimal resolution of the issue of voluntary or required residency and the timing of the residency if required, it is important that the transition process is eased by having new employees welcomed into the communities where they ultimately decide to reside by providing information on housing, schooling, shopping, recreational services, community services, etc., to assist them in this process and embrace them as valued members of the community.
Q: I believe that in Montgomery County, people who break the law are not being sent to prison. They know they can get a slap on the wrist. How does the area get tougher sentencing?
CB: You raise an often cited criticism of the criminal justice system — the lack of meaningful consequences. This criticism follows to a degree from the belief that harsh (long jail sentences), or at least predictable consequences, will serve as a deterrent and that offenders while incarcerated will be prevented from committing additional crimes — a logical conclusion but not always true.
There is a way to employ specific or targeted deterrence strategies that include consequences that are certain, swift, and severe.
Such strategies have been used in Boston in the 1990s to significantly reduce homicides and more recently in High Point, N.C., to eliminate open air drug markets.
Interestingly, these strategies, because of their high effectiveness, result in less arrests and incarcerations over time since they deter offenders. If there is no crime, there is no need to arrest and incarcerate.
Given the challenges that exist with limitations in jail capacity, there will continue to be a need for highly focused enforcement strategies that reduce crime without unnecessarily adding to an already overburdened jail and prison system. There is currently discussion with local law enforcement leaders on how these methods may be used to address crime in our area.
Q: Do you think Dayton police should expand the canine unit?
CB: I have not had an opportunity to adequately research this issue. I am evaluating staffing and deployment of officers and will be better able to answer when I have more information.
Q: I called DPD about one year ago over being harassed and threatened by dope dealing gang bangers. My dog was poisoned, my garage was hit with graffiti, used condoms were thrown in my yard and my fish pond was contaminated. I asked for phone contact, not to have an officer visit because the retaliation was severe. I was told they had to come. Chief, you need to protect your citizens that try to help! What should I do?
CB: I sincerely regret the problems you have experienced. Please call Detective Carol Johnson from my office at 333-1084 to see how we may be of assistance.
Q: What's your take on community policing?
CB: The answer depends on what is meant by "community policing." Many efforts identified as community policing — police mini-stations in neighborhoods, foot patrols, police attendance at neighborhood meetings — may help citizens feel safer or help promote better community/police relations but do not necessarily equate to safer neighborhoods.
If community policing means more effective partnerships between communities and police, then I am highly supportive of this approach.
The best approach, in my experience, is citizens collaborating and working as partners with police to implement problem-solving efforts (commonly called Problem Oriented Policing, or POP) to address specific crime or disorder problems that are of importance to communities.
The focus of these efforts needs to be the prevention of crime and disorder. There are many examples of such problem-solving efforts around the country that indicate that focused and strategic problem-solving efforts can significantly reduce crime.
Should prevention efforts fail, then effective community/police partnerships will be the most effective way to solve the crimes and hold those responsible accountable. Despite all the advances in technology and policing strategies, the most important factor in whether police solve a crime is whether citizens can tell them who committed the crime.
Thus either focus, prevention of crimes or apprehension of offenders when crimes occur is highly dependent on citizen engagement, participation and partnership in co-creating safe communities.
Q: As part of any community policing plan, we have to get officers out of their squad cars, onto the streets. They need to make themselves more a part of our communities. How can this happen?
CB: I am a strong supporter of police visibility in neighborhoods. The greater issue is "visibility in doing what?"
Police studies in randomized or (unfocused) preventative patrol have indicated that such efforts are ineffective in reducing crime. There is evidence to indicate that "hot spot" policing – concentrating proactive patrols in high-crime, high-disorder areas – reduces crime and disorder.
Police patrols in neighborhoods are a form of "guardianship" of vulnerable persons and places. Guardianship can also be provided by citizens.
Communities that police themselves – citizens providing guardianship and acting to protect vulnerable persons and places – are often low crime and disorder communities.
The best of both worlds is when citizens and police work together and implement responses to reduce crime and disorder based upon a thorough understanding of factors contributing to these problems.
