At last week’s Springfield Finance Control Board meeting, Police Commissioner Edward Flynn appeared in order to present 2006 crime data. Resident Sheila McElwaine provided a transcript of the proceedings.
Police Commissioner Edward Flynn: Good morning. I apologize for my tardiness. You have before you some information. A lot of this news has been shared with the community before, but not directly with the control board, so I’d like to walk you through it, provide some context to it, and also give you some information about where we are right now with this year’s numbers.
We’ll start with the first slide, which is the comparison of 2005 and 2006. With a crime like murder, although the base number is too high, it’s nonetheless a small base number in terms of overall numbers. A decrease in three homicides looks like a big percentage decrease, but it’s not something we’re going to be bragging about.
What’s interesting to us is how last year, much of the dynamic of our homicide was of a particular type, very concentrated. I believe two-thirds of them were very much involving people with criminal backgrounds who were having it out with firearms. It’s an issue we’re trying to develop an array of strategies to deal [with], working with community groups, as well as trying to focus our resources at the time and places where violence is most likely.
I’ll draw your attention to two numbers that are important to us, because they frequently take place on the street, to the extent that they involve strangers, demand our attention. That’s robbery and aggravated assaults. As you can see, robbery was down by 12 percent; aggravated assaults down by 19 percent. It’s important to note, generally speaking, for this community, that the aggravated assault number really drives our total crime rate in a way that makes this city look more dangerous than it is.
As we continue to analyze our data so we can explain Springfield to itself, it looks like generally 40 percent of our aggravated assaults are domestic-violence related. Those are not crimes in which police responses generally can prevent the event. We can’t help people choose well when it comes to who their partners are, and that does create a challenge for us.
We’re also beginning to try to get a better handle on the number of aggravated assaults that involve people, already known to each other, who are having a dispute. And they don’t fall into domestic violence, because it’s not a domestic relationship, but we’re beginning to get a sense that a large number of our domestic violence incidents are driven by that dynamic as well. This is, again, a continuing attempt to get the community to understand their relative vulnerability to certain types of fear-producing crimes.
Aggravated assault is a fear-producing crime. One-third to 40 percent of our assaults—probably closer to the lower number—are stranger assaults. We can’t explain the event that caused it, but closer to two-thirds of them involve people in some kind of prior, ongoing relationship. That doesn’t let anybody off the hook; it doesn’t make the violence any less concerning; but it does inform people’s vulnerabilities in terms of, "Who am I hanging out with?" and, "Who am I living with?" Those seem to be two of the most important decisions anybody can make to reduce their likelihood of violence.
The next slide demonstrates graphically the differences between 2005 and 2006. In the summer of 2006, we did a major intervention using a lot of resources to try to drive down the crime rate during the most violent season, and we had some significant success. When the fall came, we attempted to institutionalize some of the lessons we’d learned over the summer with a plan that broke the city up into geographic divisions, and put each division under the command of a deputy chief. That’s a very high level of command responsibility, but we really want to organize the city around its neighborhoods. What’s also driven that is a commitment to crime analysis, which we continue to refine. There’s still work to do, but a small unit is generating an enormous amount of productivity for us in helping us analyze crime trends, patterns, locations; we’ll use that to inform our overtime deployments as well as our deployments of special units like the narcotics squad, the street crime unit and the traffic division.
Control board members Thomas Gloster, Alan LeBovidge, and Mayor Charles Ryan
Chairman Alan LeBovidge: Rapes are up four percent. That’s the biggest increase. Is there an analogous situation there with what you said about aggravated assaults?
EF: I would say well over 90 percent of our rapes involve people known to each other, or other ambiguous circumstances. Unwanted sexual advances are unwanted sexual advances, but the vast majority of those events involve people known to each other. Some of our street prostitution community [experience] services taken against their will in some kind of ambiguous context, but we have very few what I would call “stranger rapes,” where out of nowhere, a mysterious stranger attacks someone totally unknown to them. The reporting rates have much to do with confidence in us and the attitude of the victim. The events occur, but they’re not the kinds of events in which average people going about their business—if we had a serial rapist, believe, me, we’d be making a really big deal out of it. We haven’t had anything like that.
City Council President Kateri Walsh: Commissioner, may I also ask a question about robberies. Were bank robberies part of that? I know there’s been an increase in that.
EF: Bank robberies are lumped into it. The vast majority of bank robberies are what we call “note jobs,” in which somebody stumbles off the street, passes a note to a teller, and the teller gives them money, because it’s corporate bank policy not to refuse any withdrawals authorized or unauthorized. Obviously, last week there was one involved a gun that we caught on camera. That’s concerning, and we’re working on that. There was another one in an adjoining community recently. It’s got our attention, and we’re devoting resources to it, but robberies are rolled into the overall robbery number.
We broke out of both the robberies and the assaults the numbers committed with firearms, because those have the greatest potential to turn into a homicide. They’re the most dangerous; they’re the ones we worry most about. We worked very hard to identify chronic offenders as well as to identify hot spot locations. In that context, we saw a 26 percent decrease in the amount of times guns were used in robberies. We think it’s important; we’re trying to put an assertive presence out there that deters people a little bit from carrying the firearm. We’ve also been working with a very collaborative district attorney who makes sure that bad guys with firearms do their year. With that combination, I think you see the 26 percent decrease in gun robberies and 11 percent decrease in gun assaults. Those are important numbers embedded in the larger number.
One of the things we decided to do in the last few months—one of the goals we have is to remove the anonymity of our street criminals. They thrive on anonymity. We need to remove it from them as much as possible, and so we try to publicize the “who does what” component of our business. We have returning offenders coming back to Springfield. In the last four months, we’ve had half a dozen returning offenders who’ve done one year of mandatory prison time for carrying a firearm.
I’ve worked out with Sheriff [Michael] Ashe a program. Before they’re returned home by the Sheriff’s office, they’re taken to [the Springfield Police Department at] 130 Pearl Street, and they’re presented to the four o’clock roll call. I usually have between 35 and 40 officers attending that roll call. The person is introduced. His offence is explained to them. Where he’s going to live is told to them. He’s advised that these 40 officers will only be too happy to help him in his successful transition to society. Those 40 officers now have a three-dimensional view of who this person is, and what they’ve been arrested for, and there’s just no substitution for knowing what somebody looks like and what they’ve done. So it’s an officer safety issue. It’s also an issue in terms of helping us police the community better. It helps a returning offender make better choices, because he knows that the cops know who he is, and are looking at him every time he walks down the street. If it helps, great.
AL: Is that a program widely [used] in Massachusetts or unique to Springfield?
EF: As far as I know, we’re the only ones that do it, but I haven’t tried to find out if anybody else does. It’s just one more thing to try to give our officers better information.
The next slide is a seven-year trend line for violent crime in Springfield, adding up murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. In 2006, we had the lowest number in the last seven years. There’s been a general and gradual trend down, but I think you’ll agree that this past year was a fairly significant drop in the overall trend.
I’m going to try now to bring you up to speed with current events. I’ve had a very bad luck with reporting encouraging news. It seems the fates are angered whenever Springfield takes note of some progress is being made, so I’m putting 100 police officers on the street this weekend to make sure that no bad things happen. At any rate, we are continuing to work very closely with our officers to try to help guide their deployments and give them information that makes them more effective.
This is a month-by-month gun robbery comparison of 2005, 2006, and 2007. The bottom number is how we’re doing for January, February and the first three weeks of March. We’re moving in a good direction. I’m holding my breath this weekend, but we wanted to share that information with you.
AL: Is there a difference in winter versus summer?
EF: Yes, but it can break both ways. In summertime, more people are on the street. It’s lighter longer; there’s more likelihood that an aggravated assault will last longer in the night and be violent. Wintertime is conducive to robbers, because it’s darker sooner; people wear bulky clothes, [it’s] easier to conceal a sidearm. So when it comes to the gun crimes, it’s a little bit of a wash, but we do have historic spikes of certain types of crimes during hot weather.
Moving to the next one which is the month-by-month gun assault string, a three year comparison period, and you’ll see again that gun assaults in Springfield for the first three months of this year are down significantly compared to last year and the year before. Sometimes you have to take a moment and really stop and acknowledge the work of your people. You’ve got a very experienced, mature police department, and the last thing in the world I needed to do was tell them how to be effective city cops. I think our goals have been to provide them appropriate resources to help make them more effective, give them information and intelligence that helps them make quicker decisions in terms of deploying, and also to do our best to make sure that they get the support that they need and the strategic approach to our challenges that they need to take advantage of their knowledge and experience.
I’ve been very fortunate this last year in dealing with a group of people who could have responded entirely differently to “the outsider” coming from Boston, although I hesitate to add that I had to move from Virginia to be from Boston. I’ll never understand that, but…Believe me, when I was in Boston, nobody thought I was from Boston. At any rate, the fact is that there are a lot of ways a police department can respond to somebody coming from outside with some different ideas about how to deal with their core mission.
I felt the strong sense of kinship with this police department based on the fact that I grew up in a department not dissimilar from it. I know what it’s like to grow up in a department full of good cops and bad politics. I know what it’s like to grow up in a police department that can do good work, but the cars are falling apart, the station houses are condemned, and nobody seems to care about what you do. And it’s tough to keep spirits up in an environment like that. And, although like every police department, we’ve got our conduct issues we need to deal with honestly and genuinely and without apology, we also have an extraordinary talent level, capability level and a consistent desire to do good work.
Given the fact that my junior officers have 12 years on—12 years gets you midnights on this job—and yet night after night, you read the nightlines: they’re shaking the bushes, they’re shaking the underbrush, they’re stopping people, they’re interrupting crimes in progress, they’re making high quality arrests as they always have. But what I think is always happening is we’re engaging the agency in a rational strategy and giving them the support they need, with this board’s help financially, to give them the resources the need to do the effective department that they deserve to be.
I thank you for the resources you gave us in fiscal year ’07 to help make some—we found out coming here 85 percent of the cruisers have more than 100,000 miles on them. Trust me, 100,000 miles on a cruiser isn’t 100,000 miles on a Saab. It is depressing to drive around with holes in your floorboards and exhaust coming up through the fumes and a milk crate holding up the front seat into a dirty station house. Thanks to your help, we’re doing our best to keep the station house decent looking, we’ve replaced the entire fleet, we continue to upgrade our technology. I think some real improvements can take place, but I do need to bring to your attention the performance of this agency, and the fact that they were willing to humor me and cooperate with me and help us turn some ideas into, I think, effective strategies.
The last slide I’m going to show you is the year-to-date for our crime rate. I’m going to draw your attention to the bottom number before we drop our teeth over the top number. Year-to-date, crime’s down over 10 percent overall, and that includes a 19 percent decrease in robbery as well as a 20 percent decrease in car theft which has been a significant problem for us as well as a decrease in felony assaults. Now this is going to fluctuate over the next year. I remember fondly last October when I had a 33 percent decrease in homicide working, and we had four homicides in two weeks. So this is going to fluctuate, but what we do is change our deployments in response to fluctuations in the crime rate, and we will continue to do so.
I am going to walk you through our seven homicides this year compared to last year so that you’ve got some sense of the dynamic this year. This year six of the seven homicides involved either people in a domestic relationship, or who were known to each other.
We really had one homicide that remained unsolved. We don’t know what the relationship was. The first homicide was the Kennedy Fried Chicken on New Year’s Day in the middle of the night in which two people shot each other. One of them’s dead, the other one’s under arrest, and that would fit very much last year’s trend, which is involving people with some significant criminal records in street beefs. But so far—I’m going to regret saying this, because it’ll change—so far this year, that’s the only event that fits that profile.
On January 7, we had the tragedy in which the woman on Warner Avenue was doused by gasoline by the ex-boyfriend of her daughter, and she subsequently died. He has been arrested for that and charged with it.
On January 9, we found a woman in her closet who’d been dead for some time. This is an environment in which it appears to be a drug-related crime. We have as yet not developed a suspect, but that’s an open case, and so we really can’t say what the relationship was.
On February 2, we had a homicide in which two people who knew each other got in a fight and one of them was beaten up and subsequently died. The other fellow’s been arrested for that.
On March 5, we had that horrific incident on Cottage Street by Hardey Industries in which the man burned to death himself and his two children in a domestic related issue. It’s a double homicide. Horrific. It was a domestic violence issue.
On March 10, we had another homicide where a woman, after having had a dispute with her live-in boyfriend, stabbed him in the chest while he slept, and he subsequently died. She’s been arrested for that.
And that’s our homicides for this year. We’re not minimizing any of them, but, again, in the context of what we’re dealing with, this year so far the dynamic is very much acquaintance and domestic related. Clearly these are issues of concern, but we continue to try to focus on street related violence. So having said that, I’d be happy if you have a few minutes—I don’t want to take too much of your time here—a few minutes for questions, I’m happy to try to answer them.
Let me bring one more thing to your attention. I just got this in the mail today [hold up a leaflet] Its the Police Executive Research Forum Subject to Debate and they just issued a violent crime report based on 2006 and 2005 numbers. So as you look at our overall numbers, study found increases of 20% or more in homicides over the two year period in Baltimore County, Boston, Charleston, Charlotte, Cincinnati, Fairfax County, Hartford, Kansas City, Memphis, Nashville, Newark, New Haven, Orlando, Philadelphia, Rochester, San Antonio, San Jose and Seattle, but not us. We were part of the study.
They found increases of more than 30 percent in robberies over those two years in Arlington, Texas; Baltimore County, Maryland; Cleveland, Detroit, Fort Wayne, Indiana; Memphis, Milwaukee, Orlando, Prince William County, Rochester, Virginia Beach and San Francisco.
An increase of more than 30 percent in aggravated assaults with firearms were found in Boston, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Las Vegas, Orlando, Rochester, Sacramento, St. Louis, and Seattle. Reason I mention that is these are cities not dissimilar to us in terms of their social dynamics and the amount of crime they’ve historically had, and, yet, at least in 2006, we bucked some pretty significant trends even while achieving some reductions when measured against ourselves.
Board member Jake Jacobson: Commissioner, you gave us data on how various categories are trending over time here in Springfield. How does Springfield compare to other cities in Massachusetts?
EF: There are very few comparable cities to us in Massachusetts. We tried to choose cities that had some connection to us—Lowell, Boston, Worcester, Hartford, New Haven. We also compared ourselves to Syracuse—which is also almost identically sized—as well as Jersey City and Patterson, New Jersey—which again is almost identical in size. A couple of them had ups and downs as we did in different trends; we had the largest decrease in violent crime of any of them. And we had those decreases compared to, say, Boston, which was seeing increases in assaults and in homicides.
JJ: Have you looked at—I’m not sure what the right measure is—but if it’s a particular category of crime per thousand people, population or something? I’m just trying to get a sense. Given the cities that you’ve mentioned, does Springfield tend to have the same amount of crime for its population, population adjusted, or less, or more?
EF: If I was to take a long view of cities between 100,000 and 300,000 population—which I have—our homicide numbers are kind of in the middle.
Our aggravated assault numbers are very high, and I’ve yet to come up with a simple explanation for it. We’re looking at how we categorize them, to make sure we’re doing it right. We do have a lot of assaults in this community. That’s a challenge for us, because that number drives everything else. That’s what makes us look really violent when they do the annual survey and I break them. A survey doesn’t say, "How many were domestic related? How many were two nitwits who know each other?” It’s just, "Here’s your aggravated assault data," so that’s a challenge for us.
The other thing I want to emphasize for everybody right up front: we have too much crime, regardless of how much it went down last year. I don’t want anybody to think for a nanosecond that we think we won anything last year. We made a down payment on the future. Perhaps we’re organizing ourselves in a more effective way, and using better the talents and abilities of our officers, than we might have in the past.
This is just a beginning. We’re still working out the kinks in crime analysis. Two new software packages. We try to make our numbers more accurate and our information at our disposal more rapidly. We’re continuing to refine our geographic divisions of the city in terms of problem-solving, quality of life, order maintenance, as well as crime control. We’re continuing to try to put tools in the hands of our officers to make them more effective. I am pleased that the trend’s going in the right direction, but I wouldn’t try to tell any community member that I think we’ve achieved some huge victory by any stretch of the imagination right now. I think we’ve demonstrated that certain interventions have promise, and we’re going to continue to reinforce those going forward.
Mayor Charles Ryan: Knowing the risk in trying to read the future with sensitivity [unintelligible] tomorrow, that trend line that you showed [unintelligible] been this most recent year, you have a [unintelligible] based on what you know about this department, based on where you are in your data processing, what is your feeling as to the immediate future? I’m talking about the next year, two or three. All things being equal, do you feel we can continue this downward trend?
EF: Given the size of the problem we’re confronting, I think we can make some dramatic improvements in it. I think it’s important to just surface that this is going to take work and resources. Resources are in the amount of people I can put on the street and for how long I can sustain that investment. Through a combination of our own budget and the achievement of appropriate grants, we have to create an aura that we look like a bigger police department than we are. By that I’m not trying to say we need 100 more permanent people. I don’t mean that at all.
But the challenge to a police department in a community like this in which there are so many relentless demands and calls for service that if I just left the department to its own devices, we could do nothing but answer calls for service all day long and prevent no crime. And so the challenge for us is by judiciously using overtime and our crime analysis units to try to create opportunities for us to prevent a crime by having foot and bicycle patrols, by having directed patrols, by having people not taking calls for some period of time so the public spaces feel safe.
If you come downtown and you don’t see any police officers, and you see worrisome conduct, you become afraid whether or not there’s any “real” crime. And if you’re afraid, you don’t use our downtown. So we’ve got to create that climate, and we recognize that. We also know we need to do a better job on the quality of life stuff that so bedevils many of our neighborhoods, because that’s what keeps people in the city.
We can’t be all things to all people at the same time, but I think if we’re judicious on how we manage our resources and, you know, keep that balancing act between the hard core crime control, order maintenance activities and the flexibility to do some preventive policing, we can push these numbers more rapidly and in a better direction, but it’s going to take some work.
AL: As you may know, some of us reside in Eastern Massachusetts. One of the issues that’s going on in Boston is they’re having problems with community involvement in crime and people stepping forward to identify who’s causing some of the crime. I was just curious, do we have that similar situation in Springfield, or do you feel that the citizens here are more cooperative and will be willing to stand up and be counted when a crime occurs in a neighborhood?
EF: I think it depends on what segment of crime you’re talking about. The crime we’re having trouble with is the shootings, the aggravated assaults that occur among people that have criminal backgrounds. That subset of violent crime we don’t get much cooperation with. It’s the same problem that Boston has.
We’re having better luck with our homicides. I think that one reason is that so many of them ar perpetrated by offenders that, you know, working with the DA’s office again, we’re able to provide inducements for people to cooperate with us, because many of them have pending charges against them. So we’ve had relatively more success in that world in those types of homicides, but the “young tough guy culture” is very similar here to the young tough guy culture of Boston which puts a premium on not telling us who shot you, so it is a challenge for us.
CVR: From conversations with you, I know the reliance that you put on data, and so that leads to the question of data gathering, and I’m wondering if you could share with us whether or not the capacity of the department for data gathering is greater than it was a year ago when you first came here and whether or not, if it is, whether or not it has reached the maximum of what you want. Or do you still need more support in order to adequately gather all of the data that you feel you need to have a more effective department?
EF: Information technology is a critical component of what we do, because it enables you to make better use of your most expensive and valuable resource which is the time of your people. Having said that, our crime analysis has really been stretched this year, because we inherited a number of legacy systems that didn’t talk to each other. So even though we can put together a pretty nice graphic for a PowerPoint, hours and hours are spent by hand counting things.
We found for example that our CAD system and our records managements system don’t talk to each other even though they belong to the same vendor. So coordinating the records system between what our CAD system tells us has happened, and what our reports tell us, is extraordinarily laborious. Putting together our crime dot maps: very labor intensive. We have created a situation in which we have on order a new crime analysis program that will enable us to link together the CAD and the RMS; that’ll save us tons of time. We have another software system on order that’s going to enable us to crime map much more rapidly which I’m very happy to see.
We still have a lot of old legacy systems. We still have a lot of old special unit information stovepipes that people developed for all the best reasons—they didn’t have any other way to do it—but there’s a little program over here and a little program over here and a little program over here, and we’ve got to walk to each one of them to connect them together. We’re doing our best to produce a professional product, but I can’t emphasize enough how many individual people have spent hundreds of hours trying to make this happen with technology that’s really not up to standard.
We’ve just ordered a software package to manage false alarms. We’ve had an ordinance for years, but no capability to track them or bill people or keep track of a business process to hold people accountable for the false alarms. That’s a huge drain on us every year. Ninety-nine percent of our alarms are false. You know, we’ve got to get a better grip on that, and this year we’ll be able to manage that, I think, for the first time.
KW: Thank you for mentioning quality and caliber of our police force. I agree with you. I think we’re really lucky to have the talent we have and I’d like to congratulate them on their solving the homicides. I think that they do a wonderful job of solving crime once it has happened. But I have a question and it’s actually two-part. I know that the there are categories that you put the information in. Have you changed the way you report the data to the FBI? And do you think that on that annual report, it’s going to be a much more positive rating of the city of Springfield?
EF: We went through every aggravated assault that we could last year. Once we got a sense that our aggravated assaults were remarkably high, we sat down with people from the State Police to try to see if we were classifying them correctly.
We didn’t change the number by a lot, but I think we learned from them how to classify simple assaults and aggravated assaults more appropriately. Going forward, some percentage of the decrease in the number of aggravated assaults, hopefully, will be the result of accurate reporting. I can’t stress enough, this isn’t about “cooking the books.” It’s about getting the number right for two very important reasons. One, it makes no sense to deploy my people to crime dots that aren’t the dots I’m trying to suppress, because that’s not the crime that happened. And the other part is the city does have a vested interest in seeing that it’s represented accurately to the rest of the world, because everybody wants to compare us pejoratively to other places or invidiously to other places. So we’re going to continue to work on that.
The number that was important to me last year, then, was looking to gun assault decrease, because we know gun assaults are accurately categorized every year; they’re always aggravated assaults, and that 12 percent decrease is a real number no matter what. So I’m confident that some percentage of last year’s number was responding to our activities. Going forward, I think the number will respond to more careful reporting as well as our continued attempts to deal with the issue.
CR: Mr. Chairman, I see Christine Cole in the last row. I believe this is her last day on active duty in the Springfield Police Department. She came here a year ago with Commissioner Flynn, has handled a very, very difficult set of responsibilities as senior administrative official to the department. She’s now and I think it’s to the credit of the city and offered and accepted a challenging position at the Kennedy Institute. On behalf of the city, I’d like to wish her well and thank her for her service.
EF: Can I bring her forward for a minute?
Christine Cole: Thank you very much for that, Mayor. I appreciate the opportunity each and every one of you have given me to be here the last year. I’ll echo some of the words that the Commissioner used that it’s been an honor to be here and to work with, really a great caliber of people in their department. And I have felt so warmly welcomed from the outset. And it’s been just a wonderful opportunity a great learning experience and yet another reason that I think I’ve been asked to this new position because of the relationships I have with the practitioner community which the Kennedy School really needs to figure out a way to improve those connections between the academy and the working men and women, so thank you very much.
CVR: Thank you.
AL: Good luck.
