Houston tried "zero-tolerance policing" after inaugurating community-oriented policing several years ago.
Several cities also installed a neighborhood-oriented approach that had police working with residents, businesses and public agencies to attack the roots of crimes.Perhaps community-oriented policing created an infrastructure for the crime sweeps of today, for, as Houston Police Chief Sam Nuchia said, police want support from citizens to avoid appearing as "an occupying army."
Critics, though, regard community policing as a fad or, worse, a mistake.
And although the crime dip on some cities is encouraging, America shouldn't begin celebrating, cautioned James Alan Fox, dean of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston.
Murders committed by youths aged 14 to 17 jumped 172 percent from 1985 to 1994, and that demographic group will come of age over the next decade, according to Fox.
Fox found that the national homicide rate fell 4 percent from 1990 to 1994, but he cautioned that "if we spend too much time saying we're winning the war, we may be blindsided by a bloodbath of teenager-(perpetrated) violence that someday will make 1995 look like the good old days."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)