Policing gets smarter

Philadelphia had one of the nation's most brutal and backward police forces in America in the 1970s. In the late '90s the city decided, finally, to change. Here's one of many stories I wrote on how the new police commissioner went about it.





COMPSTAT: NEW WEAPON FOR POLICE
The intense weekly meetings zero in on Phila. crime statistics - and how to thwart criminals
Howard Goodman, Inquirer staff writer
LOCAL: Pg. A01

So there's this cop up in the 14th District, see, and he goes to investigate the theft of a cell phone.

What's he do? He calls the number.

And - can you believe this? - the knucklehead answers.

The cop pretends he's the owner. Tells the thief: "Hey, this phone really likes me. Will you take $50 for it?"

Sure enough, the guy agrees, they meet. Bingo! An arrest.

Captain Joseph Marker told that story yesterday, and the assembled brass roared.

"But here's why I wanted to tell you this," Marker said. "In the 14th now, we have standing orders. Every time we investigate a stolen cell phone, we dial the number."

Celebrating ingenuity, sharing information. That's the essence of a new ritual in Philadelphia policing - the weekly meeting called Compstat.

Compstat is the organizational centerpiece of the Police Department's new crime-fighting initiatives, the chief apparatus for turning the long-slumbering department into a unified, focused force.

Conducted in the half-light of one meeting room or another, with more than 50 police officials from all over the city seated at a U-shaped table with computer-generated crime maps splashed on a screen, Compstat is where district captains and the heads of special units are confronted with up-to-date statistics about crime in their areas, and questioned about them in exquisite detail.

With Police Commissioner John F. Timoney and top aides leading the grilling, it's where captains must defend the steps they have taken to fight crime.

For the commanders on the hot seat, it's a chance to show they are getting ahead of the criminals in their districts.

But if they don't know their facts, if they haven't aggressively and creatively attacked the problems on their streets, Compstat can be an occasion of intense embarrassment.

Yesterday, for the first time since the sessions began in March, Timoney opened a Compstat session to reporters.

Alaska in an RV

A travel piece. The whole family went on the road, and it made for a funny trip.





ALASKA BY RV: A PRACTICAL WAY TO TRAVEL A CHALLENGING STATE
IT'S A LESS COSTLY, LESS DAREDEVIL MODE - WITH PLENTY OF HOOKUPS.
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES TRAVEL; Pg. T01


ON THE ROAD IN ALASKA - Wind lashed my face, cold rain cutting icy rivulets on cheeks chapped raw, as my weary team lunged onward and our sled - plied with foodstuffs, camp gear, precious serums - forged toward the white-blurred, unknown beyond . . .

Well, no, that's not actually how I traversed Alaska.

Picture, instead, a cushioned vinyl seat, a steering wheel, a bed with sheets and pillowcases, a cupboard full of Lays Baked Potato Chips, an Aqua-Marine IV toilet - all of it moving at nine miles to the gallon.

Ellen, my wife, is in the passenger seat, checking our progress against The Milepost, a 754-page guide to just about every roadside attraction in the Great White North. My stepdaughter,
Rachel, is on the couch, writing in her journal. My stepson, Mike, is curled up in the rear bed with a book on the wilderness and Soundgarden on his headphones. Rachel's boyfriend, Tal, and my son, Ben, are playing cribbage at the dining table.

We're doing Alaska family-style, in a rented recreational vehicle - a 1993 Ford Jamboree Rallye - carrying most of the comforts (and a lot of the chores) of home with us as we go from mountaintop to salmon stream to shoreline. In the biggest state in the union - Texas times two, plus change - the six of us are spending two weeks in a 27-foot-long, 18-foot-high, 7 3/4-foot-wide RV.

We have hearkened to the call of the mild.

New top cop starts work

John Timoney stormed into Philadelphia determined to bring the police department to modern standards. He worked fast... from the very beginning.





'FULL SPEED AHEAD,' TIMONEY SAYS ON FIRST DAY
BYLINE: Howard Goodman and Thomas J. Gibbons Jr., INQUIRER STAFF WRITERS
SECTION: CITY & REGION; Pg. B01

In a foul-smelling courtroom in a shabby police station in the blighted heart of one of Philadelphia's most drug-infested and violent neighborhoods, John F. Timoney yesterday began bonding with the police department that is suddenly his.

On his first day on the job, the new commissioner of the Philadelphia Police Department began at 7 a.m., addressing morning roll call at the 24th and 25th Districts of Fairhill, Kensington and North Philadelphia.

"Have a safe tour," Timoney told groups of officers unused to seeing so important a personage at their daily ritual.

"This won't be my last visit," he added. "Maybe some night at 1 o'clock in the morning, I'll pop in and drive in a radio car with you."

The 49-year-old former deputy commissioner of the New York Police Department is so new in town that his Rittenhouse Square apartment doesn't have a telephone yet. He is working out of temporary quarters at the Municipal Services Building because his office at the Police Administration Building is getting a coat of paint.

His swearing-in will not take place until today at City Hall.

But he was off and running.

"Full speed ahead," Timoney said jauntily at 8 a.m.

The fly on Rendell's wall

It was one measure of Ed Rendell's self-confidence - or ego- that he let the hard-eyed reporter Buzz Bissinger watch his every move as he tried to lead the city out of a crushing fiscal crisis. Bissinger emerged with a great book about America's cities. Too bad for his sales that the city was Philadelphia.




SILENT WITNESS TO THE CITY'S STRUGGLES
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: FEATURES ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT; Pg. F01

For four years he was commonly mistaken for one of the mayor's aides.

Which is just as Buzz Bissinger wanted it.

Believing that "access is king," he'd perch on a leather loveseat in Room 212 of City Hall for hours and days at a time, dressed in a nondescript gray suit and conservative black shoes, jotting down everything he overheard as Ed Rendell plunged in to manage the basically unmanageable city of Philadelphia.

If asked, he would say who he was and what he was up to. But people rarely asked because he was so obviously one of those earnest young suits always seen dancing at a politician's beck and call.

He was so convincing a nonentity that Henry Cisneros, then secretary of Housing and Urban Development, turned to him after discussing some very hush-hush matter with the mayor and instructed: "Don't let any of this get to the press."

Well, Mr. Secretary, you'll be relieved to know that he didn't give it to the newspapers or TV.

But, er, sir:

He put it in hardcover.

The Badlands outside, filth inside

One of the hardest things to convey in words is what the decrepitude of a major city is truly like. I tried to get at it with this one.





CITY POLICE WORK IN A "PIGPEN" AS RED TAPE DELAYS A NEW STATION
BYLINE: Howard Goodman, INQUIRER STAFF WRITER
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. A01

The reek, the stench, the stink from the juvenile detention cell should be enough in and of itself to force the closing of the headquarters building of the 24th and 25th Police Districts of North Philadelphia and Kensington.

But that would ignore the uncollected garbage bags cluttering the grimy stairwells, the overcrowded offices for detectives, the permanent grime on their gray metal desks, the heating system that goes awry and the air-conditioning that doesn't cool, the unusable locker rooms.

The roaches.

A state legislative report, released in December by Rep. Benjamin Ramos, a Democrat from the area, called the facility "totally inappropriate and unsafe."

As if that were news. Back in 1995, the city government set aside $8 million for a new facility for the 24th and 25th, after Mayor Rendell toured the run-down station at the request of the police wives' organization. "One officer described it as a pigpen," Rendell said in his 1995 budget address, "and he was being charitable."

Three Januaries later, $8 million is still set aside for a new building. Blueprints are ready. But with the tortoise pace of a bureaucracy trailing political and community bickering, no site has been determined and no groundbreaking is in sight.

Police here patrol some of the lowest-income and highest-crime swaths of Philadelphia - a battered landscape of ruins, marked by graffiti, brazen drug-dealing, domestic chaos, sporadic gunfire.

To lock up suspects, question witnesses, write reports, wrap up their shifts, officers trek back to a headquarters at Front and Westmoreland Streets that's every bit as bleak as the turf outside.

"The 24th and 25th contain some of the poorest and worst conditions in the city," said Robert Borden, treasurer of Philadelphia's Fraternal Order of Police, showing the place to a visitor recently.

"It's hard on a police officer, and it compounds it even more if you come in and this is your building."

Here's what it's like. When corporals with desk jobs take a day off, sergeants flip a coin to see who fills in. The loser stays indoors.

"You'd rather be out on the street," said Sgt. Joe Jackson, referring to terrain so chaotic that it's been nicknamed "the Badlands" and "Oz."