Up in Arms Over Crime

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A burgeoning watch program on New York's Long Island has spread to eleven communities with some 500,000 residents. It began after what Paula Broxmeyer, 33, calls "a horror movie" in Roslyn in 1982. She and four other women were enjoying an evening neighborhood party when two men burst through a door. One had a gun, the other an ax. They tied the women up, terrorized them for 45 minutes, then fled with their jewelry. "It robbed me of my sense of security," Broxmeyer recalls. "For two weeks I wouldn't leave my own house alone." Her retaliation was to organize a neighborhood crime patrol. It also helps elderly people fearful of going out to shop and supplies speakers who advise children in 90 schools how to know when they are in danger of being sexually abused.

In Green Valley (pop. 8,000), Ariz., residents donated funds to buy two patrol cars for a Sheriff Assist Team of 63 volunteers. The snooping neighbor is not always popular, of course, and a meddlesome one can incite false rumors, but the citizen informant can also make the work of police officers much more effective.

Some of the citizen attacks on crime take novel forms. In San Diego, John Wright, 65, who owns a roller-skating rink, has personally stopped an armed robber and a purse snatcher with his gun; he gives a year's free skating privileges to anyone else who grabs a thief. So far, six people have qualified. In Dallas, some residents are arming themselves with "stun guns," 6-in.-long battery-powered devices that disable a suspect with a 50,000-volt jolt. Although the gun is outlawed in a few states, its manufacturer insists that the shock effect wears off "in a couple of minutes." Los Angeles police have been pleased with residents' acceptance of their tanklike battering-ram vehicle, which can speedily knock down the walls of houses where dope dealers are thought to operate.

Catching crooks, of course, is only part of the problem: there must be some place to put them. Building new prisons is not only costly but controversial, since residents are rarely happy to have guard towers looming over the neighborhood. Without adequate jail space, justice can be distorted. South Carolina State Senator Glenn McConnell puts the problem bluntly: "Should the sentence fit the size of the prison or the severity of the crime?"

With some exceptions, the trend is toward longer sentences and more prison space. An unabashed liberal Democrat, New York Governor Mario Cuomo is pushing a $600 million program to build seven new prisons with 8,800 beds, the largest expansion of the penitentiary system in his state's history. A continent away and poles apart politically, California's Republican Governor, George Deukmejian, has his state embarked on a record prison-construction binge; he is seeking $1.2 billion for ten facilities with 16,000 beds. Almost every cell in his state now houses two convicts, which foes of overcrowding condemn, but each day the prison population grows by about 400.

In Georgia, tougher sentencing laws have to wait because the state has only 15,000 prison beds, roughly the number of new convicts sentenced each year. Opposing court-ordered release of crowded prisoners in Illinois, Cook County State's Attorney Richard M. Daley declared, "The issue before the court is whether the temporary comfort of jail inmates takes priority over the safety of our community."