CRIME: LAW AND ORDER

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But time and again, the experts are also returning to an explanation they would have played down in the past: more effective policing strategies. It is respectable once again to believe that cops can have a real impact on crime rates, an opinion that has been seriously out of fashion among professional students of crime. For decades they held that crime was too deeply connected to underlying social causes, meaning everything from the state of the economy to the breakdown of the family. Such things are still assumed to play their part in producing crime. What has changed is the view that police are useful only to chase down bad guys after they strike.

All over the U.S., the decade of the '90s has seen a rapid reinvention of how the police do their jobs, especially in major cities. A change from squad cars to foot patrolling, a shift to "proactive'' policing that seeks to dissolve problems such as open-air drug marts rather than just rack up arrests, the more frequent establishment of cross-agency task forces to target specific problems such as car theft or drug crime--all are now commonplace. "This decline in crime rates is more than a demographic phenomenon,'' says Jeremy Travis, director of the National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Justice Department. "Public policy can make a difference. Police can make a difference."

Exhibit A for supporters of the new policing is New York City, where major crime--murder, rape, robbery, auto theft, grand larceny, assault and burglary--is in something like statistical free fall, dropping 17.5% last year. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his police commissioner, William Bratton, both insist that the reason is their devotion to new ways of doing police business. John DiIulio Jr., a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, says that since the mid-'80s top brass who embrace a similar shift in philosophy have risen to key positions in cities all around the country. "So now you're seeing better policing. Not miracles or panaceas, but better policing."

To the extent that is true, police have had to pull themselves in two disparate directions--tougher and softer, as the COPS program in New Orleans illustrates. Tougher means more aggressive intervention. "If we see somebody we don't know, we ask them what they're doing there," says Compass. "If the story doesn't check out, we arrest them for trespassing. Now we don't see as many drug dealers around here." But at the same time, it has meant more neighborhood-friendly tactics, the foot patrolling and problem solving that form the loosely defined strategy called community policing. "We do neighborhood cleanups, counseling on child abuse, you name it," says Officer Djuana Adams. "We help the children with their homework, and they show up for treats when they get good grades."