CRIME: LAW AND ORDER

• Share

(4 of 6)

New Orleans is also learning what other cities have discovered when they moved more officers away from the patrol-car policing that limited them to 911 emergency-response calls. The lesson: face-to-face contact between cops and the people they work among, with no windshield in between, helps to restore trust. For a city like New Orleans, which has recently seen some spectacular instances of police corruption, that is an invaluable side benefit. "I felt better almost as soon as the police moved in," says Brenda Holmes, who lives at Desire, the New Orleans housing project with the most poignant name. "They've given us our lives back."

The potential synergy between cops and residents works not only in big cities: Taylor, Texas, about 28 miles northeast of Austin, has just 13,300 people. But no place is too small for the drug trade. Five years ago, crack moved in among the cotton gins and railroad tracks, bringing with it assault, rape, car theft and murder. Crime got so bad that Mae Willie Turner, 79, and her sister, Gladys Hubbard, 73, could no longer sit at night on their front porch. "The place was infested," says Turner.

So they got off the porch and joined Turn Around Taylor, a community-action group designed to help locals take back their town. It was conceived by Herman Wrice, a Philadelphia management consultant who organizes citizen-led anti-crime groups as part of a federal program. And the man who brought in Wrice and his ideas was Fred Stansbury, the police chief who arrived in Taylor in 1993, on an April day when a local teenager was killed in a gang fight. "We wanted a program where the community felt it had a proprietary interest," he says.

That's what they got. Most weeks Turner and Hubbard put on jackets with slogans such as UP WITH HOPE, DOWN WITH DOPE and joined other demonstrators on streets where the heaviest dealing happened. Stansbury got the town council to designate "downtown" Taylor as a historic district, which meant a ban on the public consumption of alcohol. The group even persuaded the Texas National Guard to bulldoze 48 worn-out buildings near the railroad tracks that had become weekend squats for drug dealers and their customers, who used to come in by car and train. Taylor these days is more like it used to be. "I can sit on my porch anytime now,'' says Mae Willie Turner.

The single greatest imponderable in the crime debate is the role of gun control. Or decontrol: last week Texas became the 28th state to allow people to carry concealed weapons. The rationale is to discourage crime--supporters say felons will think twice about assaulting people who may be armed. Florida became the first state to pass such a law in 1987. Since then, more than 150,000 people there have applied for permits to pack a gun. But two recent studies suggest loopholes in the law have also allowed felons, ordinarily forbidden to carry a gun, to do so legally. On the other hand, gun homicides in Florida have declined 29% since the law was introduced. Michael McHargue of the Florida department of law enforcement shrugs, saying, "If you look at the overall statistical picture, we don't believe the law made any impression."