Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 5, 1995 TAG: 9502060066
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: ST. LOUIS LENGTH: Long
Here in St. Louis, police are knocking on selected doors and making a polite but pointed pitch to startled parents: We think your kid has a gun. Fill out this form, and we'll come in and get it.
Nobody gets arrested; nobody goes to jail. Just waive your right to a search warrant and let the cops poke around the closet and peek under a mattress. Keep your kid, fork over his firearm.
``I don't care if he's got a bazooka in there,'' said St. Louis police Sgt. Simon Risk. ``We just want the gun.''
The consent-to-search form used in high-crime areas of St. Louis is popular but unproven, and it's being copied by other cities regardless. It is just one tool in one town in a country where the climate of fear has turned virtually every community into a glorified crime lab, a felony think tank.
Like never before, U.S. cities are furiously tapping each other for ideas and competing against each other for grants in a great race to develop new models for crime fighting, magic bullets to deter the terror of the '90s: violent youth, armed and loaded.
Many of these new programs involve aggressive police techniques that not long ago would have been dismissed as pure harassment, racial and otherwise.
In Kansas City and Indianapolis, police use virtual drive-by enforcement, sending special teams into high-crime areas with a free-ranging mandate to stop cars, search bodies, find guns.
In Denver, authorities are visiting licensed gun dealers they think - but can't prove - are selling guns to gangsters, and urging them to get out of the business. Many have.
In St. Louis, a black teen out on a snowy night, changing his cadence when a police car approaches, is fair game to be hit with the pinpoint beam of a searchlight, stopped and patted down.
Police appear to operate with impunity here because the high-crime neighborhoods they target have demanded it during long meetings with residents too scared to go outside when the street lights come on.
``As Malcolm X said, by any means necessary,'' said Charles Mischeaux, president of the St. Louis NAACP. ``If they're going to be looking for guns, it doesn't make any sense to go into the upper-class neighborhoods. It's black on black.''
One of the hot models for fighting gun crimes began in 1991 in Kansas City, where University of Maryland criminologist Lawrence Sherman designed a system in which special police patrols were dispatched to find guns in an 80-block area where the homicide rate was 20 times the national average.
The police had broad discretion to stop and search cars and people. Gun crimes plunged 49 percent and, most importantly, didn't rise in neighboring areas - meaning bad behavior was abating, not merely moving on.
Now, Sherman is building the same system for the entire city of Indianapolis. Last month, Washington, D.C., said it would copy it. Los Angeles is among roughly 30 interested cities.
The key, Sherman said, is building enough bridges to the community - meetings with neighborhoods, visiting schools - to make the tough tactics sprout from grass-roots concerns.
``We're moving toward a new era of politically sensitive, aggressive policing,'' Sherman said. ``The officers have to sell what they're doing.''
But as police departments push the civil liberties envelope, criticism is intensifying. Last year, a federal judge ruled the Chicago Housing Authority had violated the Constitution by searching apartments in a Chicago housing project without getting warrants.
President Clinton defended the sweeps, which were criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Rifle Association and many criminal justice and constitutional experts.
``These kind of programs, like Kansas City trying to take guns off the street by stopping cars, I've got my reservations there's going to be long-term benefits,'' said David Carter, a criminal justice professor at Michigan State University.
Experts say cities are plunging into new programs without a set of instructions, or any evidence that the finished product will work.
Norwalk, Conn., got a $100,000 state grant this spring to copy St. Louis' consent-to-search program. It plans to even set up roadblocks and checkpoints in high-crime neighborhoods.
``It's worth a try,'' said Police Chief Carl LaBianca.
In San Diego, a special task force hoping to design a nationwide crime-fighting model also is incorporating some aspects of the St. Louis program. It's printing leaflets telling parents of Indo-Chinese gang members where kids like to hide their guns.
``We're just studying strategies. St. Louis really stands out,'' said San Diego police Detective Gaye Wagner. ``They're getting some significant guns off the street: guns in the hands of kids, guns you hear going off at night, guns used in gang shootings.''
Risk's unit, meanwhile, has applied for a federal grant this year to find out simply if the St. Louis program is even working. There are no resources, he said, to run a controlled experiment.
``We are in the midst of an enormous storm of activity in the general area of violence reduction,'' said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminolology and criminal justice professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.
``There are hundreds, thousands of programs across the country. They are happening so quickly and so dramatically that there has not been time to evaluate them,'' he said.
St. Louis is something of a microcosm for the country, implementing so many programs that some officers grumble about redirected resources and duplication of efforts.
Risk works for Mobile Reserve, which began aggressive drug and gun suppression techniques last year. Another task force with similar duties was set up in August with the mandate of finding ways to jail the city's 100 most violent people.
In October, the city recruited a special team of building inspectors to look for ways to condemn the homes of drug dealers. The inspectors, to say the least, are into it: They've given themselves gonzo street nicknames, such as ``Rambo.''
``That's what intrigues me about St. Louis. They seem to be doing the most,'' said David Doi, director of law enforcement relations for the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence in Washington.
All of this has been spurred by the sort of statistics and palpable sense of danger felt in communities big and small. From 1983 to 1993 in St. Louis, the percentage of aggravated assaults with firearms soared from 20.7 percent to 52.75 percent.
Bill George, a St. Louis crime technician, gestures to the scores of assault rifles leaning against the walls of his lab.
``Ten years ago, we'd get one of those every four months. Now we get three or four a week,'' he said.
The consent-to-search forms are considered a powerful weapon. Risk said if a youngster is arrested with a gun, the officers will go to his home and those of his companions and try to conduct a search without the hassle of a warrant.
Risk claims 98 percent of the parents invite the officers in, and many are stunned when they find a gun under their kid's bed.
by CNB