I går kunne man i JP Århus læse, at Politidirektøren i Århus ikke længere ville lade sine betjente gå på patrulje på byens indkøbsstrøg. Dette til trods for, at Cityforeningen beklagede sig over, at både medlemmerne og medlemmernes kunder følte sig langt mindre sikre, efter at patruljeringen var ophørt.
Og hvad værre var, sÃ¥ mÃ¥tte Cityforeningen heller ikke hyre sig et privat vagtværn, som kunne beskytte butikker og borgere for lommetyveri, tiggerrævl, gadesvindlere og taberindianere. Netop private vagtværn har før været brugt pÃ¥ Ã…rhus’ strøg med stor succes.
Derfor kan man kun undrer sig over politidirektørens (dårlige) holdning. Alt andet lige burde han være et reservouir for kriminologi i praksis; herunder være bekendt med resultater fra ind- og (især) udland. Han burde vide, at det Strøget efterspørger ikke er politi eller private vagtværn, men helt banalt: En større følelse af sikkerhed.
Hvordan man opnår den sikkerhed er på sin vis underordnet. Men når nu vi lever i et samfund, som (desværre) har valgt at organisere ordenspolitiet efter det kollektivistiske princip om offentligt ejer- og lederskab, må det selvfølgelig være en naturlig opgave for selvsamme ordenspoliti, at hjælpe til, så borgerne kan føle sig trygge. Ikke sandt?
Artiklen fik mig til at tænke pÃ¥ Kelling & Wilsons afhandling “Broken Windows“, som er udgivet af tænketanken Manhatten Institute. Det var netop til et møde i Manhatten Institute, at Ny Yorks helt egen superhelt, Mr. Giuliani, hørte om Kelling & Wilsons kriminalprævensive ideer og fik inspirationen til at implementere dem i Ny York — hvor de, sammen med godt statistisk software, viste deres værd.
Her er en passage fra først i afhandlingen. Den handler netop om politi på gaden.
In the mid-l970s The State of New Jersey announced a “Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program,” designed to improve the quality of community life in twenty-eight cities. As part of that program, the state provided money to help cities take police officers out of their patrol cars and assign them to walking beats. The governor and other state officials were enthusiastic about using foot patrol as a way of cutting crime, but many police chiefs were skeptical. Foot patrol, in their eyes, had been pretty much discredited. It reduced the mobility of the police, who thus had difficulty responding to citizen calls for service, and it weakened headquarters control over patrol officers.
Many police officers also disliked foot patrol, but for different reasons: it was hard work, it kept them outside on cold, rainy nights, and it reduced their chances for making a “good pinch.” In some departments, assigning officers to foot patrol had been used as a form of punishment. And academic experts on policing doubted that foot patrol would have any impact on crime rates; it was, in the opinion of most, little more than a sop to public opinion. But since the state was paying for it, the local authorities were willing to go along.
Five years after the program started, the Police Foundation, in Washington, D.C., published an evaluation of the foot-patrol project. Based on its analysis of a carefully controlled experiment carried out chiefly in Newark, the foundation concluded, to the surprise of hardly anyone, that foot patrol had not reduced crime rates. But residents of the foot patrolled neighborhoods seemed to feel more secure than persons in other areas, tended to believe that crime had been reduced, and seemed to take fewer steps to protect themselves from crime (staying at home with the doors locked, for example). Moreover, citizens in the foot-patrol areas had a more favorable opinion of the police than did those living elsewhere. And officers walking beats had higher morale, greater job satisfaction, and a more favorable attitude toward citizens in their neighborhoods than did officers assigned to patrol cars.
These findings may be taken as evidence that the skeptics were right- foot patrol has no effect on crime; it merely fools the citizens into thinking that they are safer. But in our view, and in the view of the authors of the Police Foundation study (of whom Kelling was one), the citizens of Newark were not fooled at all. They knew what the foot-patrol officers were doing, they knew it was different from what motorized officers do, and they knew that having officers walk beats did in fact make their neighborhoods safer.
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[W]e tend to overlook another source of fear—the fear of being bothered by disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed.
What foot-patrol officers did was to elevate, to the extent they could, the level of public order in these neighborhoods.
Med andre ord: Den blotte følelse af sikkerhed, som regelmæssige politipatruljer giver, er værdifuld i sig selv.
