Hiring More Police in Houston Pays Off as Overall Crime Rate in City Plummets : Law enforcement: Mayor, officers claim community-based approach wasn’t working. They say more cops on the streets mean more arrests.

These days, Mayor Bob Lanier sits comfortably in his City Hall office, his black Western-style boots plopped on his desk and a stack of charts and graphs in his lap. He likes to talk statistics; he revels in numbers, and he can spin off facts about Houston as fast as a Texas tornado.

But there is one statistic he cherishes most: The city’s overall crime rate has plummeted more than 30% since he was elected three years ago.

Lanier credits the sharp decline not to “new-fangled ideas” such as community-based policing but to hundreds of newly hired police officers whose sole purpose is to go out in uniform every day and make arrests.

“I don’t look on police officers as social workers,” he said, espousing ideas that run counter to what other big cities, such as Los Angeles, are trying to do.

“I don’t expect a police officer to go to a neighborhood and figure out a drainage problem or a ditch problem. I expect him to do police work.”

Down the street at police headquarters, Police Chief Sam Nuchia is equally plain-spoken. “When I took over,” he said, “we quit using the terminology ‘neighborhood-oriented policing.’ Instead I declared that we were going to make it as tough on the criminals as we possibly could.”

Just a few years ago, before Lanier and Nuchia moved into their jobs, Houston was considered a model for community policing--a concept that has caught on in other big cities looking to rebuild public trust in their police departments.

While Los Angeles is only slowly implementing the program as recommended by the Christopher Commission after the 1991 beating of Rodney G. King, Houston officials claim to have learned the hard way that the effort never really paid off.

The perception here is that instead of reducing crime, community policing fueled a deep resentment among officers, did little to boost the public’s trust of the police and ultimately cost the two biggest champions of the policy--the police chief and the mayor--their jobs.

Houston never had an episode as divisive in police-community relations as the King case. But there were past controversies nevertheless. A Latino man drowned after he was handcuffed by police and forced to swim in the bayou. A “throw-down” weapon was planted on a suspect after he was shot by police.

To turn the tide, Houston in 1982 brought in its first outside police chief, who also happened to be its first minority chief, just as Los Angeles did in hiring Willie L. Williams from Philadelphia in 1992.

Lee P. Brown, who served as Houston’s chief until 1990, made neighborhood-oriented policing a hallmark of his administration.

It was designed to make police officers more aware of community concerns, to get them out of the patrol cars and into neighborhood meetings and other civic ventures. Proponents say it works best when officers walk their beats, meet residents and business owners and enlist the public in crime-prevention efforts.

Brown was followed by Chief Elizabeth Watson, a 20-year veteran who stayed until 1992. She embraced many of Brown’s programs, but her tenure was troubled.

Because of the oil bust in eastern Texas and the subsequent economic downturn here, the city under then-Mayor Kathryn J. Whitmire put a freeze on the hiring of officers, closed the police academy and did not grant police pay raises.

The police, in turn, began ridiculing neighborhood-oriented policing, saying that its initials actually stood for “Nobody On Patrol.” Morale sunk and senior officers began leaving for other cities where old-fashioned police work was still practiced. When Whitmire lost to Lanier in the fall of 1991, police officers unfurled a banner downtown proclaiming: “Ding, Dong. The Witch Is Dead.”

“The previous administration was penny-wise and pound-foolish,” Nuchia said. “They saved money on the budget, but they also allowed the strength of the department to go down at a time when we needed it most.”

Watson, who now preaches community policing as chief of police in nearby Austin, Tex., said her administration did not fail rank-and-file police officers. She said she was only trying to inject new ideas that would enhance the city’s crime-fighting efforts until the economy recovered.

“Community policing makes us all better crime solvers,” she said. “We develop information in the community. We develop technology and communication with the public. We can do more things in the long run so that we don’t have to keep going back to the same crime scene.”

Lanier, a wealthy businessman, ran for mayor on a promise to beef up the police ranks. “That was the only campaign issue,” he said.

He was elected in November, 1991, and one of his first appointments was Nuchia, then an assistant U.S. attorney who earlier had worked as a junior police administrator in Houston. Almost immediately they froze their predecessors’ plans to expand community policing, such as putting officers in “storefront” substations around the city where they would be more accessible to residents.

Lanier, in order to reopen the police academy and start hiring officers, scuttled a proposed downtown monorail system and saved $50 million. “That was a goddamn Tinkertoy,” he said.

He said he picked up another $50 million by restructuring the city’s debt and saved $50 million more by improving its revenue-collection system.

So far, the department has grown from 3,900 sworn officers to 4,800. Now Lanier is seeking a four-cent sales tax to boost the force to 5,200 officers.

From 1991 to today, murder and rape each dropped 15%, according to Police Department statistics. Robbery was down 22.5%; theft down 25%; burglary down 41.2%, and auto theft down 42.5%.

Even with aggravated assaults up 12.5% (the only category to see a rise), the total crime rate dropped 30.3%.

In addition, police response times to crime scenes shortened, from 6.1 minutes on major calls to 4.4 minutes. Police morale, meantime, went up, particularly when Lanier and Nuchia found two small pay raises for officers.

The chief and the mayor suggested that Los Angeles, which appears to be going in the opposite direction, also might be better served by increasing its police force before embarking on new community programs.

“I don’t want to tell them their business,” Lanier said, “but I think they have a big problem. They don’t have enough police. That’s going to strain any additional duties. It’s going to strain things.”

In last year’s campaign, Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan pledged to add 3,000 police officers in four years, a promise he has since trimmed to 2,855 in five years. So far, however, attrition has canceled out much of the new hiring. Nevertheless, Riordan’s LAPD expansion plan calls for the bulk of the buildup to occur in the last three years of the five-year program. Recently, the City Council approved the addition of 450 officers as part of Riordan’s proposed 1994-95 budget.

But even in Houston, not everyone credits the team of Lanier and Nuchia with reducing crime.

Stephen L. Klineberg, a sociologist at Rice University here, said other factors, such as the turnaround in the local economy, can do more to halt crime than just adding police officers. He added that the public’s fear of crime rises when cadres of officers are seen on the streets.

“There’s no evidence that more police automatically reduces crime,” he said. “If you have more police, you report more crime and so arrests go up. And if you target one area of the city with more police, crime just moves to another area.”

In contrast, he said, a community working with its police can bring about an overall sense of security that cold crime statistics cannot.

“Community police makes a lot of sense,” he said. “If you know you have a police officer . . . in your neighborhood working to reduce crime, that goes a long way to satisfying your fears.”

Laura Virgadamo and Tiny Allison, both active in a neighborhood association in the historic Houston Heights area, said they believe that adding police officers is actually the best community policing available, simply because more police can answer more calls.

Virgadamo said she moved from the suburbs back to the inner city because she believes that the added police presence makes the city safer. And Allison, who coordinates a citizens patrol to support the police, said she is amazed at how much faster the police cars respond. “We used to have to wait hours,” she said. “Once, I waited four hours for a police officer after a car was stolen. They were all too busy.”

In the North Loop area of the city, the Rev. Robert Jefferson, a school board member and chairman of COMAC (Coalition of Ministers Against Crime), recently called a meeting to discuss the last day of the school year next month.

In past years, numerous fights and stabbings, even drive-by shootings, had broken out when school let out for the summer. Police found themselves overwhelmed with problems. Tensions are again high this year, especially since a 14-year-old Latino gang member was stabbed to death and another youth was shot in a gang fight at a Houston theme park.

Eleven uniformed officers and an assistant police chief participated in Jefferson’s meeting, mapping out strategy on how to protect the schools this year. They promised an impressive show of force, and the ministers were clearly pleased.

“The more blue we have,” Jefferson said, pointing to the uniformed officers, “the stronger we will be.”

The night before, as a crowd of gang members and other mourners attended the wake for the youth who was stabbed, a phalanx of patrol officers and undercover detectives kept watch across the street. The officers said they believed that it was their presence that kept a rival gang from driving by and shooting the mourners.

“Things are pretty good right now,” said Officer Damian Garcia, a young patrolman who came on the force three years ago, just when Lanier and Nuchia were beginning to reinvent the Houston Police Department.

“Things are not out of control. We’re not running to shooting after shooting.”

His colleague, Officer Robert (Bobbie) King, who works the police gang detail, agreed. He said he was a young patrolman here when community-based police was all the rage, and he didn’t like it.

“The mayor wants us out now writing tickets and patrolling the city,” King said. “And that beats neighborhood policing. That didn’t work. Not here in Houston. Not as long as we didn’t have enough officers to get our crime down first.”