Cleaning up the City
| DOI | 10.1177/0032258X0107400404 |
| Date | 01 November 2001 |
| Author | Mary Dresser,Jim Weiss |
| Published date | 01 November 2001 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
JIM
WEISS AND MARY DRESSER
CLEANING UP THE CITY
Small things: reclaiming shopping, removing drunks from park benches,
discouraging begging, advocating street lighting, and behold the crime
rate goes down and a city regains its ambience and beauty!
The city of St Petersburg, Florida, in seedy decline for many years,
with a vacancy rate of 26-30%, has become a centre for arts, culture,
sports and entertainment. Million-dollar condominiums are going up
along the city's beachwalk, up-market shops are flourishing, visitors
throng the streets after dark, and a new baseball stadium attracts fans.
Parks in this sunny Florida city welcome young and old and the lakes
and bay glitter in the daytime and murmur quietly at night. The busi-
ness vacancy rate is now less than 9% and property values are soaring.
But most of all (or, perhaps, because): it is safe.
In a comparison, prepared by Sergeant Gary P. Robbins of the St
Petersburg police uniform services' Downtown Deployment Team, the
unit that patrols a seven-square-mile city-centre area is experiencing a
downturn in all crime. For the first nine months in 1998 the total
number of reported crimes is 9,862 whereas for the same period in
2000 the figure is 10,165. Analysing only muggings over this period,
the figure drops from 72 to 62. These figures by themselves are
deceptive because a higher presence of police on the streets increases
the number of reports and many reports are call-ins from other areas.
Downtown Deployment Team
Robbins points out that the Downtown Deployment Team has been in
existence since 1985, before Mayor Rudolph W. Guiliani of New York
City put his misdemeanour enforcement programmes into service, as a
tool against activities that attract crime. From morning until after bar
closing time, ten officers patrol the downtown area of St Petersburg, in
Pinellas County, the second smallest and most populated county in
Florida.
This policy addresses long-term quality-of-life issues in the city's
downtown centre, an area of new condominiums costing from $300,000
to one million dollars per unit. The downtown area also contains seven
museums, art galleries and, on the other side of the spectrum, boarded up
crack houses. The city attracts the homeless and addicted people who are
unable to care for themselves: endangering the area's quality of life.
The aim of this uniform services task force has been to 'take away
the sense of lawlessness in the city' says Robbins. One of the methods
the unit uses is to identify 'scofflaw' people (those contemptuous of the
law) in the area. These people represent a small group but they heavily
influence the public's perception of a downtown area. Downtown
deployment officer J. C. McKinnon estimates that there were only
The Police Journal, Volume 74 (2001) 303
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