Statistics Show 13 Percent Drop in Meriden Crime in 2010 – Police Credit Neighborhood Initiative

It’s 8:30 p.m. on Saturday night. Daylight has finally just slipped away and Meriden Police Officers Robii Abouchacra and Christian Rodriguez are standing on a balcony on the 8th floor at the Community Towers housing complex on Willow Street looking down at an apartment courtyard where children are playing amid lamplight below. 

“That used to be filled with drug dealers…heroin, crack,” Abouchacra says.

Sounds of laughter and a bouncing ball filter up. About two years ago, the officers say, they put the full-court press on dealers in the complex, busting one and making sure the others knew they were going to be around a lot. The dealers moved out. Now kids play there late into the night, Rodriguez says.

It’s community policing efforts like this that Meriden Police administration credit with a drop in major crimes in the city.

In the coming weeks the Connecticut State Police will release official index crime statistics for 2010. An advance copy obtained by Meriden Patch says that the number of overall index crimes – best described as a town’s serious personal and property crimes – reported in Meriden in 2010 decreased by 13 percent from that of 2009.

Meriden Police have confirmed these figures. This means that in 2010 there were 1,981 total index or serious crimes reported in Meriden versus 2,268 in 2009.

Broken down, in 2010: there were no reported murders, versus 3 in 2009; 6 reported rapes, compared to 12 in 2009; 70 reported robberies versus 87 in 2009; 68 reported aggravated assaults, versus 73 in 2009; 1289 larcenies versus 1575 in 2009; and 6 arsons versus 8 in 2009. Burglaries and motor vehicle thefts were the only crimes that reportedly rose, with burglaries jumping from 393 in 2009 to 416 in 2010, and auto thefts from 125 in 2009 to 132 in 2010.

“It really shows that the community policing model is working in Meriden,” Meriden Police Chief Jeffry Cossette said, discussing a renewed effort by the department through its Neighborhood Initiative program in the last 6 years to use communication and community relationships to stanch crime – not just respond to it. This recent drop is compounded by a steady decrease (officials say 17 percent) in Meriden’s crime statistics over the previous five years.

It’s good news for a department that has had a morale-thumping spring, after allegations of police brutality and disparate treatment of its officers by the management hit newspapers and TV stations around the state.  While those issues play out in court, the officers deal with the negative publicity on the street.

Which can be tough when your success hinges on communication and relationships. Abouchacra and Rodriguez are two of nine men in the Meriden Police Department’s Neighborhood Initiative, in which officers are each assigned their own section of the city – often the most low-income and crime-riddled parts – to patrol and get to know, and be known, well.

On a ridealong with Abouchacra last Saturday night through his region, which is roughly a square bounded by East Main, Broad, Harrison, and Meridian Streets and Cook Ave, residents of all ages greet the gregarious 28-year-old officer with a wave and a smile. A group of little girls giggles when he greets them in slang, “Yo dawgs, what’s up?” People pull him aside and they catch him up on what's happening with their families, their neighbors. If he sees someone he didn’t know, a man using a cell phone on a deserted-looking corner or a young woman at Community Towers, he’ll stop and ask who they are, what they’re doing there.

The idea is that he knows every square inch of town, nearly every person, for a variety of reasons -- to get good intel, to quickly spot problems, and to show possible offenders that the police are around, watching – and maybe they know your mom.

“We constantly monitor and stay ahead of what’s going on,” Cossette said. The officers also work closely with the neighborhood associations in their areas.

It’s not drugs or burglaries that get the most complaints, it’s quality of life issues, like speeding, Abouchacra says. And much of what he does is refer code violations – unruly lawns, graffiti –  to the city. He cites a widespread, though sometimes questioned, policing theory first presented in an Atlantic Magazine article in 1982 called the Broken Window theory – that crime will fester in places that it looks like no one cares about.

The authors mention a 1969 experiment in which Stanford psychologist Philip Zimbardo had a car parked on a street in Palo Alto, California without license plates and with its hood up. A week went by and the car was untouched, so Zimbardo smashed part of the car with a sledgehammer. Other passerby – mostly "respectable"-looking people – then started destroying the car themselves. According to the article, just a few hours later, the auto had been flipped and completely destroyed. The same experiment in the Bronx produced similar results.

If the whole idea of community policing doesn’t sound all that new, it’s not. According to Central Connecticut State University Criminal Justice Professor Stephen Cox, it is for the most part a re-branding of the concept of an old 1920’s - 1930’s beat cop, who wore out his shoeleather walking the neighborhood, talking to people.

The popularity of the police car, and radio technology that surged in police forces in the 1960s to help officers respond faster to crimes, took officers away from the people they served, Cox said, creating a very physical barrier.

Now the idea is to “get the officer out of the car so they know everybody,” Cox said, adding that community policing is more cost-effective, saving on police overtime as officers aren’t making as many arrests, thus not going to court as often or writing as many reports. “It’s a simple as it sounds.”

“It’s not all kissing babies and shaking hands,” says Abouchacra. The officers do their fair share of arrests and stings. On Saturday night Rodriguez and Abouchacra were only up in Willow Towers, a federally subsidized complex for the low-income disabled and elderly, because they were breaking up a party on a complaint from a resident, where they found likely paraphernalia for smoking crack cocaine. They found two repeat drug offenders they surmised were taking advantage of a resident.

The challenge now, Cox said, is making sure that the program stays in place and doesn't get cut as the government at all levels is trying to lower budgets.

That doesn't seem to be a worry in Meriden for the moment. Meriden Police were notified in May that the department received a 3-year grant for four new positions, three in the Neighborhood Initiative unit and one in computer crimes. The money will come in October, and the department is in the hiring process now for new officers.