Bill8

Here's that article - too long to read - so a few snippets...

This has to do with typical gun crime, but, I think it also applies to gun incidents, gun accidents, and threats using guns.

http://nymag.com/news/features/war-o...ex5.html#print

�We are fishing with a net,� Bealefeld started to say publicly, �and we need to be fishing with a spear.�

The spear he found was gun priors. Encoded in Baltimore?s murder records was a singularly interesting piece of data: Over half of the murderers in his city had previously been arrested for a handgun violation. The universe of offenders in Baltimore with prior gun convictions was very small, and most of them were serious criminals. Focusing on them seemed plausible. The commissioner did not publicly declare the war on drugs a failure, though he believes that to be the case, or petition the legislature to decriminalize possession. �We just deemphasized it,� he says.


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Quietly, in experiments in a few influential police departments around the country, a new set of tools for policing is being tested, as cops have come to realize that violence tends to be driven not by neighborhoods but by small and identifiable populations of exceptional individuals. Working with arrest records on the crime-ridden far West Side of Chicago, a young Yale sociologist named Andrew Papachristos discovered that he could create a social map of violence (including only people who were arrested together with other members of the network) that encompassed just 4 percent of the people in the neighborhood but virtually all of the murderers and murder victims. Each time you �co-offended? with another member of the network, it turned out, you grew 25 percent more likely to be murdered. The universe of the violent and the vulnerable, Papachristos found, was far tinier than the universe of people involved in drugs, or in gangs; it was a small circle of people who all knew one another.

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Bealefeld didn?t have any of this information when he started in Baltimore. All he had was his list of criminals with gun priors. So his department created a registry and required each beat cop in the city to check biweekly with every local gun offender to remind them they were being watched. The state parole and probation department was overwhelmed by the mass of drug offenders, so Bealefeld asked if instead of monitoring everyone closely, they could just pay attention to a hundred gun offenders. (They could.) Other commissioners had sent out departmental commendations when cops seized large quantities of drugs, but Bealefeld stopped doing that and started sending out letters only when gun offenders were brought in.

It worked. In 2011, Bealefeld?s last full year, his department made only 65,000 arrests, down 43,000 from the figure before he took over. The cops weren?t letting serious crime go - murders were down sharply over the same period, from 269 to 196. Many of the missing arrests were for low-level drug crime. What happened was a kind of reset, a replacement of drug-war policing with another mentality that was more risky but more precise. Perhaps, as Bealefeld worries, the new mindset won?t last. But for the moment, it has meant 43,000 people last year who weren?t locked up, who didn?t have a conviction on their record, who were not subjected to the inherent brutality of the system. The message he had wanted to get across to his officers, Bealefeld says, was �that it?s always okay to go after bad guys with guns rather than guys smoking weed.�