Fighting Crime in the Next Millennium
The primary obligation of any government, the crux of the social contract, is to provide for the safety of its citizens. Governments that cannot ensure public safety will inevitably lose the confidence of the governed and all of the other objectives of such governments become meaningless and unachievable. After all, what good is an efficient transportation infrastructure if our streets are unsafe? What use is an effective public education system if our schools are riddled with violence?
In Colorado , we have made significant progress in the fight against crime, with most trends pointed in the right direction. But, as any witness to recent events in Colorado will tell you, we still have a long way to go.
The fight against crime is three-pronged - prevention of crime, apprehension and punishment of criminals, and prevention of recidivism or repeat offenses. By empowering communities and neighborhoods and equipping law enforcement with the tools of technology, we can substantially reduce the crime that plagues our society.
The experience of the last few years demonstrates that the best crime-fighting strategies take place on the streets. Tough and effective initiatives, that involve citizens and are implemented at the local level, have lowered crime rates in Colorado and across the country.
Nonetheless, crime rates remain at historic highs. What's more, over 50 percent of violent crime in America occurs at about three percent of addresses, a phenomenon that holds true in urban, suburban and rural settings.
Community justice is a comprehensive strategy that values the role that communities play in reducing crime. Community justice programs put more police, probation officers and parole officials , and even prosecutors on the streets and in the neighborhoods that need their help , rather than behind a wall of bureaucracy downtown .
Community justice programs result in higher levels of public safety and confidence, less citizen fear and cooperative, more productive relationships between residents and the justice and law enforcement systems designed to protect them. Increased familiarity and trust between citizens and law enforcement also decreases criticism and hostility from neighborhoods, particularly high-crime areas, where police-community relations may already be poor.
Law enforcement and justice officials who are assigned to specific neighborhoods become integrated into the communities they protect and are less likely to become entangled in the conflicts that lead to allegations of police brutality, abuse of discretion or prosecutorial misconduct.
Another community-based strategy - "restorative justice" - has also been demonstrated to significantly reduce crime. In a nutshell, restorative justice is a method by which neighborhoods and communities take charge administering justice for nonviolent offenses. Offenders are confronted with the damage they do to their victims - face-to-face when appropriate. The perpetrators are forced to accept personal responsibility for their acts, make retribution and are monitored before and after their sentences are complete to determine if they are prepared for reintegration into the community.
Restorative justice compensates the community by redressing the damage inflicted by crime. Just as important, it reinforces the community's basic values - not just punishing and warehousing offenders in an overburdened corrections system and then ignoring them before and after their sentences.
To promote these strategies throughout Colorado, state government should get off the sidelines and empower local communities with financial and technical assistance to fight crime in our most dangerous neighborhoods. Through a grant application system, county and municipal executives will be asked to identify communities in each jurisdiction and design locally-administered programs to prevent crime, restore the community and prevent repeat offenses.
Hundreds of previously fragmented efforts will be coordinated, sparking unprecedented cooperation among government agencies and mobilizing thousands of citizens. Maybe most important of all, once in place, these community justice teams will be held responsible for overall levels of crime and public safety, rather than the conventional statistical conviction rates. With local empowerment comes local accountability - ineffective programs will not be allowed to persist.
Local law enforcement officers should also have state-of-the-art tools in the fight against crime. Breakthrough technologies are quickly adopted by businesses. It is time for the public sector to aggressively pursue technological innovations to protect citizens.
My New Democrat Caucus colleague, State Rep. Jennifer Veiga (D-Denver), successfully pushed a measure though the legislature last session, expanding the taking of DNA samples from sex offenders to criminals who have committed murder, assault, kidnapping, arson, burglary and aggravated robbery. The idea ranked as the most popular initiative of the legislative session in a statewide poll, generating support from 81 percent of Coloradans.
And, as evidenced by the recent apprehension of Larry Britt, a man accused of murdering his ex-wife in Colorado 25 years ago, DNA fingerprinting can be the tool to crack otherwise unsolvable crimes. We should build on this success and require all convicted felons, at their own expense, to provide DNA samples to the Colorado Bureau of Investigations.
Collecting this information and cross-referencing it with other state and federal data bases will make it possible to establish even more links between crime scenes across the state and nation, more quickly identifying offenders. DNA technology will help law enforcement catch offenders before they can inflict more harm on Colorado's citizens and communities.
Finally, we can use technology to reduce criminal recidivism by compelling probationers and parolees to kick the drug habit that so frequently drives repeat offenses and by requiring them to submit to DNA testing upon release.
Convicts who are allowed to leave prison and resume their drug habits are almost destined to reoffend. We must increase drug testing of parolees and probationers and enforce graduated sanctions with teeth to compel them to kick the drug habit and minimize the risk of recidivism.
Also, parolees should be required to submit to DNA testing as a condition of their release. Parolees should be told that their DNA will be submitted to all state and local databases so that wherever they go, if they commit a crime, they will be caught and punished.
This comprehensive agenda of empowering local governments to put more law enforcement officials on the streets, holding offenders accountable to the community and using state-of-the-art crime-fighting tools can help us prevent crime, catch and punish offenders, and minimize repeat offenses . We should get these initiatives done and continue working with local law enforcement to make Colorado the safest state in the nation.
State Rep. Dan Grossman is a member of the New Democrat Caucus, a group of state legislators advocating new ideas and the Democratic Party's historic commitment to economic growth, personal responsibility, community, individual liberty and equal opportunity.