Biting the bullet - crime policy - Washington, D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood, Jr - Cover Story

For some people it's the fear that does it: a reluctance to go out after dark, a constant tendency to glance back, a lump in the throat as the children go off to school. They may not call it fear; they might talk about taking precautionary measures or feeling a certain loss of control, a heightened sense of vulnerability that comes when the violence claims someone like them, when crime strikes closer to home than the "bad neighborhoods" generally are. But it's fear all right, and whether it paralyzes or merely cripples, it changes how people live their lives.

For others it's not so much the fear of what might happen as much as the painful awareness of what already is happening - to their neighborhoods and schools, to their children, to an entire generation. It's realizing that for kids with easy access to guns and no shot at the American dream, life and death don't mean what they used to; under the laws of the street a mean look, a gold chain, a disrespectful remark - or absolutely nothing - can get a person killed.

It's knowing that a lot of 13- and 14-year-olds have buried more of their own friends than their grandparents have, that attending the funerals of their classmates has become for them more a social event than a ritual of mourning, a foreshadowing more than a warning. It's bearing witness to a chilling change in those junior-high-school kids: While they used to gossip about what so-and-so wore to the latest wake or funeral, now they discuss the hip-hop fashions their bodies will have on at their own open-casket memorial services.

But whether the emotional, sometimes subconscious, stimulus is fear or horror, the cognitive response is often the same: A perception that crime and violence threaten to destroy our society, a gut-level feeling that something must be done about it and, perhaps, a realization that whatever we have been doing seems not to be working; maybe we should try something different.

For ex-cop Isaac Fulwood Jr. it was both: The District of Columbia chief of police saw all around him a growing culture of violence, and he feared that additional thousands of lives would be shattered and wasted. So after 28 years on the force, after locking up tens of thousands of drug dealers and murderers, after putting more cops on the street and implementing new methods of policing and - after all that - seeing still more years of record-breaking murder totals and having his hometown designated the nation's "murder capital," Fulwood called it quits.

The most powerful law enforcement officer in the nation's capital did not surrender his badge, but traded it in for what he believed would be a more effective anti-crime tool. Explaining that he wants to prevent crime rather than merely respond to it, and emphasizing the importance of creating "better opportunities for our children," Fulwood said he would become director of the District's nascent youth anti-crime programs.

"It has become abundantly clear law enforcement alone could not cure the scourge of drugs and violence," Fulwood said in a tearful resignation speech. Pained by "the record number of young black men killed needlessly," Fulwood said he was "tired of seeing black children locked up every five minutes. And it's not making any significant impact."

The time has come, Fulwood says, for politicians and society alike to bite the bullet, to trade easy responses for real solutions, to get angry enough and compassionate enough and smart enough to address the causes of violent crime: poverty, guns, drugs, and "a value system that is totally out of kilter."

While many of the programs Fulwood advocates are new, his emphasis on the need for social and economic crime prevention is not; presidential commissions and federal laws sounded a similar call in the late 1960s. But the sense of political urgency that had been spawned by urban riots soon faded; the War on Poverty approach to social programs fell into disrepute; and the go-go politics and economics of the 1980s - with drastic cuts in federal aid to cities and states and increasing gaps between rich and poor - along with the advent of crack cocaine on city streets, only fed the problem. The whole approach, according to one criminologist, has never been given a fair chance.

For years advocacy groups, criminologists, community activists and private foundations have been working to change anti-crime priorities. They've tried to convince Congress and local and state governments to support new educational, mentoring and job-training programs for children; social services for disadvantaged families; gun control; drug treatment; and sentencing alternatives. But without a strong political constituency to lobby for such programs at the national level, their scattered successes have been limited to the local level.

This spring's riots in Los Angeles seemed to reawaken the country - at least momentarily - to the needs of the nation's cities and the desperation of many young people. But calls for enterprise zones, job-training programs and other aid measures soon were lost in election-year politics.

The Reagan and Bush administrations adopted a traditional, short-term anti-crime policy, waging "war" on drug dealers and emphasizing more police, more arrests, more prisons and stiffer sentences, including executions. And, for all his talk of change, President-elect Bill Clinton's approach is not much different. He wants to put 100,000 new police officers on the streets, create "prisons that work," and maintain his support for capital punishment. He also supports a waiting period for hand-gun purchases, programs to make schools and public housing projects more safe, and federal funds to cities that establish community-based policing programs and expanded drug treatment services. -

At the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, members of Congress often see anti-crime bills that emphasize prisons and more frequent use of the death penalty as good vote-getters back home. Crime prevention programs, on the other hand, take time to work, cost money and usually are promoted as social programs.

Voters "put the politician in the position" of championing policies that don't work, Fulwood says. "Everybody says, |Hey, you better stand up and talk tough about crime and violence or we're not going to reelect you.'" As a result, short-term, "lock 'em up" laws win out and "nothing happens. The problem continues on and on," he says.

Meanwhile the District, scores of other communities, and an entire generation of youth are being ravaged by violent crime. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), one in every 28 black males born in 1987 is likely to be murdered.

Fulwood understands the emotional and political obstacles to a long-term, preventive approach to crime and violence. "I've gone to funerals where somebody's kid has been murdered, somebody's husband or somebody's wife has been murdered," he says in an interview.

"It is difficult to stand there and talk about [alternatives] in that context. This person is sitting there in deep pain ... and people are scared half to death. It becomes very difficult [to talk about anything other than apprehending the criminal] when you look at these communities that are experiencing murder, where kids are jumping on the floor because some random bullet is fired through the window."

But unless society begins working to prevent crime by investing in its inner-city children, Fulwood believes, there simply will be thousands more of such funerals.

The outgoing police chief also knows from experience that it is particularly difficult to implement such programs in the District of Columbia. The nation's highest murder rate calls out for instant solutions, and members of Congress - temporary residents and self-appointed watchdogs of the Distxict - can impose their own policies on the District's elected officials and 607,000 residents.

The same day Fulwood announced his resignation from the police force, a suburban Maryland woman driving her infant daughter to preschool was killed when two District males car-jacked her BMW and dragged her a mile and a half. That single crime, more than the hundreds of murders of black kids in inner-city Washington, horrified the community, spawned wide-spread fears of carjacking and incited demands for police and political action.

Within four weeks both Congress and the District, in what Fulwood calls "another poor political response," had passed legislation establishing harsh penalties for carjacking. Meanwhile Congress cut $30 million from the District budget - money that had been destined for the very youth programs Fulwood will direct - and passed legislation forcing the District to hold a referendum vote to reimpose the death penalty. (On November 3 District voters defeated the measure, which would have been the most severe in the country, by a 2-to- 1 margin.)

During the same week in October, however, Congress failed once again to pass an anti-crime bill, largely because it would have imposed waiting periods and background checks on hand-gun purchasers. For all their tough talk, members of Congress "don't have the political will to face the issue of guns," Fulwood says.

Fulwood works hard to come across as motivated rather than exasperated. "People in law enforcement and corrections and the court system, including judges, have got to step up and say, |Look, we've gotta do some of these other things if we want to succeed,"' he says.

"It can't be purely the police trying to lock people up to solve the problem because it doesn't work," he adds. "It just doesn't. We have to do something about guns ... and we have to address these social problems for us to have any chance of making communities safe."

Legions of criminologists, ministers, social workers and justice advocates agree with Fulwood, but until recently it's been difficult to explain to many Americans - and many American politicians - why they should care.

"We need to redefine the crime problem," says James Fyfe, a professor of criminal justice and senior research fellow at Temple University who was a New York City cop for 16 years. "It's an inner-city problem. It's a problem of young black kids killing each other. It a problem of poverty; the problem of kids being born to young, single, uneducated parents; kids growing up without love or affection, without knowing what it is to be close to another person; kids growing up without beliefs, with no value for life.

"Kids raised in the ghetto in effect are being raised in a crime factory," Fyfe continues. "To do something about crime over the long haul, we have to do something about the conditions of the inner city."

For members of Congress, white Americans, suburban residents and others who may find that definition even less compelling, Fulwood has a message: "You can't run far enough, because it will get you, too." It might "get" you as an actual victim of crime, scare you into moving or buying a gun or investing in expensive car- or home-alarm systems. Or the increased costs of law enforcement and prisons could threaten to bankrupt your local government. But, one way or another, he says, it will strike home.

Fyfe, who has known Ike Fulwood for several years, hopes Fulwood's action will lend new weight to the calls for a more comprehensive approach to the violent crime problem. "This is a big, tough cop leaving the force sounding like a bleeding-heart liberal," he says. "Everyone should listen to Fulwood's message very carefully."

However, the message coming out of official Washington has been quite different. In July Attorney General William Barr released the Justice Department's latest anti-crime proposal. While "Combating Violent Crime" contained 24 "recommendations to strengthen criminal justice," its prescription was for more of the same: Arrest more people and put more of them in prison for a longer time.

In a memo delivered along with the report to President Bush, Barr boasted of the nation's burgeoning law enforcement, criminal justice and corrections systems. From fiscal years 1981 to 1992, the Justice Department's budget increased more than 345 percent, while the Federal Bureau of Prisons' budget was bolstered 470 percent. Since 1989 the Justice Department has hired more than 800 additional FBI agents, 700 drug enforcement agents and 1,200 federal prosecutors. Since 1988 federal prison capacity has increased 62 percent and is "on its way to a 228 percent increase," Barr said, as if proud of the fact.

"Common sense tells us that incapacitating these chronic offenders will reduce the level of violence in society," Barr wrote the president. "The challenge for the 1990s is to build upon and increase these partial successes of the 1980s."

But the men and women on the front lines of law enforcement, as well as hundreds of thousands of crime victims their families, may wonder just what "partial successes" Barr is talking about. After all, statistics collected and reported by an arm of Barr's own department reveal skyrocketing crime rates.

According to the FBI, the national rate for violent crime reached an all-time high last year, an increase of 24 percent since 1987. For the second year in a row the United States also set a new murder record with an estimated 24,020 violent deaths; homicide now is the nation's tenth leading cause of death, according to Surgeon General Antonia Novello.

For juveniles the violent crime rate is even worse. Gun murders among black males 15 to 19 years old increased 71 percent from 1987 to 1989, according to the CDC, and since 1965 the arrest rate for juveniles charged with violent crimes has more than tripled. The FBI reports that homicide now is the leading cause of death for young black men.

If success is measured in the numbers of people behind bars, the attorney general was right to boast. Due largely to the much-publicized "war on drugs" and the adoption of mandatory minimum sentencing, particularly for drug offenders, the number of inmates in the nation's prisons and jails increased 143 percent from 1980 to '91, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

With more than 1.2 million citizens behind bars, the United States now has the highest incarceration rate of any industrialized nation; South Africa ranks second. The country spends some $24 billion a year to operate its prisons and jails, according to the Sentencing Project. And with most prisons severely overcrowded, $10 billion in new prison construction is on the drawing boards.

This "short-sighted policy of incarceration ... and tough law enforcement against street [drug] addicts ... makes the world safe for politicians, but it doesn't address the problems of community violence," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency in San Francisco.

"The current strategy is like trying to deal with AIDS by building more hospices," says ex-cop James Fyfe.

The emphasis on incarceration also has "squandered the credibility of the criminal justice system by making prison so common as to make it ineffective," Krisberg says. A study conducted by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives found that on an average day in Baltimore last year, 56 percent of the city's men ages 18 to 35 were either in prison, on parole or probation, awaiting trial or hiding from the law.

On many inner-city streets, "doing time" is a well-worn badge of honor. "People look at crime through very middle-class lenses," Fyfe says. "They talk about deterrence. They don't realize that in the inner city, costs and benefits are different. Going to the joint is a prestige enhancer."

Krisberg and others expect violent crime actually to increase over the next several years because of current "voodoo criminology" policies; a larger population of children entering the crime-prone teen years; a generation of teenagers raised in poverty; a dramatic increase in domestic violence; and the increasing availability of high-caliber guns.

"I've designed more lock-up programs than probably most [police] chiefs in this country," Fulwood says, "and I know that they just don't necessarily work." Referring to an anti-drug program called Operation Clean Sweep that netted some 50,000 arrests in two years in the late '80s, Fulwood says, "You know, it didn't have a long-term impact. The homicide rate continued to escalate, as did the level of violence."

Guns are the biggest culprit, Fulwood and others say. In the District of Columbia, which has both extraordinarily strict gun control laws and the nation's highest murder rate - weapons are simply brought in from other jurisdictions - guns are so much a part of the street culture that T-shirts featuring handguns, some complete with real or designer bullet holes, became the fashion rage among junior-high and high school students this fall.

For the District and other cities, guns and drugs proved a deadly combination in the mid- to late-1980s. In D.C., the upward spiral of violence began in 1986 when crack cocaine hit the streets. From 1987 to 1991 the number of murders increased 117 percent, setting four consecutive annual homicide records. Eighty percent of the District's 489 murders last year were committed with handguns.

The number of District shootings has actually decreased, as has the proportion related to drugs; but because of the increasing popularity and deadly firepower of semi-automatic weapons, more shooting victims are dying. "It started as a byproduct of the drug trade, but the carrying of weapons has now become commonplace," says Adele Harrell, a senior research analyst at Washington's Urban Institute. "It's like Nike sneakers or something: No one wants to be without one. So when disputes occur, what might have been a fight becomes a shooting."

In addition to the well-armed drug dealers and neighborhood "crews" who fought each other for a stake in the shrinking drug market, teen-aged boys began shooting one another over a "dissing" or a leather jacket. Bystanders got caught in crossfire, and others were shot just because the assailant "felt like killing somebody." High schools have had to install metal detectors.

Fulwood speaks with horror of District kids who have become so desensitized by everyday life in their neighborhoods that "when they see people with their brains blown out they can laugh about it, they can smile about it."

One change instituted by Fulwood - taking officers out of their squad cars and putting them on neighborhood foot patrols - seems to have made a dent in the killing; the number of 1992 murders thus far is slightly off last year's record-setting pace. And churches and community activists have organized anti-crime rallies and patrols and sponsored nighttime basketball games to keep youths off the street. But all too often the problem seems beyond anyone's control; in just nine hours of a recent 48-hour moratorium on violence declared by local churches, five people were killed - more than on any other day this year.

This plague of guns and violence is not unique to the District; the Los Angeles Times called 1991 "the year of the gun" in Southern California, and one out of four U.S. high school students carried a gun to class at least once last month, according to the Centers for Disease Control. In June the Journal of the American Medical Association declared gun violence a public health emergency.

The medical profession, criminologists, educators, community activists and members of every major law enforcement organization have sounded the alarm: The violence will continue unchecked until the nation does something to control guns. Opinion polls show that 95 percent of Americans support some form of gun control, and at least 26 states and scores of cities and counties have imposed waiting periods on some gun purchases, banned the sale of assault weapons or both.

Yet Congress still refuses to pass some form of national gun control, and without it many state and local laws can't work. While guns sales are illegal in the District, for example, weapons can be purchased easily in neighboring Maryland and Virginia. The Brady bill, which would impose a waiting period on handgun purchasers, was buried in the omnibus crime bill that in early October was defeated by threats of a Republican filibuster. "This is about G-U-N-S," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), "and the power of the [National Rifle Association]."

With an anti-gun control lobbying budget of more than $18 million a year and a membership of some three million gun owners, the NRA remains one of the most feared lobby groups on Capitol Hill. It contributes millions of dollars to congressional candidates and has spent more than half a million dollars in independent expenditure campaigns to defeat candidates who support gun control.

The NRA argues that Congress should focus instead on crime control. But the two go hand-in-hand. "It is just nonsensical," says Chief Fulwood, "that we can sit and say, |We're tough on crime, we're going to lock everybody up, we want the death penalty and everything else,' and then we say, |Okay, fellas, by the way, you can go buy any machine gun you want, you can buy any kind of gun you want, you can have them, that's part of the American dream.' You know, as if you need these guns to go out and slaughter human beings.

"That's the dichotomy about crime and violence," he continues. "If we're serious [about crime], let's do something about guns. Let's say to America, |Hey, the day of the Wild West is over.' Because anybody can get a gun. Anybody."

To break the cycle of violence and crime, experts argue, American families, churches and community organizations, as well as local, state and federal governments, must move to protect children from the ravages of inner-city life. It is those children who are hit hardest by increasing rates of poverty, domestic abuse, urban decay, job loss, and a popular culture that continues to glorify and glamorize violence.

"The legacy of the last 12 years is children who grew up without a safety net," says the National Council on Crime and Delinquency's Barry Krisberg.

"All this youth crime is clear evidence that we're doing a lousy job in raising the next generation," says C. Margaret Hall, a Georgetown University sociologist. "We need to change our priorities."

Crime prevention, youth education and training programs cost money; while roughly $1.5 billion a year would put more police officers on the streets and expand drug treatment in prisons, it would cost $10 billion a year for a comprehensive effort to educate and train inner-city children. But proponents argue that the money will be spent one way or another; it can be invested in programs that will enrich society and keep youth out of crime, or governments will be forced to spend even more - about $24 billion this year - to keep criminals off the streets.

Fulwood computes the costs of building a prison cell block, keeping someone in prison for a year and other crime-response costs and concludes that "even if you don't believe in the theory of prevention, economically it makes more sense to [invest] on the front side. Because if we save the person they will become a taxpaying citizen and we will reap some benefit.

"If we took half the money it costs to incarcerate people," he says, "and committed it to quality education and health care and decent housing for people, the benefit would be enormous, we'd turn the money over five times in every neighborhood."

As director of the District's new Youth Initiatives Office, Fulwood will oversee programs that target children at younger ages than ever before, programs that also reach out to families and single mothers, and offer more health care services to the poor. Drug treatment and job-training programs will be expanded and targeted at younger residents, and a whole array of self-esteem building, pregnancy prevention, conflict mediation and job-training programs designed for high-risk children ages 10 to 15.

"My fundamental goal is to try to get kids turned around and to get them to believe in themselves," he says. "To reinvest in the dream that they can make a difference, that their lives mean something and to get them to adopt different values: the value of education, the value of caring and giving back."

Ellen O'Connor, D.C.'s chief financial officer, notes that the District's $40 million budget for youth initiatives programs is virtually the same amount it spends on juvenile detention services.

"We're spending $39 million on only 1,800 kids [in detention facilities], and for $40 million we can reach" most of the District's young children, she says. The District spends roughly $252 million on its 4,700-member police force and more than $255 million to operate its prisons and jails, according to budget analysts.

While the District's programs are a step in the right direction, Fulwood and others say much, much more must be done. Day care services for children of single mothers, better health care for inner-city children, improved schools, support for families, mentoring, after-school programs and job-training opportunities all are key, experts say.

The private Eisenhower Foundation, an outgrowth of the Eisenhower Violence Commission established by President Johnson in 1968, has called for a massive "reconstruction of urban life" that would cost up to $10 billion a year. Almost half the cost is for expansion of the federal Head Start preschool program. After extensive studies and demonstration projects in inner cities, the foundation concluded that "intensive preschool appears to be among the most cost-effective crime and drug abuse prevention programs yet devised." The remainder of the funds would be targeted at job-training, drug treatment and counseling programs.

Poverty breeds crime, according to conventional wisdom, and life in the District - where as much as 80 percent of violent crime occurs in or around dilapidated public housing projects - confirms it. The Eisenhower Foundation's prescription for "youth investment and community reconstruction" also calls improved housing and public school reform; those programs not, however, included in its $10 billion price tag.

Clinton's plan to put 100,000 new police officers on the nation's street leaves Fulwood and many criminologists unimpressed. Fyfe, the former police officer who calls law enforcement "an institution of last resort," says, "crime prevention is not about cops. Where crime and violence are the lowest there are no cops.

"The absence of crime is not because of a heavy police presence," Fyfe says, "but because people there have a sense of community, a sense of ownership. They have things to lose. You see heavy street crime in places where people have nothing to lose. The simple answer [to the crime problem] is that you have to give people something to lose."

Young people must also be given something to hope for, Krisberg says, and jobs and the prospect of life outside the ghetto are at the top of the list. Providing decent employment opportunities for teenagers, who now resort to drug dealing or other crimes, could go a long way toward resolving some of their frustrations and lowering the crime rate, he says.

Krisberg also points to the violence in rap music, music videos, movies and television as a trigger for violent crime. The popular culture desensitizes children to violence, teaches them to brutalize women, and leaves them with no realistic understanding of what violence does to people, Fulwood says.

The Center to Prevent Handgun Violence has developed a curriculum to help children from preschool through high school prevent gun violence, better understand anger, resolve disputes without fighting and make sense of the violence they see portrayed in the media. Straight Talk About Risks (STAR) currently is being tested in five public school systems, and if it works will be made available to others.

But Krisberg and others foresee several years of increasing violence on the nation's streets no matter what. There has been a dramatic increase in what studies show to be one of the most accurate predictors of violent behavior: violence suffered or observed by children. From 1981 to 1991 the number of reported child abuse cases increased 120 percent, according to figures from the American Humane Association and the National Committee for Prevention of Child Abuse.

The nation's top priority, Krisberg says, should be a "massive national campaign on the prevention and reduction of family violence."

In the meantime, the criminal justice system should do more than merely "warehouse" criminals, experts argue. Since much of the nation's crime is related to drug addiction, Fulwood and others have called for "drug treatment on demand"; Clinton would help local communities expand their drug treatment programs with federal funds. Princeton Professor John Dilulio Jr. believes the federal government should spend $250 million a year for drug treatment programs in state prisons.

The Washington-based Sentencing Project works with county and state judges and corrections systems to devise alternatives to prison. Incarceration is expensive - roughly $20,000 a year per inmate - and often inappropriate to the individual or the offense, says assistant director Marc Mauer. House arrest, work release programs, victim restitution, community service and supervised drug treatment are less expensive and more effective, he says.

There is broad agreement among law enforcement officials and crime and youth experts on what needs to be done about the violent crime problem but, so far, little evidence of the political will or commitment to doing it - at least at the national level. Several states are experimenting with alternatives to prison, and some local and state governments are implementing more comprehensive, preventive approaches to crime and violence.

"Now we need a few national politicians willing to show some leadership," Krisberg says.

The presidential campaign did conclude without any "Willie Hortons," and now that the election season is over, law enforcement officials and others are hoping that a Clinton administration, a new Congress and state and local elected officials will begin to do something real about the causes of crime.

Meanwhile, citizens who've had enough of fear and horror are working to take their neighborhoods back. Whether patrolling their streets in bright orange caps or marching to city hall, community groups are demanding safety and prevention.

And Ike Fulwood, for one, will continue to do his part. "I don't want to be viewed as a mushy person...," says the burly police chief, but it's easy to "feel defeated, to feel overwhelmed by crime and violence. We've gotta energize people to believe that we can in fact make a difference."

COPYRIGHT 1992 Common Cause Magazine
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group