::Click here to view the community policing guidebook::
A West campus professor is battling gang crime all around the country without ever leaving his desk.
Scott Decker, professor and director of the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice, recently published a guidebook titled “Strategies to Address Gang Crime” at the request of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, part of the Department of Justice.
“The COPS office asked me to find a way to engage community policing and response to gangs together,” Decker said.
The office was looking for someone to create a method local police departments can use to handle and diminish gang crime across the country, said Cynthia Pappas, a COPS senior social-science analyst.
Pappas first met Decker when he was consulting with the Los Angeles Police Department on gang crime and said she liked his simple community approach to complicated nationwide problems.
“Scott is great about looking at a specific problem, breaking it down and leading local law enforcement to handle it,” Pappas said, “We asked him [to author the handbook] because he is a national expert.”
Decker spent 29 years in the criminology department at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. It was there that he saw a disconnect between response to gang crime and community policing, he said.
Currently, most jurisdictions working against gang crime don’t have an easy-to-use model for handling problems, Decker said.
“There had been real growth, successful growth, in community policing,” he said, “So when the COPS office asked if I would use community policing to help bridge that gap, we came up with the idea for a guidebook.”
Community policing, also called neighborhood policing, focuses on crime and social disorder using traditional law-enforcement as well as prevention measures and keeping residents informed, according to the COPS Web site.
Decker said the community-police partnership is key.
“Police officers and the community are able to respond to gangs together,” Decker said.
Based on this idea, Decker began working on the guidebook in 2004; it was published in April 2008.
The handbook is based on Decker’s “SARA” model of community policing: scanning a problem, analyzing its effects on the community, responding quickly and effectively and assessing whether the problem has been solved.
The procedure is simple but very effective, Decker said.
In the process of developing the model, he visited more than three dozen cities around the country to study gang crime.
The San Diego Police Department in particular influenced the guidebook because it uses a similar method to address a wide host of problems from drug markets to neighborhood nuisances, Decker said.
“The SARA model is very versatile,” he said.
Although marketing of the guide won’t begin until mid-September, the model has already become a resource for police departments around the country.
Kenneth Lavallee, chief of the Lowell Police Department in northeastern Massachusetts, said his department has been very successful in applying Decker’s problem-solving method.
“It really builds trust within the community,” Lavallee said. “It allows our officers to engage victims and witnesses and actively stop gang crime in all areas.”
Recently Lowell police were able to take 14 firearms, more than $100,000 in cash and a large amount of narcotics off the streets by employing the SARA method, Lavallee said.
“Fourteen active gang members were arrested after investigation,” he said.
Decker expects the guidebook and SARA model to continue to find success.
“It is not an academic project,” he said. “It was meant to be a very approachable resource that can be used by law enforcement at all ranks.”
Reach the reporter at tessa.muggeridge@asu.edu
