Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper on Thursday unveiled a data-driven overhaul of the Police Department that he expects will drive down homicides and assaults by 10 percent over the next 18 months.
The mayor announced that he is hiring the New Jersey-based Hanover Justice Group, led by noted crime-control strategist George Kelling, to guide the effort.
The city also is hiring Jeremy Bronson, the former strategic planning manager at Sun Microsystems in Broomfield, to fill a new $90,000-a- year post of special assistant to the mayor for public safety. Bronson is charged with coordinating a more data-oriented approach to public safety.
The initiative follows months of debate over the effectiveness of the Police Department sparked by news of declining arrest rates. It also comes after the mayor’s first serious challenge by the City Council, which in November revamped his police budget plans.
Hickenlooper said his goal is to arm police with the data they need to pinpoint hot crime areas.
“Rather than simply accepting the status quo or blindly throwing money at perceived problems, we are bringing in outside credentialed experts to analyze our systems and needs and create an action plan for immediate improvements,” he said.
“These strategists have a proven track record in reducing crime and reducing citizen complaints,” Hickenlooper said of the Hanover consultants.
In a later interview, Hickenlooper said he expects the changes will drive down homicides and assaults in the city by 10 percent in the next 18 months. Denver has logged 59 homicides this year, down from 84 at this time last year. For all of 2004, there were 94 homicides. In 2003, there were 73 homicides. Those numbers are up significantly from 2001 and 2002, which saw 53 homicides each year, and 2000, when there were 34.
As of Nov. 23, the city had logged 2,018 aggravated assaults. It had 2,207 aggravated assaults in 2004 and 1,590 in 2003.
Council President Rosemary Rodriguez welcomed the mayor’s announcement, saying that at every meeting she attends, she hears from citizens who are worried about public safety. Last month, the council overrode the mayor’s budget and voted to hire 19 more police officers than he had proposed. The mayor had urged the council to wait to see if new reforms would make police more effective.
The Denver Police Foundation agreed to pay the $75,000, six-month contract for the Hanover Justice Group, sparing the city the use of any tax funds.
The consultants are led by Kelling, a professor of criminal justice at Rutgers University in Newark, N.J. He helped develop the “broken windows” crime- fighting strategy that former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani credits with drastically cutting New York’s crime in the 1990s. The theory contends that unchecked disorder, such as urban decay and minor crimes, breed additional crime and further disorder.
“Unlike many other cities that we are working in, Denver is not in a state of crisis,” said Michael Wagers, a member of the consulting team and executive director of the Police Institute, a crime-fighting think tank based at Rutgers.
Wagers, who has been a consultant for the Los Angeles Police Department, said the Hanover team hopes to make the Denver Police Department “a model for the rest of the country.”
The consulting team includes Robert Wasserman, a former chief of staff of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy and a research fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The staff director of the Camden Commission of Public Safety in New Jersey, Wasserman has helped put in place reforms that reduced crime by 20 percent in Camden.
“The key elements that make a difference are rapidly getting data on what’s happening so you can spot hot spots, trends and get officers on those dots,” Wasserman said.
Denver Police Chief Gerry Whitman said the consultants are so well respected in the law-enforcement field that their strategies are taught to those wanting to become sergeants in Denver.
“These are the people who wrote the stuff they are tested on,” Whitman said.
He said it can take weeks for Denver police officers to get the type of data they need to effectively fight crime. When they show up for their shift, officers should be armed with data that tells them what crime trends have been developing in their patrol area, Whitman said.
Instead, they must rifle through paper reports to get an idea of what has occurred and rely on gut instincts, the chief said.
The move to improve data collection will coincide with plans by the city to use some of the $22 million budgeted for public safety technology improvements to put new laptops in patrol cars.
“There’s a delay of weeks to make decisions on,” the chief said. “That has to stop.”
In October, the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Operations Research Systems Engineering Management senior class, made up of 10 cadets, also began assisting the Police Department. The cadets are studying patrol operations and investigation policies to see if there are ways to make officers more efficient. Their review will not be concluded until May.
In 2001, the city spent more than $400,000 on another consulting report addressing inefficiencies in the Police Department. Whitman said the Hanover consultants will address issues related strictly to crime- fighting strategies, while the other report dealt more with management practices.
Staff writer Christopher N. Osher can be reached at 303-820-1747 or cosher@denverpost.com.
