COLUMN: Which side are you on?

From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99 From Michael Brus', "Narcissist's Holiday," Fall '99When historians look back on the 1990s, they will surely consider the revolution in criminology as one of the decade's most significant social trends. That's "criminology," the science, as opposed to "policing," the old seat-of-the-pants approach to crime fighting. Philadelphia, as always, is playing catch-up. For years, Mayor Ed Rendell put off calls for police reform, propping up a nebbish police commissioner willing to take orders from City Hall. Finally, seven years into his term, the mayor installed Commissioner John Timoney, an old Irish cop turned NYPD reformer under Giuliani. Timoney began work a year ago, pledging to modernize a department notorious for its lack of discipline and technical savvy. He promised to make district captains responsible -- on penalty of transfer or dismissal -- for the performance of their officers. And he resolved to tailor police patrols to attack crime "hot spots," using accurate, current crime data. This meant no more undercounting or downgrading of offenses and no more push-pin crime mapping. Because the city charter prevents the commissioner from hiring and firing all but a few deputies, Timoney has had little success reforming the traditional lack of bureaucratic accountability. But he has transformed the Philadelphia Police Department's data-gathering unit into the most advanced in the nation. This "crime analysis and mapping" unit began a little over a year ago with a Wharton computing staffer named Wanda Moore, who was constructing a database of domestic violence incidents in West Philadelphia. She told the PPD's crime analysts that if they helped her construct the database, her department would donate the necessary computers. Out of this database grew a computerized crime mapping system, run by three young techies with advanced degrees in place of the officers running the old electric push-pin unit. These consultants sit in a crammed corner of the Center City police headquarters. They look like kids, although they have graduate degrees in Urban Planning from Penn. They definitely don't look like cops -- their fresh faces, starched shirts and lack of uniforms mark them as outsiders. "We wear a lot of hats," said Kevin Switala, a goateed, bespectacled "information systems analyst" in Timoney's new crime-mapping unit. "We're not just crime analysts, we're cartographers and we're [software] developers," he said, explaining that he and his fellow dataheads modify complex mapping software for use by untrained cops. Officers can log on to the department's Intranet using standard Web browsers and construct maps of crime trends in their district -- analyzing crime patterns by location, month, week, time of day or even shift. This allows a cop to "be a crime analyst [without being] an information systems analyst," Switala said. "That use of technology puts us in the top, oh, .05 percent of the nation." Not even New York's bluecoats can input map parameters on-line, he said. "We have information available to officers that happened just 24 hours ago," he said. "We're pretty proud of that." So far, six of the city's 23 police districts -- primarily those in University City and Center City -- are hooked up. Other districts lack only the money for computers. Switala and his two co-workers print 150-200 crime maps a week, which they use to brief top PPD officials. "Before, you just had a paper trail [of crimes] and you had to visualize [their placement] in space," said Switala. Now the department can create two- and three-dimensional color maps showing crime patterns over time. There is even a video map which, with its pulsating red-and-yellow-colored blotches, looks like an outbreak of measles on the city. Press the return key and rashes of crime will form on one block, then disappear after an application of intensified patrols, then pop up again several blocks away. These reforms are showing results: homicide and auto-theft rates -- two crimes not considered subject to reporting inaccuracies -- have fallen significantly this year. But this is a conservative, working-class city and its institutions -- especially municipal ones -- don't suffer reform without a struggle. And so, late last month, the Fraternal Order of Police got a state arbiter to rule that Timoney's computerized crime mapping office violates union rules. An examiner for the Pennsylvania Labor Relations Board said police brass had improperly taken work from unionized officers by hiring Switala and his co-workers. He said that under the city's contract with the FOP, mapping was the province of sworn officers. Timoney has a year of appeals before the state can shut the computer mappers down. But he faces a more immediate threat: the end of the mayor's term in January. Of the three viable mayoral candidates, only John Street seems likely to keep Timoney on. So when you cast your vote in next month's primary, remember that a vote for John Street is a vote for John Timoney. And a vote for John Timoney is a vote for a scientific approach to safe streets.