By: Lorraine Green Mazerolle, Justin Ready, William Terrill, & Elin Waring

This paper examines the impact of a problem-oriented policing project on serious crime problems in six public housing sites in Jersey City, New Jersey. Representatives from the police department and the local housing authority, social service providers, and public housing tenants formed six problem-solving teams. using systematic documentation of the teams’ activities and calls for police service, we examine changes in serious crime both across and within the six sites over a 2 1/2-year period. We find that problem-oriented policing, as compared with traditional policing strategies used before the problem-oriented policing project, led to fewer serious crime calls for service over time and that two public housing sites in particular succeeded in reducing violent, property, and vehicle-related crimes.

JUSTICE QUARTERLY, Vol. 17 No. 1, March 2000

By: Lorraine Green Mazerolle & William Terrill

Finding effective methods for controlling crime and disorder problems in public housing has been a principal concern for policy makers, researchers, and local agency representatives for many years. Nonetheless, research continues to show that rates of drug and non-drug crime are considerably higher in public housing sites than in other areas of a city (Dunworth and Saiger, 1994; Weisburd and Green, 1995). In Jersey City, for example, public housing sites are chronically identified as being the worse drug markets (Weisburd and Green, 1994, 1995; Weisburd, Green and Ross, 1994) and having the highest levels of violent crime problems in the city (see Center for Crime Prevention Studies, 1994).

Efforts to make public housing safer places to live date back to the 1960s when policy makers found that high-rise public housing projects built in the late 1950s were social and security disasters (see Annan and Skogan, 1992). Since this time, a wide variety of strategies have been implemented to target the persistent crime and social problems that characterize public housing sites. These strategies have included traditional enforcement tactics (Skogan and Annan, 1994; Weisel, 1990a) and changing the physical design of public housing with security issues in mind (Newman, 1973). More recently local police departments, in partnership with local housing authorities, have started to implement problem-oriented policing programs to reduce drug and crime problems (see Dunworth and Saiger, 1994; Gajewski, Green, and Weisburd, 1993; Weisel, 1990b).

Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, Vol. 20 No. 2, 1997, pp. 235-255.