9 OPINION Page 4 Wednesday, February 18, 1981 The Michigan Daily L Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan Police and community:A new partnership against city crime Vol. XCI, No. 119 420 Maynard St. Ann Arbor, MI148109 Editorials represent a majority opinion of the Daily's Editorial Board Nazi comeback almost laughable- T FIRST IT SEEMS almost laugh- able. Gerald Carlson, an ex- Nazi, announced that he will take a leave of absence from his work as a private detective to run for the seat in Congress vacated by David Stockman. Stockman, of course, resigned from Congress to accept his current position as President Reagan's budget direc- tor. It seems laughable that a person could seriously run for Congress in 1981 on a "white rights" platform. Carlson says he hopes to represent Michigan's 4th District in Congress and defend the ideals of white supremacy. Unfor- tunately, however, Carlson cannot be laughed off as a lunatic. Sadly, he must be taken seriously. Last year, Carlson won the Republican nomination . in the Congressional race in Michigan's 15th District. Furthermore, in the general election that year, Carlson received 32 but not quite percent of that District's vote. Why a respectable number of the 15th District voters would flock behind such a man is a mystery, albeit a frightening one. The open support of an admitted racist and Nazi is reminiscent of pre-war Germany when the fledgling Nazi party was just beginning to build power. It is hard to believe that, after all we have learned, a former Nazi would win the nomination a major American political party. But, his surprising political success is merely a part of a larger growing trend to support racist organizations. The comeback of the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, and even the Moral Majority are all symbolic of growing self-glorifying racism. Carlson will not likely win Stock- man's seat, but the concern over the implications of his past success and his current aspirations remains. A year ago senior citizens in downtown Atlanta's Capitol Homes housing project lived in terror of a band of marauding teen-age youths who snatched purses in broad daylight, scaled walls at night to invade bedrooms, and kept tenants - old and young, black and white - cowering in their homes after dark. Now the robberies and burglaries have ceased. Residents safely come and go pretty much at any time of the day or evening. "EVERYTHING HAS changed," says Carrie Copeland, president of the Capitol Homes Tenant Association. "You can walk through here at night. Anybody can." The key to the transformation - a minor miracle in these days of rising crime - lay in a new policy which enabled terants and police to work together to end what amounted to an eight-year crime wave in the public housing project. The Atlanta Police Department is pioneering the new approach, and police argue it goes well beyond the old public relations effort undertaken in the name of "community relations" in the mid-1960s. Many have argued these efforts seldom tran- slated liberal rhetoric into actual police policy. "There has to be a change in power relations," argues Lee Brown, the city's Commissioner of Public Safety. "We have to share power with the people we serve." AT A TIME WHEN pessimism is the rule in most discussions of crime - and political leaders talk increasingly of hiring more police and building more prisons as the only plausible responses to an insoluble problem - Brown is arguing that radically improved community-police cooperation can lead to ac- tual crime prevention. But he claims that such cooperation becomes possible only after a fundamental transformation in police attitudes. According to Brown, it was the reduction in police shootings of citizens and the newly cooperative posture of Atlanta police toward the community - which set the climate for the effort of tenants and police at Capitol Homes. The Capitol Homes effort began last May at the initiation of tenant association leaders, who invited Brown to a meeting on crime problems. SOON, TENANT association leaders began walking the grounds twice nightly. Leaflets were circulated by the tenant's group to residents, urging them to keep an eye out for neighbors and to look after their children with special care. And a bargain was struck with residents whereby police agreed to respond to citizen calls with special vigilance By Patrick Glynn in exchange for information about crimes. With the assurance of tenant support, meanwhile, police initiated foot patrols in the area. They spoke to families of the youths concerned. Some arrests were made. "The message went out," says Brown, "that crime would not be tolerated either by the com- munity or by the police." In two months, says Copeland, the situation was completely tur- ned around. "The police department is won- derful," she says now. Yet relations between citizens and police in Atlanta were not always so amicable. Copeland notes that when the crime problem first started in the housing project eight years ago, residents would never have contem- plated turning to the police for help. At that time, police-community relations were tense, citizen complaints of police brutality were common, and officer-involved shootings were a frequent occurence. POLICE POLICIES changed in 1974 with the mayoral election of Maynard Jackson, who ran on an anti-police brutality platform. Brown was appointed Commissioner in 1978. Under his leadership, the Atlanta department initiated a variety of programs designed to improve relations between citizens and police and to involve the community in crime prev- ention efforts. And it appears now to be paying off. The Atlanta experience bucks a nation- wide trend toward police-community an- tagonism. According to the U.S. Justice Department's Community Relations Service, citizen allegations of excessive use of force by police nearly doubled between FY 1979 and FY 1980, from 69 to 133. Complaints of racial incidents between police and citizens rose similarly from 108 to 206. Between 1965 and 1975 millions of federal. dollars poured into police departments, bringing extensive improvements in the technological "hardware" of policing. "THE IMPROVEMENTS in hardware were useful," says Gerald Caplan, former head of the Justice Department's National In- stitute for Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice. "But it shows that even the best run bureaucracies don't make much of a dif- ference in controlling crime." Hiring more police, he claims, will not reduce crime. "That's just the politicians' non-response," he says. Brown stresses that in real life police do not actually "solve" crimes. Instead, he says, they depend almost entirely on citizens to report incidents, identify criminals, and ultimately testify in court. Caplan, who has served as consultant on crime to Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (R- Utah), notes that the issue of race is central in the conflict. But while he agrees that "blacks have had damn good reasons for fearing the policy," he faults black leaders for not making crime more of an issue. "THERE'S PROBABLY still an inverse ratio between those who are affected by crime and those who are worrying about it," he says. Others, like American Enterprise Institute fellow Robert Woodson, dispute that con- clusion. Woodson argues that crime has always been a paramount issue among blacks, who suffer disproportionately from its effects. But he says that police abuses have left blacks with few alternatives for addressing the issue. "It's always been a dilemma for blacks," he says. "They have to balance fear of crime with fear of the police." In an August poll of its readership, Black Enterrprise magazine found that blacks were "seriously concerned about the effects of crime on society" and predicted black Americans would "become substantially more conservative on the crime issue in the 1980s." But while 90.1 percent of the predominatly middle-class respondents saw crime as a "major problem," fully 85.8 per- cent agreed that police brutality was a major concern as well. "YOU CAN'T EXPECT a community to be cooperating with a police department which is abusing them," obseryes Atlanta's Brown. Brown says that police shootings of citizens have decreased radically in Atlanta in recent years. In a report prepared for the Justice Depar- tment in the wake of a riot in Miami's Liberty City last May, H. Jerome Miron of University Research Corp. argued that traditional police responses to rising tension - such as flooding streets With patrols - actually escalate the problem. The report also proposed "sharing power" as a means of easing tensions bet- ween police and community. "You'd be amazed at how much ingenuity and brilliance you have in the community," says Hubert Williams, the black Police Direc- tor of Newark, New Jersey, where another power sharing policy - combined with an emphasis on toughness - also proved suc- cessful. "The educators and the experts are not the only ones with knowledge. Patrick Glynn, an Atlanta free lance writer, wrote this article for the Pacific News Service. 'w James Bond excitement- but it really happened T HE . SOVIET SECRET police break into an American at- tache's room and find him in a com- promising position with a woman. A little unbelievable, maybe? But it gets even better. - The KGB takes pictures of the married man and, sources say, plans to use the photographs to get the man to release classified information to the Soviet Union and become a spy. e Sound like a James Bond movie? Well, it's not. Maj. James Holbrook, an army attache at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, was placed in such a situation. It's refreshing to find out that things like these don't only happen in the movies. It gives the fascinating tales of intrigue and espionage a little validity. And it gives the foreign service some spice - makes it more appealing to the romantics among us. Unfortunately, Holbrook had the bad taste to end the real-life dramatics. Instead of becoming a Soviet spy, Holbrook immediately reported his predicament to his superiors, thus spoiling the entire plot. He could have carried it out a bit fur- ther. He could have become a double agent - dealing with a Russian Mata Hari. He could have planned high speed boat chases across the Black Sea; or flung another spy from an ejec- tor seat onto Red Square. But alas, no such luck. On Jan. 17, Holbrook returned to the United States. He's reportedly under consideration for a post on the staff of Vice President George Bush as a specialist in Soviet affairs. Seems ap- propriate. ' Weasel HrR N R 14TAE- pDowCAFETRI. / , lxA 0THE .SPECIAL TrODAY, SQUIRR. 12Ap5 OAIOAST WM4 STWWaFR (SAUE ' A EA Por by Robert Lence Bu2GER C I L LETTERS TO THE DAILY: Defense spending and the free market To the Daily: Mark Gindin's "Moral defense of the free market" (Daily, Feb. 17) was the sort of unsubstan- tiated rhetoric he identifies with liberal intellectuals. The facts are that while Reagan forces cuts in public ser- vice sectors of government, he increases interference in the market with large military ex- penditures. According to the Employment Reseach Association report on the impact of military spending on inflation and jobs, Reagan is doing terrible harm to the so- called "free market". Military expenditures are inflationary. Buying power is created while few consumer goods are made. Inflation is further fueled by the high cost over-runs incurred in military production-333 percent spending creates only 45,800 jobs, although the same amount spent for public service employment would create 98,000 jobs. Michigan State University Prof. James Anderson states in a pam- phlet published by the Committee to Implement Jobs with Peace Initiative, "the military budget is responsible for an overall loss of 1,440,000 jobs." To correct the unemployment it creates, ,the Pentagon must regulate the labor market. Financially deperate people are forced into the army, and others are sucked into the army by the draft. What we get for all this robbery and regulation is garbage: Nuclear weapons, which woule be suicidal to use; Sensitive machinery that chokes on desert sands; Military intervention in tual stimulation I have a long reading list for him. In the mean- time, he is free to indulge in vacuous "moral defenses" of a system which his ignorance might help destroy. -John D. Erdevig February 17 11 '4m~muw51 i i -1 I