From the mid-1990s on, serious crime rates in America have been falling steadily, with some big cities experiencing steep declines to levels not seen since the early 1960s. Despite this welcome trend, however, Americans are still much more likely to be victims of violence than citizens of other advanced societies. Our criminal justice system also is urgently in need of reinvention. It is too fragmented and disjointed, too beholden to bureaucratic imperatives rather than community needs, and too slow to incorporate promising new strategies and technologies for preventing crime, prosecuting and punishing criminals, and improving public safety.

Mission

PPI has long promoted innovative strategies for preventing crime. For example, its work in the early '90s inspired the Clinton Administration's "100,000 cops" initiative as well as its support for community-oriented policing. Building on this foundation, PPI has launched the Community Crime Fighting Project aimed at identifying and promoting the next generation of crime-fighting ideas and technologies. The Project works to develop a Third Way on crime and public safety that transcends the right's singular focus on punishing crime through maximum incarceration and the left's fixation on more social spending to address the "root causes" of crime. The new approach instead envisions refocusing every part of the criminal justice system on empowering communities to take charge of their own self-defense.

The Project's mission is simply stated: To modernize America's criminal justice system, by harnessing new information technologies to community-based strategies for preventing crime, punishing criminals, and protecting law-abiding citizens.

Principles

The project's work is guided by these principles:

• Government's first responsibility is to keep public order and protect law-abiding citizens against criminal violence. Americans should not have to protect themselves by carrying guns and patrolling their own streets;



• Poor and minority communities suffer most from crime and stand to gain most from effective, community-based efforts to reduce crime. Just as poverty breeds crime, rampant crime perpetuates poverty;



• The information technology revolution can increase citizen participation in crime prevention, promote innovation, and facilitate information sharing between criminal justice entities. We should take active steps to extend the benefits of technology to all citizens and the criminal justice community; and



• Tactics like racial profiling that treat race as an indicator of criminal activity are a perversion of targeted crime-fighting strategies and actually reduce the community support and sense of public safety requisite to community policing.

Goals

The project's research, analysis and proposals focus on these goals:

• Providing law enforcement agencies the resources they need to prevent crime, improve overall levels of public safety, and punish criminals swiftly and surely;



• Organizing every facet of the criminal justice systemprosecutors, probation-and-parole officers, juvenile justice officials, and relevant social services agencieson community-based crime fighting strategies;



• Spreading new technologies that facilitate information sharing and trend analysis throughout the criminal justice system and among community leaders;



• Encouraging law enforcement agencies to employ a data-driven, active problem-solving approach to crime;



• Establishing links with other public services to address social and environmental concerns that impair public safety and foster criminal behavior; and



• Linking anti-crime efforts with economic revitalization activities in high-crime neighborhoods, addressing the single greatest impediment to private-sector investment while providing economic opportunities for at-risk populations.

Project Priorities and Plans

Through research papers, policy proposals, public events, and media outreach, the Project will educate policymakers and opinion leaders on new perspectives in fighting crime and maintaining public order. It will focus on core themes including community self-defense, racial profiling, what works, the role of technology, and new approaches like restorative justice.

Publications

• Eliminating Racial Profiling: A Third Way Approach; John D. Cohen, Janet Lennon, and Robert Wasserman; PPI Policy Briefing, February 2000.