Tag Archives: Steve Settingsgaard

Task force sees early success


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Peoria Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard recently updated City officials on the results of his efforts to quell gun violence. So far, it’s going well:

[P]lease see attached hot spot maps relative to our current task force initiative. We are 14 days into the task force so I conducted an analysis comparing the 14 days prior to launching the task force versus 14 days afterward. City wide we had a 25% reduction in people being hit by gunfire and a 25% reduction in confirmed gun discharges.

The attached maps demonstrate the before and after picture for the combination of murders and gun discharge incidents. The red hot spot areas are gone which is very good news. I would temper the good news however by stating that 14 days is a very small sample size and we need to keep up our efforts.

I also would note that the hot spot maps include all instances where someone was killed, someone was shot, or simply where we had a confirmed gun discharged. This does not include reports of shots being heard with no witness and no physical evidence. We must have had someone who was willing to stat they saw it happen, or we found shell casings, or someone or something was hit, etc. The criteria is identical for both “before” and “after” to ensure apples to apples comparison.

Despite promised enforcement, jaywalking tickets tossed

Students were ticketed for walking in the middle of the street near Manual High School again. And once again, Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard is tossing out the tickets. But I was intrigued by this statement at the end of the article in the Journal Star:

Settingsgaard said he is looking for better long-term solutions than issuing tickets. He has asked City Manager Scott Moore to investigate possibilities, particularly along Wiswall, that would provide a safe place for students to walk.

“One possibility might be to create a pedestrian/bicycle lane on one side of the street. This could potentially alleviate the problem without the tremendous expense or installing sidewalks/curbs/gutters.”

Some thoughts:

  • How many sidewalks/curbs/gutters could we install for $39.3 million — the amount the council is desperately trying to put in Gary Matthews’ pocket? I guess a skywalk between the Pere and the Civic Center is more important than the safety of our city’s children. We keep spending money hand over fist to lure the ever-elusive tourist while our basic services disintegrate. You’d think the big push for the census would remind City Hall that residents are important, at least in terms it can understand — money. The more population we have actually living in Peoria, the more revenue we get from property taxes and federal/state appropriations. But if we keep treating our residents as second-class citizens and catering to the Almighty Tourist, it should come as no shock that people will choose to live in surrounding communities where they are more valued.
  • While the city has a responsibility to provide for the safety of children, these students nevertheless also must bear some personal responsibility. In the absence of sidewalks, they should be walking next to the shoulder, not walking down the middle of the road obstructing traffic. The last time students were ticketed, they got their tickets thrown out only if they attended mandatory school assemblies where police officers and school officials tried to give students a “better understanding of the rules.” Furthermore, Settingsgaard said at the time — and this is a quote from the 2007 press conference announcing the jaywalking tickets would be expunged — “there will be enforcement in the future.” Now we learn there will be no enforcement, no assemblies — no accountability or consequences of any kind. What message does that send?
  • I wonder how the police officers feel who gave out the citations. Having their Chief throw nearly all the citations out after he had said there would be enforcement in the future certainly sends a mixed message at best. It also might make me wonder what other laws the Chief would like not to see enforced, and for which people.

State’s Attorney weighs in on David Kennedy

In a previous post, I talked about David Kennedy and his unorthodox methods of fighting crime in urban areas. Police Chief Settingsgaard told me that he has “a team being trained by Kennedy and his staff.” At the same time, I wrote to the State’s Attorney’s office to see what they thought of Kennedy’s methods. I recently received this reply from Kevin Lyons:

Dear C.J.:

In reply to your inquiry about David Kennedy, I am, indeed, familiar with him and this topic. In fact, four Peorians (including a prosecutor from my office and a Peoria police officer) recently returned from Raleigh, NC, following a three day training conference on details of the High Point Project. Recreating the High Point (NC) Project in some cities has met with great success; in others, uh, not so much. But I felt it worthy enough to take a look to see if we may want to embrace this effort and achieve some success for three targeted areas within the city (sorry, but I can’t share with you the neighborhoods that have been designated for this).

These four people will soon complete two more sessions before the ‘project’ here begins. I don’t know whether it will work but I do know that entire generations are lost to the buying and selling of mind-twisting drugs and that changing an entrenched culture will only be accomplished by impacting whole neighborhoods and not just a person here, a person there.

Perhaps it’s because David Kennedy and I are both 50ish and have watched drugs give the grave to friends and neighbors for more than 30 years. Perhaps it’s because we have watched battles being lost for years when waged against criminal drug sales in America. Perhaps the High Point Project makes a little sense because countless other projects do not. We’ll see.

It is interesting, C.J., that you and I were both piqued by this particular approach because, at first blush, this would never be my style…rolling the videotape to the offender and his family and then giving him a free pass. It will be a time intensive task that will take a lot of time by authorities. Then again, as prosecutors say – “there is never enough time…unless you’re serving it.”

Fingers crossed. Thanks for your inquiry.

KEVIN W. LYONS
Peoria County State’s Attorney

My thanks to Mr. Lyons for responding and sharing his thoughts on this topic. It will be interesting to see how these methods work here in Peoria.

A new way to fight violent crime

david-kennedyDavid Kennedy has been getting a lot of attention across the nation with his unorthodox — but successful — methods of lowering violent crime in urban areas. He’s the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. I first heard about Kennedy through the Smart City radio broadcast (you can listen to his interview by clicking here), and subsequently started reading up on him and his methods.

There’s a misunderstanding, says Kennedy, about what causes violent crime in inner cities. Conventional wisdom is that drugs are the common denominator in gang violence, but that’s not necessarily the case. In an article Kennedy wrote for the Washington Post in 2006, he explains:

My research … shows that in hard-hit neighborhoods, the violence is much less about drugs and money than about girls, vendettas and trivial social frictions. These are often referred to as “disputes” in police reports and in the media. But such violence is not about anger-management problems. The code of the streets has reached a point in which not responding to a slight can destroy a reputation, while violence is a sure way to enhance it. The quick and the dead are not losing their tempers; they are following shared — and lethal — social expectations.

I’ve heard shooters say, in private, that they wanted no part of what happened. But with their friends and enemies watching — and the unwritten rules clear to everybody — they did what they had to do.

The key to fighting violence is to change the social expectations in the group so that there’s pressure not to resolve conflict with violence. Unfortunately, the police don’t have much influence within these groups. But Kennedy says they could, if they changed their methods. Here’s an example (from a recent Newsweek story) of what that looks like:

In a 2004 experiment in High Point, N.C., Kennedy got the cops to try a new way of cleaning up the corners. They rounded up some young dealers; showed a videotape of them dealing drugs; and readied cases, set for indictment, that would have meant hard time in prison rather than helping them by sending them to one of the delray beach rehab centres. Then they let the kids go. Working with their families, the police helped the dope dealers find job training and mentors. The message, which spread quickly through the neighborhood, was that the cops would give kids a second chance—but come down aggressively if they didn’t take it. The police won back trust they had lost long ago (if they ever had it). After four years, police in High Point had wiped the drug dealers off the corner. They compared the numbers to the prior four years and found a 57 percent drop in violent crime in the targeted area….

One crime-infested Nashville neighborhood where Kennedy’s program was used saw a 91 percent drop in crime and prostitution in 2008, largely attributable to Kennedy’s good-cop, bad-cop approach…. The most effective cops are not the ones who make buy-busts, but who can find a dealer, show him photos of him committing a crime and give him a genuine choice: get straight or go to jail.

Hard to believe, and yet the results speak for themselves. As Newsweek summarized, “Cops were initially wary of Kennedy’s methods, which some mocked as ‘hug-a-thug.’ But Kennedy is much in demand now.”

So in demand, in fact, that his methods may be tried soon in our fair city. I wrote to Police Chief Steve Settingsgaard to ask him if he had ever heard of Kennedy and what he thought of his methods. The answer I got back surprised me: “I have a team being trained by Kennedy and his staff. More news soon.”

I’ll be standing by for the news.