Give police credit for saving lives 1.6.11

INDIANAPOLIS STAR

The effect of policing on murder rates will always be elusive, but strategies employed by law enforcement in Indianapolis deserve the benefit of the doubt.
Certainly, there's political benefit in the new statistics from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, showing last year's toll of homicides nearly identical to that of 2009, which was a 16-year low.
That preliminary figure -- 100 in 2010, one more than in 2009 -- goes along with steep declines in other major crimes, bolstering a mayor who made public safety a key election issue in 2007 and will do so in his re-election campaign this year.
How much credit should Mayor Greg Ballard and IMPD take?
As experts told The Star's John Tuohy in Wednesday's report, murder and other violent crime have been in decline throughout the nation. The FBI reports that homicides dropped 9 percent between 2005 and 2009 and continued falling in the first half of 2010.
The reasons? Not all police work, by any means. Diminishment of the crack trade, stiffer sentencing and plain aging of the population have had huge impact, criminologists say.
Nor has Indianapolis been a shining example. This city's homicide rate of 12.3 per 100,000 residents compares to an average of 11.4 percent for midsized cities in 2009. And while we fared far better than Cincinnati and Cleveland in 2010, we easily surpassed the Los Angeles rate and nearly doubled that of New York City.
"We can do better," the mayor says. And we must do better. One murder is too many. Two a week is intolerable.
Yet Ballard and Public Safety Director Frank Straub make a strong case that the situation would be worse without recent initiatives aimed at focusing on the hardest-hit neighborhoods, engaging the community and modernizing crime analysis.
It is reasonable to hope that the continuation of these measures will prevent murders and not just solve them. Yet there's always more that can be done -- and not just by local police.
Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals is a state and federal duty; and Indiana's gun laws are among the nation's weakest, particularly as regards so-called straw purchases of firearms that are later used in crimes. Local officials need to call out the legislature on these issues even as they tout their own efforts to get illegally owned weapons off the streets.
Against the worst of crimes, the best law enforcement can do will never be enough. Homicide has too many causes for police to know how much of it they prevent. But they can be confident their work saves lives. Statistics are not as vital.
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