OSINFO - Open Sources Information

A recent report in The Economist noted that Caracas, Venezuela, is now one of the world’s most violent cities, with an official murder rate of 130 homicides for every 100,000 residents. The Venezuelan think tank Incosec suggests that the real rate is even higher—a staggering 166 per 100,000, or triple the rate in 1999, when President Hugo Chávez took office. It didn’t have to be this way. From 2000 to early 2002, as members of the Bratton Group and in cooperation with the Manhattan Institute, we worked to improve public safety in Caracas. We were beginning to achieve promising results until Chávez undermined the project. Crime is now rampant, the mayor we worked with has gone into exile, the police chief sits in jail, and Chávez has barred a promising young reformer from running for mayor this fall.

We remember our days in Caracas as an exciting time. A new constitution had just granted the city autonomous status from the federal government, with the new Metropolitan Police to operate under mayoral control. Alfredo Peña, the new mayor, brought us in to help organize the force in accordance with the innovative policing ideas that had cut crime dramatically in the United States in the 1990s. Caracas hired new police officers and more than doubled starting salaries, trying to recruit better-educated cops and make corruption less tempting. The new police chief, Ivan Simonovis, was a veteran of the national investigative police, a relentless foe of police corruption, and a tireless crime fighter.

Our work sought to create a first-class police reform model in Catia, the impoverished, million-person barrio that reaches up hundreds of feet into the mountains west of the central city. We worked to break down the vast Catia police division into 12 community-based precincts, where we put some of the most promising and ambitious commanders. We trained a special cadre of local detectives who would investigate crime in the previously ignored barrio. Using New York City’s Compstat as a model, we established strategy meetings to hold commanders accountable and to track and reduce crime. In 18 months, the murder rate in Catia declined by one-third, and citizens’ perception of the police began to improve. Polls taken by independent groups measured the change. But we could also see it on the ground, as residents began showing up to help repair local police stations and form neighborhood watch groups.

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William Andrews works as a police and security consultant with the Bratton Group. William Bratton is the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.