Richard Janikowski – Memphis Flyer

In 2005, former Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin introduced a plan to crush crime one statistic at a time.

Called Blue CRUSH, the data-driven initiative uses information collected from Memphis Police Department (MPD) reports to determine local crime hotspots. Aggravated assaults, nondomestic violence, robbery, burglary, and vehicle theft are among the crimes targeted.

The location, day, and time an offense occurs is recorded and analyzed, which helps law enforcement determine where they need to deploy more officers. Crime stats in these hotspots are generally lowered as a result.

Blue CRUSH’s citywide launch was covered in the Memphis Flyer article “A Secret Crush” by Bianca Phillips in December 2006, and the initiative was later profiled in-depth in the cover story “Blue Crush” by Preston Lauterbach in April 2007.

Justin Fox Burks

Richard Janikowski

Richard Janikowski, a retired University of Memphis criminology professor, was instrumental in the creation of Blue CRUSH (an acronym for Crime Reduction Utilizing Statistical History). He along with several other analysts from the University of Memphis’ Center for Community Criminology and Research banded together to create the initiative with the MPD.

“The first year saw some modest decreases, and then things started decreasing across the board,” Janikowski said. “By the end of 2010, violent crime was down in Memphis over 24 percent [and] property crime [was down] over 26 percent. It had real impacts that became noticed throughout the country. Police departments from around the world have been coming to Memphis to look at what’s been done.”

The crime-fighting initiative came about after Godwin called a meeting of high-ranking city officials and law enforcement representatives at a local Piccadilly Cafeteria urging the development of new approaches to combat city crime.

During the meeting, Janikowski informed Godwin he could develop a program pinpointing crime hotspots but needed access to all of the MPD’s data on an ongoing basis. After being provided with data packages composed of information on various crimes, Janikowski and his colleagues began examining them on a daily basis, determining what information was useful and how they could best utilize it. They produced information packages for precinct commanders, showing criminal hotspots and frequent days and times criminal activity took place in those areas.

Pilot operations of Blue CRUSH were conducted throughout the end of 2005 and into 2006, exploring what tactics worked and how they could best be adapted. The initiative launched citywide in late 2006.

Nearly a decade later, Blue CRUSH has been responsible for triggering thousands of arrests. And Janikowski said MPD commanders and analysts continue to discover better ways to suppress local crime.

“Commanders have mastered the use of data, how to deploy task forces, and directed patrol,” Janikowski said. “They’ve developed new analysts and new technologies to apply.”

Nevertheless, annually, the MPD experiences a decrease in manpower due to budget cuts, reduction in promotions, and limited resources for recruiting and training new officers.

Janikowski said the MPD’s decline in manpower leaves open the opportunity for Blue CRUSH to become a lost cause.

“I don’t care what you call the crime initiative, the data and the analysis are tools, but the work is done by those men and women in blue on the streets,” he said. “They’re the critical variable. None of it works without them. The problem right now is literally every week MPD’s number of sworn officers is declining. It has been declining for a number of years.”

What Blue Crush has done to crime is what criminologist Richard Janikowski hopes new data will do for the city’s growing number of transitional neighborhoods.

The Blue Crush initiative, which began in 2005, uses crime data to target hot spots. Janikowski, along with wife Phyllis Betts, hopes data on foreclosures, Section 8 vouchers, and vacant homes can help the city identify vulnerable neighborhoods.

A recent article in The Atlantic cited both Janikowski and Betts, director of the U of M’s Center for Community Building and Neighborhood Action, in an exploration of the link between crime and Section 8 vouchers and the federal HOPE VI program, which provides redevelopment money for public housing.

The couple also teamed up to give a presentation on their data at a recent City Council meeting.

“This is not about Section 8. This is not about HOPE VI. It is about trying to understand how neighborhood change is occurring in Memphis,” Janikowski said in an interview at his office last week. The issue for Betts and Janikowski is how a city can ensure healthy neighborhoods.

More than 20 percent of the Memphis population lives below the poverty line, according to 2000 census data, but the dismantling of public housing projects has dispersed poor residents. That is part of what Section 8 vouchers are supposed to do.

“One thing we’re convinced the data shows us is, yes, poverty has deconcentrated in the city,” Janikowski said. “The number of census tracts with poverty rates of 40 percent or more has decreased. However, the number of census tracts with poverty rates of 20 to 40 percent has increased.”

Betts, who is working on the city’s Neighborhood by Neighbor project to identify problem properties, splits areas into four categories, or zones.

Zone 1 are distressed areas with poverty rates of 20 to 40 percent. Zone 3 are stable neighborhoods and Zone 4 are uptrending transitional neighborhoods such as downtown.

Zone 2 are the vulnerable swing neighborhoods — identified by 20 to 39 percent poverty rates, substantial growth in the number of earned income tax credit filers, or more than 30 percent sub-prime loan originations.

With federal funding from the HOPE VI program, public housing projects such as Hurt Village and Dixie Homes were torn down to rebuild mixed-income developments Uptown and Legends Park. Some of the former residents were then given Section 8 vouchers, which enables them to live in subsidized housing.

“The research nationally shows that there is a tendency [to cluster] because the voucher is only worth X amount of money. Folks are moving into transitional neighborhoods because that is where the cheaper housing is,” Janikowski said.

“If you allow clustering without taking affirmative steps to distribute housing, then what you’re doing is simply re-creating public housing in other neighborhoods with all the potential associated problems that existed with public housing.”

Robert Lipscomb argued against the interpretation and defended what he said was a criminalization of the people in the HOPE VI program.

“It’s one of the few programs we have that’s making any sense,” Lipscomb said. “There is no correlation between HOPE VI and violent crime. The folks who were there were the sick, and the weak, and the marginalized.”

Because Betts and Janikowski pinpoint aging apartment complexes as potential problems, they advocate site-specific services and working closely with landlords. But they say the solutions need to tackle all the problems facing vulnerable neighborhoods. Widespread poverty isn’t the only problem that the couple have identified with their data.

“Just like the rest of the nation, we have a foreclosure crisis,” Janikowski said.

In zip codes 38127 and 38128 in North Memphis, for instance, 49 to 53 percent of homeowners are not current on their loans.

In zip codes 38112, 39 to 43 percent of the loans are not current. And in Midtown’s 38104, 21 to 38 percent of homeowners are behind on their payments.

“Vacant and abandoned properties can make a neighborhood turn very quickly, particularly if they cluster,” Janikowski said, “so this is something for us to worry about.”

Conventional research says that once a neighborhood is 20 percent blighted, the rest of the neighborhood follows suit. Newer research suggests that figure may be lower.

“Healthy neighborhoods are the backbone of the tax base for the city, so it’s not just a question of the folks living in those neighborhoods,” Janikowski said. “It’s also what are we looking at for the future of Memphis. If the tax base decreases tremendously, we’ve got problems.”