Lanier Transcript, Part 2

Mitchell: You recently wrote a great article that was in the Police Chief magazine, IACP's Police Chief magazine, about policing in the twenty-first century here in Washington, DC—a few of the principles. And one of them was about sources, as opposed to just community policing—developing sources and using technology. Why don't you touch on that for a few moments?

Lanier: Yeah. It's really kind of going back to the basics. One of the things we veterans always talk about. It is a combination of—you know—old-fashioned philosophy of policing interfused with new technology. So, what I found is, is that the neighborhoods that have the most concentrated violent crime—a lot of times, the neighborhoods that are most alienated from the community, from the police—when you ride in the neighborhood and they really don't like you—which is not a good feeling. And the way we try to get over that is, instead of sending officers into a community to crush crime—although you want to crush crime—sending the beat officers into the neighborhood, one, on foot, and mountain bikes, and using segues so they are a little bit more accessible, and instead of saying, go to zero tolerance, or go to community policing, which you and I both know is not a word most crime fighters like to hear—

Mitchell: Right, they think it's soft.

Lanier: Right, right. So, we have worked on our patrol officers to train them to develop sources in the community. We do that through officers walking the beats, and patrolling the neighborhood. Developing sources is really very simple. You get to know everybody in the neighborhood, and you treat them with respect, and you develop that rapport, and they start to provide information to you. Now, at first, not everybody's comfortable with giving information to the police.

Mitchell: Right, sure.

Lanier: Once they get to know an officer by name, and you're not just a big, anonymous police force, they become more comfortable. So we started with anonymous text-tipping, so, here the nickname for the police in most of our high-crime areas is the 5-0, you know, they yell, "The 5-0 is coming" when we come in, so, the text-tip line is 50-411. We made up bumper stickers, we made up posters for the schools and said, "Hey, give the 5-0 the 411," we started with—

Mitchell (laughing): You took advantage—

Lanier: Yeah! We wanted to market to kids. I don't know anyone under the age of 21 who talks on the phone anymore; it's all through thumbs. So, that's the way we started asking for information about gang members that were beefing with other gangs, and people carrying weapons, and our tips—actually, our first year of anonymous tips—we had 292, and I think we're probably approaching 2,000 this year; you know, we've had an 800 percent increase. And we get great information that way. So then, people start to see that they give us information and then things happen.

Mitchell: There you go.

Lanier: They tell us where there's a gun, they tell us who's responsible for a shooting, and then we go in and we take that person off the street. And what happens is, then additional witnesses that had information that didn't come forward start to come forward to strengthen those criminal cases, because now the shooter's off the street, so it's kind of a cycle that feeds itself.

Once you start to demonstrate that if you give me information, I'm going to respond and I'm going to protect you in the process, now, we get a lot of information from people that's not anonymous. They call us up and tell us. Or they'll e-mail us, or post on a listserv. I got 16,000 residents that follow my listserv, so that's a great way to exchange information. Anonymous call-ins and tips still come in, but we really have a really good rapport now.

Mitchell: It's paying big dividends.