High Visibility Policing

Since at least the mid-1980s when New York City police used it to disrupt drug traffic on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, law enforcement agencies have employed high visibility policing to address problem areas within their jurisdictions. This tactic is at the core of Brockport Police Chief Dan Varreti’s initiative to resolve some of the quality of life issues that seem to have arisen on Main Street this summer. And I, who spend a lot of time in the business district with my family, love it.

Basically, high visibility policing works like this: by placing officers conspicuously in spots where trouble repeatedly occurs, the chance of a person being noticed (and cited for) doing something he ought not do increases. The message this sends to those contemplating criminal activity is pretty straightforward: not here.

At heart, I’m a country boy who admires simplicity, so the Brockport Police Department’s plan makes a lot of sense to me. In fact, yesterday I smiled when, while returning from a jog along the canal, I turned off the path at Main Street to see a patrol car parked between Market Street and Water Street. Then, continuing south toward Erie Street, I chugged past by two uniformed officers walking a beat on the west side of Main. If I, trying to will my body home after a 5-mile run, noticed the police presence downtown, you can bet that others did too.

I’m not ready to try to dissuade my son, who’s 3, from repeating some of the more colorful language that I’ve heard—and therefore I’m pretty sure he’s heard—while on our way to Seaward Candies or Jimmy Z’s for a cone or a shake. Nor am I eager to see again, as I did last month, a sidewalk sideshow escalate to a point where one fella gets a baseball bat to settle a beef he has with another fella. That’s how fellas become felons. If the police can preempt situations like these from unfolding to my annoyance (which I know some may view as petty) or to a serious injury as get-back for a slight, then great, I say.

Not that Main Street in Brockport will ever compare, but the one of the effects of high visibility policing in Washington Square Park—one small piece of the New York City’s intensified effort that I mentioned above—was that arrests went up 300 percent over the course of two years. Seventy percent of those arrests resulted in convictions, curbing the activities of the Big Apple’s bad apples.

In our village there aren’t nearly as many bad apples, of course. But I know from my rural upbringing that it takes but a few to spoil the bunch.