| The New York City Police Department is a leader in terms of the size of the crime and drug problems it faces, its professionalism, and its use of innovative strategies and techniques to combat crime. One of its most important approaches to crime reduction in the 1990s has become known as quality-of-life policing. This paper provides a review of how often arrestees engage in quality-of-life behaviors, their contacts with police, and whether they report changing their behaviors due to policing. Funded by National Institutes of Justice to "measure what matters" in policing research, the authors developed and administered a Policing Supplement following the Arrestee Drug Abuse Monitoring in NYC interview. This 30-minute supplement was completed by approximately 850 arrestees in the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan in the last half of 1999. All subjects gave an additional informed consent so investigators can obtain their official arrest histories to ascertain the validity of self-reports. This presentation focuses primarily upon arrestees' self-reports as recorded on a quality-of-life grid. The analysis will document the proportion of arrestees who self-reported one or more of 40 different quality-of-life behaviors (e.g. fare beating, public urination, loud and rowdy, marijuana smoking, etc.), including the recency of doing so. In addition, they reported on the recency of being contacted by police for such behaviors. Persons who reported doing such quality-of-life behaviors were asked whether they had changed or stopped their involvements. If so, they were asked whether such changes were due to "police presence," or "police contact," or for other reasons. This analysis will also control for the type of arrest charge (e.g. felony, misdemeanor, quality-of-life), drug use patterns, and criminal justice histories.
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Updated 05/20/2006