MANHATTAN (CN) - Studies remain elusive on the data-driven style of prosecution embraced by the Manhattan District Attorney's Office these last five years, but not for lack of attention drawn by DA Cyrus Vance.
The Fifth Annual Concordia Conference brought Vance uptown Friday to discuss the arrest-alert system that pings his office whenever police nab their most-wanted gang members, identity thieves and cybercriminals.
Now in its fifth year, the Crime Strategies Unit carves five areas of Manhattan to help Vance's office prioritize the roughly 100,000 cases its sees every year.
Though Vance has been pitching the program in dozens of speeches, press releases and conferences, it received little coverage before a New York Times noted the "unusual collaboration" it fostered between prosecutors and police.
As he has in the past, Vance compared his prosecutorial strategy to "Moneyball," the book-turned-Hollywood sports drama in which innovative statistical analysis helps the Oakland Athletics recruit underappreciated players to make a competitive team.
"We want to get the most bang for our buck," Vance said.
The program's roots stretch far past this Brad Pitt blockbuster, however, with Vance tracing its inspiration to Bill Bratton's first tenure as New York City police commissioner.
When first appointed by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, Bratton became known as one of the architects of "broken-windows" theory of policing. Its adherents believed that run-down buildings, litter-strewn streets, graffiti-sprayed walls and homeless "squeegee men" invited violent crime by signaling a neighborhood's abandonment.
New York City experienced a dramatic drop in crime around the time Bratton clamped down on these minor offenses, but social scientists have long been skeptical of the cause and effect. Crime sharply plummeted across the United States during the same period of the early 1990s, even in major cities like San Diego, Washington, St. Louis and Houston that did not apply "broken-windows" strategies.
Vance emphasized that his program differs from broken windows by focusing on violent crime.
"It's a different way of approaching violent crime: How to identify it, how to attack it, and making sure that people who are serious offenders wouldn't slip off our radar," he said in an interview after the panel ended.
What the squeegee man was to broken-windows policing, a street hustler named Naim Jabbar is to Vance's Crime Strategies Unit.
Before landing in an upstate prison, Jabbar ran a scam where he jostled unsuspecting pedestrians, claimed that they broke his glasses, and then intimidated them until they paid him between $40 and $100 to replace his cheap specs.
With more than 40 arrests under his belt, Jabbar stacked up 19 convictions for fraudulent accosting.
The misdemeanor would only send Jabbar to jail for a few months, but Vance's arrest alert system has caused the man to face far heavier charges of robbery in the fourth degree and grand larceny. Prosecutors cited Jabbar's imposing stature to prove that the 250-pound man standing more than 6-foot tall "forcibly" stole money, more than $1,000 over the years, from his marks.
Vance called Jabbar his own "hot spot," police jargon for a high-crime area in a precinct.
"He is a walking hot spot, and he needs to be identified if he comes up in the system," he said.