Eric McDonald had been on the job for only six months when Austin District Attorney Ronald Earle asked him to work as the neighborhood district attorney in the downtown area. McDonald accepted, saying he was intrigued by the idea of focusing on the “overall problems in the community” rather than addressing problems in the courtroom, one offender at a time.
His aim initially was to establish a rapport with the community. He walked the streets of the district and introduced himself to storeowners and residents. He attended meetings of established community groups. And he actively brought community members together by establishing a crime advisory board. The board consists of representatives of social service providers, faith-based groups and law enforcement, as well as area residents and business owners.
“The goal of the board is to get the community involved and get a good cross section of everybody who is participating and working on downtown issues. It also helps prioritize what we want to focus on in the downtown area,” McDonald said. The board has about 30 invited members, about half of whom regularly show up at monthly meetings to identify hot spots and brainstorm solutions.
McDonald’s understanding of community concerns was enhanced by a survey that he distributed to local residential and business associations as well participants at meetings he attended. The seven-question survey, which about 250 people completed, asked questions like, “What do you feel are the major crime and crime-related problems in the downtown Austin community?” and “How safe do you feel in the downtown area during the day and night?”
It was the feedback from all these sources—community meetings, the crime advisory board and the survey as well as police data—that led McDonald to focus on burglaries of vehicles as a top priority.
“The commander of the area told me if you can reduce our burglary of motor vehicles you could go a long way in dropping the overall crime rate,” McDonald said, noting that police had recorded an average of 110 car burglaries a month. “Also, residents in the downtown area were telling us that they themselves or visitors they knew had had their cars broken into. It seemed to be an issue that really needed to be looked at, and one we thought we could have an impact on without simply making more arrests.”
McDonald created a task force to look at the issue. The task force included two officers from the Austin Police Department, a security manager from a large hotel, the president of the downtown area neighborhood association, a member of the downtown business association, a bar owner, an advocate for the homeless and someone representing the city’s lighting department. McDonald said he recruited participants based on their interest in the issue and the skills and knowledge they could bring to the topic.
“The first thing we did was look at Police Department stats and make hot spot maps to see where it was most prevalent. Then we actually visited the locations during the day and at night to check out what environmental changes could be made,” McDonald said. “That’s when we got this guy from Austin City Lighting involved, because we saw some areas where the lighting was bad.” In another hot spot, task force members noted that trees were overgrown. They also found that vehicle burglaries were three to four times more common at night.
Ultimately, the best information about the problem came from the offenders themselves. McDonald and a crime analyst from the Police Department actually interviewed about 15 convicted burglars. “It was amazing the similarity of the stories,” McDonald said. “Most were addicted to crack, although some were alcoholics. All for the most part were living on the street or on the verge of living on the street. Most admitted to being responsible for multiple car break-ins that they were never caught doing. One guy said he did over 700. He was a young kid, and he may have been lying a little bit, but who knows?”
The burglars said they could get in and out of a car in a matter of two minutes. They believed the probability of getting caught was fairly slim. “I could see how one person could be responsible for five or six of them in one night,” McDonald said. “The bottom line was that it didn’t matter if the car was a Mercedes, or old Honda, what would cause them to try and break in was if there was something of value that was visible when walking by, CDs, cell phones, quarters just sitting out. They didn’t break into the car to go digging.”
The information from these interviews led the task force to conclude that simply hiding valuables from view would put a dent in the number of burglaries. The focus then turned to education—that is, how to help potential victims reduce their vulnerability to theft.
The task force decided to create a flier in the form of a “vehicle inspection” survey. Beat officers and rangers (who are employed by the Downtown Austin Alliance, a business group) slip the survey, which offers a pass or fail grade, under windshield wipers. A “Pass” goes to vehicles with locked doors and no visible valuables. For those who fail, the survey warns in all capital letters, “Caution! You could have been a victim.” Under “Fail” is a checklist of risks: property openly displayed; vehicle left open; parked in poorly lit or hard to observe location.
“When we first began to distribute the fliers, 70 percent of the cars had something of value visible,” McDonald said.
A local insurance company printed 10,000 flyers, which were distributed during the last four months of 2002. The flyers led to an immediate and significant drop in the number of burglaries the very first month—from about 110 to about 65, McDonald said.
The task force also encouraged a couple of businesses to put better lighting in adjacent alleys and the city replaced a number of street lights that had burnt out. Some bars and night spots also equipped their doormen and parking lot attendants with communication equipment so they could immediately report suspicious behavior. “A lot of the burglaries were happening in parking lots so we tried to educate the parking attendants to tell customers about stowing away their items. We actually posted 10 metal signs in the public parking garages that say ‘Stow away your items,’” McDonald said.
“If we could keep it up on a monthly basis, I think that number of 65 or 70 a month would continue to drop. The key is to be committed to it for the long term,” McDonald said.