The Pinch Must Really Sting

Careless cops are losing cases

A policeman collars a mugger on a busy downtown street, but in his haste to make the arrest he forgets to take the names of any witnesses. A burglar is nabbed just as he is leaving the scene of the crime, but while the case against him seems powerful, his loot somehow gets lost in the labyrinth of police headquarters, and he must be set free. A woman catches a second-story man in her house, engages him in conversation, gives him a drink to get his fingerprints. When he flees she calls the police, who refuse to dust the glass for prints because "it's too much trouble." Completing their "investigation," they leave the flabbergasted householder to file their report.

These cases, some real, some hypothetical, illustrate a problem that is increasingly distressing prosecutors, judges and the general public. In the battle against crime, police are making more arrests than ever, but the number of convictions is apparently failing to keep pace. According to a major study released this week by the Washington-based Institute for Law and Social Research, more than half the felony arrests were either rejected by prosecutors--who found the evidence too flimsy to bring to court--or subsequently dismissed by judges for similar reasons.

Undertaken with the help of a grant from the Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the study, concentrating on Washington, D.C., examined arrest and conviction records compiled by police in the course of a single year. The statistics, which were supported by similar findings in five other urban areas--Los Angeles and San Diego counties, Baltimore, Detroit and Chicago--told an abysmal story. In 1974 Washington's metropolitan police made more than 17,000 arrests for felonies and serious misdemeanors by adults. Yet prosecutors found more than half the cases so flimsy they refused to press charges. Judges tossed out an additional 8%, and in 6% there was no action at all because the defendants simply vanished. The upshot: only 33% of those arrested were ever brought to court for plea or trial. The report acknowledges that factors in the poor conviction record may include the shortage of policemen and such restrictions on police power as the still controversial Miranda rule, which requires the arresting officer to inform the suspect of his rights to counsel and to remain silent. But it puts the essential blame on the police themselves, especially for what the study asserts is an obsession with the idea of measuring crime-fighting efficiency only by the number of arrests they make. This policy, described by outgoing FBI Director Clarence Kelley in his foreword as "a perspective that does not extend beyond arrest," produces repercussions all the way down to the beat.

Realizing that making arrests can be a sure way to impress department brass and win promotion, cops grab all the "perpetrators" they can put the arm on, but in their eagerness may neglect rudimentary procedures for gathering proof of the crime that will stand up well in court. With predictable results. In the course of a year, 31% of the Washington cops who made arrests produced no convictions whatsover.

Police generally deny any departmental obsession with arrest records. They say they are forced into what appears to be an arrest numbers game by the rising crime rate. They also point out that dealing with criminals is complicated and dangerous, and argue that even if an aggressive arrest policy does not always lead to convictions, it has a deterring effect on crime. The Washington study sharply disagrees with this view. The number of suspects arrested, rather than convicted, it contends, not only has little effect on crime but actually undermines the law by making it "difficult for many persons to see how justice is done."

As a remedy, the report urges different training for police, as well as a new reward system that will encourage officers to make "better" arrests. It cites, for example, a recent collaborative experiment in which Washington police and a team of prosecutors combined forces to instruct officers in such elementary matters as interviewing witnesses, verifying the accuracy of their information and advising them on what is expected of a witness in court. The report praises imaginative crime-control tactics like Washington's Operation Sting, in which phony fences were set up to receive stolen goods while officials secretly photographed and recorded the transactions to provide airtight evidence. Such operations, now being carried on in several cities, apparently work quite well. When Washington police took the trouble to produce tangible evidence and reliable witnesses, convictions in robbery arrests went up 60%, in other violent crimes 33% and in crimes against property 36%. The study also reveals another provocative statistic to prove that conviction rates are primarily determined by police procedures. In the cases studied, more than 50% of those arrests that resulted in conviction were regularly made by a handful of skillful officers.

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