Citizen Journalist: At City Hall, one man fights crime by fixing broken windows

by Mike Martin

May 16,2008

They stopped his life "in its tracks," two thugs who robbed Columbia newspaper carrier Mike Cook last week with a shotgun, a pistol and a senseless beating.
"Every time I bend over, my nose starts bleeding," Cook told Columbia Daily Tribune reporter Sara Semelka. Instead of gardening as planned this spring, Cook will meet with surgeons to decide whether he needs a metal plate in his broken cheek to hold his damaged eye in place.

"What is happening to our city?" wrote a Tribune blogger. "This is the town where I was born, raised and educated, and I hope to one day raise a family here. But the alarming number of violent acts plaguing the city has me second-guessing. Why hasn't the police force hired more officers? Why aren't there increased patrols?"

Good questions. Instead of pouring money into new parks, new city offices and new parking garages, City Hall desperately needs to reprioritize. Adequately funding crime fighters like the police department—and a lesser-known city entity called the Neighborhood Response Team (NRT)—has never been a more critical priority.

Broken Windows

Borrowing help from Columbia's police, health and building inspection departments, the NRT works to abate dilapidated buildings that blight the central city. Motivating everything from Columbia's chronic nuisance property laws to the North Central Overlay Ordinance, dilapidation—according to the so-called "Broken Windows Theory"—also encourages crime.

"Consider a building with a few broken windows," wrote the theory's creators, public policy professors James Q. Wilson and George Kelling. "If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building and, if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters, light fires," or steal copper.

Fixing broken windows, keeping up houses, cleaning sidewalks and erasing graffiti all help prevent crime, the theory holds, an idea New York's Mayor Rudy Giuliani tested and proved when he and a much larger neighborhood response team transformed the Big Apple.

But where Giuliani was committed, our city government is sinking in a quicksand of commitment phobia. It expanded the NRT's duties last Monday night without also expanding its budget. It presides over two of the central city's most dilapidated buildings—the Blind Boone home and Heibel-March Store.

It has stood largely idle as a widening cesspool of criminal contempt threatens to swallow our quality of life.

Chronic Offenders

With the heart and persistence of a social worker, NRT director Bill Cantin is a one-man department, overseeing a vast central-city territory that includes most of the First Ward and his newly added domains: Benton-Stephens and East Campus.

In a yearly report, Cantin details individual instances of blight. For North Central Columbia alone, the section was 18 pages long in 2007 and involved some 150 properties.

Coordinating three departments and a troubled property owner can make follow-up code enforcement a problematic ordeal. Take the case of the Shoddy Shed on Sixth. Its crumbling concrete walls and caved-in roof posed an immediate hazard to schoolchildren who climbed around it as a shortcut through an open lot. But with the property owner in prison on drug charges, getting the shed demolished—a protective inspection function—took about a year. Getting the debris removed—a health department function—took another six months.

At 807 Washington, a small apartment building owned by the Hinshaw Family Partnership, Cantin's report noted "several areas with peeling paint that need to be repainted; portions of the exterior siding that are deteriorating and need to be repaired or replaced; and a driveway that is deteriorated and needs to be repaired." "4/13/07—letter mailed" the report continues, referring to official correspondence sent to building owners about required repairs.

But one year later, the only thing that's changed at 807 Washington is that the paint there is now peeling as badly as the paint at the Blind Boone home.

Mayoral Priority
Columbia Mayor Darwin Hindman has made "stepping up the Neighborhood Response Team" one of this top three priorities for the 2008-09 budget year.

That's a good thing. Too many dedicated people—like Bill Cantin and the many central city neighbors who want safe streets and quality housing—work virtually alone.

It's also mission critical in this community, as another Tribune blogger pointed out after reading about Mike Cook. "I lived in Columbia for 10 years during and after college but will never move back. Residents need to open their eyes and see how bad it's become. Drive-by shootings in downtown. Armed robbery and rape. My wife and I live in a similar-size college town now that has zero crime. It makes Columbia look like St. Louis."

Columbia resident and science journalist Mike Martin earned a master's degree in business administration from the University of Washington, with a concentration in entrepreneurship and innovation. He can be reached at mike.martin@nasw.org.

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