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Defenses. Specifically to combat street crime, both Detroit and New York have tried using decoys. New York's Deputy Inspector Anthony Voelker told his squad that "anything that is legal, moral and works is satisfactory." The result has been a patrol of blind men, little old ladies, Santa Clauses, cripples, garbage men and rabbis, all armed cops. The squad's sentimental favorite is Policewoman Mary Glatzle, known as Muggable Mary in honor of her having been attacked more than 35 times.
Despite such innovations, even the most optimistic police officials admit that a significant part of the change in crime rates reflects an enforced change in American life. The new auto steering-wheel locks, for instance, get credit for much of the drop in car thefts. The same sort of result is achieved when taxi drivers carry little change to be robbed of, and when their cabs are equipped with bulletproof partitions. Young women who live alone are safer when they keep dogs in their apartments; welfare clients are foiling mailbox thieves by picking up their checks in person; and elderly Boston women are going to morning Mass in self-protecting groups of ten to 20. One of the most important contributions to the new style of defensive living is one of the simplest: more and more cities are lighting up at night. New sodium lights, which double the illumination of normal street lamps, have proliferated. Last week New York Mayor John Lindsay announced that $15 million would be spent putting sodium lights on 1,200 miles of the city's streets.
But defensive living and improved police techniques deal only with one end of the criminal-justice system. Police have long been able "to produce more arrests than the courts and prisons could dispose of rationally and efficiently," says Criminologist Hans Mattick of the University of Illinois in Chicago. For reasons of both deterrence and fairness, "speedy law enforcement is most important," says Phoenix Lawyer John Frank. "The Administration could do a hell of a lot more in that area." Funds are needed for more judges, expanded courtroom facilities and better administrative techniques. Furthermore, penologists agree that the entire prison system needs to be overhauled for the benefit of society as well as that of the inmates. Today's penitentiaries produce ex-cons who are often more violent than when they went in.
Rash. Little of the Nixon-inspired war on crime has been directed beyond front-line measures. "The whole program operates on the assumption that crime is a superficial rash," says Harvard Law Professor James Vorenberg, former executive director of the President's crime commission, and now an adviser to George McGovern. "Continuing denial of opportunity, combined with the anonymity of city life, is destroying the social pressure to abstain from crime." Guessing that the odds against catching the average burglar "are no better than 50 to 1," Vorenberg suggests that "crime may seem like a good bet for those whose lives are little more than a struggle for survival."