The police behind America's biggest crime drop.(Edward F. Davis III and the Lowell, Massachusetts police department)

Since Edward F. Davis III took the reins of its police department six years ago, crime in Lowell, Massachusetts, has fallen by well over 50 percent, Between 1994 and '99, Lowell reduced crime more quickly than any other American city with over 100,000 residents.

In the early 1990s, the milltown-turned-high-tech-center regularly competed for the dubious distinction of having New England's most dangerous streets. Today only a handful of cities over 100,000--all of them wealthy and ethnically homogenous--provide safer streets than Lowell.

Lowell has experienced some luck, and used federal grants and other outside resources, but most of its success can be credited to dramatic reforms at Lowell's police department. Superintendent Davis's innovations in technology, public relations, officer training, and accountability have transformed a reviled and ineffective department into one of America's best.

When Ed Davis commanded the Lowell Vice and Narcotics Squad during the late 1980s, it outdid itself every year. Only Boston's vastly larger force managed to seize more narcotics than Lowell's undermanned unit. Through vigorous prosecutions in federal and state court--Lowell was the only Massachusetts city besides Boston to pursue federal drug charges regularly--Davis's team sent dozens of drug kingpins away for long sentences.

But getting tough failed to reduce crime. "We would put out 30 people on the sidewalk in plain clothes to make drug buys, and people would drive by and see how disorderly everything was and get scared," says Davis. "We weren't doing any good; the problem got a little worse every year." Davis also observed that persistent disorder itself could cause crime. Reading scholars like George Kelling and Mary Ann Wycoff, he decided that effective police departments needed to attack crime before it became serious. So he decided to innovate.

Despite giving lip service to so-called "proactive" policing, most of America's law enforcement departments still cling to a model that assumes police can do little to reduce crime, and so must focus on responding to emergency calls quickly and making lots of arrests. When serious problems like carjacking and narcotics trafficking emerge, departments move their best officers onto ad hoc teams. Neighborhood patrol gets de-emphasized, although it still employs the largest number of officers. Crackdowns on quality-of-life offensives like graffiti, aggressive panhandling, and small-time narcotics sales take a back seat to efforts against "serious" crimes. To prevent corruption, police officers receive little formal encouragement to take part in the communities they patrol. Following this pattern, arrests-per-officer, offense "clearance" rates, narcotics seizures, and response times can all move in the "right" direction, even as crime rates track an upward course.

While it operated in this common fashion, Lowell's police force kept its doors closed to the community. "Some officer would want to tell me something, and I would do everything I could to get to know him, but if he did, it would be a risk to his career," says Patrick Cook, who covered the police department for the Lowell Sun through most of the 1980s. "Writing even a positive story was like pulling teeth." Department commanders often threw Cook out of police headquarters.