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Pat Dee and the Agency of Change
An Adventure in Social Marketing
It is a gray and wintry day a few years from now. An unanticipated and unexplainable rise in arrests in New York City has created a brutal rash of motiveless crime.
Some people attribute this surge in violence to demographics, a bubble of inner-city baby boomers born in the early 1990s, victims of a failed school system and a lack of challenging jobs. But most attribute it to a new, cheap and potent drug called Skotch.
Skotch is an inorganic chemical that induces the dreaminess of LSD and the rush of crack. Apparently, it is easy to produce the drug at home with the help of a friendly pharmacist. You smoke it. You float and come down hard, and want more right away. People coming down, it is said, don’t know their own strength. As a result, many people have died at their own hand, and many more at someone else’s.
Crime and suicide are up, primarily in a square mile area of upper Manhattan and in certain pockets of New Jersey and Miami. If Skotch follows the pattern of similar drugs, it will emerge in about a month in such cities as Topeka, Dubuque, Albuquerque and Austin. We would then see it on college campuses everywhere. In a year it will have become another one of those nationwide behavioral epidemics costing billions of dollars and taking hundreds of lives a month.
The responsibility for addressing the problem in its infancy in New York City has fallen to the Health Department’s Agency of Change.
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The Agency of Change is committed to developing and implementing short- and long-range social marketing programs designed to decrease the social acceptability of dangerous behaviors, such as drug abuse, teen sex, drinking while driving or teen pregnancy.
Dozens of similar agencies have sprung up in cities large and small across America. All these agencies sprang from a pilot proposal drafted a decade earlier by a young Manhattan Borough police department sergeant, Pat Dee. A credible and engaging 26-year-old woman at the time, Pat Dee was known for having her facts straight, fire in her smile, and to put it simply, taking chances. She was also the right person at the right time.
A few years before Pat came to the police department, federal block grants had been issued that allowed state and local governments the freedom and flexibility to produce innovative, even untested programs tailor-made for the problem at hand.
As a result of this new system, Pat had been given a modest internal grant and six months to demonstrate her experimental approach to reducing the city’s never-ending graffiti problem. She was successful beyond anyone’s expectations. Under her focused and fiery direction, the programs she developed linked schools with the police department, as well as radio and television stations, half a dozen community web sites, local arts group, and representatives of the broadcast media. Together, these groups developed a quick action alliance known by insiders as "Presto." ...
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