Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 21, 1991 TAG: 9104210292
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LISA PERLMAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The idea is to restore public confidence and make the streets safer.
They aim to eliminate the image - reinforced by pictures of nightstick-wielding cops beating a Los Angeles motorist - of the officer as a brute rather than a benefactor, a trusted public servant in blue.
"Community policing" is the buzzword of a new generation of law-enforcement officials, who see the progressive approach not as a throwback to an earlier era, but as the first major reform in a half-century.
Faced with the failure of standard approaches to fight crime, police departments view community policing as a way to forge partnerships between police and residents in the most depressed neighborhoods in the country.
Residents become more willing to report crimes and take responsibility for cleaning up their neighborhoods, the philosophy goes; the beat officer, in turn, has the flexibility to focus on the specific problems of the community and serve as its personal advocate.
The relationship also breaks down the mistrust and alienation between citizens and police, said Robert Trojanowicz, director of the National Center for Community Policing and the School of Criminal Justice at Michigan State University.
"If one or more of those cops accused of beating motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles had been community police officers, I doubt you would have seen the same scenario," Trojanowicz said. "The anonymity is broken down and accountability is restored; the residents know the cop and the cop knows the residents."
Trojanowicz estimates community policing programs are in place in at least 360 departments nationwide.
Community police officers often are stationed in their respective neighborhoods full time. Sometimes they are based at churches or public schools, focusing on anti-drug programs and eliminating dealers from the surrounding neighborhoods. Others rent apartments in housing projects and create on-site minipolice stations.
An officer may organize a cleanup of a neighborhood where vacant buildings and broken street lights invite crime, rather than just responding to 911 calls after the crime has been committed. Stop it before it happens.
"It goes back to the old cop on the beat, but in a modern-day way," said Lee Brown, commissioner of the New York City Police Department. In March, his department launched one of the nation's largest community policing programs.
Community policing "provides the opportunity for the police officers to do something to make a difference, to make a difference in the lives of people, to solve problems and not just respond to incidents," Brown said.
Besides New York, other large cities implementing community policing are Los Angeles, Detroit, San Francisco, Boston and Houston.
In Roanoke, police walk beats in the downtown area, but other parts of the city are patrolled by officers in cars that are assigned to certain districts. Some community leaders - especially in Northwest Roanoke, where relations have been strained between police and black citizens - have called for more foot patrols as a way of improving relations. Others have suggested a precinct be established in an area such as Lincoln Terrace housing project to give police a more regular presence in the black community.
Minneapolis Mayor Don Fraser said that in medium-sized cities such as his an interpersonal relationship develops between police and citizens. "Where it becomes a we-they relationship, then we're in trouble," he said, "and that's one reason we're moving toward community-oriented policing.
"We need to connect with the community. We need to be responsive to what the community has to say about what they think is important to their neighborhood."
The people, said Fraser, "feel a lot better when they know a police officer by name, when he or she is a familiar figure." In turn, he said, the police officer benefits from the confidence of the citizens who know their neighborhood best, including knowing who the criminals are. "There is a potential to be tapped into there," he said.
Community policing also is taking hold in smaller communities, where just a few drug dealers can quickly decimate an entire neighborhood.
Before a community police officer turned an apartment into an office at the drug-ravaged East Park Manor housing project in Muskegon Heights, Mich., last September, "We were developing a nice little collection of chalk outlines on the street," said Lee Abisch, executive director of the Muskegon Heights Housing Commission.
But 130 arrests and 40 evictions later, officer Latrice Sain estimates the 200-apartment complex is 90 percent drug-free.
Where once there was an "us-vs.-them" attitude toward police, Sain now returns from foot patrol to find several messages, including occasional tips, on his telephone answering machine. He's helped establish a tenant's council, which plans to form its own crime-watch patrol.
"Some of the people who live here used to be prisoners; they felt they weren't safe leaving their homes," said Sain, who is on a first-name basis with most of the neighborhood's residents. "Now they're taking control again."
Said resident Ruby Merkson: "My daughter and me used to sleep in shifts because of what was going on outside our windows at all hours. But because of this man, we can sleep nights now."
In the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colo., where community policing has been in place since 1983, division Police Chief Ron Sloan is trying to institutionalize the approach throughout his 391-officer department.
"It's a matter of trying to reflect more of a problem-solving approach, rather than a reactive approach," Sloan said. He finds his officers are making better arrests and building better cases, largely because residents are more willing to report crimes and testify in court.
"Middle-class residents are going to have to be more patient when there's an abandoned car outside their house that they want gone," said Trojanowicz of Michigan State. "The focus is going to be on more-serious problems."
by CNB