Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, April 13, 1991 TAG: 9104130016
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Frances Stebbins
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
First, the chapter of the National Association for Evangelicals heard Roanoke Police Chief M. David Hooper, Sheriff Alvin Hudson, and Roanoke County's new Police Chief John Cease.
Speaking to about 25 Protestant pastors, who mostly represent doctrinally conservative groups tending to favor being tough on criminals, the three men agreed that some of the valley's increase in violence is the fault of TV and newspapers.
A few days later the interfaith Roanoke Valley Ministers Conference heard Jeffrey Spence of Richmond discuss "Multi-Cultural Policing: Challenge of the 90s."
Spence coordinates the Virginia work of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, a group associated with individual rights and tolerance of all people.
Hooper told the evangelicals at the prayer breakfast at The Roanoker Restaurant that he knew four years ago when the crack variety of cocaine appeared in Roanoke that police were in for trouble.
That trouble today includes not only the frustration of trying to stop drug trafficking originating out of state but also the public's perception that police are either brutal or inefficient, Hooper said.
TV news brings isolated incidents of police brutality in Los Angeles, Miami or New York into Roanoke homes. In a matter of days, he said, similar accusations or incidents occur nearby. Newspapers contribute to the problem, all three men said, when they devote a major part of their space to details of crime both near home and elsewhere.
"We're dragged through the press" every time a suicide occurs in a jail or a crime is not solved at once, was the way Hudson put it.
"It's greed for profits" that come from high TV ratings or print readership, the Rev. John Kepley, a rental manager and part-time pastor, said.
Cease stressed crime prevention and having citizens learn more about police work to help restore confidence in law enforcement. He said he is developing a program that will use carefully screened adults as riders in police cars and as crime analysts through computer usage.
All will be volunteers - to save public money - and will offer genuine help with details too time consuming for highly paid professionals, Cease said.
Both Hooper and Cease said they'd like to be invited into more church education groups to talk about moral values and the need of human concern for law-breakers' families and prison rehabilitation.
The evangelical pastors asked Hooper to start a ride-with-a-cop program like the county's.
The church-sponsored West End Center program helps youngsters who can stay with it long enough, the city police chief noted. It would be more effective, Hooper said, if many inner-city families were not so unstable, resulting in frequent moves.
A change of meeting date and place reduced the Roanoke Valley Ministers Conferences's attendance to less than 20 at First Presbyterian Church.
Its speaker, Spence, departed from his frequent role of championing underdogs to informing the religion professionals about what his organization does to educate law-enforcement people in human relations.
As Spence described police work today, police officers are underdogs. They should, he said, be no more regarded as a class of poorly educated, brutal white rubes out to get minorities than all blacks should be stereotyped as drug addicts.
Citizens, said Spence, deserve the same high-quality performance from their law-enforcement employees that they get from those in private business. And generally, he asserted, they do get this performance.
The National Conference of Christians and Jews has offered courses to Roanoke police, as well as to several officers in Eastern Virginia, for nearly 20 years, Spence said. He was engaged to develop one last year for top Roanoke police personnel after "the Hardee's incident," he said.
He referred to charges that city police used unnecessary force in restraining a black guidance counselor who said he was defending two schoolgirls being evicted late at night from a parking lot.
Spence said he is glad the Roanoke police chief is planning to actively recruit more minorities, since blacks represent only 5 percent of the force in a city that is 25 percent black.
But police, according to Spence, are far more sensitive to human rights and feelings than they were even 20 years ago when civil rights violence and Vietnam War attitudes made criticism of them routine.
He cited the treatment of rape victims as an example of the way investigators have grown more aware of the victimization of women.
Women's rights groups often have said that police do not take seriously their reports of rape and assume that the act was provoked. Today, according to Spence, that attitude is rarely encountered.
His classes, which commonly last for a day, also raise consciousness in word association. "Words like `prejudice,' `racism' and `sexism' are sterile in the dictionary" but become loaded with bad personal associations when spoken at tense times, Spence noted.
Though eight hours of sensitizing is inadequate, it is all that departments can afford in money and lost time from active duty, Spence said. Citizens don't champion higher taxes for police protection the way they do for such services as public schools, he said.
by CNB