Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 14, 1993 TAG: 9301140454
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
CRIME NEWS
THE NUMBER of reported crimes in the Roanoke area declined in 1992 from the year before, which is great. Equally encouraging is the development that law-enforcement officials are citing as perhaps one of the reasons for the lower numbers: greater citizen involvement in crime prevention.In Roanoke, in particular, community policing methods are beginning to get the kind of respect they deserve. Community policing refers, generally speaking, to organized police interaction not just with offenders, but with a neighborhood's law-abiding residents.
Police help organize the community against lawlessness; they gather intelligence, and try to resolve problems and prevent crimes where they can, rather than simply respond to events.
The point isn't public relations, but to enlist the community's help in fighting crime. Roanoke police say they have seen a marked increase in citizen involvement since they installed COPE teams (Community Oriented Policing Effort) into high-crime neighborhoods around housing projects. They've also seen crime in those neighborhoods go down.
Outside the few places where COPE teams are at work, moreover, community teamwork and crime prevention seem generally to be paying off. In Salem, where most crimes were down 15 percent from the year before, Lt. James Bryant says: "People will report crime now. They're beginning to take it a little more personally than in the past."
They should take it personally.
This is not to take away from the good work of all police, including in rapid response to crimes and emergencies. (Thanks for being there.) Commendable, too, are good-old-fashioned investigative efforts, such as those that last year cut the valley's crime rate substantially by breaking up three, major drug-crazed burglary rings.
Nor is this to suggest that, on the basis of one year's reports, the crime problem is easing in this region. Many factors account for annual variations in statistics. The drug culture and the proliferation of guns are still very much with us, and they aren't limited to inner-city neighborhoods.
Still, there is hope to be found in the initial success of community policing methods and in the reported widespread increase in citizen involvement. There is reason in this news, too: reason to make community policing the dominant philosophy of local police work, reason to expand its practice throughout the city and across the region.