Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 18, 1994 TAG: 9404190031
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The police were accused of brutality, racism, rudeness and playing Rambo - and, at the same time, of doing too little too late to stop the crack cocaine and gun crimes terrorizing Roanoke's poorest neighborhoods.
"That's been completely turned around," says the Rev. Alfred Prunty, a black minister who served on a citizens' task force that focused on the strained situation. "It's a most beautiful thing," he says, to see blacks, including black youngsters, now regarding police officers as friends and allies, rather than enemy stormtroopers.
Prunty, like many others in the black community and in city government, gives much of the credit to COPE - the Community Oriented Policing Effort, begun in 1991.
The purpose of COPE is to fight crime by working to prevent it, not simply to give the Police Department a slicker image. Its success as a crime-prevention effort is of critical importance not just to residents of high-crime neighborhoods but to all city taxpayers. No city can afford a police force so big and so techologically sophisticated that it could by itself get every criminal or would-be criminal off the streets
With limited resources, in other words, the police must rely on the help of law-abiding citizens to control crime. That help is not apt to be forthcoming if citizens, justifiably or not, are as suspicious of the cops as of the crooks. Moreover, such suspicions tend to be most intense in areas where crime rates are highest. It's a kind of vicious circle: Police inability to do their job well contributes to citizen attitudes that make the job all the harder.
COPE breaks the deadlock by breaking down the barriers of suspicion, winning citizens' support and confidence - and, in the winning, helping the law-abiding protect their neighborhoods from a criminal takeover.
It seems to be working. If folks like Prunty are right, the blue uniforms have a new user-friendly hue in public-housing developments and other areas where the program has been concentrated.
In those neighborhoods, where police previously just pulled up in their cruisers in response to trouble, COPE-trained officers have walked door to door, interacting with residents, asking citizens about their problems and concerns, acting as the citizens' advocates in getting action from other departments of the city, whether it's to get a pothole filled, an overgrown lot cleared or playground equipment repaired.
Results specifically attributable to COPE aren't easily quantified. But serious crime in the city has dropped two years in a row, and the police believe COPE has been one important reason.
An even bigger success may be the dramatic reduction in the fear of crime. This reduction improves the quality of life in marginal neighborhoods; at-risk places become less risky.
Rising trust in the police may be hard to measure, but it's easy to see.
Residents who used to boo and hiss police making an arrest now cheer for the police. It's the troublemakers who're booed and hissed. Women and children who used to fear leaving their houses now walk alone to the store or the neighborhood park. Little kids run up to greet an officer, and take his or her hand.
And many who used to look the other way if they saw or suspected a crime, afraid to get involved, are joining neighborhood crime-watch organizations, and calling the Police Department and asking for officers - by name.
COPE does not come cheap. It takes more law-enforcement manpower and womanpower to get ahead of the game than to play catch-up - in the short run. But in the long run, every crime prevented in a crime-prone neighborhood translates, citywide, into a more productive, efficient and cost-effective police department. That's something everyone - except the criminals - can cope with gladly.
by CNB