ROANOKE TIMES 

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 1, 1994                   TAG: 9405020140
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: B2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CRIME CONTROL

THE SUCCESS of Roanoke City's COPE program (Community Oriented Policing Effort) is based on a fairly simple premise: Highly visible police officers in partnership with an organized neighborhood will discourage criminals from going about their business.

City officials say they can't afford to put labor-intensive COPE teams in every neighborhood. But they have a new program that borrows from the COPE premise. It helps police officers buy homes in certain crime-susceptible inner-city areas on the theory that the officers will become that more connected to the community, and even their off-duty presence can help stabilize neighborhoods and deter crime.

The concept has proved effective in other cities, including Columbia, S. C., which won a national Innovations in State and Local Government Award for developing the program nearly four years ago.

In Columbia, officials found that police buying homes in targeted communities had a direct impact on the peace of mind of other residents. Where residents began to feel that their troubled neighborhoods had become safer, better places to live, they made more structural improvements to their properties, vacant houses began selling, and a sense of neighborhood pride returned and spread block by block.

To date, Roanoke has had no takers of its offer to provide financial assistance, in the form of low-interest loans, to police who want to buy and fix up homes in certain city neighborhoods. But several city police officers have shown an interest. (The city's Police Homeowners Loan Program, incidentally, is not limited to city police. State troopers and law-enforcement officials of surrounding jurisdictions may also apply.)

It's a modest idea with limited potential, but a promising one nonetheless. As in many metropolitan areas, owner-occupied housing has declined and renter-occupied housing has increased in many older sections of Roanoke over the past 20 years. This has caused an erosion of neighborhood and housing values that the city needs to try to turn around.

Thus, financial incentives for police to buy and live in homes in a half-dozen selected neighborhoods - ones still considered relatively stable but on the brink of slipping into blight - represent good thinking on housing policy as well as crime prevention.

And if neighborhoods become safer when a police officer is one of the neighbors, why not take the high-visibility concept a step further?

Councilman William White has proposed that city police living in certain at-risk neighborhoods be allowed to drive their cruisers home and park them in front of thier houses when they get off duty, rather than leave them parked downtown. It's worth considering. 


 by CNB