Governing Magazine/May 1995

FEATURE: COMMUNITY POLICING

COPS & COMMUNITY

Community policing can help save a neighborhood. What it can't do is
save a neighborhood all by itself.

By Rob Gurwitt

The Parkside Motel in St. Petersburg, Florida, is not the sort of
place you'd want to come to on a family vacation. A dilapidated motor
court that rents "weekly efficiencies" and is just a few steps shy of
a flophouse, it sits on the edge of Harbordale, one of the drug-ridden
south-side neighborhoods that complicate St. Petersburg's image as a
sedate haven for retirees from the Midwest.
 On an unseasonably cool and overcast day, Officer Holly Hadrika pulls
her patrol car onto the grass in front of the Parkside to stop and
question a young woman with a gold braid who matches the description
of a suspect in a knife-point burglary the month before. The woman,
who had been walking down the street toward the motel, tells Hadrika
with perfect aplomb that she doesn't know how to spell her own name
and can't remember her last address, blaming her confusion on years of
drinking. She says the manager at the Parkside can vouch for her if
he's there, but he may not be, because he lives off-site.
 Hadrika nods, expressionless, and, leaving the woman with two other
cops who have joined them, heads inside to talk with the manager.
"What she doesn't know," Hadrika says with a slight smile, "is that I
probably speak with the manager at least once a day. And he lives
right here."
 It is the suspect's misfortune to have been stopped by the one police
officer in St. Petersburg who can tell on the spot that she's lying.
Hadrika is Harbordale's community police officer, one of 52 who are
each responsible for a patch of the city's turf. She has spent three
years in the neighborhood, day in and day out. She knows its drug
dealers and addicts, its schoolchildren and troubled families. She
knows the efficiency motel regulars and their companions, the
apartment managers who will cooperate with her and the ones who won't,
the property owners who let dealers work out of their houses and the
homeowners who will turn out to help her fight dealers on their block.
In turn, many of them--dealers, schoolchildren, managers and
homeowners alike--know her. Hadrika is sure that the woman she has
stopped is from outside the neighborhood, which the Parkside's manager
confirms: He's seen her around a few times, he says, but doesn't know
much about her.
 Back out front, the woman's luck has vanished entirely. Sandy Minor,
the community police officer for the next area over, is talking
quietly with a woman who was passing by--one of her neighborhood
contacts and, as it happens, the burglary victim. The victim
identifies Hadrika's suspect. "I think," says Minor, drily, "we've got
probable cause to arrest."
 The St. Petersburg police have been engaged in community policing
since 1990, and at its heart, it comes down to this: In every
neighborhood in the city, the police department has at least one
officer who either knows the terrain intimately or is learning it.
These are not, as the community policing stereotype would have it,
cops walking a beat. They are more like roving problem-solvers--
policing their neighborhoods "the way they would want if they lived
there," as Princeton University's John DiIulio puts it. They find ways
to shut down drug houses and chase dealers from neglected corners;
they enlist community help in everything from dealing with
troublemakers to cleaning up the neighborhood; they find and try to
resolve difficulties of all sorts--from elderly homeowners who can no
longer keep their property in shape to teenagers who attract the wrong
crowd--before these problems kick a street into a downward spiral. And
they put what they have learned to use, as Hadrika's suspect has just
discovered, in catching criminals.
 The results have been encouraging. Both the crime rate and residents'
fear of crime have dropped in the years since community policing was
established in St. Petersburg. Many of the city's neighborhoods have
become fiercely protective of their community police, finding them
office space to work out of and even buying them bicycles when the
department's budget falls short. In neighborhoods where police were
long seen as little more than an occupying army, they have built up
levels of trust that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. "St.
Petersburg," says Dennis C. Smith, who directs the public policy
program at New York University's graduate school of public policy,
"has taken community policing as far or further than anyplace I've
seen."
 Yet St. Petersburg's very success also points up how difficult
community policing can be to do well. For as the program has taken
hold, the role of officers like Holly Hadrika and her colleagues has
expanded beyond law enforcement: They have become de facto community
organizers, social workers and civic ombudsmen. They have, in short,
been thrust into the vanguard of the city's efforts to shore up and
reclaim neighborhood life.
 There are plenty of police chiefs around the country who believe that
is exactly where the police ought to be. "What we want is to enhance
and nurture the neighborhood concept of churches, schools, stores,
people interacting, festivities, cultural diversity," says Nicholas
Pastore, the chief of police in New Haven, Connecticut. "To do that,
people need to feel safe in the effort. You'll find that most people
want to move in that direction, but they want help overcoming their
fears."
 Making that happen, however, turns out to require much more than a
police department dedicated to the idea. If, as is happening in St.
Petersburg and in other cities, police officers are being asked to
stand in the way not simply of criminals but of the forces that drive
crime and neighborhood decay, then they need help. And they need it
not just from the community, as any community police officer can tell
you, but from the one place it can be most difficult to find: the rest
of city government.
 "We're asking our officers to take on the issues that create an
environment of crime and violence and fear," says Darrel Stephens, St.
Petersburg's soft-spoken chief of police and a nationally known
community policing theorist. "Those are very complex issues. In the
past we told our citizens, `Give us resources and taxes, and we'll
solve these problems ourselves.' We've learned it's not possible to do
that. We won't significantly change neighborhoods, stop them from
decline and help rebuild them unless we have the participation both of
people in the neighborhood and of the rest of government."

There are, it is true, plenty of opportunities for St. Petersburg's
community police, acting alone, to make a difference. Driving through
Coquina Key, a racially mixed neighborhood a bit to the south of
Harbordale, Officer Terrell Skinner points to several houses where
single mothers, away at work all day and often into the evening, had
lost control of adolescent children whose raucous activities were
driving neighbors to put their houses up for sale. He helped the women
get blanket trespass warnings limiting visitors while they were out
and giving Skinner the ability to crack down on any violators. "The
`For Sale' signs," he says, "went away."
 On the north side of town, Officer Mark Blackwood has made a point of
getting to know the youngsters in the middle-class neighborhood he
covers, hanging out with them while they play, buying lemonade from
their stands in the summer, helping the parents of a handful of kids
experimenting with LSD find places for them in drug programs. So when
two boys threw a stink bomb through an elderly resident's mail slot,
setting her rug on fire, Blackwood knew within a day who had done it;
he took them, with their parents, over to the woman's house the
following evening to sit down and talk about how to make amends. "The
kids in my neighborhood pimp each other out to him in a second," says
Lieutenant Tony Potts, who directs St. Petersburg's community policing
program and lives in the area for which Blackwood is responsible.
 All told, there are 48 community police areas in St. Petersburg, and
within them, officers have broad latitude to deal with whatever
problems they and local residents think are priorities. That can be
anything from making life difficult for drug dealers--Hadrika and
Minor are jokingly referred to around police headquarters as "Cagney
and Lacey" for their hard-nosed attitude toward the dealers in their
neighborhoods--to setting up a program to identify elderly residents
with Alzheimer's disease who get confused and wander from home.
 It doesn't take long, though, to realize that for all the community
police officers' autonomy, the ultimate resolution of a problem is
often out of their hands. You get an inkling of why just a few minutes
after Hadrika's burglar is handcuffed and sitting in the back seat of
the patrol car on the way back to police headquarters. Searching her
pockets, Hadrika turns up a crack pipe; the woman tells her that she's
been using the drug since Christmas. She can't, she says quietly, get
off it.
 Stopped at a light, Hadrika turns her head. "Do you want to get
help?" The woman tells her she's been unable to.
 "You've got to ask the judge," Hadrika tells her, stressing each
word. "You have to ask the judge to help you out."
 The problem, Hadrika later explains, is that in St. Petersburg, as
elsewhere, the number of people wanting to get into drug rehab
programs is far greater than the space available. About the only way
to make sure it happens these days is to get a court order. Every so
often, people who've gotten to know Hadrika in Harbordale will tell
her they have a drug problem, even try to get her to arrest them, in
hopes that she can help them get into a program. If the woman Hadrika
has just arrested doesn't get into drug rehab, it's a pretty good bet
that her path will cross Hadrika's again.
 The fact is, community police officers have to rely on other agencies
and government officials daily. Getting vacant houses boarded up or
trash-strewn lots cleaned may be problems that neighborhood residents
ask the police to resolve, but it's actually the sanitation department
or code enforcement officers who must make sure it happens. Putting
pressure on a motel owner who has been catering to prostitutes and
their trade depends on the willingness of other city officials, from
fire inspectors to nuisance-abatement boards, to help out. Getting a
handle on public drunkenness can take anything from finding alcohol
treatment programs with available slots to working with liquor control
authorities to shut down troublesome outlets.
 All of this is an inevitable result of a major strand of the thought
that underlies community policing. It was laid out in an influential
1982 article in The Atlantic by Professors James Q. Wilson, now at
UCLA, and George Kelling, now at Northeastern University. Titled
"Broken Windows," the article made the point that crime is linked to a
disorderly environment and that allowing signs of disorder--graffiti,
a broken window--to go untended promotes the impression that no one
cares about the neighborhood, which in turn permits crime to breed.
Reducing crime and the fear of crime, Kelling and Wilson suggested,
would depend on a "return to our long-abandoned view that the police
ought to protect communities as well as individuals.... [T]he police--
and the rest of us--ought to recognize the importance of maintaining,
intact, communities without broken windows."
 In the years since then, most of the academic and professional
discussion of community policing has focused on just this issue:
moving beyond the simple question of apprehending criminals to the
infinitely more complex questions of managing public order. Even if
there are no definitive blueprints, police administrators are now
keenly aware of such tasks as restructuring the department to support
its community-oriented functions and finding ways to involve community
groups and ordinary citizens in identifying and resolving problems
plaguing their neighborhoods.
 What has gotten less attention, however, is the question of
coordinating with other government agencies, which Kelling and Wilson,
in a later article, warned might be the most difficult challenge of
all. "The police can bring problems to the attention of other city
agencies," they wrote, "but the system is not always organized to
respond."
 That is a widely held view. "One of the problems with community
policing in most cities is that it's a police department program, not
a government program or a particular chief executive's program," says
Wesley Skogan, professor of political science and urban affairs at
Northwestern University in Chicago. "This is really fatal, because one
of the things about community policing is that it inevitably calls for
a big expansion of the police mandate to cover a broad range of
disorder, decay and quality-of-life issues as well as crime fighting."

Perhaps the single most admired city in the country in community
policing circles is Portland, Oregon, where the program has lasted
through several changes in both police and city administration. One
clear reason for its success there is that the city bureaucracy has
been geared for some time to respond to neighborhood concerns--
crafting a coordinated response to particular problems, while it still
takes work, is not the alien endeavor in Portland that it can be in
other cities. "If police agencies are forced to facilitate projects
without assistance, they'll fail," says Tom Peavey, a neighborhood
resource officer in the city's Central District. "When police have to
pull their resources and go to another project--since they can't do
everything at once--if there's no set structure of community service
providers or public agencies to maintain what was created, then pretty
soon it'll be business as usual."
 Far more common than Portland are cases such as Houston, which was
the first big-league city to embrace community policing, under former
Chief Lee Brown. The city, which drew widespread attention in the
1980s for its efforts, is now drawing equal attention for its
rejection of the whole idea. Under Chief Sam Nuchia, the police there
have adopted a strategy focused explicitly on fighting crime--boosted
by the addition of more than 600 police officers since the beginning
of 1992--with a combination of aggressive patrol and investigations,
rapid response times, arresting parole violators and saturating the
city's highest crime beats with additional patrol units. Community
policing in Houston is dead.
 But the fact is, Houston's experiment with it was, at best, limited.
For one thing, police leaders never tried to train officers in the new
discipline or to rearrange the department to maximize their
effectiveness. Just as ruinous, although less noticed by outsiders,
they never got the rest of city government to buy in to their efforts.
 "One of the frustrations in Houston was that we were a police
department all by ourselves," says Elizabeth Watson, who followed
Brown as chief there before moving on to take that post in Austin,
Texas. "Many of the things we encountered were things over which we
had no control: lighting, weeds, graffiti, the deteriorating
conditions that can breed a criminal element. It was very difficult
for the police to work in concert with city government."
 The problem, Watson argues, was that community policing demands
coordination, when the norm is for agencies to focus solely on their
own priorities. "Each department establishes its own directions; it
hears its own drummer," she says. "It's a natural development, and it
takes a lot of hard work on a continuing basis to overcome that
natural tendency." Indeed, many cities don't seem up to the task. A
recent study by the Vera Institute of Justice in New York found that,
in seven of the eight cities with community policing that it analyzed,
coordination between the police and other municipal agencies had
failed entirely.
 There are signs, though, that things may be changing. Roberta Lesh,
who conducts training sessions on policing issues for the
International City/County Management Association, says that recently
the city officials she deals with have been showing more recognition
of the role they can play in dealing with crime and violence. "It
doesn't take a mental genius to figure out that the police can't
operate in a vacuum," she says, "so we're beginning to see this shift
around the country, where managers and elected officials are not just
thinking of it as a police issue."
 In Austin, for instance, where Elizabeth Watson is getting ready to
reorganize the entire police department to focus on the city's
neighborhoods, the city administration is also gearing up to make it
easier for each neighborhood to work directly with its various
departments. And in Chicago, which has undertaken what may be the
country's most ambitious effort to re-gear a police department for
community policing, the improvement of city services in coordination
with police "beat teams" has been part of the program from the start.
Indeed, Mayor Richard M. Daley kicked the whole program off with a
now-famous meeting in which he told his department heads that
community policing was his policy and that if they didn't support it
they'd lose their jobs. He has kept the heat on by having service
requests generated by beat teams and the citizens they work with
coordinated through his office.

St. Petersburg could easily have gone the way of Houston. Although the
advent of community policing there coincided with growing concern
among some officials at city hall about the deteriorating state of the
neighborhoods, the city's attention for the most part lay elsewhere.
As in many other places, local officials in St. Pete--backed by most
of the city's major financial interests and its only newspaper, the
St. Petersburg Times--spent the 1970s and 1980s all but fixated on
downtown development. By the beginning of this decade, the city had an
empty $135 million domed stadium (it will be filled only with the
start of the 1998 baseball season), the equally empty Bay Plaza
commercial development downtown, and a rising tide of resentment among
residents who felt they'd been ignored for too long. "There were bumps
at the highest levels," says Planning Director Ralph Stone. "The city
manager was used to dealing with things set by the council's agenda,
which really lagged behind neighborhood needs."
 All of that changed in 1993, when an electoral revolt was touched off
by the police chief who brought community policing to the city. Ernest
Curtsinger came to St. Petersburg from Los Angeles, where his
direction of a community policing pilot project in the high-profile
Wilshire District had given him a reputation as an innovator. He was
an immediate hit with the St. Petersburg force, combining as he did
the hard-nosed fervor for crime-fighting that has been the LAPD
trademark with a devotion to giving his officers far more of a say in
how the department ran than they had ever been accustomed to.
 "He was our savior," says Sam Giardina, a 23-year veteran and former
police union president who is now a community police officer on the
western edge of the city's downtown business district. "He made us
feel like adults again. When he went to community policing, he told
us, `This is your area. You will get to know the people, you'll work
whatever hours you need, and you don't need me to tell you how to do
your job.'" In an organization that had been as hierarchical and
tightly controlled as any, Curtsinger's insistence that community
police officers be fettered only by their imaginations and the bounds
of the law was almost revolutionary.
 But his actions had another, even more far-reaching consequence.
Placing community police officers around the city--with orders to
listen carefully to the residents in their areas and then do something
about their concerns--turned out to be a revelation to the
neighborhoods. To many of them, Curtsinger's shift to community
policing marked the first time in years that a branch of city
government was not only paying attention to them but giving them a
voice in what went on in their bounds. "The neighborhoods had been
slighted for many, many years," says Karen Mullins, president of the
city's Council of Neighborhood Associations. "He changed that."
 So when Curtsinger was accused of insensitivity toward his black
officers and toward the black community in general, the city's white,
middle-class neighborhoods rallied around him. And when he was
ultimately dismissed by an acting city manager, resentment boiled
over: Angry citizens placed an initiative on the ballot to replace the
council-manager system with a strong mayor, while Curtsinger himself
ran for mayor against David Fischer, who had held the post under the
old system. In a closely fought and often bitter campaign, the strong-
mayor initiative won but Curtsinger lost.
 The message, however, got through. Fischer, like Curtsinger, ran on a
pro-neighborhoods plank, and since taking office he has pushed
aggressively to steer the city's resources toward its neighborhoods.
Even before the change in government, the planning department had
begun working with one run-down neighborhood on a plan to improve its
infrastructure and deal with the growing number of properties in the
area that were attracting prostitutes; it expected to take two years
to put the plan into effect. Fischer, on taking office, announced to
his department heads that he wanted a full-bore commitment on the part
of every city agency to turn the neighborhood around, and gave them
six months. Since then, the city has moved on to six other
neighborhoods with similarly concerted efforts to overhaul them.
 In each of those, community police officers have played a central
role. They are part of so-called "city teams" that bring together
staff from the planning, codes, housing and public works departments
with responsibility for a particular neighborhood. They work with
bankers, real estate brokers, neighborhood leaders and other city
officials to find ways of bringing new investments into hard-hit
neighborhoods. And they have driven an ongoing process of change in
municipal procedures and ordinances designed to strengthen the hand of
the police in dealing with problems, from an open-container law to
help them rid the downtown business district of public drunkenness to
a new lot-cleaning program aimed at clearing problem properties far
more quickly than in the past.
 The community police have given the entire city establishment a point
of entry into its neighborhoods. Because many--though not all--of the
officers are the most trusted city officials in their neighborhoods,
they lend credibility to the city's development efforts. "What we're
doing couldn't exist and be effective without community policing,"
says Mike Dove, who directs St. Petersburg's neighborhood programs.
"It's a lot easier to work in a neighborhood where the community
police officer has established him- or herself. People get a more
comfortable feeling working with them than with the typical
bureaucrat. They already see their CPO as a problem-solver."

After years of getting little but good press all over the country,
community policing lately has run into more questions. There is, for
one thing, the issue of its cost: A number of cities have found it
necessary to hire additional patrol officers to replace the officers
they assign to neighborhood detail--although others, including St.
Petersburg, have managed to avoid that expense. There is also the
persistent problem that, in the majority of cities where the officers
who respond to 911 calls are different from community officers, there
is tension between the two parts of the force. Even in St. Petersburg,
where CPOs make a habit of giving arrest credit to patrol officers,
the problem endures. "We still have the let's-bust-bad-guys group,"
says Tony Potts, "and the fact is, we want them, because we still do
that. But we also want them to see that we need to do both things.
We've gone through some rocky roads on that."
 There is also the larger issue, for a country obsessed with getting
tough on crime, of whether community policing can deliver results as
quickly as most communities and politicians would like. "What we have
mostly done is prove that the assumptions underlying the old model
don't work," says NYU's Dennis Smith, a community policing advocate.
"We have yet to demonstrate that the new model does work."
 And perhaps most difficult of all, there is the question of whether
the new, community-oriented roles being thrust on police officers in
cities such as St. Petersburg are the most appropriate use of people
with a badge and a gun. As a society, we have been grappling with the
forces of urban decay for decades. Why should the police be any better
at resolving them than social workers or urban redevelopment
authorities have proven to be?
 The answer lies, in part, in the notion that all the police are doing
is finding new ways of filling their traditional role: keeping
communities safe. There is strong evidence from St. Petersburg and
other cities--in the form of both surveys and anecdotal confirmation--
that community policing helps residents feel safer, and certainly more
connected to the police department. "I firmly believe that one police
officer can make a difference in a neighborhood," says Darrel
Stephens. "It may not be a change-the-world difference, but it's a
difference that makes things a little better, a little easier to live,
a little more civil, a little less fear, maybe less actual crime."
 The result is that the police create room for other forces to take
hold. By reducing the fear of crime or violence in a neighborhood,
they give neighborhood associations the confidence they need to begin
mobilizing residents, they give city agencies on-the-ground support,
and they make it more likely that the kind of private money needed to
turn a neighborhood around will ultimately show up. "It's not a
question of the police opening a grocery store," says Drew Diamond,
the former chief of police in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and now director of
operations for the Community Policing Consortium in Washington, D.C.,
"but being part of a broader community process that enables that to
happen."
 That is why, if community police officers in St. Petersburg are
dependent on other city agencies to help them do their work, the
reverse is also true. "I would advise any city that's contemplating
revitalizing neighborhoods by geographical area like we have, make
sure you've got community policing first," says David Fischer.
"Because security, and believing that you can secure the place, are
prerequisites to doing this."
 "Community-based police officers need to understand their role in
society, and that role is no longer the crime fighter who chases the
bad guy and goes red-lights-and-sirens," says Bob Taylor, a one-time
Portland cop who has studied community policing as director of the
research office at the University of Texas at Tyler. "It's looking at
deep-rooted social problems in the neighborhood, figuring out how to
deal with the way people live, what resources they can tap into, how
to look at cleaning up the surrounding environment of the
neighborhood. Those are things we've never talked about in policing,
and it's an extremely big order to fill. On the other hand, who else
could fulfill it?"

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