Police Take to the Streets to Cut Crime and Blight : Strategy: Under a three-month pilot program, senior lead officers are getting out of their patrol cars and working directly with residents to improve community relations.

As part of his new assignment, Los Angeles Police Officer Jon Damascus slogs through weeds, flies and garbage in squalid abandoned houses in Pacoima, where he posts notices ordering that the property be cleaned up or bulldozed.

In North Hollywood, Officer Nancy Reeves walks the first official foot beat of her life in the Lankershim Boulevard barrio, drawing surprised stares from street vendors and day laborers. She also walks a tough stretch of residential Runnymede Street, where on a recent morning she enlisted property owners--and gang members--in a fight against graffiti smothering apartment buildings, sidewalks and the street.

“We don’t write on our street. We respect our street,” said gang member Mario Campirano, an 18-year-old construction worker at one building. “It’s the homeboys from the other streets around here. I’m getting tired of painting my own garage, man.”

“Can’t you talk to them?” Reeves said. “Get after them. I’m going to be back.”

Reeves will be back soon and often. She and Damascus are part of a three-month pilot program started recently in the five Los Angeles Police Department divisions of the San Fernando Valley. The goal is for 31 “senior lead officers”--patrol veterans who have the highest rank below sergeant--to get out of their cars and work with residents in attacking blight, career criminals, neighborhood disputes and lack of citizen involvement in crime prevention.

Until several weeks ago, these officers had only a few days a month for community relations in their designated areas. Now they have considerable freedom from routine radio calls. They will meet with community groups, work to identify repeat offenders, spend part of each day walking foot beats and otherwise tackle problems on turf they know better than other officers and detectives. They will answer only top-priority emergency calls.

The shift reflects a law enforcement strategy, known as community policing or problem-solving policing, that has emerged around the city and nation in the past several years. The concept gains significance as a result of the Rodney G. King beating, which involved officers from the Valley’s Foothill Division, and the ensuing focus on community-police relations.

“The Rodney King matter has made us step back and make changes,” said Sgt. Dennis Zine, spokesman for the Valley Bureau, which encompasses the five Valley police divisions. “We were in a mode that obviously wasn’t effective, so we’ve changed.”

David Kennedy, a Harvard researcher who has studied the role of senior lead officers in the Los Angeles Police Department, said the initiative is “extremely significant.”

“This is not soft policing,” he said. “This is nuts-and-bolts, pragmatic stuff. The links they form with the community help them catch burglars and rapists.”

The Valley presents an ideal setting because it has several increasingly high-crime hot spots mixed with areas that have generally less crime than inner-city neighborhoods, Kennedy said. Community policing appears to work especially well in areas undergoing such a transition, he said.

The use of senior lead officers varies widely around the city, from a traditional emphasis on patrol and training in most Westside station areas to South Los Angeles, where the officers have mostly community-related, non-emergency duties, police officials said.

That reflects a recurring conflict in the department between high-tech, rapid-response policing and community-based approaches, experts said. The latter philosophy has the danger of turning police into catchall social workers and increases the potential for corruption, critics say.

But Kennedy said the Valley program represents the path out of the current crisis. And experts, community leaders and police officers said more than a short-term public relations project will be required for true change.

“It takes a long time for the officers to learn how to do this job,” said Mark Moore, a professor of criminal justice at Harvard University. “It takes a long time for the community to learn how to interact with the officers who do this job.”

Zine acknowledged that the makeup of the senior lead officers in the Valley is not as diverse as the department would like. In an area that is 40% Latino and 3% black, seven are Spanish-speaking, four are Latino and none is black. This concerns some black leaders in the Pacoima area, which contains the largest concentration of blacks in the Valley.

There are more veteran minority officers in predominantly minority areas of the city, Zine said, and many minority officers have joined the force or come to the Valley area relatively recently.

“We are committed to affirmative action,” he said. “But you don’t promote to senior lead overnight. You don’t promote to sergeant overnight.”

In three months, commanders will evaluate the program’s impact on crime statistics, 911 calls, and attitudes of officers and residents, Zine said.

Some experts said three months may not be enough time. They cautioned that crime statistics may not go down because increased public confidence often leads to more reported crime.

“What happens when you have a situation where there has been fear and distrust of the police and suddenly the police become much more accessible?” Kennedy said. “Reporting goes up.”

The eventual outcome notwithstanding, the officers are off to an enthusiastic start.

In a five-square-mile area that is home to several violent street gangs, Reeves recently cruised through alleys that are playgrounds by day and danger zones by night. She has persuaded several building owners to install security gates on carports to cut down on loitering, blight and theft. She plans to intensify her work with property owners and help them through the city bureaucracy.

“I could only get one day a week before to talk to citizens who had all these complaints about traffic, crime, graffiti, people who don’t take care of their houses,” said Reeves, 39, a 10-year veteran. “It was frustrating. It’s nice talking to people, even the gang members. You get all kinds of information.”

Reeves visited a supermarket on Lankershim Boulevard, watched by Latino vendors who sell cassette tapes by the entrance. The tapes are probably bootlegs and therefore illegal, Reeves said. Although she disperses loiterers, she leaves the vendors alone. The supermarket manager believes that they provide a sense of security in the parking lot.

As officers become attuned to such local nuances, they focus on places and situations that produce repeated 911 emergency calls--particularly those that are not true emergencies. The strain on manpower in some areas makes this their primary mission, officials said. Ideally, as problems are solved, 911 calls will decrease and give all officers more time for working with the public and responding to serious emergencies, police said.

“There will be some impact,” Zine said. “We have taken 31 cars off the street. It addresses the root of the problem. We believe it is a long-term solution that will pay off.”

Long-term solutions are not always glamorous. Damascus’ expanded duties at Foothill Division included meeting recently with a representative of a county-funded mediation service to which police refer ongoing disputes between neighbors and landlords and tenants.

And he ripped his uniform clambering through a fence into an overgrown back-yard jungle as he accompanied a city Building and Safety Department inspector through abandoned buildings that attract gang members, drug dealers and homeless people. Damascus and inspectors work closely to identify problem buildings and put legal pressure on owners through warnings and fines. If nothing else works, the abatement process can result in demolition.

“There’s all kinds of resources around that we can use,” Damascus said. “You direct people in the right direction to solve the problem.”

At one building, Damascus called an ambulance for Bradley, a diabetic transient he found lying in a daze amid bottles and muck. Bradley said he had been living there for three weeks, literally poisoning himself with alcohol.

“It’s cold at night, but I figure if I drink enough, I’ll sleep,” Bradley said.

Afterward, Damascus said: “What’s really tragic is when you find kids and families living in these places. Existing, you can’t call it living.”

The assignment gives Damascus a perspective that is generally absent during the stress and desperation of emergency calls, he said. Although officers who do community work have traditionally endured sarcasm from colleagues, attitudes are changing as new policing styles involve more and more officers, several officers said.

“Some of them feel we should be out here arresting more people,” Reeves said. “But deep down, they know it’s the way things are going to go.”