COLUMN ONE : When Cops Go Back on the Beat : Houston has pioneered community-based policing, a practice now urged for Los Angeles. While some see benefits, many officers are skeptical. And crime there keeps rising.

For 25 years, Sgt. J.W. Collins did what good cops were supposed to do: He caught bad guys and threw them in jail.

Then came Link Valley, six blocks of living hell near the Astrodome in southwest Houston where armed drug dealers reigned through terror, and cops were ridiculed rather than feared.

“We kept coming in here day after day, and it wasn’t making any difference,” Collins said during a recent patrol. “I began to think I was a failure. Normal law enforcement wasn’t working for the first time in my career.”

In what many regard as a model for a new era in policing, Collins turned to a coalition of area homeowners for help.

Police set up checkpoints to discourage buyers from entering the thriving drug market, while residents hounded owners to board up or tear down abandoned buildings commandeered for the trade. Volunteers from civic and homeowner groups hauled away enough debris to fill 10 railroad cars.

Within months, the largest cocaine market in Houston had been dismantled, and police calls to the area had dropped by half.

The cooperative effort in Link Valley illustrates what many academics and police professionals nationwide regard as the way of the future in law enforcement. Most commonly known as community-based policing, the new approach envisions police and residents working as equal partners to fight crime--neighborhood by neighborhood.

In its report last month on the Los Angeles Police Department, the Christopher Commission recommended that Los Angeles adopt the model on a citywide basis as a key element of reforms designed to eliminate racism and brutality in the department. The commission predicted that the approach would reduce tension between residents and police by eliminating the perception within the Police Department of “the community as enemy.”

The Houston Police Department embarked on its own makeshift version nearly a decade ago, making it a pioneer in a policing style that experts say continues to evolve. As the first major city to commit to the new style of policing, Houston is viewed as an experiment in progress--a laboratory of do’s and don’ts for reformers across the country.

“Everything thorny and difficult that Los Angeles will face are the same things they are struggling with in Houston,” said David Kennedy, a Harvard research fellow in criminal justice. “What is really important about Houston . . . is that they have bitten the bullet. They have taken it upon themselves to figure out what the new department is going to be like and they are making the changes.”

Neighborhood-oriented policing, or NOP as community-based policing is known here, began as a series of trial-and-error experiments under former Chief Lee P. Brown, now police commissioner in New York City. In 1987, after several years of dabbling, the department committed to NOP on a citywide basis, turning the Police Department upside down by giving unprecedented authority to officers on the beat.

Brown embraced the new approach after inheriting a renegade department that had become distrusted and feared among minorities after a barrage of brutality and racism cases in the 1970s. In one of the most inflammatory incidents, several police officers drowned a handcuffed Latino man by throwing him into Buffalo Bayou, the waterway that traverses downtown Houston.

“The department was isolated from the people,” Brown said in a recent interview. “People were afraid of their police. I was brought there because they wanted reform.”

At its best, the new style of policing has meant a throwback to the days of the neighborhood cop, when officers knew the people they protected and crime prevention was as important as crime suppression. Every neighborhood has its own problems, the theory goes, and the local cop, joined by residents and merchants, should work to solve them.

Today, in Link Valley, much of the area is still run-down, but residents and police remain upbeat; they believe their partnership is working.

“Things are getting better,” said Don Graff, head of a homeowners group. “And it is only happening because the community and the police work together.”

Neighborhood policing has not been at its best everywhere in Houston. It has been a venture rife with problems and obstacles.

Several miles from Link Valley, Collins has been unable to chase crack dealers from a neighborhood of about 50 apartment complexes, primarily because it has been too difficult to persuade owners of competing apartment buildings to cooperate. Some dealers from Link Valley, it is believed, have found a new haven in the neighborhood.

In northeast Houston, one of the city’s poorest areas, a social services agency recently honored a neighborhood cop for rebuilding several church-based food banks overrun with cockroaches and rats. But residents waiting in line one recent day outside one of the churches said they were unimpressed by what they viewed as a public relations gimmick. As a matter of course, they complained, police come into their neighborhood only when looking for trouble.

“I don’t want to have nothing to do with them,” said one woman awaiting her weekly bag of groceries. “I stay in my house.”

The mood has been equally pessimistic inside some police stations.

Neighborhood-oriented policing has run into stiff resistance from many in the 4,000-officer department who view it more as social work than law enforcement. Skeptics complain that NOP really means “Nobody On Patrol” because, as one officer complained, police are too busy “having tea with blue-haired ladies” to respond to service calls.

“We don’t have time to run all of the calls much less talk to people,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The best you can do is when you get to a scene, try to be nice.”

Low morale has made things even worse. Tough economic times during the late 1980s dropped police pay in Houston well below that of most other major cities and some smaller cities in Texas. Officers often work second and third jobs to make ends meet, leaving them with little energy or enthusiasm for anything but routine police work.

“People are burned out,” said Officer Armando Florido, who works as a security guard five nights a week after leaving his beat in west Houston. “NOP might work if we had raises and more manpower. You need to have officers fresh.”

Houston and Los Angeles rank lowest among major U.S. cities in number of police officers per capita, according to a study cited by the Christopher Commission.

A recent audit of the Houston Police Department also came down hard on its new direction. The report praised neighborhood policing for encouraging innovation and initiative by officers, but it criticized the force for straying too far from the traditional bread-and-butter issues of policing.

The audit blamed “management’s preoccupation” with neighborhood policing for causing a decline in police response time--which averages 6 1/2 minutes for emergency calls--and for causing some officers to lose “sight of the fact that ‘chasing crooks’ is an important part of their job.”

“The Police Department is in the police business,” wrote Virginia-based Cresap Management Consultants. “Although it is tempting to involve the department in a wide range of community issues, the department can provide the most value by focusing on problems related to crime and security.”

City officials, including Police Chief Elizabeth Watson, acknowledge that NOP has been--and will continue to be--a tough sell, but they reject such criticism as coming from out-of-touch “voices of the ‘70s.”

In recent interviews, both Watson and Mayor Kathryn J. Whitmire said the city is committed to neighborhood policing, although both warned that it could take years before it is accepted throughout the department.

“It is going to take a very, very long time,” Watson said. “It is very difficult, particularly when policing tends to be a semimilitary bureaucratic structure. In a large organization, it takes an awful lot to get everybody reading the same sheet of music.”

Kennedy, the Harvard research fellow who has studied and written about Houston, said the transformation could take a generation.

“The danger about this transition is that it is a whole lot more thoroughgoing a change than people normally understand,” Kennedy said. “It is not something that you can decide to do, put in a lot of programs, and three years later turn around and say, now we’ve got it. It is a re-creation of policing, top to bottom.”

One of the toughest tasks in Houston has been finding a simple way to assess the effectiveness of the new policing. The Cresap auditors criticized the department for mediocre performance on such things as response time to emergency calls for service, but NOP backers insist that such traditional indicators of police performance are less meaningful in a system that encourages non-traditional crime fighting.

Watson has attempted to give patrol officers more time to work their beats and meet with residents by shifting responsibility for a large number of service calls to the department’s telephone unit. Many calls, including such things as car thefts, are now handled over the phone and never involve an officer at the scene.

Similarly, the department has opened a series of “storefront” police stations in shopping centers and mini-malls, where residents can report complaints and discuss neighborhood problems with officers. The storefronts are so popular that residents and businesses volunteer to pay rent, utility bills and other costs to keep them open.

In both instances, the department has had difficulty justifying such programs within a police culture that equates success with numbers. Beat and storefront officers may appear less productive because they respond to fewer calls and make fewer arrests, but statistics do not reveal that the officers may also prevent crimes by solving neighborhood problems.

Officer P.D. Hawkins, who heads the Ranchester storefront in the Happy Village apartment complex in south Houston, recently spent days persuading local transit officials to install a bus shelter down the street--a task that some police officers considered demeaning and outside the realm of police work.

Hawkins can offer no statistical proof, but he believes his time was well spent.

“Now people waiting for the bus aren’t standing on the apartment complex step, thinking, ‘I wonder how I could get in there,’ ” Hawkins said. “An officer should do more than run calls and make arrests. We should be out preventing crime.”

To account for such changes in the daily routine of beat officers, the department has begun to reassess its traditional approach to evaluating job performance. Last month, supervisors on the city’s west side began using an experimental evaluation form that focuses on results rather than numbers.

Under the program, an officer is judged on his ability to solve problems and develop ties with the community. A supervisor interviews residents who have dealt with the officer, instead of simply tallying the number of calls the officer has answered or traffic tickets he has written.

The department is also attempting to create a new rank of “master patrol officer,” which would reward good beat officers without removing them from their patrol duties. Under the existing system, ambitious officers leave their neighborhood beats when promoted to the rank of sergeant.

“The key person is the cop on the beat, and the role for everyone else must be to assist that cop and make him successful,” said Brown, who introduced neighborhood policing in Houston as chief from 1982 to 1990. “We reward cops for acts of valor, danger and making arrests. That is good and well. But we also have to give them recognition for problem solving.”

Probably the biggest complaint about neighborhood-oriented policing has been its inability to make a dent in the city’s rising crime rate. Houston is experiencing a surge in violent crime, with reported murders, rapes, robberies and assaults during the first five months of this year up nearly 18% over the same period last year.

Fear of crime led to an unusual rally by community groups last month outside police headquarters in downtown Houston. The protesters said they supported neighborhood-oriented policing, but they blamed city leaders for giving the Police Department too few resources to make it work. They demanded more police officers and higher police pay.

“Our city today is in the grip of a crime crisis that vividly illustrates a breakdown in our government to provide for the basic protection of its citizens,” said Frank Hood, one of the rally’s organizers.

An annual survey of Houston residents by Rice University revealed that 46% of respondents in 1991 rated the Police Department as excellent or good, down from 58% five years ago. Although the recent numbers are well above the 32% registered in 1982, Prof. Stephen L. Klineberg said public perceptions of neighborhood policing remain murky at best.

“The message of the survey is that community-based policing has not had a powerful enough effect to counteract the negative effects that have come from the massive increase in the crime rates and a police force that is increasingly dispirited and demoralized by a perceived lack of support,” Klineberg said.

Defenders of neighborhood policing say it is unfair to blame it for the worsening crime rate. They insist that over the long run crime rates will improve because of prevention efforts by residents and police. In the meantime, they insist, crime here is no worse than in other major cities that rely on traditional policing.

“Who is to say what the rate of crime might have been if we hadn’t instituted this form of policing,” said Watson. “As long as there are selfish people in society there is going to be crime. The issue is how we, as a whole city, respond to it. We have people working in concert to restore a level of trust in the community.”

After nearly 10 years of neighborhood policing, the Houston experience has generated several lessons for other cities considering the approach. Officials and observers here recommend that community-based policing:

* Be implemented from the beginning throughout the department, not piecemeal or in isolated geographic and technical areas, as it had been tried in Los Angeles in the past. Bureaucratic resistance to the changes makes it virtually impossible for small pilot programs to succeed in the long run.

* Be developed and explained to police officers, management and the public as a new approach to fighting crime, not as a substitute for “catching crooks” or as a conversion of officers to social workers. Police still respond to emergency calls, make arrests and fulfill other essential law enforcement functions, but they also work to prevent crime by forging ties with the community.

* Provide new job descriptions and incentives for supervisors and managers within the department, not just for the patrol officers on the front line. Officers who buy into the new approach are ineffective when their supervisors erect roadblocks because of insecurities and fear of change.

* Devise a radio dispatch system that screens calls and allows patrol officers and sergeants to do their neighborhood jobs without being held captive to the 911 system. The dispatch system should be decentralized to allow officers and supervisors familiar with particular neighborhoods to set priorities for calls from their areas.

Brown, the former Houston chief, took over here at a time of great turmoil in the city. Charges of police brutality and racism were commonplace in the department, which had “prided itself on a peculiar brand of tough, shadowy, no-quarter policing,” as author Malcolm K. Sparrow wrote in the book “Beyond 911: A New Era for Policing.”

Similar turmoil and public distrust now exist in Los Angeles. The Christopher Commission sees salvation in community-based policing. If the experience in Houston is any indication, current and former Houston residents warn, the transformation will not be easy.

“There is no manual to follow,” said Brown, who now is introducing community-based policing to the 27,000-officer force in New York City. “We are still plowing new ground.”

Crime in Two Cities: A Comparison

Cities

In 1982, the city of Houston began experimenting with community-based policing, a nontraditional approach to crime fighting that focuses less on numbers of arrests and more on crime prevention and day-to-day problem solving.

The Christopher Commission has suggested that the LAPD, known for a high-tech and militaristic style of policing, do the same. Here is a comparison of the two cities:

Houston Los Angeles Population 1,630,553 3,485,398 Area 579 square miles 469 square miles Anglo 40.6% 37.3% Latino 27.6 39.9% Black 27.4% 13% Asian 3.9% 9.2% American Indian, .2% .3% Eskimo/ Aleut Other .2% .3%

Crime Rate

A major criticism of community-based policing in Houston has been its apparent failure to reduce crime, as measured by traditional statistics. Supporters, however, say such statistics are misleading because the new style of policing emphasizes crime prevention and neighborhood problem solving, which are less easy to measure.

Here is a look at the crime rate per 100,000 population. (In 1987, Houston’s population was 1.7 million while L.A.’s was 3.3 million.)

Source: Houston Police Department and Los Angeles Police Department, Uniform Crime Reports for U.S., FBI