Preventing Crime Isn’t as Easy as It Sounds : Many people cry out for more police on the streets. But who is to say that the offenses won’t simply be committed where officers don’t happen to be physically present?

“What can be done to reduce murders in our cities?” a radio talk-show host once asked his guest.

“Put doctors in the police cars,” Chet Dettlinger, a former assistant to the Atlanta chief of police, replied. “If even one life can be saved at the scene of a shooting, it’s worth the effort.”

I pay a lot more attention to street crimes nowadays. Not so much about why they happen, but how. Not so much about how our police look for suspects, but how hopelessly ineffective they seem to be about fixing crimes at the front end, before they happen.

It’s not just because I’ve long believed in the gospel according to Dettlinger, an iconoclastic ex-cop (now an Atlanta attorney), who asked me to help him write a book about Atlanta’s series of killings that in 1979-81 made headlines around the world.

It’s because I’m now a crime statistic myself, having been robbed at gunpoint.

It happened in the dead of night not long ago, on a pitch-dark residential street.

A car with its lights off sneaked up on a friend and me as we stood in the street after dining at a restaurant. The passenger pointed a gun at us through a window.

“ Carjack ,” I thought.

That very morning, two men had turned up dead in North Hollywood, the apparent victims of separate carjackings.

But those cases had occurred Out There--in the San Fernando Valley, parts of which seem as immobilized by fears of street crimes as Atlanta did by those multiple killings when I worked there.

My robbery wasn’t supposed to happen where it did--in upscale La Canada Flintridge, just east of the Valley. It’s top-heavy with half-million-dollar-and-up houses. Hints of Dodge City rarely turn up except on TV.

“Brothers, we want your money,” the gunman said coolly but menacingly.

“You got it,” said my friend Arelo Sederberg, managing editor of the Foothill Leader newspaper.

“Sure. It’s all yours,” I echoed timidly, staring at the gun.

We had lingered for about 10 minutes preparing to say goodby. Now we wondered: Would this be the last goodby we would say to anyone?

The gunman’s accomplice bolted from the driver’s seat and took our cash and my wallet. I kept watching the gun.

“Give us your keys--we don’t want your car,” one of them said to my friend. That was to keep us from chasing them.

Then they were gone, leaving us dazed, mute, rattled.

At the sheriff’s station nearby, deputies pestered us with routine questions that suddenly seemed hard. Our descriptions were sketchy indeed.

When you’re looking down the barrel of a gun, you become a knot of human frailties, not a trained observer in action, even if you do work for a newspaper.

In the aftermath, I have been thinking about the frailties of our free society, which is so overrun by robberies, carjackings and drive-by killings that we all seem either blase or prisoners of our fears.

As many cry out for more police officers on the streets, the skeptic in me says that no amount of police presence, patrol cars, helicopters, night sensors and other high-tech hardware will prevent crimes.

Maybe this robbery could have been prevented, on this street, at that time by police presence--but who’s to say the same crime (or worse) wouldn’t have been committed elsewhere at that very moment, on a street where the police weren’t?

Of course, the police often catch criminals. But as Dettlinger points out, crime-solving and crime-prevention are different things. “If you have to apprehend someone,” he says, “then prevention has, in most instances, already failed.”

On this night, I wondered if some of those crime problems Out There had been flushed to La Canada Flintridge.

And I thought about my newly learned lessons: Don’t make yourself more vulnerable than you have to be. Don’t park or loiter where it is (or will be) dark. If you get unlucky, keep cool and don’t resist anyone brandishing a gun.

The truth is, it can happen to any of us, anywhere.

But having figuratively dodged a bullet, maybe I should think less about Out There than Up There. Somebody Up There apparently liked us.

After all, this story could have been reported by someone else. On the obituary page.