Community-Based Policing Takes On New Meaning : Program gives officers opportunity to buy houses in troubled areas. It’s come to be an effective crime-fighting tool.

When rookie police officer James Jones helped raid a shabby crack house in 1990 he never dreamed his family soon would be living there.

The place was a mess, with rotting floors and holes punched in the walls. After the drug dealers were evicted, vagrants moved in. The house, in a middle-class north side community, was an eyesore and a safety hazard, a drag on a neighborhood that was otherwise successfully struggling to lift itself up after a long period of decline.

Jones moved in almost two years ago after purchasing the house through an innovative city program that has won kudos nationally and that is being copied in at least 10 other cities.

The program--which gives new meaning to the term “community-based policing”--offers low-interest loans to encourage officers to buy and rehabilitate houses in troubled sections of the city. The idea is that a resident police officer will help deter crime and stabilize the neighborhood while giving the officer a personal stake in the community.

Jones paid no money down before moving into his renovated home. He pays 4% interest on his $53,250 loan. The loan program was originally financed through federal community block grants; nine banks recently signed on to fund 50% of the loan program. Eleven officers so far have bought homes.

Although Jones said he and his wife, Lisa, were afraid to buy the house at first because of its condition and concerns about criminal activity, now they’re glad they gave up their small one-bedroom apartment for the house. “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else,” said Lisa.

Resistance to the program was widespread. “When we first started trying to do it, frankly no one was interested,” said Eric V. Cassell, the city loan officer.

In December, 1990, when the first policeman moved in, the city began pushing the program. The officer proved the program’s best salesman--holding open houses for other officers and going on television to extol the pleasures of home ownership. That broke the ice. Now, Police Chief Charles P. Austin uses the program as a recruiting tool.

Jones was the second officer to participate and the first to move into a drug house. The dealers had run a curb-side operation. They had painted the word “stop” on the telephone pole in front of the house, a message to customers. The sign is still there, and twice since the Joneses moved in, old customers have dropped by.

Jones, who had just come home from work, was still in his uniform when one knocked at the door. “These guys looked like they were big-time drug dealers,” he recalled in an interview in his home. “One was from Miami. He came up in a big white Cadillac wearing a lot of gold.

“He said he was from out-of-town and was looking for the previous resident. I said, ‘No problem. They don’t live here.’ He apologized and left.”

The loan program, which last month was named a winner in the Ford Foundation Innovations in State and Local Government awards program, grew out of two city initiatives--Austin’s emphasis on community-based policing and Mayor Bob Coble’s efforts to revitalize housing and promote home ownership.

In addition to instituting such measures as decentralized substations, foot beats and mounted patrols, Austin decided to encourage police officers to live in the city by offering Christmas bonuses to officers who are city residents and requiring city residency for promotion to the rank of captain or higher.

Since moving in, Jones said he has made it a point to get to know his neighbors, and they aren’t shy about coming to him with problems. He has been asked to intervene in several domestic disputes, he said.

The program is not only seen as a crime-fighting tool but as a way to help stabilize relatively safe communities by putting caring homeowners in houses that otherwise might stay vacant.

Lucy Robinson, the former president of a northside neighborhood association, hails the program for putting one police officer’s family in a dilapidated house that was about to be torn down in her relatively safe community. “Now we have a good, stable family,” she said. “The house is well rebuilt. They’re obviously good people. . . . We really feel that neighborhoods must be protected lot by lot by lot.”