Ft. Worth’s Citizen Cops Cut Crime : Volunteers: In the four years that the community policing programs have been in existence, the city’s crime rate has dropped 44%. The approach is gathering steam across America.

Jennie Skidmore, a retired woman at home alone, discovered she needed a few things at the store. Be back in a jiffy, she said to no one, and hopped in her car.

As it disappeared down the street a nondescript auto with three men pulled up in front of her house. One got out. The car drove around to the back. The other two got out.

Just then a third car, with a blue emblem on the door, cruised by.

Spotting it, the two men jumped back in their auto, rushed around front to collect the third, and sped off.

When Skidmore returned, a police officer greeted her at the door.

“I wasn’t gone 20 minutes,” she recalled. “Can you imagine? I nearly got robbed.”

Now Jennie Skidmore’s own Toyota bears a blue emblem. It identifies members of COP--Citizens on Patrol. COP numbers about 3,000 Ft. Worth citizen volunteers, a group three times the size of the city’s police force.

They are trained at the city’s police academy and equipped with police radios. And they are backed up by a specific neighborhood patrol officer who, as in the abortive Skidmore break-in, can answer a call in minutes.

So COP is a far cry from simply well-meaning neighbors who take turns “keeping an eye on things.” COP is the linchpin in an approach to law enforcement that appears to be gathering steam in city after city across America.

The results in Ft. Worth tell why. Since community policing began here four years ago:

* Burglaries have gone down by 51%.

* Grand theft by 38%.

* Auto theft by 60%.

* Robberies by 31%.

* Aggravated assaults by 56%.

“I almost don’t believe it myself,” said Ft. Worth Police Chief Thomas Windham. “But look at the figures. The city’s overall crime rate has been reduced by 44%. It is the lowest it’s been since 1978. Community policing is largely responsible for that. Not entirely, but largely.”

That’s because COP is just one aspect of a broader endeavor the city calls Code:Blue, a catchword borrowed from hospital jargon to signify an emergency.

What it signifies in Ft. Worth is the city’s priority at getting citizens involved in taking back their neighborhoods. In many American cities, Ft. Worth among them, it has been a goal viewed as an emergency. Code:Blue enlists the support of local businesses as well as every city department--police, schools, parks, housing, sanitation, roads--the works.

“Code:Blue is more than a name and more than a program,” said Chief Windham. “It’s a philosophy. It’s a concept that recognizes the critical difference between law enforcement and crime prevention.”

According to Joseph Brann, director of Community Oriented Policing Services in Washington, D.C., an offspring of the Justice Department, “Ft. Worth is one of the country’s best models of this approach to policing.”

“Five or six years ago you couldn’t have found more than a dozen examples in the nation of community policing,” Brann said. “Now, literally hundreds of cities are adopting it.”

The reason for the upswing, he said, is because the crime bill that Congress passed last year ties the money for 100,000 new police officers by the year 2000 to community policing.

“Chiefs complain they favor the idea but don’t have the resources,” said Brann. “This gives them the resources. Once a city gets started, it will stick to it, find the resources.”

Chicago, as one example, instituted community policing in five pilot districts. Professor Wesley Slogan of Northwestern University’s Center for Urban Affairs conducted a yearlong study. He found “significant, visible improvements in the quality of life. . . . The single most impressive set of outcomes I’ve seen yet.”

Chicago is now expanding the program to its 20 other police districts.

“I’ll tell you what Ft. Worth thinks of it,” said Mayor Kay Granger. “Can you imagine any city these days voting for a tax increase? Well, last month we voted a sales tax increase to raise $120 million to fund Code:Blue over the next five years. That’s what we think of it.”

Local businesses have sponsored management-training courses, donated rent-free units for storefront police and COP use, house trailers for mobile police mini-stations. (“Park one in front of a dope house,” said Chief Windham, “it has an immediate effect.”) One officer explained COP to a Lions Club meeting and left with a dozen pairs of donated binoculars.

Code:Blue, says the chief, “requires the public’s complete involvement and a willingness to try anything within reason to prevent crime. ‘Hey, folks, tell us what you think it will take. No limits.’

“Some areas might want a gym opened at night, for example, a basketball league. That’s what they want. OK. But what they need is job training. So we combine the two. If that approach doesn’t work, we try something else.”

What Ft. Worth has tried so far seems to be working, so the figures say. Equally revealing is what the people say.

Jay Stott, 57, lives in South Hills, a middle-income neighborhood with many retirees. “We’ve gotten rid of all the crack houses and one chop shop,” he said. “Now we see people in the parks again.”

Jesse Kemp is COP coordinator in Highland Hills, a predominantly black neighborhood in South Ft. Worth. He is 58, owns a janitorial service and has put three sons through college. He says he worries less nowadays about his teen-age grandson. “We don’t have anybody hanging out on the corners anymore. People feel comfortable getting out again.”

“Stopping crime is one result of COP,” said Chief Windham. “Reducing the fear of crime is as important. Fear drives people inside, behind locked doors, destroying the neighborhood concept. What kind of life is that?”

Sheldon and Karen Field saw that concept return to their neighborhood of Fairmont where drug dealers and prostitutes once operated openly.

“We were sitting in the car at 2:30 one morning observing a place known for drug sales. Suddenly a woman popped up at the car window, just to chat. She had lived there 25 years but rarely came out at night. There she was, in her robe, in the middle of the night, chatting with us about the neighborhood.”

The COP emblem is a magnetic device, like an oversize refrigerator magnet, and can be switched from car to car. On duty, patrollers wear light-blue jackaets, T-shirts and baseball caps. By now, they and their cars are recognized, and waved at with enthusiasm, all over town.

COP has spread to 97 neighborhoods so far. It will perhaps double by year’s end, as fast as a large backlog can complete the 12-hour training course. Patrollers learn police procedures, how to spot crime and what to look for. They have two rigid rules: Never leave the car, never confront a suspect.

Essential to the community policing concept is the Neighborhood Patrol Officer, or, bowing to Code:Blue’s penchant for initials, the NPO.

An NPO is assigned to every COP neighborhood or clusters of neighborhoods, a throwback to the old-fashioned cop on the beat. But the 1990s version drives a car with a computer, an assortment of telephones, radios, beepers and what all. NPOs are on call 24 hours a day.

“The people get to know us, confide in us, and if we see to their problems they learn to trust us,” said Officer Roy Guilfour, a West Division NPO. “Even something as minor as replacing a broken street light. We know how to cut through the red tape and get it done. That gains confidence.”

In some cases, more than just confidence.

Officer Jim Smith was the NPO in Cavile, an area encompassing 300 apartments and known as Ft. Worth’s war zone. He had become well known to all its 1,200 citizens. At first he didn’t seem to fit because his was practically the only white face. Nonetheless, he shared their worries, solved their problems, gained their trust.

“Don’t call it ‘war zone,’ ” Smith said evenly. “And don’t call it a project. Cavile is a neighborhood.”

In that neighborhood on June 4, 1993, Smith made what is still called a drug bust. It wound up a wrestling match. The man grabbed Smith’s gun from its holster and shot him in the leg, shattering the bone. The man fired off more shots and, with the officer immobile on his back, pointed the gun directly at Smith’s face.

Whereupon a woman threw herself across the officer’s wounded body. At least 10 other residents called 911. Help came. The man fled and hid. Neighbors told police where to find him, and he was arrested.

Flowers overflowed Smith’s hospital room. They came from Cavile, a neighborhood.