Playground Tactics Helping Redlands Police Curb Crime

Four-year-old Angela Valdez peeked out from behind her mother, eyeing the police officers as they rolled into her neighborhood with six police cars and a SWAT bus.

Had they come again to take somebody away for something bad--drugs or guns?

No, her mother said, they came to play with her.

“She didn’t believe it,” Angela’s mother, Sonya Valdez, said recently. “To her, the police take people away--arrest them.”

But week after week, members of the Redlands Police Department came, bringing toys, games and snacks as part of a first of its kind policing program aimed at reducing crime through prevention.

“I was tired of being the bad guy,” said police Chief Jim Bueermann. “I wanted a way to serve the public in a more deeply meaningful way. It had to be about more than enforcing the law and arresting people.”

The weekly play dates are the latest addition to Redlands’ Risked Focus Policing program, which uses statistics--compiled from school, hospital and police records--to target areas in the San Bernardino County city where residents, particularly children, have the highest exposure to drugs, gang violence, poverty, domestic instability and other factors long believed to play a role in criminal behavior.

Once the troubled neighborhoods have been identified, police offer recreation and education programs each week--organized cleanups of neighborhoods, mini-carnivals, study groups, parenting classes--and constant friendly contact with residents.

The policing program was conceived in 1993 as an outgrowth of Community Oriented Policing, a movement that put officers on bicycles and in schools as part of a nationwide crime prevention program.

But Bueermann wanted his department to understand even better what problems communities faced.

Under his program, police officers now serve as part social worker, part housing officer and part law enforcement agent, with a dash of playmate thrown in.

The payoff, he says, has been a 50% drop in crime in the Valdezes’ neighborhood, once high in crime, and a 36% drop in crime overall.

Officers say the program makes it easier to solve crimes in neighborhoods that were traditionally uncooperative.

“When there was a problem here, we’d roll in and ask questions and people would just give us blank looks. Nobody ever saw anything,” said Officer Stephen Crane. “Now when something happens, people give us descriptions.”

On a recent day, Crane attended a mini-carnival in the Valdezes’ neighborhood and was challenged by the children to a potato sack race, which he easily won.

“He’s too big,” said 11-year-old Quantrell Knight. “They should make him use one foot or something.”

The officer agreed. But when he won the second race on one foot, the children applauded him and then tackled him.

“When I grow up I want to be a police officer,” Quantrell said. “They help people. They have fun.”

In addition to playing games, the police have turned their SWAT bus into a mobile tutorial unit where children can get help doing homework.

“They help me with my science, because I got a bad grade,” said 11-year-old Antonio Valdez.

The department is a finalist for the Ford Foundation’s Innovations in American Government Awards program.

But critics of the program say police may be trying to do too much. Working as an officer is one thing; serving as social worker, tutor and welfare case officer is another.

Some also question the practicality of trying to make a program designed for a community of 70,000 work in large urban areas, such as New York City or Los Angeles.

But Bueermann says the key to success is changing the traditional view of policing.

“Most Americans don’t live in large cities. They live in cities like Redlands and . . . have the same kind of problems,” he said. “We’re kidding ourselves by thinking that if we put drug dogs and police officers on campus and patrol neighborhoods we are going to solve the problem. . . .

“You can’t just arrest somebody and think the problem is finished. All you’ve done is removed the person, not the problem.”