The News Journal/WILLIAM BRETZGER
WILMINGTON -- Since Kevin Britt was killed by Wilmington police during
a struggle in June, his two sons have been visited by a social worker
and an officer, even though they weren't present when the shooting
occurred.
The boys were sought out as part of a community policing program
started by the department early this year to counsel children affected
by a traumatic event. A relationship, albeit a fragile one, has begun
between the boys and Lt. Faheem Akil.
"They saw me as a police officer who is part of the community,
not as a member of an occupying force," Akil said. "Before
we started this program, this kind of thing, police visiting with
family members of crime victims when we weren't interviewing them
as part of a formal investigation, wasn't happening at all."
The Child Development Community Policing Initiative is one of several
changes meant to improve relations between the police department and
the community. Five months ago, the Wilmington HOPE Commission, as
part of its mission to draft a blueprint to make the city safer, said
the police force should adopt community policing as a departmentwide
approach.
To that end, the department also has begun two-day training sessions
that put officers and residents in the same room. Five community police
officers and six new bicycle officers have been added. Officers assigned
to patrol the city in cars have been encouraged to leave their cruisers
to take short walks and talk with residents.
Critics of the department remain. Some residents and members of City
Council say community policing can't be successful until there are
fewer officers in cars and more walking beats. Police Chief Michael
Szczerba counters that the bulk of the 322-officer force needs to
be in the motorized patrol division to respond to calls and can't
be redeployed to such tasks.
Still, Jackie Latson, who lives in Wilmington and works in West Center
City, where her son Hakim Crawford was one of 17 people killed by
gunfire in 2004, said she was pleasantly surprised to see a couple
of officers walking the streets last week.
"I said to them, 'Did you lose your car?'" she said. "But
seriously, I was glad to see it. It's a good thing."
Opinions differ
Some experts, however, don't think community policing helps reduce
crime.
Maki Haberfield, chairman of the Law and Political Science Department
at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, said she's not
a believer. She was a lieutenant in the Israeli National Police and
has researched community policing from Patterson, N.J., to Poland.
"It's a noble concept, but it's a phrase that becomes a paper
tiger that doesn't work without resources behind it," she said.
Wilmington has an acceptable ratio of officers per resident, she
said, but not nearly enough officers to create a division of community
officers that could make a real impact.
"Community policing is something implemented in response to
pressure from a community to show you're doing something," she
said. "But it never changes anything, other than satisfying a
cry for change or the displacement of crime from one area to another."
In Wilmington, the murder rate is up 44 percent from the same time
last year. Robberies are up, too, but shootings are the same as last
year and assaults, rapes, burglaries and thefts have dropped.
Connections can work
Lawrence, Mass., Chief of Police John J. Romero thinks new approaches,
some based on community-policing principles, can make a difference.
His city has the same population as Wilmington, but half the cops.
It used to average six murders a year.
Last year, there were zero. So far this year? Two.
A big reason for the success, Romero said, was sending drug officers
and detectives to community meetings each month.
"People started feeling like their complaints weren't falling
on deaf ears and we created a direct link to the residents who knew
about crimes. That paid tremendous dividends," he said. "We
put the whole department in a community-policing mode."
Gail Treglia, a retired Maryland State Police trooper and one of
the instructors with the Mid-Atlantic Community Policing Institute
at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, hopes to promote similar
connections between officers and residents.
In June, she took part in the first training session offered to Wilmington
officers and residents. She said some of the officers were resistant
at the first session, but hopes they will learn that talking with
residents will allow them to gain information that will help them
solve crimes. In two future sessions, officers will be paired with
young people and then with senior citizens.
Most of the training police receive is about "officer survival"
and how to act during emergencies, Treglia said. But little of their
time on the streets is in emergency situations.
June's session focused on how many residents are concerned with quality-of-life
issues, such as streetlights, while many officers focus on major crime
investigations.
"Our training focuses on a brief, two- to three-minute interaction
with someone," Treglia said. "It's as simple as making small
talk and asking someone how they're doing. Unfortunately, some officers
don't know how to do that."
When the sessions were announced, Wilmington's police union president,
Kevin Connor, called them "ridiculous," saying officers
interact with residents daily and don't need outsiders to tell them
how to do it better. Szczerba, on the other hand, thinks it will be
helpful to have a third party facilitate the discussions between police
and residents.
Cpl. David Hilliard, a 17-year veteran who has been a community police
officer for seven years, called the June session informative. "Residents
and officers, especially the newer ones, got a lot out of it."
Wilmington's program
Szczerba calls the Child Development Community Policing Initiative,
which led to Lt. Akil reaching out to Britt's sons, "an example
of community policing at its best."
Since the program was implemented in November, officers have initiated
counseling for children in 170 cases, Public Safety Administrative
Assistant Diana Morrison said.
Candice Davis is one of two full-time crisis clinicians with offices
in the police station. She said most of the officers have been trained
in how to use the program, which is starting to reap benefits for
children who are the victims of or witnesses to violence, or simply
knew a victim.
"Officers can run upstairs to us and say, 'OK, we just found
a kid in a car and we don't know what to do,' " Davis said.
Before the program began, social workers such as Davis were called
by police if a child was suicidal or so out of control that they had
to be removed from a home. Now, they are reaching a whole new population
who might need counseling but don't immediately show symptoms.
In addition to helping the children, it also helps them realize the
police are not bad people.
"The same SWAT officer who busted through their door at 6 a.m.
comes back with a clinician to tell them that they realize what they
experienced was traumatic," she said.
Szczerba said he hopes the program will have long-term benefits,
even if they don't show up in current crime statistics.
Akil said the program has had many successes. He points to officers
who teamed with boxer Bernard Hopkins and Pastor Derrick Johnson in
asking the community for tips in solving the July murder of 17-year-old
Kevin Lewis.
"People actually stood up and gave information when normally
we would run into a roadblock," Akil said.
Akil said police and residents have to change together.
"Cops have to stop looking at victims as numbers and start looking
at them as human beings," he said. "The community has to
stop thinking we can solve these things in an hour. This isn't 'Adam-12,'
'CSI,' 'Mannix' or 'Barnaby Jones.'"
Connecting with residents
City Councilman Kevin F. Kelley Sr. said many of the strides toward
community policing have been weakened by Szczerba's refusal to change
the department's deployment plan, which pulls officers from their
regular jobs to work five-week shifts on a bolstered evening patrol.
Although the department added five community policing officers this
year, Kelley thinks moving them to motorized patrol for five weeks
a year weakens their impact.
"There isn't any continuity when you take them from their assigned
neighborhoods," he said. "People like to go to the same
community officer with tips, because they know and trust them."
The department is working with 34 fewer officers than its authorized
strength of 322 officers, so leaving the community policing division
out of the rotation isn't an option, the chief said.
Michael White, an assistant professor at John Jay, thinks community
policing can change a police force -- without changing deployment
patterns -- but only if officers buy into the concept. He doesn't
think Wilmington's two-day training sessions are long enough to make
much of an impact.
Szczerba said the police can't solve Wilmington's social ills that
cause violent crime: Young men kill each other over drugs, money,
girls, sneakers. Yesterday's shooters are often today's victims.
"It's easy to attack the police, but what we're facing in the
community is not a one-group issue," Szczerba said.
But Latson, the city resident, said one thing that can't be argued
is the chasm between some officers and some residents.
"They need to re-establish that critical link to the community,"
she said. "People have started to crawl back into their shells."
Contact Adam Taylor at 324-2787 or ataylor@delawareonline.com.
