It Takes a Village

Community policing enters a new age in Columbia. 

 

As he walked through the halls of a Columbia public elementary school, Sergeant Mike Hestir passed by a third-grade boy who looked up at the black uniform and the golden badge pinned to Hestir’s chest. “Oh, it’s the PoPo,” the boy said. “Don’t shoot me.” The other kids in the hallway looked around at the exchange, a few probably even giggled. But the new supervisor of CPD’s Community Outreach Unit wanted to take advantage of the situation and explain why that statement didn’t represent him.

“Well, I don’t shoot people,” the sergeant said to the eight year old. “Not unless they’re an immediate threat to me or another person’s life. Let’s talk about it at lunch sometime.” So Hestir made plans to return to the elementary and share a school lunch with the young boy. “I’m going to listen to where he’s coming from,” Hestir told me. “And I’ll try to share my side, if there’s a chance to.”

That discussion, over some school pizza or chicken patties, is what community-oriented policing means to Hestir. Well, to be more exact, it’s one of the thousands of different activities, experiences, relationships, and ways of thinking that make up the idea of community policing. Currently, in Columbia, Hestir and his six-officer unit are working alongside local residents to change the way the public and the police interact with one another; he’s also hopeful their work will change the future of policing in town forever.

“Some of the main goals are getting out and meeting people one on one,” Hestir said. “I tell my guys to foot patrol their neighborhoods every day they can, so they’re talking with people, going to schools … Not campaigning necessarily, but just getting to know people.”

Loosely defined, community-oriented policing, or COP, is a form of policing that relies on active participation and engagement between the police and the public. The main requisites for effective community policing involve a shared trust and respect between area residents and officers; collaboration in reporting and preventing crime; and a development of more accurate strategies for problem-solving within a community, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS).

There has been some kind of COP in Columbia since the 1990s, when the community-policing craze was first swept the nation, and Hestir’s new outreach unit is the latest, most-targeted iteration. And though the group is still in its infancy, the department’s track-record for community-policing points toward a bright future for the outreach unit.

 

History of Columbia COP

The city, working in collaboration with the city manager’s office, identified three distinct neighborhoods in north, east, and central Columbia that have historically been higher-crime, higher-minority populations and lower-income areas of the city. Developed as a result of the city’s strategic three-year plan, which was published in October 2015, the three sections of city wards one, two, and three have become the daily beats for each two-man COU team.

This newest evolution of Columbia COP began in February. CPD Chief Ken Burton worked with City Manager Mike Matthes to create a more representational and relationship-based approach to law enforcement in each strategic neighborhood.

The central neighborhood stretches from Ash Street to Business Loop 70; the east bloc encompasses the area inside Clark Lane, up around Indian Hills Park to Mexico Gravel Road, and back down Hanover Boulevard; and the north neighborhood covers the Auburn Hills Park area north of Smiley Lane to the west of the county fairgrounds to Highway 763. This targeted approach has been done in smaller scales in Columbia before.

In 2009, Chief Burton removed four officers and a supervising sergeant from the regular patrol rotation and assigned them to the downtown area. The officers were instructed to get to know the business owners and people living downtown and to help calm nights after the bars closed. Burton said the plan was a success, especially with the business owners, and two years later he assigned a new two-officer team to Douglass Park, an area that had been receiving a high number of police calls and was in need of increased attention. The goal was to familiarize the officers with the local residents, with the hopes that the public would feel more at ease with the presence of the police and the area would become safer for children.

The basis for the newest COU plan evolved as a result of the Douglass Park Unit’s successes.

 

A New Outreach Unit is Born

Eight months ago, Matthes brought Chief Burton into his office to talk about the new COP program he wanted to start.

“Hey, I need some officers for community policing.” Matthes said. “We’ve already got two, but I need three – one for each neighborhood.”

“I can’t give you three,” Burton said. “I will not do it with three.”

“Well, it looks like I’ll be hiring a new chief,” Matthes thought.

“It’s going to have to be six” Burton said. “For safety reasons, you can’t put an officer out there by themselves. They need a partner.”

“You’re re-hired,” Matthes thought to himself, and together, the city manager and the police chief decided to cut six officers from the patrol rotation: officers who would be chosen through an application and public recommendation process to form the new COU.

This was not a particularly popular decision with many of the regular patrol officers who made up the already 30 percent understaffed CPD.

“Those are officers that come away from the workforce that are helping them answer calls,” Burton said. “So it’s not that they don’t believe in community-policing; they do believe in community-policing. They’d love to be able to engage in it themselves and have the time to do it. Unfortunately, the manpower that we have just doesn’t allow it.”

 

“They gave me a 9 mm pistol, handcuffs, and pepper spray, but that doesn’t cure drug addiction.” — Sgt. Mike Hestir

 

If anything, that decision shows the importance the city and the police department places on the Community Outreach Unit. Taking six dedicated officers out of the call rotation may not seem like a huge deal, but in a department that has already requested 50 additional officers, six looks like a significant amount. Even the supervisor position that Mike Hestir assumed came at the cost of absorbing the traffic unit supervisor’s duties into the patrol supervisor’s. “Every time you do this, you have to rob Peter to pay Paul,” Burton said. “It’s a constant balancing act.”

 

No Cop is an Island

The basic tenet of COP revolves around a partnership between the police and the public, meaning the local population needs to take an active hand in helping officers enforce the law. Citizens can do this by feeling more comfortable with talking to the police, engaging in community efforts, like the neighborhood watch or charity drives, and by helping to break cycles of crime, drug addiction, and helplessness wherever they see it occurring.

When Hestir first became the supervisor for the new COU, one of his first tasks was to reach out to organizations, churches, and support systems around the city, which he could have his officers and neighborhood residents utilize as needed. Speaking with groups like Love INC, Voluntary Action Center, Phoenix Health Programs, Job Point, and others, Hestir had almost 130 people from around the community step forward and offer their assistance to the COU.

Hestir said that the help he’s received from local organizations is crucial to his mission success —  he said that with resources like these, he’s able to help bring more offenders out of the cycle of crime and abuse that many fall into.

“They give me a 9 mm pistol, handcuffs, and pepper spray, but that doesn’t cure drug addiction,” Hestir said.

Hestir said he will often visit a perpetrator in jail after a week or so to talk to them about drug addiction or abuse counseling. By breaking the “big circle of hurt,” Hestir said that everybody in a community can benefit. For example, he says, instead of just arresting a repeat shoplifter and putting them in jail, maybe the police can figure out what’s causing the repeat behavior, find a solution to it, and end up helping the criminal, the business, other citizens, the taxpayers, and the public’s perception of the police. It’s a holistic approach to policing that Hestir thinks will take off very quickly in Columbia.

Another part of that holistic approach is being taken on by the city manager’s office. As a part of the three-year strategic plan, Matthes put together a task force of part-time city employees to address racial and socioeconomic gaps that exist in the city.

“These new employees work half-time for the city; they’re our cleanup hitters,” Matthes said. “They go where we need them every day, and they go to a lot of places most people can’t. It’s the same thing they’ve been doing in the same neighborhoods for the past 20 years.”

One of those employees is Glenn Cobbins, a former Columbia drug dealer turned community outreach specialist and juvenile mentor. Since his last prison stint, 18 years ago, Cobbins has been helping to rebuild the community in which he once jacked cars, dealt crack, and stole guns.

“I wanted to give back the things I had taken from people,” Cobbins said. “I had a conscience now. I was getting in touch with my emotions. I got out and started a program for young boys to be successful.”

Cobbins and his mentor, Judy Hubbard, also a current member of Matthes’ task force, began the Imani Mission Center, a faith-based project that provided programs for at-risk youth and low-income families. Though the Center closed its doors in 2015, Cobbins sees his new position with the city as a natural evolution of the work he’s been doing. Now, he and Hubbard spend time in the strategic neighborhoods, often working in conjunction with the COU to do what Cobbins calls “community in-reach” work.

“We think God closed [the center] to help us get with the city,” Cobbins says. “It’s an evolution of what the Imani Mission Center stood for and what we stand for. Now we have resources, the police have welcomed us, for the most part, and the people have welcomed us.”

Some of Cobbins’ and Hubbard’s duties take them into the houses of the people living in wards one, two, and three to ask questions about their quality of life and see how the city could better represent their needs. Cobbins said there is an assessment they use, asking things like, “What does poverty mean to you?” and “Do you think you’re poor? Why or why not?”

Hestir said that while the COU’s work is still in the initial phases, he’s always looking for ways to better partner with the work Cobbins and Hubbard are doing.

This cooperation between city officials, the police, and members of the community seems, when taken at face-value, to be a positive step forward for law enforcement in Columbia, though it can be difficult to accurately gauge the effectiveness of a plan still in its infancy. By casting a net over a broad range of COP programs across America, it might be possible to see in which direction CPD’s efforts are headed.

 

COP Across the Country

Community policing relies heavily on the public’s perception of the police and citizens’ fears about crime, making COP as much a study in psychology as it is public safety. One of the benchmarks for measuring the impact community programs and policing styles can have on a city or town focuses on assessing public perceptions of protection. Chief Burton, during his time as the police chief in Haltom City, Texas, co-wrote a study for the International Journal of Police Science and Management on COP’s effects on fear and public perceptions within multicultural communities.

The 2002 study, “Community-oriented policing in a multicultural milieu: the case of loitering and disorderly conduct in East Arlington, Texas,” allowed him knowledge to use as a basis for building Columbia’s program. The study found that COP efforts could be used to better residents’ living conditions in targeted apartment complexes by lowering racial tensions and increasing familiarity with the police. The East Arlington research was small-scale, but it was an early success for studying COP effectiveness in American communities.

Gordon Ramsay, chief of the Wichita Police Department and former chief of police in Duluth, Minnesota, is also something of a student of community policing. During his time as chief in Minnesota, Ramsay implemented COP efforts throughout his department and achieved measurable successes within his targeted areas.

“We had tremendous success with [COP],” Ramsay said, “Where we’d be going 300 or 400 times to this one apartment building one year, by deploying the concepts of community policing, we only went eight times the next year.”

 

“I have no doubt, I have no doubt that we’re going to be successful and effective in these three neighborhoods.” — Chief Ken Burton

 

When Ramsay became the new chief in Wichita, at the beginning of this year, he saw a demand from the community for an increased COP presence in town. However, as in Columbia, Ramsay said budgetary concerns have slowed the transition from traditional to community policing. In fact, a lack of resources is one of the main hindrances to COP’s implementation around the country.

Dr. Melissa Morabito, an associate professor at the University of Massachusetts–Lowell, began her community policing career with a job at the DOJ’s COPS Office, where she first became curious about implementation strategies for COP. As part of her dissertation, she authored a 2010 study for Crime and Delinquency in which she analyzed survey results from 474 American police departments to map adoption and implementation patterns. What she found was that city size and city government style could have an effect on how well COP would be adopted into a department. Basically, the smaller the city, the fewer resources there are available for additional officers, training costs, and equipment. She also found that cities with a city manager in government had a better chance for adoption than cities with only mayors or city councils.

“Because it’s not an elected position, the city manager can make harder choices and evaluate research…” Morabito said. “Whereas a mayor has to answer more to the people … The mayor is much more affected by that than the city manager is.”

This is the case in Columbia. Instead of waiting for the public process to play out, in terms of developing a community-oriented policing plan, Matthes just decided to do it. He said his goal was to just get the ball rolling and refine it as the plan went along.

Some Columbians are unhappy with having been left out of the initial stages of decision-making, but Matthes said the city is already planning community meetings in the months to come where all residents of Columbia will be invited to voice their opinions on the matter.

 

Moving Forward

“In five years, I would like to see us be able to duplicate what we’re doing in these three neighborhoods in neighborhoods across the city,” Burton said. “I have no doubt, I have no doubt that we’re going to be effective and successful in these three neighborhoods.”

The city’s three-year plan calls for a six percent increase in citizen satisfaction with police services by 2019, but only time will tell if that will be achieved. Matthes, Hestir, Burton, and Cobbins are confident in the program, but it will ultimately be up to the citizens to decide.

Maybe something as small as having lunch with a third-grade student really can be a catalyst for change in a community. Hestir would like to think so.

“Some people have asked me, ‘Isn’t this a waste of time? You’re not going to change that kid’s mind,’” Hestir said. “And I say, ‘What if I connect with this child? And what if, instead of him growing up thinking he’s going to break the rules because cops are just as bad as the criminals, he becomes a police officer and harnesses his energy for good?’”

For now, the CPD Outreach Unit will continue taking steps — one newly forged relationship at a time.