Residents report feeling safer
PUBLIC SAFETY FACILITY As the so-called Silverware Bandit continued burglarizing homes on the Westside, Officer Artis Williams knew it was time to take preventative action.
In order to ease an apprehensive community following break-ins at two Sunset Park homes over the summer, Williams organized a neighborhood meeting that discussed safety tips on keeping out unwanted visitors. A suspect was arrested last month and charged with residential burglary and robbery.
“I was getting calls from residents expressing concerns and that is when we set up the community meetings,”Williams said.
The gathering was made possible because of a rapport that’s been building between Williams and the Sunset Park community in which he has served as its Neighborhood Resource Officer for the past eight months, a time when residents have increasingly grown comfortable in turning to law enforcement.
It’s a budding relationship that has been reported in neighborhoods across the city since the Santa Monica Police Department rolled out its Andy Griffith approach to community policing in January with a new patrolling plan, which included the first realignment of beat boundaries in 50 years.
The centerpiece of the plan is the Neighborhood Resource Officer, which is assigned to each of the eight beats, serving a sheriff-like role and acting as the link between the residents and the police department.
With rave reviews coming from residents and the business community since the new patrol plan was put into place, it looks as though the sheriffs are here to stay.
After Chief Tim Jackman joined the department in late 2006, he met with various members of the community — ranging from business to residential to educational interests — to discuss the best ways in which to police the city.
What resulted was an idea to place a mini chief in each neighborhood, a person who would establish relationships with residents and business owners, putting a familiar face in the community and fostering trust.
“The approach we’ve taken to dealing with complaints with folks from different neighborhoods seems to be working well,”Jackman said. “It’s gotten down more to a personal touch, which seems to be well received by the community.”
At the program’s inception, the department made a big push to deploy the NROs to as many community gatherings as possible, identifying problems in the area and giving neighbors a contact person for the SMPD, according to Sgt. Jaime Hernandez, who supervises the officers.
“We have established a baseline for crimes that aren’t normally being reported,” — Hernandez said
The officers altogether have gone to more than 300 community meetings, Hernandez said. Williams has attended several Friends of Sunset Park meetings.
“He is becoming a familiar face in the community, which makes residents more comfortable in contacting him when they need help,” Zina Josephs, the president of the neighborhood group, said.
Many residents have reported an enhanced sense of safety since the new patrol plan was put into place, enjoying the comfort of personally knowing their law enforcers.
Gale Feldman, the vice chairman of the Wilshire Montana Neighborhood Coalition, lives in an area that for the past few years has been the target of ongoing crime,ranging from mail theft to muggings.She was recently accosted by an inebriated man who had stolen her laundry and voiced her concerns to the NRO, who later stepped up patrols in the neighborhood.
“When a woman was mugged recently by a group of juveniles in front of our building, the officers were quickly able to apprehend the perpetrators,” she said.“This was in large part due to the close proximity of the officers, their knowledge of the neighborhood, and because they had trained residents to appropriately respond through our neighborhood watch program.”
While officials say they won’t know for a while whether crime has dropped as a result of the patrol plan, they do believe that more incidents are being reported because of the relationship between civilians and the officers. In the Downtown commercial area, shoplifting incidents are being reported more to the department via the neighborhood resource officer who checks in with businesses frequently, Hernandez said.
Officer Jeffrey Glaser, the NRO for Downtown,is a familiar face in the area,having been a bike cop the previous two years on the Third Street Promenade. Glaser has noticed that those stores that have a loss prevention program in place, such as a security guard, are reporting more incidents of shoplifting, while those without, are reporting a decrease.
“Some stores are more zealous than others and are good about finding shoplifters and will report those,”he said.
For the businesses,there is comfort in seeing an officer on the street, according to Laurel Rosen, the president of the Chamber of Commerce.
“The businesses feel that changes are happening in the community that are all about safety,”she said.
Sabine Lehmann, the chairwoman of the Montana Avenue Merchants Association, said business owners are more likely to file police reports because they know their officer.
“We’re more comfortable communicating with them and we don’t have to explain what’s new and what’s different with what we’re doing,”said Lehmann,who owns clothing bou-tique Platino.
The association has established a sophisticated crime reporting system that begins with an “ambassador”for each block.When an incident occurs,the ambassador contacts the police and then immediately notifies the stores on their block and the liaison for the adjacent blocks. The news slowly trickles to all of the stores on the commercial strip.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 13, 2008. Read the original PDF.