News-Sentinel.com

Friday, 12/22/2000

SON OF A SON OF A POLITICIAN

CHAPTER 4

Fighting criminals



Photo by Steve Linsenmayer
A new way of old policingA lineup of gleaming, new, take-home police cars typified what community-oriented policing (COPS), a Helmke administration trademark, was all about: maximum visibility from police coupled with nontraditional crime-fighting techniques that enlisted help from neighborhoods. Critics, however, saw COPS as little more than public relations fluff.

Problems with the Fort Wayne Police Department were a major issue in my campaign for mayor in 1987.

Cops were unhappy with the city administration at the time, whether it was Chief Dave Riemen or Win Moses Jr. It was a concern that had emanated from the police officers themselves.

The public was sensitive to it as well. Things weren't going well, especially with some high-profile criminal cases.

And crack cocaine had come to town. There were different theories on how it had gotten here. Crack was on a different crime-fighting level. It was easy to make and transport; relatively cheap and lucrative; and very addictive to the user. As a result, you had good continuing business.

Around 1985 or 1986, a situation was occurring that was leading to more drug use in town and more crime as a result. When deals like these go bad, you see shootings and execution-style killings.

But in 1987, you had zero drug raids; the vice and narcotics squad was just four officers.

Meeting the challenge

After the election, my top priority was choosing a police command that would have respect of the officers and beefing up narcotics and the vice squad to tackle the crack situation. And I was committed to getting more officers on board. The department in 1987 was under 300 officers, although a class was sworn in at end of year to bring it to 315. Still, it was pretty thinly staffed.

Equipment was in pretty bad shape; it had been a campaign issue as well. There were police cars with 150,000, 160,000, 170,000 miles. In addition to those concerns, police were in five different locations -- City-County Building, Murray Street, Southgate, Marketplace of Canterbury, and the academy.

I chose Neil Moore as chief. I had a lot of confidence in him, not because I knew him, but he had a good reputation with officers and would help correct some of the problems with the bad perceptions from the Riemen administration. He was someone who also was working on the department's accreditation, and following changes other police departments were trying.

Vice and narcotics

First thing we did was bring vice and narcotics to a deputy chief level within the Police Department, and put about 24 officers in it.

We started with the prosecutor and sheriff's offices to do a crackdown on drugs. It was the first major visible thing we dealt with; it was around the third week of January. It got a lot of attention because an individual was killed in the drug raid, making it big news. We even started to get some phone calls to the police from informants wanting to turn in others. Maybe they realized there was a change in the way police and government were doing business when it came to crime-fighting. Maybe they wanted to get out of the business, finger someone else in the business or maybe they wanted to make sure nobody came in with guns a'blazing at their place.

The drug raids changed the equation; we tried to raise the cost of doing business for drug dealers.

In that first year, we had 25-26 drug raids and they expanded as we went on.

Modernizing

One of the other early issues dealt with settling disputes with minorities. There was a pending lawsuit that was still around regarding promotions; there had been a lot of issues over 10 years with the relative lack of promotions and recruitment of minority officers.

We tried to get those issues straightened out, especially since I always believed you needed a strong department that represented the entire community and that the commitment showed in the police command. It's one of the reasons in the initial command we had two African-American officers -- Dave Coleman who had been a deputy chief under Moses, as well as Al Pruitt. Partly, it was a sign we wanted to deal with these issues, and to have the department in strong shape.

We also wanted to lay the groundwork for the future. Moore and I were interested in the concept of community-oriented policing. While the concept was relatively new, it also was relatively old. It was what police used to do before there were police cars and before radios came around in the 1920s. It was one of the newer ideas Neil knew a lot about; he and some of his folks looked at what was being done in Flint, Mich., and Kansas City, as far as storefront offices and bicycle patrols. We had a lot of talk early on about how to move toward community-oriented policing and break down the barriers between officers and neighborhoods.

A new way of old policing

We opened a couple storefront offices; we decided not to close the one at the Marketplace of Canterbury. The north-side precinct had a number of problems: Officers didn't like it and it wasn't in a high-crime area at all.

We closed Marketplace of Canterbury but looked elsewhere; one on Anthony Boulevard and Pontiac Street, others at Oaklawn Court and Precious Blood School. These ended up not being the model we followed, but they were a starting point toward getting more police in the community.

Those efforts continued the entire 12 years. They went from storefront offices to a citizens' police academy to bicycle patrols and more emphasis on mounted patrols; the Target 2000 program, named after our aim to have community-oriented policing in place by 2000; new police districts; and area partnerships with neighborhood liaison officers. Even community-oriented government was an outgrowth of the COPS effort.

What sold me on COPS? It's a concept I believed in strongly, especially when I got active nationally and heard what other communities were trying to do. There were a number of parts to it. Getting police more into the community, it addressed the broken windows theory. It's the idea that if a broken window appears, pretty soon you get graffiti on the house and the house becomes a drug house, and then the whole neighborhood comes down. It's part of the idea that if you spot problems early, you can keep bigger problems from occurring.

Another part of the concept was police with open lines of communication with neighbors, allowing them to see problems directly. And part of it was just seeing and talking to a real live police officer. Part of the change from the 1920s to the 1980s, when you gave everybody a car and radio to make it easier to cover the town, took away from that intimate level of policing.

An old yearbook

Someone sent me a Police Department yearbook from 1935. It's fascinating. The letter from the chief touted great new advances in policing, likes cars and radios and fingerprinting. One thing that struck me about those advances from the 1920s and '30s is they really caused less face-to-face contact with people.

Thus, community-oriented policing helped combine what was good from the old way of policing with modern techniques. It found ways for officers to walk a beat, be on a bike or on a horse, be in a storefront or attend a neighborhood meeting. Any of those things helped break down the barriers and made it easier for police to serve the community. And if you spot problems early, you get leads on the bad influences in a neighborhood.

When you talk about COPS, you talk about community being part of policing. It means neighbors taking some responsibility for making their community safe. Whether it was crime watch programs, or taking back the night, it made citizens play a role.

You can never have enough police or ask them to be everywhere. You can never have, or want, police on every corner. Most crime occurs indoors where nobody's going to see it. You need citizens to police themselves and police the neighborhood. It's not vigilantism, but it means spotting problems early.

Free time

We decided the best way to measure this, is to look at the officers' time. We had a situation where short-staffing and crack cocaine resulted in an explosion in the number of calls for service. And there were more calls than we could possibly handle; we figured about 95 percent of an officers' time was spent responding to calls. Burglary here, accident there. They were constantly going to another call. Doing so, you couldn't do proactive things.

So we tried to restructure government and add enough personnel where eventually only 50 percent of officers' time would be spent responding to calls and the other 50 percent proactively involved in crime prevention. We tried to look at the Fire Department model. One of the reasons we've had fewer fatalities is we've put a lot of emphasis on fire prevention. The same wasn't true with crime prevention until now.

Did we see evidence of the community becoming a part of the solution? We saw it at different levels. The citizens' crime watch, for example, was around for some time, but maybe not the model that worked the best. We tried to strengthen it, but tried other models as well, like working with neighborhood associations. When folks saw things developing early, like rowdy kids throwing rocks at windows or picking on other kids, we would try to figure out ways to deal with it. It applied to rowdy kids, drug houses, motorists cutting through neighborhoods to get around a traffic intersection.

You had to have enough confidence in residents wanting to keep their neighborhoods safe and sound. With empowerment, they'd pass along tips to the police command and eventually to a liaison officer so the city could address those problems.

Over the years, with neighborhood walks and with community-oriented government, I saw a lot of crime-fighting being strengthened. The mood changed from a lot of griping and complaining, "We never see a cop in our neighborhood"-type of thing, to "We got a problem and let's find a solution."

Resources

You can have great plans and models, but you need the resources to back them up. There were things we could do with police to make their time more useful, and some were controversial. For example, we wanted to educate people how police worked. Having police come out didn't do much unless people knew how to spot a good suspect. Also, a phone service where people could call in things like stolen bicycles allowed police to deal with more important crimes.

Bike patrols were controversial as well. We had a deputy chief, Greg Lewis, who resigned because Neil was looking at articles about bike patrols and Greg believed that wasn't the way things were done. Where Greg was coming from, I understand. But when the goal was to get officers to stop and talk with somebody, officers on bikes were better than in cars. The goal was to redistribute time to give police more citizen contact.

That could only go so far; more officers meant you had to pay for them with budget increases. In 12 years, the budget went from $10 million to $30 million, and obviously, the money came from taxpayers. People still complain the percentage of money for the parks has gone down. The reason? We put more emphasis on the policing side of things and it was appropriate. We let crime-fighting slide too long. We needed more officers to get closer to the 50 percent time for proactive policing.

Take-home cars

We did take-home police cars for some of those same reasons. It was expensive. We had a problem before I came on board with poor equipment, with cars with too many miles. But we started our program for another reason and it was visibility. We wanted someone to see a police car whenever they were out, and I believe people do so now.

Eventually, I rarely heard anybody complain they didn't see a car in their neighborhood. If they didn't see a police car in their neighborhood, they weren't watching. I kept my eye out and generally, if you were out driving, you'd see one. A reason? We have maybe three times as many police cars as we used to. We went from 24 take-home cars, and a number of pool cars, to 240 take-home cars in the time I was mayor. Those cars were parked in driveways, were driven to and from work, and driven off-hours. So even when the officer wasn't on the clock, you'd see a car. And most times you saw a car, you didn't know if the officer was on the clock or not. It wasn't just seeing the car in the driveway, it was seeing that officer driving home or driving to the store.

It helped response times, because one of the requirements was if an officer was off the clock, they had to respond if they were the closest car to an accident or crime. Old complaints of it taking an hour for police to get to an accident also diminished because response times went down significantly as a result of more cars in service.

These were expensive programs, but they helped increase police visibility and the philosophy of community-oriented government: Police are somebody and somebody you can work and communicate with.

Homicides

So, how did this jibe with record number of homicides in mid-1990s? Crime rates aren't directly controlled by what government does. Whenever we had falling crime rates, Moore and Hannaford cautioned me not to take credit for them going down, as we shouldn't be blamed for when crime was going up.

The increase in homicides was serious in this community. We got to all-time highs, about 42, in the mid-1990s. This was at a stage when we weren't as fully staffed as I would have liked and when we started to push some of the crucial programs in crime-fighting, like take-home cars. We also pushed the Crime Bill at the federal level, which got Fort Wayne $2 million and 30 officers.

We kept having classes, but we kept having resignations, and the one-time infusion of federal money helped us move up. When we did an analysis of it locally, we found 75 percent to 85 percent of the crime was drug-related, and it was crack cocaine still hanging around. Crack had taken a hold; we were fighting back but only staying even with the proliferation of crack houses. We'd close them down, and they'd open up somewhere else.

When they got more lucrative, folks got nastier protecting their turf. I've told people, unless you are in the drug trade or in a bad domestic situation, you most likely have little chance of being a homicide victim.

Our response was to push even harder for more take-home cars and officers. We tried Operation Strike Out in the early 1990s, a targeted anti-drug street crime team. We tried the CAN team, which was an anti-narcotics effort. These initiatives also tried to determine where drugs were being sold and used undercover agents before sending in uniformed officers.

Homicides would go up, then go down. In my last year in office, we had the lowest crime rate since about 1974. It shows some things we were doing were on the right track.

Lines of defense

Government is the third line of fighting crime. It's the individual who plays the most important role. The reason most people don't commit crimes is they have a sense of what's right and what's wrong. When that sense of values, that sense of right and wrong is weaker, you're going to have more crime. It's not something government controls.

The second line of defense is the family, someone who reinforces good behavior and discourages bad behavior. It doesn't have to be the family or an extended family; it could be a peer group or neighborhood as well. And that's where community policing is important. It's where the neighborhood has a sense of values enforced unofficially that encourages good behavior.

Part of what you try to get across to people, in the case where there's prostitutes in a neighborhood, is it just isn't enough for police to arrest them or run them out. Instead, you need neighborhoods doing their own policing.

For example, at St. Patrick's Catholic Church on Harrison Street, where there was an increase in prostitution, we worked with the church and the neighborhood association to really try to take back the corners from the hookers. It's something where you need government to step in, but neighbors actively working as well.

Police don't come until the third line. The individual and the family, are more important.

Strengthening lines of defense

I tried not only to strengthen the government side, but strengthen the second level -- the neighborhoods. The faith community, for example, was better at the first level. If the two levels before government were weakened, it was tougher for the police to do their job. But where those first two lines of defense were strong, you didn't have a problem.

Nobody wonders how many fires there were but how we responded to the fire. With the police, it wasn't how long it took them to respond to crime, but to blame them if the crime had occurred. And it never totally made sense to me. Fire departments don't start fires, but respond to them. Police don't start crimes, but also respond to them.

Meanwhile, you get criticized how you respond to crime as well. It's a tricky business. There were some problems we should have seen coming but didn't handle as well as we should have. We had done some of the early targeted drug work -- Operation Strike Out, the Community Anti-Narcotics, or CAN, Team, for example. But part of what we also did is lay early groundwork with neighborhoods and ministers, so when we would do something new in crime-fighting, we had more institutional support in the community.

But later on, as crime started to escalate in the mid-1990s, we didn't do that as well.

Complaints pop up

Part of it was the pressure to respond to the large number of calls. We started to get posturing from the Sheriff's Department where it would come in to an area and do police work without laying any groundwork, and we felt that wasn't necessary.

At the same time, we were hiring a lot of officers. One of the dangers with new hires is that you don't have officers fully attuned to community policing, with a sensitivity to the community. We realized the pitfalls ahead of time and I thought we were doing fairly well in the selection process. But in retrospect, when we had the Crime Bill class, we almost added too quickly to the Police Department with large classes. Actually, some of our problems were with lateral transfers from other police jurisdictions than with our own rookie hires.

Adding many officers quickly changed the culture of the Police Department. Suddenly, you were seeing more in the community, and those officers were reading about the crime rates going up, and they wanted to do something to stop it. As a result, there was less supervision, mentoring and training over officers than had been in the past. And there were some officers with too much of a "cowboy attitude" about things.

It's a fine line. You want aggressive policing, you want to fight the bad guys, but you also want to be sure you are following the law and the Constitution, and treating people with respect.

New cops/old outlook

It's a tough situation. From the officers' perspective, especially if they're new and under pressure, there's an attitude where everyone is seen as the bad guy and you always have to be watching yourself. And the slightest bit of confrontation can escalate.

Once this started to occur and I started to hear more examples, we did things early on I thought would help. For example, we had a citizens contact office where people could file complaints without having to go to the police station. It was a bit of a challenge to explain to them the internal affairs department wasn't the only avenue to address grievances. You could get a lawyer, go to the prosecutor or the U.S. Attorney for remedies.

I always stressed the police and I didn't want bad cops, and if there were some, we supported appropriate discipline. To do that, we needed information. But by the time we were getting information, we had a few too many folks causing problems.

At the same time, Chief Neil Moore was seen in the community as not being as sensitive to the complaints. Neil was always concerned but there was an impression he wasn't. Neil made the decision on his own it was time to go. He wasn't forced out, but it was probably time. Neil was somebody who was always supportive of the Police Department and sometimes needed to be tougher in terms of discipline.

Problems with the minority community

Dan Hannaford, who was a strong part of Neil's administration, really scored points for himself when he appeared at a meeting at Greater Progressive Baptist Church after some of the tensions were at their highest. Hannaford, as assistant chief, was there, and showed he and the department were sensitive to the complaints.

Going to the U.S. Justice Department with complaints about alleged police mistreatment of minorities -- as a group of minority ministers did -- however, doesn't do a whole heck of a lot. In this case, the Justice Department didn't really do anything. It pretty much felt we were taking care of the issue on our own. If we hadn't, the Justice Department would have stepped in. Going to the Justice Department was the ministers' way of saying there's a growing problem, and it sent a message to the broader community there's a serious problem. And I agreed. There was a serious problem that had to be dealt with. It was a way for ministers to legitimately raise issues.

We had started working with the ministers before that day to find ways to help the situation. Hannaford coming on sent a sign there were going to be some changes. Dan took a stricter view on discipline; at least the perception as stricter than Neil. We put in a whole new police command and it was not a slam against the folks who were there. But it sent a message we needed new folks with new ideas. They communicated closely with Payne Brown and I to work with the minority community to bring things on track. And I think we did.

Task force

One of the most important things we did is put together a forum on police-community relations. The balanced task force brought a lot of good proposals, like video cameras on the cars to protect police and citizens and more authority for line officers to discipline others.

Anytime you have 390 individuals, regardless of profession, you're going to get a few that cause problems. And it's the few who caused problems that gave the department a bad image. It's a tough situation. We want police to be aggressive, but not too aggressive. We want police to protect us from the bad guys, but people don't normally have clear identifiable tags that say, "I'm a good guy, I'm a bad guy." For most of us, being the bad guy means running the stop sign or exceeding the speed limit. But most of the time the officer doesn't know what he or she is facing, and our efforts through the task force gave us a lot stronger department.

We also made changes in training and in the academy to keep an eye on whom we select, how we train and how we discipline.

Those challenges continue. In the campaign of 1999, between Linda Buskirk and Graham Richard, we were criticized for not hiring fast enough even though we had a full class of 26 starting in July. Mayor Richard had an idea of a different way to get new officers in there right away. And I cautioned him if you put people in there too quickly, either with a lateral transfer or a quicker training period, you run the risk of problems.

For example, with lateral classes, we believed it would be a great idea to bring in other officers who had experience and training, and who wouldn't need that much training time. Instead, we found they were leaving from other departments because of problems there.

I tried to do all I could -- in light of criticism that I was racially insensitive -- to show I wouldn't countenance any racial discrimination in my administration and in the way we did business. The leaders of the minority community believed me and had confidence in my attitude. They realized it was not always easy to get those working for you to be of the same mind. Part of the reason we were successful in keeping potentially explosive situations from getting worse was the good relationship I had with leaders in the minority community like the Revs. Ternae Jordan and Mike Nickleson and local NAACP President Liz Dobynes. I was always willing to listen, talk and make changes.

Open lines of communication

Communication is important. When watching other cities, you notice police/community relations turn out tense when elected leaders and community leaders only talk through the media or in antagonistic situations. I tried to speak with the black and Hispanic communities on a regular basis, so when things were bad, I knew how to get hold of them and they knew how to get hold of me.

Meanwhile, my job was to select a chief, and I worked with Hannaford and Moore in selecting the top slots. Outside of that, I relied on them to do crime-fighting, to look at major initiatives like take-home cars. I wanted to be involved with those initiatives, but how specific crime was being handled, it was a police job. My job was to help set the broad direction, the tenor of how we did business, to help get the resources there to do it, including good people to carry it out. They did the actual crime-fighting.

I'd hear enough from citizens about specific cases, and I passed them on to the chief to check on. It also let the chief know there was an issue to make sure it wasn't indicative of a broader problem. And it showed we weren't ignoring a specific crime or a specific area, or that we had a rogue officer we needed to take care of.

The ugly side of life

I also got exposed to the ugly side of life in Fort Wayne. Talking with officers, you got details of what's happening undercover or behind the scenes. It's pretty clear it's a grizzly, messy business. One thing was clear to me; it takes a special kind of person to be a police officer. I couldn't do it. You have a lot of challenges and pressures an ordinary citizen never sees. I always was impressed and proud of the efforts of nearly all our officers. They're good men and women who did tough jobs. People are always trying to play games with you and cut corners, when some of the situations you'd see were beyond the comprehension of ordinary people. You get a different view of life from there.

There's the challenge from the other side as well. There's the risk of getting jaded. If all you see is the bad side of the community, you are going to start making mistakes. But if you work with community and neighborhood folks who want to make life better, it really helps reinforce that most people are good people. And it helps police carry on.

Mean streets

Were there neighborhoods with persistent crime problems worth giving up on? Not really, because I walked most of them. I walked streets where the chief or someone else would tell me later, "Boy, that's some of the toughest streets in town, or where there's the most drug houses."

Walking 4-5 p.m. and knocking on doors, you saw bad houses and people who looked rough, but people generally were positive. There were people who cared, despite locks on their doors, security systems and them peeking from windows. It gave me faith most people were good even on the toughest and meanest streets. There was some hope. A house or two in some of these areas were the only ones causing problems and terrorizing the neighborhood. If we could just find a way to deal with the isolated problem we could help the neighborhood. The catch was if you made progress on one street, criminals would move to another. Or a gang leader would take over the mantle of the guy we had just arrested or the guy who had just gotten killed.

Often, a single person or two affected the crime rate in an entire neighborhood. There were times when we had a person locked up, the crime rate would fall, and as soon as he got out, it would go back up again. One or two individuals drive a lot of crime. It would be great if we knew who they were, but the tricky problem with fighting crime, despite knowing who these people are, knowing it and being able to prove it are two different things. The situation's the source of a lot of frustration in neighborhoods.

We couldn't shut down "known" drug houses without undercover buys we could take to the prosecutor. The court's level of proof is different than people's level of knowing.

A barometer of success

What was the barometer of success? We looked at different statistics, both overall and of serious crimes. We would poll on an annual basis about safety in neighborhoods. We spoke with neighborhoods, with area partnerships and their officers, to give us a sense if we were making progress.

Then there was Tom Ostrognai, a local landlord, who videotaped suspected drug houses. He aired them on Channel 10, to show the alleged drug deals going on. He called it something like Drug Wars.

The catch is just because you can get a video camera of somebody knocking on a door on a regular basis and handing something to another person, without an undercover buy or an arrest right away, the video couldn't get anybody convicted. We tried different tactics of stationing cars at some areas of a neighborhood to disrupt traffic. But, do you want to disrupt traffic so it moves elsewhere or do you want to make an arrest?

I make a drug buy

Early on, Ostrognai wanted me to see drug buys in person. He had a property on Chestnut Street and this was where he had filmed some of his videos. It was a cold winter day, and we were bundled up quite a bit. I didn't want to look mayoral or visible, so I guess I had jeans on.

We went to this house and looked out a window, trying to observe drug buys. This is the sort of stuff he had on this TV show. We did this for about one or two hours and not a single thing happened. It shows part of the challenge for police -- staking out where nothing is happening.

Tom was frustrated that nothing was happening, and I was cold. So we went driving around, and he was going to show me drug deals while cruising. It was about 4 p.m., and he pointed out somebody he believed was selling drugs. I said, "Are you sure about that?" It's probably what's happening but you can never be sure.

We drive up to this one place, and he wants me to try to make a crack buy. I'm concerned about breaking the law, but I also want to see what's going on here. So we drive up to this place, and I don't look like I'm in disguise, but I don't have a coat or tie on either. I rolled down the window, and just did hand signals to this guy because I didn't want to entrap anybody. And some guy brings over a rock of something, and I hand over $20 -- maybe it was Ostognai's, maybe it was mine. I basically bought some stuff from this guy with a school bus half a block in front of us. It really showed how easy it was to buy drugs.

We went straight to the Police Department and told them where we bought it so they could go right out. By the time they got there, nobody was around. It was crack cocaine. The incident showed you could buy this stuff. It showed me that a lot of folks buying this stuff were white folks from non-poor neighborhoods in town who pull up in a pickup like I did with Ostrognai and very quickly get a rock or two of crack. It was obvious we had problems.

Ostrognai, meanwhile, couldn't believe I did this. "You don't have a gun on you, you don't have anything," he said. Instead, my attitude was that I'm trusting of people so let's see what happens.

Then I told him I didn't want to talk about the incident too much publicly; he's mentioned it a couple of times afterward, but not too publicly.

Frustrations

It shows how fighting crime is frustrating. That situation showed it. I bought drugs but unless I was an undercover police officer who could make an arrest, it was too late by the time the cops got there.

Despite who buys drugs, the reality is that drugs are sold outwardly in some areas more than others. A lot of what happens, drugs could be sold in one part of town but people come from all parts of town to buy them. Also, they're sold in people's basements and behind closed doors. It's different with visible sales, or with street prostitution -- those criminals are easier to arrest.

Bigger drug deals could be happening in private offices and behind closed doors in any part of town, more so than on the street. But you're not seeing it.

The kinds of crimes that cause problems in the community are everywhere. But the kinds of crimes that especially bring down a neighborhood are the ones that are visible, and isolated in certain parts of town.

You need flexibility to deal with these problems. I found out over the years, whenever we tried something new, the bad guys also tried something new. So we had to change our tactics whenever they changed theirs. You just keep doing it.

A poor relationship

The evolution of the poor city-county police relationship was frustrating. Tensions went back up sometimes, whether over differing pay scales or differing backgrounds, or the kinds of problems they were dealing with. In some communities, city cops see the county cops as more of the rural types, the "County Mountie" derogatory stereotype. These tensions go both ways.

A lot of the problem started to occur with the personalities of the different sheriffs. When Dan Figel was sheriff during my first term, we had a pretty good relationship; so did Chief Neil Moore and I. Part of the problem started with the sheriff's election to succeed Figel in 1990. A large part of it goes back to the GOP primary election, when one of our city deputies, Pat Harper, ran against Joe Squadrito. And Harper, while deputy chief, was not my candidate. My father might have been on Squadrito's election team. It was something that clearly had potential for problems. But I wasn't directly involved.

The campaign also got messy. Squadrito's opponent in the November election, Democrat Glen Harpel, accused the department of mishandling a shooting in a January 1988 joint drug operation. There were accusations, with no basis, about Martin Clay Carter, believed to be a high-volume cocaine dealer, being executed when police busted into the Lewis Street house he was in.

These accusations evoked suspicion of the city's involvement, although I did not know from where the accusations came.

I'd known Squadrito for some time, and I had early meetings with him in hope of working as well with him as Figel. The relationship, however, always seemed a bit tense. I don't know if it was my fault or Joe's fault, but from my perspective it always was a bit tense.

Joe, the Federalist Papers and I

Early on, I remember having Squadrito up to my office to talk about things. It wasn't long before I believed he was lecturing me about the Federalist Papers and his theories of limited government. Maybe I read the situation wrong but I didn't like being lectured to by anybody, Squadrito included. I'd been a political science major and I studied the Federalist Papers. This wasn't an area I was unfamiliar with. I know the Federalist Papers and what they contain.

I don't mind having good spirited discussions and disagreements with anybody. But early on there were tensions there, and they seemed to escalate during Joe's eight years in office.

During the 1995 city election, there was talk Joe was going to run for mayor. There had been criticisms of the city's drug-fighting efforts. He had been critical of Neil Moore publicly. It didn't lead to good relationships with Neil Moore, the Police Department or me. As we faced challenges with the drug situation, I and the city Police Department sensed Joe was out there second-guessing a lot of things we were doing.

Part of it was our move toward community-oriented policing. The challenges were, oftentimes, if you went to community-oriented policing too quickly and shoved it at officers without their buy-in, they would be resistant and would talk with Joe. This would feed in to his ideas the city was getting too soft. There was an attitude this stuff was too soft; all we needed was some hardheaded, "knock-their-heads-around" mentality.

It started to come across in public comments. Here we're taking a long, two-year process to get our Target 2000 community policing effort by teaming up officers who were resistant to change with those who helped draw up the program. Instead, the dissension brought up the argument that officers don't want to be social workers, especially at times when it looks like crime is going up.

All these tensions: Between Joe and I, Neil and Joe. There's mistrust over the Harper situation. There's political considerations with Joe having an eye on the mayor's office. There's talk that since the crime rate outside the city is low, Squadrito is doing a great job. And since the crime rate inside the city is worse, Fort Wayne is doing a lousy job. All these things made it difficult for us to work together.

Other problems

There were other problems. There was a joint program, a regional anti-drug task force with the U.S. Attorney's Office, the State Police and the prosecutor, that the sheriff and city were involved in. Joe didn't want to be part of any joint programs and left it.

I still remember one meeting when George Bush was president. There were "weed and seed" funds. You could get grants, part of which would "weed" out crime, and part of which would "seed" proactive efforts. We had a meeting early on with the prosecutor, the sheriff and our folks to send in our application. It was around 1992. We had this whole meeting about what should the boundaries be, what should we put in this application. After meeting for half an hour or more, Joe starts to walk out. Somebody said, "We're going to need you to put your signature on this form." And he basically said, "I'm not signing anything."

He hadn't raised one word of criticism during the entire meeting, but just basically said he wasn't going to sign a joint application on anything. It made it really hard to do things together with that kind of attitude.

When I was out lobbying for the Federal Crime Bill, Joe would show up at these White House meetings, and then come back and say, "This is disgusting. This is the wrong approach. We don't need these things." He said he'd gotten other invitations from the White House and he turned down those. It was when Clinton became president; it was a bit of a slap at me and the allegations I was a bit too friendly with Clinton.

The dynamic

Sometimes, Joe was just tough to work with. He would announce some unilateral program where he was going to go in and save the southeast side of the city. He did it with Councilman Cletus Edmonds' support.

He would just go in, and first of all, it would drive our folks nuts. They weren't sure what was going on, where county police were going to be. Particularly with drug dealing, if we're doing an undercover operation some place, we didn't want the county sheriff's people to do a drug raid on a house where we had agents inside. We could have been working on a long-range deal not just to get the house but the supplier, and then, all of a sudden, you can get some real problems with the sheriff's people coming in with our undercover people in there.

We had several situations that came close to happening, or had happened, because Joe didn't want to share information. Meanwhile, Joe believed we had some bad officers who couldn't be trusted. My point was, if we have a problem, tell me whom they are and we'll try to get rid of them. Over the last few years, we had found officers who were involved in some shady stuff.

The relationship between us always was more adversary, more political, with more posturing than necessary.

There were times when Joe was going to go in and save the south side with targeted policing. Joe went before TV cameras and they went with him. He's in the car the first night, and the TV stations are reporting it. But the fact is, he never went back the next night and his people never did either. It was all for PR. But everybody assumed that Joe and his people were in there for weeks afterward.

I had concerns with those early county police forays on the southeast side of Fort Wayne. I remember being at a meeting at one of the black churches trying to work on our neighborhood programs. I was driving back home, down Rudisill Boulevard around 10 p.m. in the summertime. All of a sudden, I passed a stop sign on one of the side streets on East Rudisill. There, I saw a sheriff's car had stopped somebody and a deputy with a shotgun or some large rifle held across his chest was looking out at all the cars driving on Rudisill. I felt intimidated. If I felt intimidated, a public figure, how did the poor or minority person driving down the street feel?

Part of that approach was intimidation. It meant you come in with the guns out and the big, burly guys ready to shoot -- at least it was the impression -- at any incident, or stop any car that looked suspicious. And that's the stuff I sensed ended up causing more problems fighting crime. Instead, you have to fight crime in ways folks aren't harassed.

The gall of it all

One of the other things that galled us -- and it's part of the structural nature of the sheriff's department -- is that as a city resident, you pay the same amount for the sheriff's department as folks in the suburbs. But the sheriff, except for these special cases, never did anything inside the city.

As a result, city taxpayers would subsidize the sheriff's department, and the sheriff would always act like he was doing the city a favor by spending other folks' money to solve our problem. But it was our money that helped pay for the sheriff.

Another galling aspect? The sheriff's responsibility is to serve warrants countywide, inside and outside the city. It's not the job of city police to serve warrants. We were at a stage where there was a backlog of 10,000-12,000 warrants that hadn't been served inside the city. We always felt that if the sheriff just did his job and served these warrants, it would take care of the problem more than the posturing and playing to the media and the "big, tough guy stuff" to help reduce crime.

If you get people who have outstanding warrants -- whether it's for failing to pay parking tickets or not showing up at a court hearing -- and get them off the street, or at least back to take care of their warrants, the community would be in better shape.

Some cooperation

We would work on some efforts together. We did a Metro Squad together, leading to the mayor's election in 1995. It's at a time Squadrito is making noises about running for mayor, and Allen County GOP Chairman Steve Shine tried to bring us together at a dinner, just the three of us. We all smoked cigars and drank cognac afterward. It was one of these, "How can we work together? How can we make peace with all our problems?" kind of get-togethers.

Indicating he had some proposals, one of them was the Metro Squad he'd be in charge of but where I and the Police Department would have some say and our people would communicate what was going on. We tried it around 1995, and it did some decent things but never really worked as well as it should have, part of it being the intrinsic jealousies and turf battles.

We tried to do some things together but it wasn't easy.

The Klan

When we had the first Ku Klux Klan rallies in front of the courthouse, we worked well together. I spent most of the afternoon in the sheriff's office, with Joe and Neil watching things. We had good advance planning and the execution worked out well. It showed we could work together.

But the next year, it showed how we couldn't work together when the Klan came back. That same weekend, I was going to be in Washington for a U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting, and it was going to be some lousy, 20-below-zero weather. When I discussed it with Neil and our people, they believed the weather would be of help because it would cut down on the number of Klan people and the crowd. It made for the perfect situation, making the situation easier to control.

However, the sheriff didn't want to be part of policing the rally because he didn't want his men to be cold. The cold was a threat to their safety. It turned out to be a situation where he said he wasn't going to be a part of the rally but we went ahead anyway and handled it very well.

Then Joe was out later saying we were chicken. If anything, he was the chicken. He didn't want to be out in the cold. Instead, we were chicken because we wouldn't cancel the event, he said.

It never made sense.

Nonsensical policing

He was a tough guy to deal with and part of it really showed up after Joe left office and Jim Herman became sheriff. Herman had been his deputy and somebody Squadrito endorsed, but just in that first year, 1999, the relationship between the city and county got better right away. It showed again how individual personalities in these elected positions can make or break cooperation.

It just doesn't make sense to have two police agencies covering the same jurisdiction. In effect, while the city's jurisdiction doesn't extend beyond Fort Wayne's boundary line, the sheriff is within the city, at least when it comes to the jail, warrants and special law enforcement techniques. With two departments, they better work together well or they're going to step on each other's toes and cause problems.

For me, it begs the larger question. Why do we have this kind of setup? The bad guys don't organize themselves that way. Burglary rings or drug selling gangs don't treat things differently inside or outside the city limits. It's not the most efficient way to fight crime with these arbitrary boundary lines.

It would make a lot more sense with a combined, joint law enforcement agency. You can elect a chief, like the sheriff, or have him appointed by the mayor, like in the city. Do you really want the sheriff to have the broad range of responsibilities? Or maybe he should just be the jailer and let police agencies do the rest.

It doesn't make sense now; it worked well when personalities worked well, but not when personalities didn't mesh.

The public suffers

Regardless of personalities, it's the public that's going to suffer when you have clashing personalities, duplication and two people trying to raid the same drug house without knowing who's undercover in there.

Soft on crime? Hardly.

I can't understand how anyone could say we were soft on crime. The emphasis we put on crime-fighting belies the characterization. We increased the budget from $10 million to $30 million, and it wasn't easy. We got more fully staffed, to 390 officers; we got take-home police cars; we established a centralized police station; we put video cameras and mobile data terminals in cars; and we started a whole new technique of policing.

We made fighting crime and public safety the No. 1 emphasis of our administration.

How do you judge if you're successful? Sometimes statistics don't show a complete, or accurate, picture. But in 1999, crime numbers show total crime down the most since 1974. And if it's the measure, we're doing well.

Anybody who suffers from crime, however, will feel we've done badly. We looked at different measures: total crime rate, total number of crimes, amount of police being proactive, the number of crimes solved, for example, to figure out how we were doing.

I felt safe going into any part of the community at any time. Perception, however, plays a big role. People read the headlines, and over-generalize their conclusions from it. A lot of crime isn't random, it's related to drugs or gang activity. The random ones get most of the headlines and are of concern.

But most crimes aren't random acts. Look at stolen cars: 75 percent of those we analyzed one year had the keys in them or the motor running when they were stolen.

Tools

We believed community-policing would be a tool that would work here. Target 2000 was the name we put on one of our early grant applications to the federal government to help fund the initiative. It was turned down. The aim was to have community-oriented policing in place by 2000. We wanted it for the entire community, and all officers to be involved. Other places would do it in certain neighborhoods only; we wanted it as a philosophy that was embraced by the entire community. As a result, the effort had to be long-range.

A lot of police, we believed, would be resistant to the approach. The approach wasn't just to respond to high-profile crime, but look at situations that contribute to crime. We had a committee of about 35 people, and worked for two years, through about 1994-95, looking at how other communities did its COPS programs. Some of the officers on the group were very much against the new approach. Capt. George Letz, for example, had the attitude, "We don't need this." By the end of our efforts, he was one of the biggest cheerleaders for the approach.

It was a realization that a Sgt. Friday approach of "Just the facts, ma'am" wasn't working anymore. An officer needed to be closely allied, trusted and needed by the community.

Target 2000 proposed steps to break down barriers between police and community. We redrew all police districts so they didn't cross neighborhood boundary lines. We put police districts into quadrants. We created a citywide community services council. The issues in different neighborhoods often are distinct; it's why we had neighborhood liaison officers.

As a result, we created a neighborhood, quadrant and citywide level of contact for police and residents to deal with problems.

Taking it further

COPS went beyond crime issues, and addressed the concern, "I'm a police officer, I don't want to be a social worker." It's why Code Enforcement inspectors and other city workers got involved in direct action teams to address quality-of-life issues.

The efforts helped police deal with crime before it happened and became a major issue. At first, we believed it would take a decade to institutionalize. Instead, it became successful a lot sooner, and helped the community get national recognition. And it showed you don't look at policing issues separately from others.

We needed a "front door" approach to government. Streets clear of snow where kids could play, for example, helped you feel comfortable with the neighborhood outside your front door. The whole concept of community-oriented government was aimed at those front-door issues: not those that necessarily make headlines but issues residents really care about.

This wasn't the latest fad or gimmick. Chief Moore and I believed COPS was going to be very successful and last a long time. It was returning police to the roots of policing, and correcting trends that evolved from technology.

I believe this firmly: Police won't be effective unless they have the trust of the community. And you get it through interaction and with an understanding of those specific issues of to residents. You can't have police seen as an invading force or a group that's coming in just to bang heads. We don't want a police state with officers on every corner. It's why we have to rely somewhat on the neighborhood doing a level of policing on its own, with the confidence police are doing their job when needed.

No police state

It's why I opposed random car stops. When we talk about crime, we think about policing aimed at the bad guys, so they're the ones who are stopped and hassled. But we often don't stop to think it could be us, or our friends or children, who are stopped and hassled. We need to look at the system overall. Random traffic stops are wrong as policy. It's not appropriate to stop every 10th car, for example, because such stops bring us a step closer to a police state.

I saw firsthand what those random searches could do.

I was driving to Bloomington one evening, and south of Indy, I saw all sorts of police lights on U.S. 37. Being a divided highway, I believed it was a big accident. When I came closer, I saw it was just police pulling over cars, maybe after the 10th or 15th car. And you could tell it would be 30 minutes, maybe even 45 minutes, and not a quick process, before getting past the roadblock.

I kept driving to Bloomington and then checked the papers next day but found nothing. I was at a reunion of student body officials, and spoke about the incident with a fellow who was president a year before me who is now on the Indiana Court of Appeals. We figured out it was one of these random stops. It was hard for me, a lawyer, to accept such an activity could be legal. We need to look at these things and ask, "What if it was me? It's late at night, I'm tired and want to get to bed, with a busy schedule next day. I don't have any drugs and I haven't been drinking, and have no guns in my car."

But just because of this policy, I could be pulled over and detained for some time; it's still an intrusion into my freedom. While government has a balancing role, without specific reason to believe something illegal was happening, it didn't make sense to me.

I started to raise this issue with others: Is it legal? All of a sudden, I hear it's being done in Indy and could be coming to Fort Wayne. And I said, no way. I don't like this and we weren't going to do it.

A bad message

Such random stops send a very negative message about the government's role in our lives. Police could do a more efficient job if they could get into people's homes and check their cars for drugs and other illegalities. But we'd be giving up a lot of our rights and freedoms. You have to keep things in balance. And part of my job as mayor was to do that.

Police technically can stop someone because their blinker isn't working properly. But if not used carefully, it isn't seen as a tool to protect us but a tool of a police state. You could get some arrests from it, but you turn off the entire community to a police department's primary role to serve and protect.

I heard from people who were stopped because of their skin color, and that was wrong. It's something we need to fight against. One of our top CEOs in town, an African

American, spoke with me and said one of his children home from college was stopped two or three times in the course of a Christmas vacation. The child was doing nothing out of the ordinary but obviously a target because of race.

Police power is so serious. They can carry guns, stop and arrest you. They have to be careful with the power they use. As mayor, it's important you do your part to see you have a good department doing its job.

Discipline

Anytime we disciplined an officer, we heard murmuring we were being too politically correct or didn't know policing. I believed it was important for police to understand from the community's perspective how this looked and how we needed balance. A strong department meant not only more cops and money and equipment, but one that had gotten support from the entire community.

And the support was more important than the police budget or take-home cars.

Rogue cops. It's a small number of officers who create problems, no more than five or six at one time. The goal was to find out who's causing the problem, to correct it or get rid of them. A lot of this was objected to by police as interference, but if an officer makes mistakes, there are consequences. When it happens, the challenge is to take care of it as quickly as possible. We moved swiftly in all cases, even with due process rights of individuals. Officers have rights. Even with allegations, we had to prove them before we could discipline or fire someone.

It's one of the reasons we went to a three-civilian safety board, people who are independent thinkers. Sometimes they'd agree with discipline; other times, not. It was an independent, semi-judicial group looking at these incidents.

Legacy

Even with the new Graham Richard administration, folks seem to have bought into the philosophy of community-oriented government and policing. One of the reasons I ran for a third term was because the philosophy was too new, and thus, at risk. Four more years helped institutionalize COPS with police and residents.

It's where I believe we are now. Neighborhoods have bought into it and so have police. The general concept of community-oriented policing is here to stay and it's going to make the community safer. COPS won't make it a perfect world, but it brings together police and the community.

It's my legacy. It's something as significant and something I'm as proud of as anything else I've done. It's a change in the way people relate with city government. We've changed the way people think, and what's in their heads and hearts.

Cast of characters:

Neil Moore and Dan Hannaford -- Two police chiefs under Helmke

Tom Ostrognai -- A local landlord and unsuccessful political candidate, he's made a reputation chronicling alleged drug activity in Fort Wayne neighborhoods

Pat Harper -- A city police captain who ran unsuccessfully for Allen County Sheriff

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