Police enlist teammates in unsafe areas

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, June 18, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Luis Bernabe was 16 years old when police found him lying on a sidewalk in North Las Vegas, bleeding from fatal gunshot wounds.

Twenty-six hours later, on April 3, Bernabe’s parents were standing at the corner where their son was shot, speaking from a podium to a crowd — the Safe Valley United Team — who had gathered (or “activated” as team members put it) to take a stand against violence in the area.

Swift and methodical mobilization of citizens, community leaders, clergy, police and activists is one small part of a larger, non-traditional crime prevention strategy Metro has implemented in a number of high-crime areas since January 2007. The strategy emphasizes collaboration between police and people in the neighborhoods they patrol — an approach that, put simply, repositions the traditional role of cops, from reactive officers racking up arrests to proactive collaborators trying to unify a community under one message: We won’t tolerate crime. The cops won’t, and neither will the people in the neighborhoods targeted by criminals.

Turns out, this system works, at least according to a study published last year by UNLV researchers, who found that a directed effort to reduce gun violence in West Las Vegas, through community partnerships and proactive policing, led to a 37 percent drop in all gun-related calls in the target area, including a 42 percent drop in calls for assault/battery involving a gun, and a 46 percent reduction in calls for illegal shootings.

This community-oriented policing program, called the Safe Village Initiative, was the first Metro launched, and the inspiration for each program that followed; the Safe Valley United program in Northeast Clark County; the KEEN (Keeping Everyone’s Eyes on the Neighborhood) and a third program so new it doesn’t have a name yet, focused on the neighborhoods surrounding Sierra Vista Drive and Cambridge Street.

Different names for identical ideas: Join forces to target problems.

It works like this: Police identify a specific problem in a specific area. For the Safe Village program, it was gun violence. For the KEEN program, it’s community blight and narcotics. Once the focus has been decided, police reach out to area stakeholders: social service workers, community members, clergy, concerned citizens. This group is tasked with getting out the message: Gun violence will not be tolerated, selling drugs is unacceptable, etc. The group pushes the message through several channels. Police target known problem addresses, clergy bring the issue to pulpits, citizens distribute literature, social workers reach out to victims of crime, everybody hosts community events to talk about crime prevention.

And when something happens to challenge the forward momentum, like the shooting of Bernabe, the group mobilizes, making members’ outrage and determination known.

The goal is to make it clear to targeted offenders — and studies show that a small group of criminals can wreak a large amount of havoc — that their behavior will not be tolerated. But the message is only half of it. The mere act of unifying a diverse group under one cause helps instill a feeling of community cohesiveness, and this cohesiveness makes way for even more collaborative work. Everybody in the group is more willing to aid in the greater fight, by sharing information with police, for example, and making it clear they will not look the other way when crime occurs. The UNLV study calls this a “deterrence model gained through advertising the message.”

But maybe that’s jargon for something obvious: Multi-faceted problems, like crime, call for multi-faceted solutions. Communities that have historically been pitted against one another — police and the people they’re policing — can make deeper inroads working with each other rather than against each other.