By Jean Marbella
The Baltimore Sun
BALTIMORE, Md. — A girl and a boy, maybe 5 or 6 years old, round the corner, and their eyes widen when they see the cops.
“What are you doing?” the girl asks suspiciously.
“Just walking around,” one of the officers, James Mingle, says.
“Why you stopping us?” she continues.
“I’m not stopping you,” Mingle says. “I’m getting out of your way.”
The kids walk on, shooting occasional backward glances to be sure.
So maybe the only time they see police in their neighborhood is when they’re arresting someone. On this particular evening, though, Mingle, usually a detective, indeed is just walking around. He and another detective, Thomas Stoner, in blue patrolman uniforms, are taking their turns on the boosted-up foot patrols that Mayor Sheila Dixon has ordered as part of her plan to combat crime.
This past Friday night, Mingle and Stoner walk the area of the Poe Homes, a public housing complex on the west side of town. It’s a quiet evening for the most part - the only things going bang in the night are fireworks set off by kids - and the officers are mainly sources of novelty. People watch them from their steps and chat them up, while an occasional pair of eyes peer out from windows as they pass.
“Oh, they know we’re here,” Stoner says.
There’s something of a stage-set quality to all this — one passer-by calls out, “It’s like the 1960s again” — as the two Officers Friendly walk up and down Lexington Street. Women pop their heads out of doors — usually to say something like, “It’s good to see y’all around here!” — and kids clamor around them, asking to try on their hats or, more commonly, see their guns. “Let me see the electric gun,” demands one connoisseur of police weaponry.
How this will prevent violent crime — as opposed to shifting it to another area without foot patrollers or delaying it until their shift ends — isn’t readily apparent. But then, preventive measures rarely are dramatic or immediate.
“It’s hard to know what you’ve prevented from happening,” police spokesman Matt Jablow says. Jablow says some of the patrollers - who number about 70 on any given night - have stopped crimes in progress, including a carjacking and a shooting. “There’s displacement, no matter what we do, whether it’s blue-light cameras or foot patrols, but we adjust accordingly. We’re flexible.”
Mostly, it’s about being there, on the street rather than in a passing car, approachable to residents who don’t necessarily have a positive view of police. And in fact, among the first residents the duo came across is a little girl, who shrieks in fear and hides behind a chair when Mingle tries to shake her hand.
She might have been the exception. Other kids can’t seem to keep their hands off the uniformed men, drinking in the adult attention. “Excuse me,” one little boy says, gazing up at Stoner, his voice whistling through missing front teeth. “Everyone says the toof fairy’s not for real. Is it?” (Stoner, the father of two, gives a practiced parent’s response: “What do you think?”)
In the alley off Lexington Street, the scene plays out like a children’s version of criminal activity: The officers have wandered over following the sound of fireworks, and by the time they get there, the contraband is hidden and everyone is wide-eyed with innocence and deaf and dumb to any knowledge of any fireworks. When one little boy is seen talking to an officer, and pointing behind him, an older girl jumps up and yells in her best stop-snitching fashion, “Don’t point at me!” Mingle jokes, “Don’t worry, he’s not pointing at the firecrackers you hid in those bushes.”
Eventually, the kids are all over them, one girl mentioning her uncle who was a cop, and Mingle telling her he is a sergeant, other kids making the case for dirt bikes, which are illegal.
Mingle turns out to already be a legend in these parts. On his first day on foot patrol, June 2, a kid was showing off and riding a dirt bike right in front of them - “Now it becomes an issue of disrespect,” Mingle said — so he stepped into the biker’s path. The kid tried to execute an evasive maneuver, but only managed to get thrown off the bike. “He runs, trying to get us to chase him,” Mingle said. Instead, Mingle did a little victory show over the bike — “The whole sidewalk is roaring” — and has it towed away.
“Hey, dirt bike!” a passing teenager calls out to him Friday night, imitating how Mingle put his foot on the bike in triumph. “Yeah, he was mad, wasn’t he?” Mingle calls back.
Mingle and Stoner have, respectively, 13 and 14 years on the force. While they don’t like taking time away from their cases — Mingle is in the missing-persons unit, Stoner in sex crimes — they can see the benefit of foot patrols.
“Been there, done that,” Mingle says. “Would I rather work my cases? Yeah. But you can put a police on every corner, and you still are going to have people who don’t like other people. Are you making a difference by being out here? Yeah, it makes a difference, but those conflicts aren’t going away.”
Stoner says he can see both the pluses and the minuses. “Do I feel like we’re accomplishing anything? I think we’re connecting with the community, yes. As far as my case load though - no,” he says.
From their vantage point, it’s an issue of resources - with the department understaffed, how can officers juggle all the enforcement and investigative duties that they have and still walk foot patrols? And for how long?
“The question I get most often is: Is it going to be sustained?” Stoner says. “You guys aren’t going to be out here, are you, then after the election be gone?’”
Jablow says the department is committed to the foot patrols and believes they are working.
With their many years on the force, Stoner and Mingle have seen crime plans come, and they’ve seen them go. If the current plan involves foot patrols, so be it.
“Basically, we’re soldiers,” Mingle says. “They tell you to take that hill, we’ll take that hill.”
“If the man says do it,” Stoner agrees, “you have to do it.”
“Or the next day,” Mingle says, “you’re asking, `Want fries with that?’”
Copyright 2007 The Baltimore Sun