By Glenn Smith
Post and Courier
CHARLESTON, S.C. — The burglar had eluded North Charleston police for weeks, breaking into buildings in the city’s Ferndale neighborhood under the cover of darkness. Officers found the thief’s fingerprint on a broken window, but computers failed to tie it to a known criminal.
Chris Talbott, a neighborhood resource officer, hit up contacts and informants he’d developed over months working the streets of Ferndale. They told him a man nicknamed Black was committing the burglaries. Talbott did more digging and learned that Black was an ex-con who had drawn his suspicion on the street.
Talbott urged a fellow officer to compare the convict’s fingerprint with the one from the window. A match. Case solved.
Police say the episode illustrates the benefits of the city’s push to expand community policing, embed officers in troubled neighborhoods and foster stronger relationships with the residents they serve. In recent months, North Charleston police have restructured the department’s patrol division to improve response times, create greater accountability and increase trust and problem-solving in neighborhoods.
A key feature of the plan is giving officers more time to get out of their cruisers, meet people and get to know the problems, issues and potential threats in the areas they patrol.
“People will talk to you if you get to know them,” Police Chief Jon Zumalt said. “But you can’t develop a relationship with a patrol car that speeds past your home at 70 mph on its way to one call or another. We’re trying to fix that.”
Zumalt helped build a successful community policing program in Wichita, Kan., in the 1990s. He said he has long wanted to institute such a model in North Charleston but the department lacked the manpower to pull it off when he arrived in late 2001. Since that time, however, Mayor Keith Summey and City Council have helped the department grow from about 250 officers in 2002 to more than 320 today.
Police have reconfigured the boundaries of the city’s three patrol bureaus to more evenly balance staffing and workloads, said Deputy Police Chief David Cheatle, who oversees the patrol division. The move also eliminates an awkward layout that had some officers racing from as far away as U.S. Highway 78 to calls in the lower end of the city, which could take upwards of seven minutes. The new boundaries aim to get officers to the scene of calls in five minutes or less, in line with national standards.
With the change, some 60 officers are now assigned to specific zones and neighborhoods throughout the city to fight crime.
Officer Steve Hall is one of the new “zone officers,” assigned to the area around the former Charleston Naval base. Since taking the assignment in June, he’s developed a strong sense of the area - what goes on, what challenges it faces, who belongs there and who doesn’t. On a recent afternoon, he visited motels looking for a troublesome prostitute and kept close watch on an apartment complex where several cars had been broken into.
“We’ve always been community-oriented, but this really makes us accountable for certain areas,” he said. “It allows you to build a rapport with people that I think is going to help.”
Talbott, assigned as a neighborhood officer in Russelldale and Ferndale, proved that point last month when his contacts in the community helped police arrest Leon Horlbeck, one of two brothers charged in the fatal shooting of a 15-year-old boy in Charleston. Talbott, who had arrested Horlbeck on a traffic offense in the neighborhood earlier in the year, called the suspect and lured him to the police station, where investigators nabbed him.
Talbott, who has worked the neighborhoods for nine months, said he has tried to chat up as many people as he can, enlist informants and get to know exactly where the hot spots are in his area. One way or another, he tries to bring the city’s resources to bear to correct problems.
When police noticed drug dealers were ducking behind a broken fence to make their sales, Talbott spoke with the property owner and got the fence repaired. When he saw prostitutes using brushy cover along railroad tracks to shield their activities, he worked with city officials to get the brush cleared away.
On another occasion, residents complained about drug sales from a low-slung apartment house in Russelldale. As Talbott kept watch on the place, he learned one apartment also was functioning as an illegal corner store, selling cigarettes, shots of booze, sticky buns and other items. He notified city code enforcement officers, who cited the tenant and seized the illicit merchandise.
“When you’re out here like this, it’s really like having a hand on things all the time,” he said.
City Councilwoman Dorothy Williams supports the increased community policing, but she said she has received many complaints from people who accuse officers of being heavy-handed. They complain that police use racial profiling to pull over minority motorists and treat them rudely, she said. “It’s not working how it’s supposed to be,” she said.
Zumalt pledged to look into any allegations, but he said the department’s internal affairs division hasn’t received any complaints about officer conduct. “I can’t chase ghosts,” he said.
City Councilman Bob King, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, said he has been impressed by what he has seen from the program so far and he senses the community is pleased with the effort.
Larenda Baxley, former president of the Ferndale neighborhood association, is among those who have noticed a change. “We still have a long way to go, but I have to hand it to them,” she said. “It seems to be better, and the neighborhood is quieter these days.”
Copyright 2009 Post and Courier