When Nature assembled, from a lot of good material, Leroy O’Shield, Nature had a policeman in mind. Thick-armed and barrel-chested, with close-cropped hair and a salt-andpepper mustache, Commander O’Shield’s visage expresses, in quick succession, stolid authority, intense curiosity and knowledge of life as it actually is lived. An African American, his demeanor is that of someone who has seen many discouraging things without becoming discouraged.
However, when, 26 years ago, O’Shield, who is now 50, decided to become a cop, he did not have anything like today’s 15th Police District in mind. Located in Chicago’s Far West Side, it is 90,000 people in 3.2 square miles of what sociologists call a “challenging urban environment,” and the rest of us call a bad neighborhood. It is not the sort of place you would want to stroll at night or raise children any time, but many decent people must do the latter and would like to be able to do the former. O’Shield and his 242 officers want to help by using “community policing.”
His recurring word is “proactive,” the antonym of “reactive.” It means police not controlled by 911 calls for help. Such calls are, in a sense, always too late-too late for preventative policing and the informal social controls that can prevent disorder. Police, says O’Shield, can be quite efficient at arresting criminals without reducing crime. This is because the drug epidemic has swamped the revolving-door criminal justice system-courts, prisons, probation. That system, he says tersely, is “no deterrent.”
But what can prevent the crumbling of the thin, brittle crust of civilization when the culture itself is assaulting that crust? O’Shield says one of Chicago’s most violent weekends followed the showing on national television of “Boyz N the Hood,” the movie about Los Angeles gangs. There was a rash of drive-by shootings and some young men arrested for the shootings said they “just wanted to see what it was like.” After the Los Angeles riots, California’s Gov. Pete Wilson said “everybody in America” should see that movie because of its portrayal of a strong, caring father. O’Shield wishes he saw more such fathers in his District, where most young males come from homes without fathers, and most have been arrested for something before they are 21. But O’Shield calls the movie a “training film” for crime and says the message young men get from it (and from others, such as “New Jack City”) is “the mystique of being tough.” O’Shield goes to such movies so he can know “what to expect” on the streets.
O’Shield and his officers would be forgiven for surrendering to fatalism and despair-for feeling that their task is to bail an ocean with thimbles. He notes that when he became a policeman, police and teachers were like parents-they were sources of authority. Drug abuse was aberrant and stigmatized behavior even in rough neighborhoods. Today, he says, police work must include-must begin by-working with all community groups to re-establish the “informal social controls” of community mores.
He has two master’s degrees, in criminal justice and corrections. His conversation is salted with matter-of-fact and to-the-point references to scholarly works, citing authors and publication dates. He cites one study showing that young police officers’ cynicism rises, on a scale of zero to 100, from zero to 60 in their first three years. He recommends community policing for police morale as well as community morale, because it gives officers the inspiriting sense of taking the initiative.
It is not arcane. It is common sense adaptation to the fact that most crime is committed by a few people in a few places. So: Find out who and where they are. Have a police presence throughout the community establishing relationships with merchants in their stores, with the elderly on their stoops, with young people in gymnasiums.
Chicago’s West Side has been called “Up South,” so many residents came from Mississippi and Arkansas. In 25 years the area has suffered white flight and black flight. The white working class fled the black working class, which in turn fled the crime and drugs that came as the manufacturing jobs left for South Carolina, South Korea and south of the border. Social and physical disorder and fear of crime precede, and breed, crime. But disorder and fear can be driven back by bite-size efforts to bring people out of their homes into nonthreatening streets.
Even a dash of beauty can be a bulwark against the menacing sense of encroaching chaos. So community groups plant trees and flowers, and the city provides paint for covering graffiti. When the bureaucrats were slow to give permission for boarding up some abandoned buildings that had become drug markets, community groups bought plywood and notified the police that they were not waiting for permission, and the police looked the other way.
Today we seem to spend a lot of time proving with sophisticated research that Grandmother knew a thing or two. Such as: Eat your vegetables and an apple a day. And: Befriend a cop walking the beat. Community policing can be as elemental as shoe leather. Asked how many more officers he needs, O’Shield says words rarely uttered in government: “I have enough.” Enough, that is, if the community becomes engaged; if noncoercive social measures regain control of the children and hence of the streets; if drug treatment becomes available on demand, and made mandatory for the people involved in the drug-related crime that is 90 percent of the 15th District’s crime. O’Shield stresses that the gangs that run the drug business constitute highly organized crime: “They meet just as we do.” But he and community activists are meeting not just to plan to catch dealers but to prevent people from becoming customers.
The embattled enclave that is the 15th District will eventually be much better because the community is energized by involvement with O’Shield’s extraordinarily patient and determined officers. Of course, “eventually” might come a lot sooner to embattled ethnic enclaves throughout urban America if we did not also police Bosnian enclaves, but this column is not about that.
