By Jürgen Schäfer (Text) and Frieder Blickle (Photoraphs)

Police officers in New Haven formerly hat to be, white skinned, and uncompromising. A women leading the police academy initiated a fundamental change. Nowadays officers get special trainings in mediation, active listening and non-violent conflict resolution.

Jay-Dee Smith drives his police car as if it were a convertible. His left elbow rests casually on the rolled-down window, his right on the gear shift. His sunglasses rest on his forehead, revealing piercing blue eyes. He cruises Orchard Street at walking pace, past freshly painted Victorian-style wooden houses. Girls are playing in the street. When they see him, they drop their scooters and bicycles and come running, their braids bouncing in the wind. Jay-Dee stops the car. The girls give him a lollipop. Their parents, standing in the yard, give him a friendly wave.

That wasn't always a normal occurrence. Officer Jay-Dee Smith, the grandson of Irish immigrants, couldn?t be any whiter. The girls on Orchard Street wear low-slung jeans, inseam at knee level like hip-hop stars, and they are black. Just a few years ago, there would have been no trace of friendliness in the encounter. Jay-Dee wouldn?t have driven down Orchard Street without lights and sirens. Break-ins, assaults, and shootings were routine. A white cop on Orchard Street would have drawn hundreds of curious gazes.

Peace has come to the once unruly streets of New Haven, Connecticut. Today children play where the bullets of gang shoot-outs once flew. Geraniums bloom in the window boxes of former crack houses. Many gang members are either behind bars or have become upright citizens who sweep their sidewalks on Saturday mornings. Since the 1990s, crime rates in New Haven have fallen by more than 60 percent. The success can be credited to an unusual style of police work - "community policing".

"Community policing" sounds harmless enough, but it was a cultural revolution. It began in New Haven?s police academy, a former precinct house on Sherman Parkway. In the 1960s its policemen were simple enforcers, arresting Jim Morrison, for example, for his ?inappropriate behavior.? Morrison would have approved of the banner that greets visitors to the center today. It cites Victor Hugo:  "Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

The school is the domain of Kay Codish, the only civilian in the U.S. to lead a police academy. Since she took over 13 years ago, nothing is the same. Along with law, criminology, and firearms practice, the future cops learn standard English, read poetry, and rehearse nonviolent conflict resolution with role-playing games. They write plays about racial prejudice and produce them with inner city kids. The calligraphy of the greeting-card rhetoric outside is set forth in the classroom. "It's never too soon to be friendly - you never know when it might be too late."

When Kay Codish took over in the early 1990s, New Haven was in worse shape than ever. The sky over the once prosperous academic center, home to Yale University, began to cloud in the 1980s. In the poorer sections, small glass tubes could be seen lying carelessly broken in the gutters: crack pipes, harbingers of a massive drug-use epidemic. Addicts broke into cars, then into houses. Dealers fought over the best locations with knives. Then came the first crack-related murder, followed by drive-bys with semiautomatic weapons. The inner city started to slide. Prostitutes stood on the street corners. Gangsters patrolled their turf with Colt revolvers tucked into their waistbands.

"We had seven different gangs in a city of 125,000 and a murder almost every week," Kay Codish remembers. There were public housing projects that police would enter only after calling for reinforcements. Gang members had shot out the lights in the dark hallways and covered the walls with graffiti. The elevators were permanently out of order. Inhabitants threw old television sets from the roofs on to passing police cars. "There was a mass exodus from the inner city," says Codish. "People didn't even bother locking the doors when they left. Their houses had become completely worthless. The police were fighting a losing battle."

The officers holed themselves up in their headquarters, a hostile-looking brick building with narrow slits for windows. It looks down on the inner city streets like a hostile watchdog. They raced, sirens blaring, from crime scene to crime scene, but they couldn?t get a handle on the spiraling statistics. "The police only showed up when the crime had already happened. They arrested as many people as they could get their hands on, no questions asked, and drove away." As if it would help, police recruits were given extra training in dehumanization. "Whoever couldn't manage his pull-ups had to scrub the floor with a toothbrush. At night, when school was out, the boss would throw a package of confetti in the air and say, now pick it up, every scrap!" The students learned how to collar and subdue suspects as quickly and brutally as possible.

A height requirement for aspiring policemen (5'10") effectively ruled out women and Latinos, who together made up the majority of New Haven's population. Most policemen came from Irish and Italian families, "white cowboys looking for adventure." The problem:  Public housing residents were almost uniformly black. How could they communicate with each other? The police department in New Haven in the 1980s resembled a paramilitary organization, staffed with bull-necked stormtroopers who feared nothing and no one.

They feared nothing - except, perhaps, Kay Codish. She was recruited by an especially courageous and liberal chief of police. She had been an activist in the gay and lesbian liberation movement and against the Vietnam war. She had studied literature at the Sorbonne and practiced yoga. She wore hippie skirts. Her voice and her handshake were soft and gentle, her hair wild and untamed. For the uniformed machos, it was a nightmare: a civilian woman with the power of a police captain.

In just three months, she turned the academy upside down. The "recruits" became "students" and were drawn from every conceivable walk of life: homosexuals, single mothers, Latinos, African-Americans. In the school day, the firing range ceded time to soup kitchen visits. Kay Codish brought prostitutes, hustlers, abused women, the mentally ill, and the homeless into the classroom. She drilled her students nonstop in the Golden Rule: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. A police officer needs to remember that, almost more than anyone else." Previously, a high number of arrests had been regarded as evidence of good police work. Codish reversed the logic. "An arrest means that prevention has failed."

Within a few days after starting work, Kay Codish found toilet paper in her in-box. A female student had her tires slashed. A student moved his bowels in the shower, "clearly an inarticulate protest." Policemen whined that Codish was turning them into social workers. She was not moved. A class on domestic violence: Each student must take a 20-dollar bill out of his wallet and turn the wallet in. "Now imagine you're a woman. You have three kids, and your husband has just beaten you black and blue. You leave home with 20 dollars. What do you do?" Codish knows her students don't like role-playing, "but they learn the most in exactly these situations."

Along with the academy, police work as a whole was reorganized. In place of the centralized headquarters, local police stations were set up in ten precincts. The chiefs were encouraged to cooperate with local schools, churches, businessmen, and citizens. They helped found neighborhood watches. Officers parked their cars and started patrolling on foot. They had time and opportunity to talk while demonstrating their presence. The anonymous peace officer turned into a neighbor.

The successes of the new system can be felt most clearly where they were most desperately needed - in the poorest areas. "Before, the police was your enemy," remembers Sam Foster, a black former nightclub owner who settled in North Hill, one of New Haven's problem zones. "If four black guys were standing on a corner and anything happened anywhere, the police would just drive up, jump out, and arrest them without asking questions." It was useless to ask them for help. "Their attitude was, let the blacks kill each other off." As Sam Foster sees it, a black youth in New Haven in the 1990s had only a fifty-fifty chance of living to adulthood. Too many became victims of drugs and violence. "We lost a generation."

Today Sam Foster is a pillar of society in North Hill. He runs a private agency offering home health care. He comes to the meetings of the District Management Team, a local association of citizens and industry that meets regularly with the local precinct chief, in a pinstripe suit, cufflinks, and a gold Rolex. The precinct has been led for seven years by Lieutenant Jay-Dee Smith, the cop who won the hearts of Orchard Street. He starts the meeting with bad news. "We took three handguns out of circulation this week. One was yesterday morning at six when we arrested a drug dealer. It was a .357 magnum with an eight-inch barrel. Have you seen Dirty Harry? That?s the kind of gun I?m talking about."

Over his desk hangs a newspaper clipping from the 1980s. Officer Smith made the front page of the local section after he rescued a drowning boy from a pond. Next to it is a Norman Rockwell print. The chronicler of the American idyll of the 1950s depicts a policemen and a young runaway side by side at the counter of a diner. In the past seven years Jay-Dee Smith has shaken the hand of just about everyone in his precinct. He meets with parents, has watched children grow up. When he walks his beat on foot, or patrols it on his bicycle, he can tell at one glance who is a stranger.

It took five years for the "community policing" idea to catch on in New Haven, and since then crime rates have been sinking continuously. "This will be the safest year in over 40 years," says Francisco "Cisco" Ortiz, chief of police of New Haven. He is Latino and grew up in the ghetto. At 5?8", he is too short to have qualified as a recruit under the old system. ?This city will never accept anything other than community policing." In his eyes, diversity is key to the strategy?s success. Ethnic minorities now make up the majority, 55 percent, of the police force. He demands that each officer be prepared to work actively with the community in his own district. "This is not a job for robots. We need human beings who do their work wholeheartedly."

Lately, in spite of the good statistics, Chief Cisco has worries he thought were a thing of the past. "We've been finding more weapons. The murder rate went up a little. The atmosphere on the streets is more tense." The development shows the limits of what community policing can do. "There are many factors beyond our control," says Cisco Ortiz. They include increasing poverty and unemployment, but also new tasks assigned by the conservative administration in Washington. "We waste too much time watching airports, harbors, and other such facilities. Those people are then lacking when it comes to work in the communities." He is troubled by the war in Iraq, more than 5,000 miles away: "I worry about the message the war is giving people. How are we supposed to explain to our kids that they should deal with their issues nonviolently, when we're showing them the opposite every day on TV?"

Although New Haven's police force is one of the most effective crime-fighting units in the U.S., and although delegations from overseas as well as elsewhere in the U.S. are beating down the doors, community policing has remained an exception. That can be traced to the nationwide mood swing after 9/11. People are demanding hardcore cops able to face down terrorists.

"It's the wrong approach," says Professor Joe Ryan of Pace University, an adviser to the Department of Homeland Security. "Instead of spying on people and putting our constitution at risk, we need to redefine the role of the police, like Kay Codish and the police in New Haven." He believes a military-style organization is no help in a diverse democracy. Terrorists prefer to stay anonymous, so the best protection against them is a functioning, viable community with a fully integrated police force. Joe Ryan has his own name for officers who take community policing seriously. He calls them "guardians of peace."

> PeCo Reporting