Saying police cannot stop crime by themselves, Louisville Metro Police Chief Robert White presented a plan to community leaders in the west end that will put officers back on the streets and keep them there. White said it's the only way he knows to prevent crime before it happens. WAVE 3 Investigator James Zambroski was there.
From the day he took the job as Metro Louisville's Police Chief, Robert White has worked to get officers out from behind desks and on the streets.
He's disbanded specialty units, put plain clothes officers back in uniform and realigned police districts -- all to facilitate what he pitched again Thursday: a true neighbor-to-neighbor relationship between police officers and the people they are sworn to protect.
"The system doesn't work," White said. "You don't get locked up, you don't get rehabilitated, you don't do your time and you don't come back and be a good citizen."
From day one, White has said the police cannot prevent crime simply by arresting their way out of it.
"I think our focus has to be on prevention," he told those gathered at a community forum in the city's west end Thursday. "What can we do as a police department to prevent crime from occurring to keep people from getting in the criminal justice system?"
The answer, White said, is an old idea made new again: community oriented policing. Like the old days, with officers working a beat: knowing it, feeling it, understanding it.
He wants the same officers working the same neighborhoods, day after day, building a foundation of trust between residents and police. That way, White says, police can find out: "who are the good guys, who are the bad guys, what parts of the beat are there crime problems, what parts of that beats are organized."
That's the only way White believes crime can be prevented in a free society.
More important, White says police simply can't do it alone. "For us to do it by ourselves require a couple of things that aren't going to happen in our society: it requires having a police officer on every corner 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and it requires us to be in a whole bunch of homes."
White's plan: build trust and have a police finger on the pulse of the neighborhood. Those who heard White's plan were cautiously optimistic.
West end resident Robert Maddon says more officers on patrol would be a good thing. "If more policemen are out on the streets and stuff, walking around, getting to know the neighborhood, it'll kind of like quiet things down a little bit."
In the end, White said stopping crime only happens when the community says enough is enough.
"Even if we had 12,000 officers, we could not do it by ourselves," White said.
Despite White's belief that you cannot arrest your way out of crime, a taskforce created this summer that locked up some of the worst of the worst of the city's criminal element seems to have paid off: the murder rate in Louisville has dropped sharply since the end of August.
Chief White's on a roll and he apparently intends on keeping it that way.