Mobile police units hit LR's hot spots for crime
Posted on Monday, January 5, 2009
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette/STEVE KEESEE Little Rock Police officer Joe Hill searches the purse of a woman who was pulled over in a traffic stop last week near 11th and Pine streets. The woman had outstanding warrants, police said.
In the narrow closet of an office the Little Rock Police Department's seven-member downtown mobile unit uses inside an old veteran's hospital, a fading plaque on the wall offers little ambiguity.
"People Sleep Peaceably At Night Only Because Rough Men Stand Ready To Do Violence On Their Behalf," the plaque says.
Divorced from routine duties and everyday radio dispatches, the unit's members jump on whatever hot spots their supervisors assign them. They have to be versatile, both in their policing talents and their mental state, ready to run and gun or sit still and do little but observe for hours or days at a time.
Daytime burglaries in the city's Heights neighborhood? Check. Trying to serve a murder warrant in a falling-down shack off West 12th Street? Check. Staking out drug houses? Check.
This unit is one of three in the city - one in each patrol division - designed to go wherever the statistics and citizens' complaints tell the police they need to be. Sometimes they're in marked patrol cars, sometimes not - whatever the mission requires.
"It's not for everybody," downtown patrol unit officer Denny Hutchins said Friday as he drove north on Fair Park Boulevard. "I mean, we have to be prepared to go from working a day shift in Hillcrest where everybody says hi to you, waves to you, to get a call and start the next day working midnights on Asher Avenue where people are hollering at you and flipping you off."
Making such changes so quickly is not easy, department spokesman Lt. Terry Hastings said.
"I wouldn't want to do that job," he said. "Back before it was a full-time unit, it rotated, and you always had the guys who really wanted to do it and the other guys who really don't want to do it and don't like that kind of work."
Hutchins said he tried not to ask too many questions beyond the scope of his mission.
"I don't really look at stats too much," he said. "The supervisor will tell me there's a problem somewhere with dope dealers or burglars or something and then it's my job to fix it."
CREATION OF THE UNITS
The mobile units don't have the profile of the SWAT team or the homicide detectives who often appear in newspaper photos and television footage.
"Sometimes I think even other areas of the police department don't really know what we do," downtown mobile unit officer Joe Hill said.
And that extends as well to involved members of the community.
Sharon Welch-Blair is president of the Downtown Neighborhood Association. She meets monthly with Mayor Mark Stodola on safety issues related to the neighborhood.
"I'm not sure I knew there was something called the mobile unit," she said. "Does that just mean the cars?"
Mobile units emerged in the mid-1990s under different names, like park patrols and zero-tolerance squads. Supervisors would pull patrol officers out of their districts and into temporary special assignments covering anything from traffic problems to prostitution stings to drugs.
By 1998, there was one fulltime unit covering the entire city. Poaching from the patrol ranks on a rotation or a case-by-case basis was over.
Its success, Hastings said, led the department a few years later to create one each within the boundaries of the northwest patrol division, the southwest patrol division and the downtown patrol division.
The permanent assignments gave supervisors the ability to target problem areas without compromising their ability to respond to the thousands of regular calls and radio dispatches they were responsible for covering every day.
It also allowed for more targeted policing efforts over time, such as Operation Phoenix, aimed at reducing property crime, and Quiet Nights, an initiative to reduce violence by heavily policing areas with large numbers of robberies, shots-fired calls and drug or vice complaints.
"If it wasn't for the guys in the mobile units, all that would be a lot harder for us," Hastings said. "We'd still be pulling staffing from other units and patrol, which would then be less effective for us."
The units are not entirely invisible.
"It's like having the most professional extra security available," said Hatim Smouni, president of the Heights Neighborhood Association. "We know it's unrealistic to have 24/7 patrol units in a neighborhood like ours that doesn't have the kind of crime they have elsewhere. But when we do notice an issue, if there is a problem, this is one of the best things I've seen that the police have to deal with that."
A CLOSE GROUP
As a former Marine who fractured his back in Iraq in 2003 when Iranians in a truck slammed through a checkpoint and as the son of a Little Rock police sergeant, Hutchins has the sharp sense of humor those environments tend to breed in people. He and the other mobile unit officers laugh easily and often at each other - at Hutchins for his self-mocking "country" accents, Hill for being the face of the department on recruiting posters all over the city.
They joke about making traffic stops in goofy accents or with a silly walk. They don't actually do it - they know exactly who in the department would have their heads - but that doesn't make it any less funny for them to picture.
At those moments, the rough men mentioned on the plaque back in the office are simply men.
Working tightly together made them friends. The stress and the demands of the job made them closer still.
"You have to get to a place where you're comfortable," Hutchins said. "I see these guys more than my own family a lot of the time."
Driving on South Peyton Street south of 12th, Hutchins and the rest of the downtown mobile unit just switched from a mission to stop daytime burglaries in the Heights and Hillcrest neighborhoods to serving violent-felony warrants and hunting for drugs south of West Markham Street.
He monitored dispatch radio traffic even though he didn't have to respond to it.
"I like knowing what's going on around me," Hutchins said.
Though the officers in the mobile units ride alone, they are rarely far from each other.
"No matter where we go," Hill said, "we're usually within about 10 blocks or so of each other."
After Hill stopped a silver BMW sport utility vehicle at West 11th and South Pine streets for making an illegal U-turn, Hutchins was the fourth mobileunit officer to arrive.
The woman in the SUV had active arrest warrants in Sherwood, Jacksonville and Little Rock.
Hill went through her purse on the hood of his car. Officer Van Thomas searched through the BMW along with officer Eliot Young. They checked the stereo - sometimes a radio that doesn't work is hiding drugs - felt under the seats and opened the glove compartment.
In the back, Thomas, Young and Hutchins examined massive aluminum pots, a plastic trash can and a yard-long masher. It was the sort of stuff used to make vast quantities of pasta or mashed potatoes. Later, Young said the woman told him she made sweet potato pies.
"You could use that to make food, I guess, sure," Hutchins said. "My guess is someone's cooking up some drugs."
Next they went to South 13th and West Harrison streets to try to serve a few aggravated robbery warrants. Hutchins and Young knocked on the right door and were let right inside. Less than a minute later, Hutchins emerged shaking his head and laughing.
"Man, he's already in custody," Hutchins said. "I checked these warrants this morning so I know they're supposed to be good and active. Someone must have got to him early because he's back in jail."
He gets back into the patrol car and grabs the radio microphone, already thinking about what's next.
"Anybody want to try to go serve this murder warrant?"
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